The following photo has been doing the rounds today:
The optics are certainly not good from an Israeli point of view.
But what those spreading it don’t show you is what happened right before this photo was taken:
It very much looks like the woman attacked the boy, and the knee may have been a reflexive, defensive reaction:
But I simply don’t know. And neither do those passing this off as Israeli aggression against poor, defenseless palestinian Arabs.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do not agree that he should have reacted the way he did against a much smaller, old woman. But to try pass this off as simply an Israeli boy attacking an elderly palestinian Arab woman for shits’n’giggles is dishonest.
Need I remind you how photos designed to demonize us are often not at all what they seem? Take this example from 2014:
As I explained at the time, he was angry at her because she stole a book of Psalms from him, something that was caught on camera.
