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dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/06/israeli-armys-lies-can-no-longer-salvage-its-image/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/06/israeli-armys-lies-can-no-longer-salvage-its-image/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Israeli Army’s Lies Can No Longer Salvage
Its Image</h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook - March 6, 2018</a></span> </p>
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<p>It is has been a very bad week for those claiming
Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a
small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in
which the Israeli army was caught lying.</p>
<p>A child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested
and terrified into signing a false confession that he
was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was
claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually
shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob
of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear
gas canister at a Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as
they fled for safety during a military invasion of their
village.</p>
<p>In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media
revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of
brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they
called “Pallywood” – a conflation of Palestinian and
Hollywood.</p>
<p>In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the
Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more
convenient version of reality.</p>
<p>Last week, it emerged, Israeli officials had conceded
to a military court that the army had beaten and locked
up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an
explicit policy of stopping journalists from covering
abuses by its soldiers.</p>
<p>Israel’s deceptions have a long history. Back in the
1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become one
of Israel’s most celebrated actors, was assigned the job
of carrying a weapons bag on operations in the Jenin
refugee camp in the West Bank. When Palestinian women or
children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the
body.</p>
<p>In one incident, when soldiers playing around with a
shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the
12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to
put explosives on their remains.</p>
<p>That occurred before the Palestinians’ first mass
uprising against the occupation erupted in the late
1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later
given a Hollywood-style makeover himself as a peacemaker
– urged troops to “break the bones” of Palestinians to
stop their liberation struggle.</p>
<p>The desperate, and sometimes self-sabotaging, lengths
Israel takes to try to salvage its image were
underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi
was grabbed from his bed in a night raid.</p>
<p>Back in December he was shot in the face by soldiers
during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh. Doctors
saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head
and a section of skull missing.</p>
<p>Mohammed’s suffering made headlines because he was a
bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was shot,
a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi,
slapping a soldier nearby after he entered her home.</p>
<p>Ahed, who is in jail awaiting trial, was already a
Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol
too of Israel’s victimisation of children.</p>
<p>So, Israel began work on recrafting the narrative: of
Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.</p>
<p>It emerged that a government minister, Michael Oren,
had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that
Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not
Palestinians, there to “make Israel look bad”. The
Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.</p>
<p>Last week events took a new turn as Mohammed and other
relatives were seized, even though he is still gravely
ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied
access to a lawyer or parent.</p>
<p>Shortly afterwards, Israel produced a signed confession
stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not
Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a
bicycle crash.</p>
<p>Yoav Mordechai, the occupation’s top official,
trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies and
incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the
Israeli media dutifully reported.</p>
<p>Deprived of a justification for slapping an occupation
soldier, Ahed can now be locked away by military judges.
Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital
documentation, including brain scans, all prove that
Mohammed was shot.</p>
<p>This was simply another of Israellywood’s endless
productions to automatically confer guilt on
Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s
incarceration production line each year have to sign
confessions – or plea bargains – to win jail-sentence
reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.</p>
<p>It is more Franz Kafka than Hollywood.</p>
<p>A second army narrative unravelled last week. CCTV
showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank
range during an invasion of Jericho, then savagely
beaten by soldiers as he lay wounded, and left to bleed
to death.</p>
<p>It was an unexceptional incident. A report by Amnesty
International last month noted that many of the dozens
of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of
extra-judicial executions.</p>
<p>Before footage of Saradih’s killing surfaced, the army
issued a series of false statements, including that he
died from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid
treatment and was armed with a knife. The video
disproves all of that.</p>
<p>Over the past two years, dozens of Palestinians,
including women and children, have been shot in
similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army
concludes that they were killed while attacking soldiers
with a knife – Israel even named this period of unrest a
“knife intifada”.</p>
<p>Are soldiers today carrying a “knife bag”, just as
Meir-Khamis once carried a weapons bag?</p>
<p>A half-century of occupation has not only corrupted
generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been
allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed
an industry of lies and self-deceptions to make sure the
consciences of Israelis are never clouded by a moment of
doubt – that maybe their army is not so moral after all.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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