We’ve been hearing about “consequences for Israeli society” for ages now, and I’ve yet to see any evidence of such. Yes, Israel has probably gotten worse in lots of ways since 1967, but it’s very hard to find evidence of causality, especially considering what’s been going on in other democracies that were not occupying/colonizing powers. I’m very skeptical of this claim.

The settler’s car comes around a blind curve and into a well staged, and well documented ambush. Notice that are were no rocks on the pavement before the rock throwing began. That’s because no other car was stoned, which is because the kids were lying in ambush for that one prominent settler.

How many staged injuries do you have to watch before you become cynical. See the you tube videos from the Niztana crossing to Gaza. Watch the documentary Pallywood, look at the entire Mohammed al Dura video.

Please.

It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that this single incident was staged, but there is no definite proof and there is certainly no suggestion that such things are staged as a matter course. You are trying to take one video clip and use it as a smokescreen for a pattern of entrenched abuse that has already been spelled out. As the soldier testimonies have demonstrated and my own experience corroborates, the army doesn’t look for proof of involvement when arresting a child. Children, like adults, are subject to administrative detention, which means that the army isn’t obliged to give any reason for detaining them, let alone present evidence for it. When reasons are given, they can be totally trivial – such as looking at a soldier in a way he doesn’t like. Sometimes teenagers in one area will be rounded up as an intimidation tactic – it happened to one of my good friends when he was seventeen. He was held for three weeks in Ofer Prison, along with all the male teens from his area, and the army didn’t even bother to present the stone-throwing excuse as a figleaf. Back in April, using that excuse, soldiers in Kufr Quddoum attempted to arrest two-year-old Mo’men Shteiwi. They said they’d seen him with something resembling a slingshot.

You, like the army, are automatically presuming the children are ‘guilty’ (of something, it doesn’t particularly matter what) and deserve what they get, which is classic victim-blaming. A discussion of child maltreatment in military custody becomes, “Prove that they didn’t do something to earn it, prove that the hapless innocent IDF soldiers weren’t forced to blindfold a kid and threaten him with death and beat him and make him crap his pants by sinister manipulative Palestinians.” You evidently don’t see how sick that is, and unfortunately I don’t have any way of making you see. I’m just glad that some of the soldiers realise it.

What do you think?

If we had a phenomenon of children being recruited to do anything they didn’t want to do, I would need to address it, because child mental health is my area and I don’t decide whether something is ‘abusive’ or not based on who is committing the abuse. This is where our approaches differ. You are keen to oppose the ‘cynical abuse’ of Palestinian children by adult activists – but physical and psychological abuse becomes ‘tame’ providing it’s done by people in the right colour uniform. Your concern isn’t for the children.

While we’re talking about the cynical use of ‘other people’s children’, it might be a good moment to mention all the supporters of occupation (especially those living overseas) who rely on a military draft of teenagers fresh out of high school to maintain that occupation for them. The difficulties faced by soldiers and ex-soldiers have already been touched on in other comments, and they’re crystal clear in the testimonies. Most of these young people have never even lived away from home before, are used to being guided and directed by parents and teachers, and are far less likely than a adult with more life experience to question an inhumane order. Most of them have taken it for granted that they will be in the army since they were young enough to understand the word. They’re groomed for this, and the only get-out clauses are ill health, orthodox religious observance, and in some cases total pacifism, not, “I don’t want to go.” We need far less talk of ‘other people’s children’ from anyone supporting this enterprise.

You have gone from trying to make out that Palestinian children and Israeli Jewish children are treated equally, to acknowledging they aren’t and qualifying it with that old favourite, “It’s a grey area, it’s a war, everything is complicated” – the old Emperor’s New Clothes argument. In an example of victim mentality on steroids, you even invoke the need of thousands of heavily armed, well-equipped soldiers to ‘protect’ themselves against young kids through inhumane and traumatising methods – methods that they never need to use against anyone else, funnily enough, and that in these testimonies perpetrators themselves identify as pointless. “It’s a grey area…” will never be a sufficient smokescreen for that.

When American G.I.s go to murder people in Iraq and Afghanistan and get medals for it.

And if the G.I.s come back to the United States and murder an American civilian the murderer gets a life sentence.

War and peace are funny that way and the Occupied Territories are a political and judicial ‘grey zone’.