Video puts Israelis, Palestinians at sharp odds

JERUSALEM: To Palestinians, the video shows a 13-year-old boy being left to die in the street as Israelis shout abuse at him. To Israelis, it shows a teenage knife attacker bleeding as police keep angry locals back and wait for an ambulance.
The two minutes of amateur footage has become one of the most divisive videos to emerge from a wave of violence sweeping Jerusalem, where clips of attacks are being shared at on social media in what has been dubbed a smartphone intifada.
The problem, as with so much in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is about interpretation.
Palestinians watch the shaky video, with voices in Hebrew shouting “Die, son of a ****h,” and draw one set of conclusions that fuel anger and alarm. Israelis watch the same — and subsequent police CCTV footage showing the two Palestinian teenagers running through the streets with knives and attacking an Israeli boy — and come to different conclusions.
“Both sides are living in different dimensions,” said Daniel Nisman, an intelligence and security analyst who runs the Levantine Group. “You can have an incident happen and it’s interpreted in two completely different ways instantly.”
And it is also immediately shared with tens of thousands of people on social media platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, where each community’s outrage is reinforced in an echo chamber, driving an ever-deeper wedge between the two sides.
The video in question shows 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra, a Palestinian from Beit Hanina in northern Jerusalem, lying on the street in Pisgat Zeev, a nearby Jewish settlement, with his legs twisted behind him and blood coming from his head after being hit by a car.