The video from Nabi Saleh is hard to watch. That’s exactly why it should be viewed again and again.

The soldier acted well under the circumstances, and I’m not being sarcastic. A soldier is someone who obeys orders. His margin of discretion is very limited. This soldier was sent by his commanders to put a stop to stone-throwing. He physically overcame a 12-year-old boy who was suspected of throwing stones and neutralized him.

It’s a difficult scene to watch. Deal with it.

Dozens or hundreds of similar scenes take place every day in the occupied territories. In many cases, much more serious violence is employed; sometimes, guns are even used. Many hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the first intifada erupted in the late 1980s. The minority were killed by shots from light weapons; the majority by artillery fire or aerial bombings.

The soldier in this video clip didn’t try even for a moment to use his gun. Had there not been cameras in the vicinity, perhaps he would have used it. But here, he didn’t lose his head even as more and more Palestinian women and girls fought with him. One girl even bit him.

It’s surprising that his comrades in this mission didn’t hasten to his aid, but that’s an issue for an operational inquiry at the squad or platoon level. It’s also possible that they were busy chasing other children.

The soldier cursed a bit and spoke rudely to the “leftists.” One can understand him given the circumstances, and in any case, that’s what they’re teaching him in this country nowadays (the left is to blame for everything, etc.).

The most upsetting moment comes when the Palestinian women tear off the soldier’s face mask. Until then, we saw only his eyes and his mouth peeping out of black holes.

The new fashion of masks reached the Israel Defense Forces over the last few years. It was copied from foreign armies and distant conflicts, especially the fighting in the Crimean Peninsula. Their purpose is twofold: to intimidate, but primarily to avoid being identified and incriminated by the camera.

On the poetic level, this reflects an inversion or a merger of roles with the Palestinians’ masked men, but we’re not in a class on cinematic symbolism. We’re in reality. The masked ball has ended.

All at once, it has become clear that the soldier, too, is essentially a child – a frightened child. He’s the child of all of us, the one who is starting first grade this morning and in another 12 years will graduate to Nabi Saleh.

When his buddy drags him aside, a moment before the mask is removed, he suddenly decides to throw a stun grenade at his enemies. It looks more like a childish act ending a nursery school spat than the deployment of weapons in a military operation.

And what was the right’s reaction to this foundational scene, which, as any sentient being understands, encapsulates all the insanity and the injustice and the stupidity and the purposelessness and the pointlessness of the occupation and the settlement enterprise? It’s a reaction that managed to overshadow even the video clip itself. A Pavlovian, bloodthirsty reaction, devoid of either context or logic. Like a pack of moonstruck, salivating dogs, they’ve been howling about the “rules of engagement” and moaning that “the hands of the IDF and its soldiers are tied.”

It’s not just the readers commenting on Internet news sites. Nor is it just their equivalent in the cabinet, like Culture Minister Miri Regev, one moment after allegedly tailoring a tender and coordinating testimony. Nor is it just their equivalent among extra-parliamentary organizations, like Ronen Shoval, the Professors for a Strong Israel chairman who isn’t a professor. It’s even level-headed pundits like Yoaz Hendel.

What would they all prefer – for the soldier to draw his gun and spray the Palestinian child and the Palestinian women and the effing leftists with automatic fire? And who exactly are their complaints aimed against, at the height of a series of right-wing governments headed by Benjamin Netanyahu?

This is the real mask that has been removed: All these people have no answers, only clichés about the use of force. Their perception of reality is fundamentally flawed. The Israeli right doesn’t live in a video clip; it lives in a fantasy movie.