Israeli Police: Boy Crying Video Staged

In a recent PTN post, we showed the internationally-broadcasted video of Israeli police arresting a father and dragging him away as his five year-old child ran after him in tears.

The Israeli police responded with a well-worn script -- that the video was staged, that the boy was instructed to cry and was intentionally not held back in order to produce cheap propaganda. As improbable as this spin is, I'm not paraphrasing loosely. The official statement read:

Instead of the family acting responsibly toward a child and removing him from the situation, they chose to make cheap anti-Israel propaganda, whose sole purpose is to present us in a negative light around the world. As is seen in the pictures, and in order to remove any doubt, the authorities on site acted lawfully against the unacceptable phenomenon of water theft

Pointed out by a New York Times blogger, this explanation, and other "Pallywood" theories, are purely conspiratorial. And they always try to deflect from the fact that Israel's gross abuses are the really powerful part.

The Israeli explanation of the boy crying really misses the issue -- the criminality of Israel's West Bank water theft and overuse, and the abhorrent criminalization of Palestinians using water meet their needs (especially when Israel drains their water supplies).

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Where's Baba? In an Israeli jail ...

Watch this heart-wrenching video below. Here a young Palestinian boy, somewhere around 4 or 5, witnesses his father being dragged away by Israel's occupation apparatus. His father's crime? Using Palestinian water. The Israelis deem this an 'illegal irrigation system', which basically means he tapped into a water supply that is reserved for Israel's settlers so that he too could access water. Nick Kristoff wrote an important piece about this recently.

So not only is the Israeli occupation stealing Palestinian water on Palestinian land and keeping it for illegal Israeli settlements, but they have the nerve to arrest a Palestinian farmer in front of his family for the crime of wanting to feed them. A recent headline in an Israeli newspaper speaks to just how delusional supporters of the Israeli occupation have become when it comes to a sense of right and wrong.

I know we often hear about incitement and cartoons that are supposedly convincing Palestinian children to hate Israelis. But as you listen to this child scream at the top of his lungs, I ask you to think about what could possibly form a more negative image in the mind of a child than the traumatic day when the Israelis came for his baba.

How many more countless Palestinian children have witnessed similar events?

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