What happens when a young Israeli soldier chases children who throw rocks
Young Israeli soldiers, trained to fight wars, are finding themselves caught up in battles they can't win against a foe that knows how to use the power of imagery.
There is no way on earth to successfully deal with this kind of video clip. An armed, well-trained Israeli soldier from an elite unit, covered with camouflage paint, pursues a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, trying to arrest him. Meanwhile, the entire family arrives at the scene where they set upon the soldier with howls and screams. After all, the boy is only 12, with one hand in a cast.
Once every few weeks or months, Israel finds itself facing this kind of video going viral on the Internet, a clip that soars through digital space with the speed of light, without limitations of time or place. Go argue with these pictures. A chronicle of an inevitable Israeli rout, the clip was filmed Aug. 28 in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh. Now, against all odds, I will attempt to describe the same event from the soldier’s point of view, from the Israeli angle.
He is 20 years old. He was a teenager himself not very long ago, attending school. Suddenly he became a soldier. He volunteered for an elite unit (in this case, the Egoz Unit of the mythological Golani Brigade). He went through advanced combat training for a year and a half. He is trained to locate and destroy Hezbollah fighters. Last summer, his own family spent 50 consecutive days hiding in shelters in the course of the Protective Edge campaign.
He wasn’t supposed to be in Nabi Saleh at all; he was supposed to be training, but he is frequently called to combustible sites in the territories. He finds himself facing a seething civilian population that throws stones if he’s lucky, and Molotov cocktails if he’s not. He also faces lone-wolf terrorism — what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) calls an “intifada of lone wolves” that is currently taking place in the territories. He is targeted by stones every day, all day long. His friends have been injured by stones. And the memory of Adele Biton, 4, who died of her wounds after being hit by stones, is still engraved in his memory.
