7 APRIL 2007, Page 18

‘You get your film,’ the Israeli soldier said, ‘and go home’

Rod Liddle witnesses a Palestinian teenager being brutally treated by an Israeli soldier and considers the part he and his film crew played in the incident ‘S o, are you happy now?’ the young Israeli soldier with the machinegun and the sneer asked me, as the Palestinian kid was bundled into the back of a police paddy wagon and conveyed to who-knows-where for a spot of rigorous who-knows-what. As the van pulled away along the dirt track the boy’s mum — toothless, distraught — detached herself from the angry little group of Arabs and remonstrated pitifully with the police, while being poked from time to time with a machinegun in the belly. We stood in the middle, not entirely sure what to do. The cameraman, Brian, stopped filming.

‘No, not happy at all,’ I replied. ‘What will happen to the kid? Where’s he going?’ But the soldier had turned away, in evident contempt. They’re not meant to talk to the film crews who turn up, every other day, to film stuff like this, just ignore them and get on with their jobs. I lit a cigarette and padded around like an imbecile, an uncomfortable imbecile.

Because he had a point, the young Israeli. We had arrived in clamorous, divided Hebron, on the West Bank, to shoot a film for Channel 4 about the iniquities suffered by the indigenous Palestinians, who constitute about 99.5 per cent of the population of this rather lovely old city. A city which, unfortunately, contains what is said to be the tombs of the Patriarchs — Abraham and his missus, Sarah, and their kids Isaac, Rebekah, Leah and Chardonnay. OK, I made the last one up. Tombs of some significance, then, to the Orthodox Jews as well as the Muslims.

And so, here was an iniquity: Orthodox Jewish settlers have taken over a bunch of residences on the hilltops and the Israeli soldiers are stationed, in some force, to protect them. This means a life of unending misery and hassle for the Palestinians who are required to traipse through a multitude of checkpoints every day, sometimes being detained for three or four hours at a stretch, just to get from home to their place of work, or to take the kids to school.

What the settlers have done is certainly illegal under international law and in some cases, one should assume, illegal under Israeli law. So, 120,000 Arab people are subjected to enormous disruption and, through the presence of the army, unequivocal oppression in order to protect the rights — or, more properly, wrongs of 500 or so religious zealots who act with impunity. Who was it said that the true test of a democracy is how its minorities are treated? Israel treats its tiny minority of Orthodox Jewish settlers in Hebron with enormous understanding and indulgence, regardless of how often they break the law or attack Palestinian kids going to school. Must be a good democracy, then.

And so we’re here, on this scrubby patch of land, to witness a telegenic iniquity, a microcosm of the larger Hebron iniquity. Apparently, some Palestinians were building a large house on this hill when, late one night, some 200 settlers swooped down and took it over, evicting the Palestinians, who have since erected a tent to one side of the dwelling with the Israeli soldiers in between (although not of course, ideologically speaking, really in the middle). Both sides claim legal rights to the land and property, and I have had sufficient dealings with lawyers in the last four years not to delve too deeply into the rectitude of each claim. Just to say that in a normal world, when you buy a house, you exchange contracts and send round a removal van when the last people have left; you don’t creep along in the dead of night with 198 of your friends armed with baseball bats. Also, you usually move in when the house is finished, rather than when there’s no roof.

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.

The Israeli government is rightly worried that the Palestinians have captured the moral high ground by precisely such tactics, if they are tactics. It is aware that the Palestinian PR machine wins hands down, as it has done since the first Intifada, back in the late 1980s — kids with rocks versus a professional army with heavy ordnance and, behind even that, the USA. And when the TV crews, or the international observers are around, the Palestinians play it up for all it is worth; they know how it will go down with an international audience. It is no coincidence that almost all of the anti-Israeli graffiti daubed on the buildings in Arab Hebron and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and also on the side of the crude and shocking wall the Israelis have built to divide the Arab West Bank from the Israeli West Bank, is written in English, rather than Arabic. The anti-Arab graffiti is written in Hebrew. They know, the Palestinians, that the force — the external force at least — is with them. The Orthodox Jews, the settlers, know that only a rapidly diminishing proportion of their own citizens support the cause to reclaim the proper Israel — those bits redolent of the Bible and the Torah, rather than that low strip adjoining the Mediterranean coast.

A little later the Israeli soldier who sneeringly asked if I was happy now returned to where I was standing, smoking and shuffling my feet and, very much off the record, spoke for a while. He was a decent, thoughtful, clever kid — a conscript from the agreeable town of Haifa who had felt as impotent in front of the cameras as he did in front of the settlers, to whom he felt no great allegiance, defending the scarcely defensible. This, I suspected, was not his idea of Israel, any more than it had been Ben Gurion’s.

‘I never sleep,’ he said. ‘I just want everything to be quiet, for nobody to get hurt. You turn up and you show this ...’ he gestured to Brian, with the camera, ‘but you don’t show the other side. And you know what will happen, when you turn up here with your camera. There will be trouble. And you get your film and you go home. I stay here.’ He wouldn’t be drawn on the politics, of course. ‘I have my political beliefs but ... I put them aside when I am called up to the army. I don’t want to save the Prime Minister either, though — I just have to do my job.’ I tried to tell him that I hadn’t wanted the kid to go berserk and end up in a police van, that this is journalism and it has to be done so that the world can see what’s going on and make up its own mind. ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘it’s what you do, isn’t it? And this is what I do.’ The kid was taken to a police station. We tried to find out what happened to him, but without much luck.