The international mainstream media and Israel-haters everywhere are doing their best to turn Ahed Tamimi, the teenage Palestinian girl filmed repeatedly slapping an Israeli soldier last week, into a new symbol of "resistance."

But, in order to do so, they're ignoring the very reason Tamimi (and other Palestinians) engaged in this and previous assaults on Israeli soldiers.

Tamimi wasn't trying to "resist" or drive the soldiers back. She was trying to provoke them into violently responding to the tantrums of a little girl. That's why a camera was trained on her during the encounter.

Had the soldiers responded with physical force and caused bodily harm, Tamimi would instantly have been held aloft around the world as a heroine of the Palestinian cause.

Instead, she's only being celebrated by Israel's most venomous antagonists, who will latch on to any excuse to smear the Jewish state. And, in trying to push Tamimi as a new symbol of resistance, they must brush aside the fact that the Israelis didn't take the bait.

They must sidestep the very clear, documented evidence that, contrary to the popular narrative, Israelis soldiers are not child-killers. If they were, Tamimi and her cameraman would be corpses, and the video would never have gotten out in the first place.

To be sure, the situation puts Israel itself in a conundrum. Israelis are furious that our soldiers can be treated in such a shabby manner with near-impunity (Tamimi was eventually arrested for this latest assault, but faced no punitive action for earlier similar provocations). At the same time, the effective "surrender" of these particular soldiers absolutely demolished many of the blood-libels circulating on social media.

PHOTO: Ahed Tamimi (left) appears in Israeli court after assaulting an IDF soldier on camera. (Flash90)