Chastened

'Do demos work?' I asked.

A friend who was at the Ma'asara protest today and was filming from the front saw something I missed. A 10 or 11-year old boy incrementally edged onto and eventually over the razor wire and began attempting to hand out flyers to the soldiers. Later, despite being warned, he took hold of the handle used by the troops to lay the wire across the street and ended up in a tug-of-war with an IDF soldier armed with an M16 and the back up of one of the world's mightiest militaries. Aware of how daft he looked, the soldier gave and left the kid free to remove the coil of razor wire and liberate the road.

Here we have the rare interface of humans at either ends of the gun. Humans who have begun to operate as cogs in the military machine but who, faced with the courage of a small child, can deploy none of that apparatus without surrendering their humanity completely. It is the those armed to the teeth that look naked in the meeting of flesh and blood with flesh and blood.

Do demos work?