This week marks the twentieth anniversary of two connected events: the launching of the second intifada by Yasir Arafat on September 2000 and, two days later, the airing of video on French television showing the twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Dura shot dead, supposedly by IDF bullets. But the boy in the film, it turned out, had not been killed that day, and it is unlikely any gun battle took place. Nidra Poller, who played a leading role in uncovering this hoax, recounted the story in a 2005 essay in Commentary. In the course of her investigation, she was able to view other footage from the scene of the nonexistent crime from the same day:

In an extended television interview with an Arab broadcaster, Prince Bandar bin Sultan—who served for twenty years as the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., for a decade as head of the Saudi National Security Council, and two years as intelligence chief—responded forcefully to the Palestinian claim that the Gulf states have, by normalizing relations with Israel, “stabbed the Palestinians in the back.” Defending Saudi devotion to the Palestinian cause, Prince Bandar delivered a lengthy history of his country’s role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he bluntly upbraided Palestinian leaders, and Yasir Arafat above all, for squandering chances at statehood and for their lack of “ethics.” While Bandar’s sentiments can hardly be described as pro-Israel, he asserted that the Palestinian leaders are every bit as responsible as the Jewish state for the plight of their people: