Israel Matzav

When an IDF soldier points a gun at you

Last Thursday night, the New York Times Lede blog posted a video that had been put up on YouTube by B'Tzelem, an Israeli human rights organization. I'm going to flip the order and give you the description of the video first, and then the video itself. Then I have a comment to make after the video.

Updated | Friday | 2:44 p.m. A video uploaded to YouTube by an Israeli human rights group on Wednesday shows an Israel Defense Forces officer pointing a gun at a Palestinian who appears to be unarmed. The group, B’Tselem, says it was filmed on June 18 at a gasoline station in Beit Ummar, a town in the West Bank.

The video shows an Israeli officer — a first lieutenant, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — yelling at a Palestinian man. The officer shoves the man, raises his gun, and for a moment, brings the muzzle to the man’s face. The officer then lowers the gun, takes a few steps back, and raises it again.

According to Haaretz, an unidentified representative for the Israel Defense Forces said the incident would be investigated.

On Friday, Capt. Barak Raz of the I.D.F. confirmed that the incident was under investigation.

“This is not the type of behavior we expect, not of our soldiers and certainly not of our commanders, both professionally and ethically,” Captain Barak said.

As my colleague Robert Mackey has reported, the group B’Tselem distributes video cameras to Palestinians so that demonstrations and rights abuses in the Palestinian territories can be documented.

Reached by e-mail on Thursday, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, Sarit Michaeli, said the video posted this week had indeed been filmed by a volunteer. The video, Ms. Michaeli explained, shows a resident of Beit Ummar being detained by soldiers on suspicion of throwing stones. When a male relative of the young suspect tried to intervene, Ms. Michaeli said, the officer pointed his gun at the man.

Let's go to the videotape.



I watched this video this evening with a friend who had a very interesting comment:

It’s difficult to know for sure, but it seems a reasonable interpretation of the video that the officer overreacted and earned himself a reprimand or the like.

But what’s most interesting is not the officer but the Palestinians. All of them, including the one with a gun pointed at his head, seem utterly unconcerned that the officer might shoot. They are well aware, contrary to the propaganda of the anti-Israel radicals, that even officers who violate disciplinary rules (like this one appears to) are never going to randomly shoot Palestinian civilians, even in the heat of an argument. Would you talk this way to a soldier or policeman if you had a serious fear he would shoot you?

Compare that video to some of the videos we've seen of Syria over the past several months. Notice how people in Syria (and for that matter Bahrain where we saw similar videos) scatter when the gunfire starts.

Just sayin'....

Labels: B'Tselem, Bahrain, IDF, IDF ethics, IDF purity of arms, Palestinians, Syria

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:51 AM