What would you have done? [updated]

You buckle your young son into your car and drive away from your home to run the kind of errands that pretty much every parent on the planet runs as a part of their regular schedule of responsibilities.

As you are coming down a hill near your home, you round a corner and find the road blocked by a large group of masked teenagers who begin pelting your car with stones as soon as they spot you. 

In a peripheral part of your brain you note that there are nearly as many video and still photographers as there are stone throwers... and even though these media personnel are 'adults', they are too busy recording the attack on you to exert any influence over the stone throwers or prevent their actions. 

[In retrospect you realize that the presence of the photographers is likely an encouragement to the attack, or perhaps even the primary reason for it, but that dawns on you only much later when you are in police custody.]

In an instant several instincts begin fighting for control of the situation:

1.  Your instincts as an experienced, licensed driver dictate that you must avoid hitting pedestrians at any cost.  So upon seeing the road blocked with living, breathing people, you swerve towards the sidewalk.

2.  Your Parental instincts trigger your fight or flight reflex and almost as soon as you swerve towards the sidewalk, you realize that once you hit the curb you will be trapped and will become an easy target for the stone throwers.  Your only hope lies in keeping the car in motion and getting past the attackers... so you swerve back towards the center of the road and gun the engine.

3.  The act of trying to escape the attack brings your car into violent contact with one of the attackers, and the impact throws him up over the hood of your car... and onto the ground.  The experienced driver in you again cries out that this is one of the worst sins a driver can commit, and your foot goes from gas to brake.

4.  Almost instantly the sound of rocks on your vehicle goes from a clatter to a roar as your semi-stationary vehicle becomes an easy target.  Glass begins to break as the attackers find their range.  Even though your mind still registers the teen you have hit as a pedestrian, your foot now goes back to the gas as you realize that any moment one of the softball-sized rocks will find your head, or the head of your son... at best injuring one or both of you.  And at worst... well the mind can't abide that.

5.  After you pull clear of the crowd of rock throwers and are out of range, your mind pops back out of the rabbit hole into which it had fallen and begins to wrestle again with the idea of the pedestrian who moments ago was sprawled across your hood and windshield.  In the pantheon of driving infractions, the only sin as grave as hitting someone is leaving the scene of the accident.  But the injured teen's accomplices are moving towards you again, yelling and gesturing threateningly with the rocks they have in their hands.    In a moment they will certainly resume the attack... so you pull away.

As you do so you do a mental check of your own status and that of your son.  Have we been hit?  Did any of the broken glass cut us?  Is the car still functional enough to take us to safety?  Are there more attackers up ahead?! 

After these immediate issues are resolved you report the incident to the police (as it has surely been reported by others) and in short order you find yourself in police custody... unsure of where you stand in the eyes of the law.

While this is exactly the kind of thought problem that many Israelis go through in preparation for driving anywhere near Arab populations, what I've written here is not some hypothetical scenario.  It actually happened exactly as I've described it.

Want to see for yourself?  Here is how it played out (courtesy of one of the media cameramen who was at the scene in Jerusalem's City of David neighborhood):

 

So I ask you; after reading this post and viewing the video... and given that you have the benefit of unlimited hindsight and time to ponder all the variables... what would you have done?

Afterthought:  It occurs to me that many people reading this will have no idea about the status of the East Jerusalem Arabs who perpetrated this attack.  Therefore I offer the following,  plus a link to a source of not-entirely biased information:

"Following the 1967 war, Israel conducted a census in East Jerusalem and granted permanent Israeli residency to those Arab Jerusalemites present at the time of the census. Those not present lost the right to reside in Jerusalem. Jerusalem Palestinians were permitted to apply for Israeli citizenship [emphasis mine], provided they met the requirements for naturalization such as swearing allegiance to Israel and renouncing all other citizenships which most of them refused to do.  At the end of 2005, 93% of the Arab population of East Jerusalem had permanent residency and 5% had Israeli citizenship.

As residents, East Jerusalemites rejecting Israeli citizenship have the right to vote in municipal elections and play a role in the administration of the city. Residents pay taxes, and following a 1988 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, East Jerusalem residents are guaranteed the right to social security benefits and state health care.[emphasis mine]"   [source]

Of course, just to prove that there is always another way to view just about any incident, here is a decidedly different conclusion drawn from the same set of facts I presented.  I guess it all depends on your agenda.