Analysis: Mid-East war of images

Mob rule: The lynching of two Israelis in Ramallah

By Magdi Abdelhadi BBC Arab Affairs editor

Ever since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the Palestinians and Israelis have both sought to use photography and television pictures to mobilise world opinion against each other.

The message was simple: I am the victim and therefore you should stand by me.

Muhammad al-Durrah and his father were caught in crossfire

Throughout the conflict, each side has relied on the media documentation of the fighting to parade its own suffering, as it were, in order to justify the means it uses to kill the other - Israeli Apache helicopters on one side and Palestinian suicide bombers on the other.

The war of images started with the video footage of the Israeli army shooting a young Palestinian boy while his father was trying to protect him with his body.

The images caused a furore around the world.

Not long after that, we saw the pictures of the bloodstained hands of a Palestinian mob who lynched two Israeli soldiers. Here, too, the message was simple: look how savage and brutal the other side is.

Carnage

The war of images has not stopped over the past year and a half.

The toddler joins other stark images from the brutal conflict

Not a month has gone by without world media outlets carrying images of Palestinian lives destroyed by the Israeli army, or pictures of the carnage caused by Palestinian suicide bombers destroying the lives of many Israeli civilians.

Now the Israeli army has taken this war of images a step further by releasing the picture of a Palestinian toddler with mock explosives strapped to his body.

The argument is that they are not only up against individual suicide bombers but a whole culture that glorifies suicide bombings.

But many Palestinians regard them as the weapons of the poor in an unequal struggle against the Israeli army.