Two pictures of two Arab children went viral this week. The Syrian toddler whose lifeless body washed up on the shores of a Greek island after an attempt by his family to flee their war-torn country and that of an 11-year-old Palestinian struggling to free himself from the headlock of an Israeli soldier have stopped people dead in their tracks. Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi was one of 12 Syrian refugees who drowned while trying to reach Greece and one of more than 2,600 people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe this year alone. But it was a picture of Kurdi's tiny body washed up alone on the shore that has caused particular outrage. It shook social media and outraged leaders because it shouldn't have happened. Kurdi and his family wanted what anyone else does - what hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence, who have flooded Europe want - a safe home. What Aylan got instead was death at sea. It is the hope of many that the images of the boy lying on the beach and his limp body being scooped up by a rescue worker can be a turning point in the debate over how to handle the surge of refugees and migrants heading to Europe, although sadly, the migrant and refugee crisis shows no signs of abating. The other picture speaks of a much older crisis. For a few years now, Palestinians in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh have held a weekly demonstration to protest the Israeli occupation that has confiscated village land for a nearby Israeli settlement. These protests don't usually make international news. But a camera in Nabi Saleh captured the panicked screams and gasps of 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi held in a headlock by a soldier who claimed the boy was throwing stones at his comrades. It was all caught on camera by the press who had attended the protest. The result was a video of an IDF soldier placing the child, his arm in a cast, in a chokehold, holding a gun near his head, and then sitting on him as he screamed in fear and pain. Because the video is so brutal, yet so very typical of the daily norms of the occupation, it has taken on a symbolic quality. And as with everything in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there are two narratives to this video. The Israeli version is that it shows an Israeli soldier being attacked by a mob of angry Palestinians trying to free Tamimi. The Palestinian story is that it shows an Israeli soldier brutalizing a Palestinian child. It is difficult to imagine how this soldier's treatment of the boy is even remotely justifiable. This is a story in which cruel and inhumane Israelis are so committed to forcibly maintaining their occupation of Palestinian land that they will attack even children. The repetition of the thousands upon thousands of images of the nearly 70-year-old Israeli occupation has probably desensitized viewers. Photos of the recent migration explosion, if it lasts long enough, may do the same. Pictures of these crises become such a common sight in the media that they are hardly noticed. Unfortunately, it takes something truly out of the ordinary – usually something to do with human suffering - to grab our attention. Aylan and Mohammed are distressing casualties of war and upheaval and images of them convey raw emotion and highlight the politics of neglect of the world. The children are small but they are the biggest indictment of our collective failure.
