‘You get your film and go home’
This, then, is an iniquity for the benefit of the international community, a perpetual little flashpoint, with the Palestinians camped out sulkily in their tent and the Jews hammering away at struts and balconies and fences in full view of the infuriated, dispossessed Arabs, who are kept 15 metres distant by the disincentive of machineguns. And in full view of the camera crews, of which there have been many. And the various liberal international-pressure-group observers, of which there are also a great many.
What happened on this occasion was this: undoubtedly emboldened by our camera, one Palestinian kid — 15 years old — crosses a line he is not supposed to cross. He walks a bit nearer the house than he should. The cameras are rolling. The soldiers surround him and tell him to clear off, back to his tent. He refuses. He says something vainglorious and declamatory in Arabic about refusing ever to move, and then maybe throws in a few obscenities at one of the soldiers — an Arab-Israeli guy (everyone will tell you that the nastiest of the IDF are the Druze). At which point, he gets kicked, hard, in the balls, punched in the stomach and shoved in the back of a van.
In the world league-table of atrocities this is small beer — and, for film crews used to operating in tense and dangerous parts of the globe, a familiar and perhaps minor ethical problem. The Israeli soldier was right, though, in his implication: if we had not been there, this would not have happened. If you build it, they will come, etc. The kid was grandstanding for the cameras and, as a result, will get a beating. If we — or some other TV monkeys — had not been there, it would not have happened. We were there to witness injustice; and also, if possible, exacerbate it for the benefit of the viewing public.
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