Fiddler of the Truth (or Violince in the Middle East)

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

 

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

 

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

 

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to “play something sad” while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

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It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

 

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs. 

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Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

 

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is “the most moral in the world” because it says it adheres to a code of “the purity of arms”. There is rarely much public questioning of the army’s routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been “caught in crossfire”, or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

A Palestinian filmed by a human-rights group playing his violin at an Israeli military checkpoint was not forced to do so by soldiers, the Israeli army said yesterday, summing up an internal investigation.

 

Footage of Wissam Tayim making music last week near the West Bank city of Nablus struck an emotional chord in Israel, where the local media drew comparisons to Jewish musicians forced to play at Nazi death camps.

 

In an interview with Israel’s biggest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, Tayim said a soldier demanded he take his violin out of its case and play something sad.

 

A member of the Israeli human-rights group Machsom Watch who filmed the incident told Reuters last week she did not believe Tayim was coerced into playing.

 

Commenting on the results of an investigation led by a general, a military spokeswoman said soldiers asked Tayim only to open the violin case for a security check but he was never told to play the instrument.

 

“The Palestinian took the violin out of the case and began to play it. After a few seconds, he was asked by an officer … to stop playing,” the army said in a communiqué.

 

Nonetheless, the military statement said the army recognized “that insensitivity was shown during the incident, although there was no intention to show disrespect towards the Palestinian or mock him.”

Filed Under: General

Tags: Media Bias