Photos and video of family grappling with soldier trying to arrest son show how power of social media is challenging military might

Late last Friday a series of photographs from a protest in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh dropped on the news wires.



They portrayed a masked IDF soldier trying to arrest a boy accused of throwing stones (denied by villagers) before his mother and teenage sister intervened.

The pictures, taken by agency photographers, were striking, if not the fact of the demonstration and scuffle itself.

The soldier, armed with an assault rifle, holds the boy in a headlock while sitting on him; the family claws at his mask; the daughter bites him on the wrist.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The soldier detains Mohammed, aged 11. Photograph: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahed Tamimi bites the soldier’s hand. Photograph: Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images

In the 24 hours and more that followed, the pictures and video footage of the scuffle shot by another member of the family went viral, prompting comment in the Israeli and international media as well as on pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian websites.

Seen in different ways by different commentators with different agendas, the only thing they could agree on was that the images represented a vivid summation of some idea: of the brutality of occupation; of the weakness of the soldier involved; of the need to use more or less violence on demonstrators; of the use by Palestinians of children as a propaganda tool.

Amid the disagreements, a pressing question has emerged: what did the images show? The reality is as complex as it is unsettling and contradictory.

Demonstrations on Fridays in West Bank villages are commonplace, in some cases having taken place every week for years. Small-scale affairs, often accompanied by Israeli and international activists, they follow a similar format, often ending with stone throwing on one side and the Israeli military response of teargas, arrests and plastic or even live rounds.

Nabi Saleh, a village dominated by members of the Tamimi family, is one place where such confrontations are a regular occurrence.



The Nabi Saleh Solidarity Campaign – led by Bassem Tamimi, who was once designated a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International when he was jailed by Israel for his activism – hold their demonstrations to protest against the theft of their land and water by Israelis who live opposite the hilltop village in the settlement of Halamish.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bassem Tamimi and his wife, Nariman, arrive at an Israeli military court in 2012 where he was sentenced to 13 months’ jail for urging youths to throw rocks at soldiers. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

They are clashes that have sometimes cost the lives of Palestinians. Bassem Tamimi’s brother-in-law Rushdi died after being shot at another protest in 2012 while Tamimi was in prison. Another member of the extended family died after being hit in the face by an Israeli teargas canister.

Friday’s photos and video show Tamimi’s 11-year-old son, Mohammed, with his broken arm in a cast. His wife, Nariman, is seen grappling with the still-unidentified soldier, and his 15-year-old daughter, Ahed, is biting the soldier’s hand.

Explaining her actions afterwards, Nariman Tamimi said: “If you are a mother, you will protect your children without thinking. They weren’t just trying to arrest him, the way the soldier’s hand was around my son’s neck he could have killed him.”

For their part, the Israeli military – and some media – described the event as a violent assault on the soldier.

None of the Tamimi family involved are unfamiliar figures in the story of Nabi Saleh. Family members, including Ahed, have been profiled in the New York Times and the Guardian. Ahed was the subject of another viral video recorded in Nabi Saleh in 2012 when she was seen berating Israeli soldiers for arresting another brother at a demonstration, an act for which she was given a bravery award by the Turkish government.

The prominence of the Tamimi children in these confrontations has inevitably raised questions – not least among pro-Israeli commentators – about how much they have been pushed by the family into the frontline of potentially dangerous encounters. And how much those encounters are designed to produce images such as those on Friday.

In truth it is almost impossible to tell, not least because of the long history of the politicisation, and involvement, of Palestinian children in demonstrations going back to the first intifada and before, many with their parents’ acquiescence.

Having interviewed Ahed two years after she first shot to prominence, the Guardian’s then Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood, wrote last year about her youthful political awareness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahed Tamimi pictured in her bedroom at the age of 12. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/Guardian

Her answers to questions about what the protests are over and the role of the army seem practised, the result of living in a highly politicised community. “We want to liberate Palestine, we want to live as free people, the soldiers are here to protect the settlers and prevent us reaching our land.”

With her brothers, she watches a DVD of edited footage showing her parents being arrested, their faces contorted in anger and pain, her own confrontation with Israeli soldiers, a night-time raid on the house, her uncle writhing on the ground after being shot. On top of witnessing these events first-hand, she relives them over and over again on screen.

On the opposite side of the equation is evidence that the Tamimis are acutely aware of the value of such footage in their activism.

Following the same formula, week after week and year after year since 2009 the demonstrations have become performative, an almost ritualised encounter, in which, for all the brutality, there is an intimation on both sides much of the time of a kind of restraint.

In a conflict where young Palestinian stone-throwers are too often shot dead by Israeli soldiers, this was a confrontation that remained on the threshold of more serious violence.

If that is the context of the images themselves, the reactions they have prompted have been easier to unpackage, coloured by competing ideologies that have supplied their own stories.

Israel’s rightwing culture minister, Miri Regev, was quick to suggest on Facebook that soldiers should have shot the Tamimi family members.

“We need to decide immediately that a soldier that is attacked is permitted to return fire. Period. I call on the minister of security to put an end to the humiliation and change the open-fire regulations immediately!”

Others saw the apparent panic in the soldier as he struggled with the Tamimis as a sign of weakness, among them the hawkish former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who claimed the images portrayed “helplessness on the part of the IDF and Israel”.

The soldier’s father, also unidentified, said he thought his son demonstrated cool.

A pro-Palestinian website painted the Tamimi mother and daughter as “determined lionesses”; Israeli ones as manipulative “Pallywood” frauds playing for the cameras.

Perhaps one of the most interesting commentaries was supplied by Anshel Pfeffer, whose editorial in Haaretz condemned the image of Israeli soldiers chasing children.

Pointing out, like others, the dreary commonplace of the Friday clashes, and concluding that the soldier was masked because of shame, Pfeffer wrote of the image: “It’s no longer a tactical mistake, it’s a national headlock in which an entire army, and behind it a nation, remains in a state of denial that there are military solutions to the conflict.”

He dismissed suggestions that the images might be less powerful with suspicions of a degree of orchestration.

“Whatever you think of the Palestinian national struggle, you don’t get to choose the other side’s weapons. The people of Nabi Saleh, with the help of foreign volunteers, put on the weekly show for the media because it’s compelling, it works. Anyway, if the only issue here was one of appearances, then why is the IDF providing extras every week for the show?”

Perhaps that, in the final analysis, is as much as you can say about the images: they are “compelling” because they illustrate the long drama of occupation, an aide memoir to daily events which depict an underlying reality.

They speak of the asymmetry of the conflict. And they speak too of Israel gradually losing a global battle of narratives over the occupation where a different kind of asymmetry – the leverage of social media – can propel a single incident into an international scandal.