Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?

The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli
confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now
a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the
fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been
involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds-but
the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon

by James Fallows The Atlantic Monthly June 2003
The URL for this page is
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/06/fallows.htm.

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The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a
billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance
against Israel and-because of this country's support for Israel -against the
United States as well.

Al-Dura was the twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during an
exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators on
September 30, 2000. The final few seconds of his life, when he crouched in
terror behind his father, Jamal, and then slumped to the ground after
bullets ripped through his torso, were captured by a television camera and
broadcast around the world. Through repetition they have become as familiar
and significant to Arab and Islamic viewers as photographs of bombed-out
Hiroshima are to the people of Japan-or as footage of the crumbling World
Trade Center is to Americans. Several Arab countries have issued postage
stamps carrying a picture of the terrified boy. One of Baghdad's main
streets was renamed The Martyr Mohammed Aldura Street. Morocco has an
al-Dura Park. In one of the messages Osama bin Laden released after the
September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he
began a list of indictments against "American arrogance and Israeli
violence" by saying, "In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his
media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not
forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and
Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing."

But almost since the day of the episode evidence has been emerging in
Israel, under controversial and intriguing circumstances, to indicate that
the official version of the Mohammed al-Dura story is not true. It now
appears that the boy cannot have died in the way reported by most of the
world's media and fervently believed throughout the Islamic world. Whatever
happened to him, he was not shot by the Israeli soldiers who were known to
be involved in the day's fighting-or so I am convinced, after spending a
week in Israel talking with those examining the case. The exculpatory
evidence comes not from government or military officials in Israel, who have
an obvious interest in claiming that their soldiers weren't responsible, but
from other sources. In fact, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, seem to
prefer to soft-pedal the findings rather than bring any more attention to
this gruesome episode. The research has been done by a variety of academics,
ex-soldiers, and Web-loggers who have become obsessed with the case, and the
evidence can be cross-checked.

No "proof" that originates in Israel is likely to change minds in the Arab
world. The longtime Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi dismissed one
early Israeli report on the topic as a "falsified version of reality [that]
blames the victims." Late this spring Said Hamad, a spokesman at the PLO
office in Washington, told me of the new Israeli studies, "It does not
surprise me that these reports would come out from the same people who shot
Mohammed al-Dura. He was shot of course by the Israeli army, and not by
anybody else." Even if evidence that could revise the understanding of this
particular death were widely accepted (so far it has been embraced by a few
Jewish groups in Europe and North America), it would probably have no effect
on the underlying hatred and ongoing violence in the region. Nor would
evidence that clears Israeli soldiers necessarily support the overarching
Likud policy of sending soldiers to occupy territories and protect
settlements. The Israelis still looking into the al-Dura case do not all
endorse Likud occupation policies. In fact, some strongly oppose them.

The truth about Mohammed al-Dura is important in its own right, because this
episode is so raw and vivid in the Arab world and so hazy, if not invisible,
in the West. Whatever the course of the occupation of Iraq, the United
States has guaranteed an ample future supply of images of Arab suffering.
The two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the war, killing
scores of civilians, offered an initial taste. Even as U.S. officials
cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether U.S.
or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the
brutality that created these new martyrs. More of this lies ahead. The saga
of Mohammed al-Dura illustrates the way the battles of wartime imagery may
play themselves out.

The harshest version of the al-Dura case from the Arab side is that it
proves the ancient "blood libel"-Jews want to kill gentile children-and
shows that Americans count Arab life so cheap that they will let the
Israelis keep on killing. The harshest version from the Israeli side is that
the case proves the Palestinians' willingness to deliberately sacrifice even
their own children in the name of the war against Zionism. In Tel Aviv I
looked through hour after hour of videotape in an attempt to understand what
can be known about what happened, and what it means.

The Day

The death of Mohammed al-Dura took place on the second day of what is now
known as the second intifada, a wave of violent protests throughout the West
Bank and Gaza. In the summer of 2000 Middle East peace negotiations had
reached another impasse. On September 28 of that year, a Thursday, Ariel
Sharon, then the leader of Israel's Likud Party but not yet Prime Minister,
made a visit to the highly contested religious site in Jerusalem that Jews
know as the Temple Mount and Muslims know as Haram al-Sharif, with its two
mosques. For Palestinians this was the trigger-or, in the view of many
Israelis, the pretext-for the expanded protests that began the next day.

On September 30 the protest sites included a crossroads in the occupied Gaza
territory near the village of Netzarim, where sixty families of Israeli
settlers live. The crossroads is a simple right-angle intersection of two
roads in a lightly developed area. Three days earlier a roadside bomb had
mortally wounded an IDF soldier there. At one corner of the intersection
were an abandoned warehouse, two six-story office buildings known as the
"twin towers," and a two-story building. (These structures and others
surrounding the crossroads have since been torn down.) A group of IDF
soldiers had made the two-story building their outpost, to guard the road
leading to the Israeli settlement.

Diagonally across the intersection was a small, ramshackle building and a
sidewalk bordered by a concrete wall. It was along this wall that Mohammed
al-Dura and his father crouched before they were shot. (The father was
injured but survived.) The other two corners of the crossroads were vacant
land. One of them contained a circular dirt berm, known as the Pita because
it was shaped like a pita loaf. A group of uniformed Palestinian policemen,
armed with automatic rifles, were on the Pita for much of the day.

Early in the morning of Saturday, September 30, a crowd of Palestinians
gathered at the Netzarim crossroads. TV crews, photographers, and reporters
from many news agencies, including Reuters, AP, and the French television
network France 2, were also at the ready. Because so many cameras were
running for so many hours, there is abundant documentary evidence of most of
the day's events-with a few strange and crucial exceptions, most of them
concerning Mohammed al-Dura.

"Rushes" (raw footage) of the day's filming collected from these and other
news organizations around the world tell a detailed yet confusing story. The
tapes overlap in some areas but leave mysterious gaps in others. No one
camera, of course, followed the day's events from beginning to end; and with
so many people engaged in a variety of activities simultaneously, no one
account could capture everything. Gabriel Weimann, the chairman of the
communications department at the University of Haifa, whose book
Communicating Unreality concerns the media's distorting effects, explained
to me on my visit that the footage in its entirety has a "Rashomon effect."
Many separate small dramas seem to be under way. Some of the shots show
groups of young men walking around, joking, sitting and smoking and
appearing to enjoy themselves. Others show isolated moments of intense
action, as protesters yell and throw rocks, and shots ring out from various
directions. Only when these vignettes are packaged together as a
conventional TV news report do they seem to have a narrative coherence.

Off and on throughout the morning some of the several hundred Palestinian
civilians at the crossroads mounted assaults on the IDF outpost. They threw
rocks and Molotov cocktails. They ran around waving the Palestinian flag and
trying to pull down an Israeli flag near the outpost. A few of the civilians
had pistols or rifles, which they occasionally fired; the second intifada
quickly escalated from throwing rocks to using other weapons. The
Palestinian policemen, mainly in the Pita area, also fired at times. The IDF
soldiers, according to Israeli spokesmen, were under orders not to fire in
response to rocks or other thrown objects. They were to fire only if fired
upon. Scenes filmed throughout the day show smoke puffing from the muzzles
of M-16s pointed through the slits of the IDF outpost.

To watch the raw footage is to wonder, repeatedly, What is going on here? In
some scenes groups of Palestinians duck for cover from gunfire while others
nonchalantly talk or smoke just five feet away. At one dramatic moment a
Palestinian man dives forward clutching his leg, as if shot in the thigh. An
ambulance somehow arrives to collect him exactly two seconds later, before
he has stopped rolling from the momentum of his fall. Another man is loaded
into an ambulance-and, in footage from a different TV camera, appears to
jump out of it again some minutes later.

At around 3:00 P.M. Mohammed al-Dura and his father make their first
appearance on film. The time can be judged by later comments from the father
and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of shadows in the
footage. Despite the number of cameras that were running that day, Mohammed
and Jamal al-Dura appear in the footage of only one cameraman-Talal
Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian working for France 2.

Jamal al-Dura later said that he had taken his son to a used-car market and
was on the way back when he passed through the crossroads and into the
crossfire. When first seen on tape, father and son are both crouched on the
sidewalk behind a large concrete cylinder, their backs against the wall. The
cylinder, about three feet high, is referred to as "the barrel" in most
discussions of the case, although it appears to be a section from a culvert
or a sewer system. On top of the cylinder is a big paving stone, which adds
another eight inches or so of protection. The al-Duras were on the corner
diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. By hiding behind the barrel they
were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from
Israeli fire.

Many news accounts later claimed that the two were under fire for forty-five
minutes, but the action captured on camera lasts a very brief time. Jamal
looks around desperately. Mohammed slides down behind him, as if to make his
body disappear behind his father's. Jamal clutches a pack of cigarettes in
his left hand, while he alternately waves and cradles his son with his
right. The sound of gunfire is heard, and four bullet holes appear in the
wall just to the left of the pair. The father starts yelling. There is
another burst. Mohammed goes limp and falls forward across his father's lap,
his shirt stained with blood. Jamal, too, is hit, and his head starts
bobbling. The camera cuts away. Although France 2 or its cameraman may have
footage that it or he has chosen not to release, no other visual record of
the shooting or its immediate aftermath is known to exist. Other Palestinian
casualties of the day are shown being evacuated, but there is no known
on-tape evidence of the boy's being picked up, tended to, loaded into an
ambulance, or handled in any other way after he was shot.

The footage of the shooting is unforgettable, and it illustrates the way in
which television transforms reality. I have seen it replayed at least a
hundred times now, and on each repetition I can't help hoping that this time
the boy will get himself down low enough, this time the shots will miss.
Through the compression involved in editing the footage for a news report,
the scene acquired a clear story line by the time European, American, and
Middle Eastern audiences saw it on television: Palestinians throw rocks.
Israeli soldiers, from the slits in their outpost, shoot back. A little boy
is murdered.

What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally
confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted
on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But
according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was
admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the
afternoon. The doctor's report also notes, without further explanation, that
the dead boy had a cut down his belly about eight inches long. A boy's body,
wrapped in a Palestinian flag but with his face exposed, was later carried
through the streets to a burial site (the exact timing is in dispute). The
face looks very much like Mohammed's in the video footage. Thousands of
mourners lined the route. A BBC TV report on the funeral began, "A
Palestinian boy has been martyred." Many of the major U.S. news
organizations reported that the funeral was held on the evening of September
30, a few hours after the shooting. Oddly, on film the procession appears to
take place in full sunlight, with shadows indicative of midday.

The Aftermath

Almost immediately news media around the world be gan reporting the tragedy.
Print outlets were gener ally careful to say that Mohammed al-Dura was
killed in "the crossfire" or "an exchange of fire" between Israeli soldiers
and Palestinians. The New York Times, for instance, reported that he was
"shot in the stomach as he crouched behind his father on the sidelines of an
intensifying battle between Israeli and Palestinian security forces." But
the same account included Jamal al-Dura's comment that the fatal volley had
come from Israeli soldiers. Jacki Lyden said on NPR's Weekend All Things
Considered that the boy had been "caught in crossfire." She then interviewed
the France 2 cameraman, Talal Abu-Rahma, who said that he thought the
Israelis had done the shooting.
ABU-RAHMA: I was very sad. I was crying. And I was remembering my children.
I was afraid to lose my life. And I was sitting on my knees and hiding my
head, carrying my camera, and I was afraid from the Israeli to see this
camera, maybe they will think this is a weapon, you know, or I am trying to
shoot on them. But I was in the most difficult situation in my life. A boy,
I cannot save his life, and I want to protect myself.

LYDEN: Was there any attempt by the troops who were firing to cease fire to
listen to what the father had to say? Could they even see what they were
shooting at?

ABU-RAHMA: Okay. It's clear it was a father, it's clear it was a boy over
there for ever who [presumably meaning "whoever"] was shooting on them from
across the street, you know, in front of them. I'm sure from that area, I'm
expert in that area, I've been in that area many times. I know every
[unintelligible] in that area. Whoever was shooting, he got to see them,
because that base is not far away from the boy and the father. It's about a
hundred and fifty meters [about 500 feet].
On that night's broadcast of ABC World News Tonight, the correspondent
Gillian Findlay said unambiguously that the boy had died "under Israeli
fire." Although both NBC and CBS used the term "crossfire" in their reports,
videos of Israeli troops firing and then the boy dying left little doubt
about the causal relationship. Jamal al-Dura never wavered in his view that
the Israelis had killed his son. "Are you sure they were Israeli bullets?"
Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, asked him in an interview later that year. "I'm a
hundred percent sure," he replied, through his translator. "They were
Israelis." In another interview he told the Associated Press, "The bullets
of the Zionists are the bullets that killed my son."

By Tuesday, October 3, all doubt seemed to have been removed. After a
hurried internal investigation the IDF concluded that its troops were
probably to blame. General Yom-Tov Samia, then the head of the IDF's
Southern Command, which operated in Gaza, said, "It could very much be-this
is an estimation-that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field
of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from
which he was being fired at, and he shot in that direction." General Giora
Eiland, then the head of IDF operations, said on an Israeli radio broadcast
that the boy was apparently killed by "Israeli army fire at the Palestinians
who were attacking them violently with a great many petrol bombs, rocks, and
very massive fire."

The further attempt to actually justify killing the boy was, in terms of
public opinion, yet more damning for the IDF. Eiland said, "It is known that
[Mohammed al-Dura] participated in stone throwing in the past." Samia asked
what a twelve-year-old was doing in such a dangerous place to begin with.
Ariel Sharon, who admitted that the footage of the shooting was "very hard
to see," and that the death was "a real tragedy," also said, "The one that
should be blamed is only the one ... that really instigated all those
activities, and that is Yasir Arafat."

Palestinians, and the Arab-Islamic world in general, predictably did not
agree. Sweatshirts, posters, and wall murals were created showing the face
of Mohammed al-Dura just before he died. "His face, stenciled three feet
high, is a common sight on the walls of Gaza," Matthew McAllester, of
Newsday, wrote last year. "His name is known to every Arab, his death cited
as the ultimate example of Israeli military brutality." In modern warfare,
Bob Simon said on CBS's 60 Minutes, "one picture can be worth a thousand
weapons," and the picture of the doomed boy amounted to "one of the most
disastrous setbacks Israel has suffered in decades." Gabriel Weimann, of
Haifa University, said that when he first heard of the case, "it made me
sick to think this was done in my name." Amnon Lord, an Israeli columnist
who has investigated the event, told me in an e-mail message that it was
important "on the mythological level," because it was "a framework story, a
paradigmatic event," illustrating Israeli brutality. Dan Schueftan, an
Israeli strategist and military thinker, told me that the case was uniquely
damaging. He said, "[It was] the ultimate symbol of what the Arabs want to
think: the father is trying to protect his son, and the satanic Jews-there
is no other word for it-are trying to kill him. These Jews are people who
will come to kill our children, because they are not human."

Two years after Mohammed al-Dura's death his stepmother, Amal, became
pregnant with another child, the family's eighth. The parents named him
Mohammed. Amal was quoted late in her pregnancy as saying, "It will send a
message to Israel: 'Yes, you've killed one, but God has compensated for him.
You can't kill us all.'"

Second Thoughts

In the fall of last year Gabriel Weimann mentioned the Mohammed al-Dura case
in a special course that he teaches at the Israeli Military Academy,
National Security and Mass Media. Like most adults in Israel, Weimann, a
tall, athletic-looking man in his early fifties, still performs up to thirty
days of military-reserve duty a year. His reserve rank is sergeant, whereas
the students in his class are lieutenant colonels and above.

To underscore the importance of the media in international politics, Weimann
shows some of his students a montage of famous images from past wars: for
World War II the flag raising at Iwo Jima; for Vietnam the South Vietnamese
officer shooting a prisoner in the head and the little girl running naked
down a path with napalm on her back. For the current intifada, Weimann told
his students, the lasting iconic image would be the frightened face of
Mohammed al-Dura.

One day last fall, after he discussed the images, a student spoke up. "I was
there," he said. "We didn't do it."

"Prove it," Weimann said. He assigned part of the class, as its major
research project, a reconsideration of the evidence in the case. A
surprisingly large amount was available. The students began by revisiting an
investigation undertaken by the Israeli military soon after the event.

Shortly after the shooting General Samia was contacted by Nahum Shahaf, a
physicist and engineer who had worked closely with the IDF on the design of
pilotless drone aircraft. While watching the original news broadcasts of the
shooting Shahaf had been alarmed, like most viewers inside and outside
Israel. But he had also noticed an apparent anomaly. The father seemed to be
concerned mainly about a threat originating on the far side of the barrel
behind which he had taken shelter. Yet when he and his son were shot, the
barrel itself seemed to be intact. What, exactly, did this mean?

Samia commissioned Shahaf and an engineer, Yosef Duriel, to work on a second
IDF investigation of the case. "The reason from my side is to check and
clean up our values," Samia later told Bob Simon, of CBS. He said he wanted
"to see that we are still acting as the IDF." Shahaf stressed to Samia that
the IDF should do whatever it could to preserve all physical evidence. But
because so much intifada activity continued in the Netzarim area, the IDF
demolished the wall and all related structures. Shahaf took one trip to
examine the crossroads, clad in body armor and escorted by Israeli soldiers.
Then, at a location near Beersheba, Shahaf, Duriel, and others set up models
of the barrel, the wall, and the IDF shooting position, in order to re-enact
the crucial events.

Bullets had not been recovered from the boy's body at the hospital, and the
family was hardly willing to agree to an exhumation to re-examine the
wounds. Thus the most important piece of physical evidence was the concrete
barrel. In the TV footage it clearly bears a mark from the Israeli Bureau of
Standards, which enabled investigators to determine its exact dimensions and
composition. When they placed the equivalent in front of a concrete wall and
put mannequins representing father and son behind it, a conclusion emerged:
soldiers in the Israeli outpost could not have fired the shots whose impact
was shown on TV. The evidence was cumulative and reinforcing. It involved
the angle, the barrel, the indentations, and the dust.

Mohammed al-Dura and his father looked as if they were sheltering themselves
against fire from the IDF outpost. In this they were successful. The films
show that the barrel was between them and the Israeli guns. The line of
sight from the IDF position to the pair was blocked by concrete.
Conceivably, some other Israeli soldier was present and fired from some
other angle, although there is no evidence of this and no one has ever
raised it as a possibility; and there were Palestinians in all the other
places, who would presumably have noticed the presence of additional IDF
troops. From the one location where Israeli soldiers are known to have been,
the only way to hit the boy would have been to shoot through the concrete
barrel.

This brings us to the nature of the barrel. Its walls were just under two
inches thick. On the test range investigators fired M-16 bullets at a
similar barrel. Each bullet made an indentation only two fifths to four
fifths of an inch deep. Penetrating the barrel would have required multiple
hits on both sides of the barrel's wall. The videos of the shooting show
fewer than ten indentations on the side of the barrel facing the IDF,
indicating that at some point in the day's exchanges of fire the Israelis
did shoot at the barrel. But photographs taken after the shooting show no
damage of any kind on the side of the barrel facing the al-Duras-that is, no
bullets went through.

Further evidence involves the indentations in the concrete wall. The bullet
marks that appear so ominously in the wall seconds before the fatal volley
are round. Their shape is significant because of what it indicates about the
angle of the gunfire. The investigators fired volleys into a concrete wall
from a variety of angles. They found that in order to produce a round
puncture mark, they had to fire more or less straight on. The more oblique
the angle, the more elongated and skidlike the hole became.

The dust resulting from a bullet's impact followed similar rules. A head-on
shot produced the smallest, roundest cloud of dust. The more oblique the
angle, the larger and longer the cloud of dust. In the video of the shooting
the clouds of dust near the al-Duras' heads are small and round. Shots from
the IDF outpost would necessarily have been oblique.

In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent
with shots coming from the IDF outpost-and in all ways consistent with shots
coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location
of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not
the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to
determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the
investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood
no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental
point-that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no
bullets had gone through the barrel-could be confirmed independently from
news footage.

It was at this point that the speculation about Mohammed al-Dura's death
left the realm of geometry and ballistics and entered the world of politics,
paranoia, fantasy, and hatred. Almost as soon as the second IDF
investigation was under way, Israeli commentators started questioning its
legitimacy and Israeli government officials distanced themselves from its
findings. "It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this
bizarre investigation," the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz said in an editorial
six weeks after the shooting. The newspaper claimed that Shahaf and Duriel
were motivated not by a need for dispassionate inquiry but by the belief
that Palestinians had staged the whole shooting. (Shahaf told me that he
began his investigation out of curiosity but during the course of it became
convinced that the multiple anomalies indicated a staged event.) "The fact
that an organized body like the IDF, with its vast resources, undertook such
an amateurish investigation-almost a pirate endeavor-on such a sensitive
issue, is shocking and worrying," Ha'aretz said.

As the controversy grew, Samia abbreviated the investigation and
subsequently avoided discussing the case. Most government officials, I was
told by many sources, regard drawing any further attention to Mohammed
al-Dura as self-defeating. No new "proof" would erase images of the boy's
death, and resurrecting the discussion would only ensure that the horrible
footage was aired yet again. IDF press officials did not return any of my
calls, including those requesting to interview soldiers who were at the
outpost.

So by the time Gabriel Weimann's students at the Israeli Military Academy,
including the one who had been on the scene, began looking into the evidence
last fall, most Israelis had tried to put the case behind them. Those
against the Likud policy of encouraging settlements in occupied territory
think of the shooting as one more illustration of the policy's cost. Those
who support the policy view Mohammed al-Dura's death as an unfortunate
instance of "collateral damage," to be weighed against damage done to
Israelis by Palestinian terrorists. Active interest in the case was confined
mainly to a number of Israelis and European Jews who believe the event was
manipulated to blacken Israel's image. Nahum Shahaf has become the leading
figure in this group.

Shahaf is a type familiar to reporters: the person who has given himself
entirely to a cause or a mystery and can talk about its ramifications as
long as anyone will listen. He is a strongly built man of medium height,
with graying hair combed back from his forehead. In photos he always appears
stern, almost glowering, whereas in the time I spent with him he seemed to
be constantly smiling, joking, having fun. Shahaf is in his middle fifties,
but like many other scientists and engineers, he has the quality of seeming
not quite grown up. He used to live in California, where, among other
pursuits, he worked as a hang-gliding instructor. He moves and gesticulates
with a teenager's lack of self-consciousness about his bearing. I liked him.

Before getting involved in the al-Dura case, Shahaf was known mainly as an
inventor. He was only the tenth person to receive a medal from the Israeli
Ministry of Science, for his work on computerized means of compressing
digital video transmission. "But for two and a half years I am spending time
only on the al-Dura case," he told me. "I left everything for it, because I
believe that this is most important." When I arrived at his apartment,
outside Tel Aviv, to meet him one morning, I heard a repeated sound from one
room that I assumed was from a teenager's playing a violent video game. An
hour later, when we walked into that room-which has been converted into a
video-research laboratory, with multiple monitors, replay devices, and
computers-I saw that it was one mob scene from September 30, being played on
a continuous loop.

Shahaf's investigation for the IDF showed that the Israeli soldiers at the
outpost did not shoot the boy. But he now believes that everything that
happened at Netzarim on September 30 was a ruse. The boy on the film may or
may not have been the son of the man who held him. The boy and the man may
or may not actually have been shot. If shot, the boy may or may not actually
have died. If he died, his killer may or may not have been a member of the
Palestinian force, shooting at him directly. The entire goal of the
exercise, Shahaf says, was to manufacture a child martyr, in correct
anticipation of the damage this would do to Israel in the eyes of the
world-especially the Islamic world. "I believe that one day there will be
good things in common between us and the Palestinians," he told me. "But the
case of Mohammed al-Dura brings the big flames between Israel and the
Palestinians and Arabs. It brings a big wall of hate. They can say this is
the proof, the ultimate proof, that Israeli soldiers are boy-murderers. And
that hatred breaks any chance of having something good in the future."

The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of
onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence
for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of
oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why
is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move
in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is
supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret
Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown
waving his arms and yelling at others, as if "directing" a dramatic scene?
Why does the funeral appear-based on the length of shadows-to have occurred
before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the
father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be
that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, "The boy is dead" before he
had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else
and not for al-Dura?

A handful of Israeli and foreign commentators have taken up Shahaf's cause.
A Web site called masada2000.org says of the IDF's initial apology, "They
acknowledged guilt, for never in their collective minds would any one of
them have imagined a scenario whereby Mohammed al-Dura might have been
murdered by his own people ... a cruel plot staged and executed by
Palestinian sharp-shooters and a television cameraman!" Amnon Lord, writing
for the magazine Makor Rishon, referred to a German documentary directed by
Esther Schapira that was "based on Shahaf's own decisive conclusion" and
that determined "that Muhammad Al-Dura was not killed by IDF gunfire at
Netzarim junction." "Rather," Lord continued, "the Palestinians, in
cooperation with foreign journalists and the UN, arranged a well-staged
production of his death." In March of this year a French writer, Gérard
Huber, published a book called Contre expertise d'une mise en scène
(roughly, Re-evaluation of a Re-enactment). It, too, argues that the entire
event was staged. In an e-mail message to me Huber said that before knowing
of Shahaf's studies he had been aware that "the images of little Mohammed
were part of the large war of images between Palestinians and Israelis." But
until meeting Shahaf, he said, "I had not imagined that it involved a
fiction"-a view he now shares. "The question of 'Who killed little
Mohammed?'" he said, "has become a screen to disguise the real question,
which is: 'Was little Mohammed actually killed?'"

The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it
more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all
sides will ever emerge. For most of the Arab world, the rights and wrongs of
the case are beyond dispute: an innocent boy was murdered, and his blood is
on Israel's hands. Mention of contrary evidence or hypotheses only confirms
the bottomless dishonesty of the guilty parties-much as Holocaust-denial
theories do in the Western world. For the handful of people collecting
evidence of a staged event, the truth is also clear, even if the proof is
not in hand. I saw Nahum Shahaf lose his good humor only when I asked him
what he thought explained the odd timing of the boy's funeral, or the
contradictions in eyewitness reports, or the other loose ends in the case.
"I don't 'think,' I know!" he said several times. "I am a physicist. I work
from the evidence." Schapira had collaborated with him for the German
documentary and then produced a film advancing the "minimum" version of his
case, showing that the shots did not, could not have, come from the IDF
outpost. She disappointed him by not embracing the maximum version-the
all-encompassing hoax-and counseled him not to talk about a staged event
unless he could produce a living boy or a cooperative eyewitness. Shahaf
said that he still thought well of her, and that he was not discouraged. "I
am only two and a half years into this work," he told me. "It took twelve
years for the truth of the Dreyfus case to come out."

For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the
decided camps-the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the
revisionists who are equally sure-the case will remain in the uncomfortable
realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood. "Maybe it was
an accidental shooting," Gabriel Weimann told me, after reading his
students' report, which, like the German documentary, supported the
"minimum" conclusion-the Israeli soldiers at the outpost could not have
killed the boy. (He could not show the report to me, he said, on grounds of
academic confidentiality.) "Maybe even it was staged-although I don't think
my worst enemy is so inhuman as to shoot a boy for the sake of publicity.
Beyond that, I do not know." Weimann's recent work involves the way that
television distorts reality in attempting to reconstruct it, by putting
together loosely related or even random events in what the viewer imagines
is a coherent narrative flow. The contrast between the confusing,
contradictory hours of raw footage from the Netzarim crossroads and the
clear, gripping narrative of the evening news reports assembled from that
footage is a perfect example, he says.

The significance of this case from the American perspective involves the
increasingly chaotic ecology of truth around the world. In Arab and Islamic
societies the widespread belief that Israeli soldiers shot this boy has
political consequences. So does the belief among some Israelis and Zionists
in Israel and abroad that Palestinians will go to any lengths to smear them.
Obviously, these beliefs do not create the basic tensions in the Middle
East. The Israeli policy of promoting settlements in occupied territory, and
the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never
have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed
al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no
settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect. Gabriel Weimann is to the
left of Dan Schueftan on Israel's political spectrum, but both believe that
Israel should end its occupation. I would guess that Nahum Shahaf thinks the
same thing, even though he told me that to preserve his "independence" as a
researcher, he wanted to "isolate myself from any kind of political
question."

The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If
anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive
realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate
apparatus for "proving," dramatizing, and disseminating its particular
truth.

In its engagement with the Arab world the United States has assumed that
what it believes are noble motives will be perceived as such around the
world. We mean the best for the people under our control; stability,
democracy, prosperity, are our goals; why else would we have risked so much
to help an oppressed people achieve them? The case of Mohammed al-Dura
suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other
cultures-in particular today's embattled Islam-will perceive our truths.