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The Discourse of Human Shields and the Tolerance for Mass Civilian Deaths [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-23
As far as current reckoning goes, around 1139 people, including 695 civilians, were killed in the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Palestinian death count till date—accounting for the fact that constant bombardment has not allowed for accurate count and the counts are likely an undercount—has now crossed 20,000, with a few hundreds killed in the West Bank as well.
Whereas the civilians killed in the Hamas attack are continually mourned in the West—rightly so—and the hostages’ well-being constantly inquired after, that grace or humanity has not been extended to the Palestinians. There seems to be far higher tolerance for mass deaths in Palestine among those who hold power in Daily Kos, across the United States, and most of the rest of the West.
Why is this?
One explanation offered by Israel’s supporters is that Israel does its best to limit civilian casualties. That civilian death is unavoidable because Hamas uses civilians as human shields. If you want to destroy Hamas, you need to be ready to accept the deaths of non-combatants. Thus goes the reasoning. All that is within international law. So goes the claim.
Well then. Let us examine this claim.
Let us start by looking at this concept of human shields.
What Is a Human Shield?
Human shields, as anyone who has come across the term would likely know, means using humans as shields to protect yourself, especially in an attack of armed violence.
What differentiates human shields from inanimate shields?
The fact that they are human, civilian (non-combatant), and vulnerable but protected under international law.
International law makes it a crime to use human shields and has made it legal for militaries to attack areas protected by human shields.
Interestingly, herein lies a contradiction in international law. Because they are protected in law, they are used as shields. And because they are used as shields, they are no longer protected.
How Did the Discourse Around Human Shield Arise in the Context of Palestine and Israel?
Since the late 1930s—when the British used Palestinians as human shields to protect their rail lines during the Arab uprising—all sides have used civilians in armed conflict. However, they did not come into repeated use in public discourse until the early 2000s. During the second intifada, the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem noted that Israeli soldiers were using Palestinians to check for traps and shield them from attacks.
B’T selem indeed has a page on it.
Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers. This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.
Civil rights organisations including B’Tselem approached Israel’s High Court of Justice over it and the court ruled the practice illegal. The practice does continue and the law breakers rarely get more than minimum punishment if that. Look at this BBC news story from 2010, for example.
An Israeli military court has convicted two Israeli soldiers for using a Palestinian child as a human shield during an offensive in Gaza in 2009. The soldiers were found guilty of reckless endangerment and conduct unbecoming for forcing the nine-year-old boy to check suspected booby-traps. It is reportedly the first such conviction in Israel - where the use of civilians as human shields is banned.
The punishment as per Human Rights Watch was demotion and suspended sentences, with higher level officials escaping investigations. As per the B’Tselem report quoted earlier, this was a rare case of limited justice being delivered because on the most part, Israeli military ignores reports of the practice.
However, soldiers continue to occasionally use Palestinians as human shields even after the court ruling, especially during military operations. Despite the fact this violates an HCJ ruling, the security establishment, including the military law enforcement system, has responded feebly – if at all. For example, over the course of Operation Cast Lead, which took place in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009, B'Tselem and other organizations were informed of incidents in which soldiers used Palestinians as human shields. The vast majority of these reports were never investigated, and those that did resulted in no further action. Soldiers were prosecuted in one case only. The two soldiers in question had ordered a nine-year-old boy, at gunpoint, to open a bag they suspected was booby-trapped. Despite the gravity of their conduct – putting a young child at risk – the two were given a three-month conditional sentence and demoted from staff sergeant to private, some two years after the incident took place. None of their commanding officers were tried.
How did the association with Hamas Come About?
In the wake of Israeli High Court declaring the practice illegal, an Israeli conservative organisation, affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, started producing reports that accused Israel’s opponents of using human shields.
From Gordon, Neve, and Nicola Perugini (whose piece I have used for the history and definition above as well), "The politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol 34, 2016, pp. 168-187.
One year after the High Court ruling, other Israeli political actors began appropriating the term human shield. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), a conservative Israeli think-tank whose offices are located in the Ministry of Defense, published a report about Hezbollah’s use of Lebanese civilians as human shields during the 2006 Lebanon War (Erlich, 2006). In this report, the claims originally made by Israeli and international human rights organizations against the IDF, and which were validated by the High Court of Justice, were slightly reframed. Appropriating the same logic advanced by the liberal human rights NGOs, the anti-terrorism think-tank accused Israel’s enemies of human shielding. In so doing, the think-tank transformed the prohibition of using human shields into a legal and ethical justification for military necessity (Perugini and Gordon, 2015). The think-tank reasoned that Hezbollah’s violation served to legitimize Israel’s killing of Lebanese civilians, pointing out that the ‘‘exploitation’’ of a civilian population is
‘‘considered a war crime and gross violation of international laws governing armed
conflict’’. It went on to argue that ‘‘the IDF’s air strikes and ground attacks against
Hezbollah targets located in population centers were carried out in accordance with
international law, which does not grant immunity to a terrorist organization deliberately hiding behind civilians, using them as human shields’’ (Erlich, 2006: 8, 10). Hence, the use of human shields is not only a legal violation, but, in contemporary asymmetric urban wars, can also help validate the ethical claim that the death of ‘‘untargeted civilians’’ is merely collateral damage.
From Hezbollah and Lebanon, the same organisation moved to accusing Hamas of the practice. Fast forward to 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza when around 72 Israelis (5 civilians) and 2,133 Palestinians (1,489 civilians, including 500 children) were killed. During the course of the campaign, Israeli military used social media to propagate the view that Hamas uses human shields and hence, disproportionate civilian deaths are Hamas’ fault.
Gordon and Perugini analyse IDF’s social media campaign and memes of the time to demonstrate how the IDF conveyed this idea.
So, how did they do it?1
They start by hiding the asymmetric nature of the conflict—as has been common practice even in mainstream Western media reporting and US, Israeli, and most Western government discourse so far. They portray Israel and Hamas as two equivalent sides rather than the truth: one side is a fully armed state supported by the most powerful military in the world whereas the other is a militant group in an occupied territory with makeshift rockets and light arms that has been subject to decades of occupation, economic blockade and continual military attacks since 1967.
They use memes showing Palestinian homes, mosques, schools as storage spaces for Israeli weapons with taglines such as:
“Some bomb shelters shelter people, some shelter bombs.” When is a House a Home?: Hamas uses Palestinian homes for military purposes. Hamas uses mosques as terrorist facilities. For Hamas nothing is sacred. Hamas uses its civilians to harm ours.
They collapse the distinction between Palestinians and Hamas because each Palestinian civilian, women, kids, writers or priests, is a potential Hamas tool.
Once again, Gordon and Perugini say it far better than I could.
In this way, the notion of human shielding erases existing distinctions between private and public spaces, including, as it were, homes and incorporates them within the bounds of legitimate targets by excluding their existing normative functions (Agamben, 1998). Israel’s warfare is, however, not only about the re-signification of architectural structures. It is also about the transformation of human beings into collateral damage, subjects who can be killed in their homes without violating international law. The legitimization for its bombing is premised upon a profound moral disjuncture between Israelis and Palestinians, which is uncannily similar to the way the colonizers of old related to the natives.
That is, they portray Palestinians and Hamas as animals with whom no reasoning is possible. More, Palestinians don’t occupy the same moral plane as Israelis.
The ultimate function of all these images is to insinuate a moral incommensurability between oppressors and oppressed. It both reflects and produces an ethics whereby the space of killing with impunity is dramatically expanded through the obliteration of the threshold between spaces of life and spaces of death. [...] Indeed, for Palestinians living in Gaza, simply spending time in their own homes, frequenting a mosque, going to a hospital or to school became a potentially lethal activity, since any one of these architectural edifices could become a target at any moment.
That was 2014.
The Discourse in 2023
In 2023, so far, IDF has not just claimed that Hamas uses human shields but has propagated false stories of atrocities (such as the forty babies being beheaded story and baby being found in an oven story) that Haaretz has debunked to portray Palestinians as beyond redemption. Israeli politicians, such as President Herzog has called Palestinians animals whereas PM Netanyahu has called Israeli military campaign a fight between forces of light and dark. The language of genocide and ethnic cleansing has only continued and have become more and more frequent since.
Instead of merely hiding the asymmetric nature of the conflict, they have inverted the asymmetry by comparing Hamas to Nazis or portraying them as worse than Nazis and Israelis as being subject to the same conditions as the holocaust. The logic of this comparison is not that of the ideology. Because as you are aware (I hope) that many Americans, Canadians, Germans, English and other Europeans harbour Nazi ideology. None of that calls for bombing say Florida into oblivion. The ideology needs a brutal state to effect its agenda.
By making the comparison to WWII and saying that Hamas is as bad or worse than the Nazi Germany, Israel is situating a well-armed state, ably backed in diplomacy, propaganda, and arms by the strongest military in the world not to mention much of the West, as the internally oppressed and internationally repelled Jews in Nazi Germany. Whereas Hamas, an irregular militia with light arms and improvised rockets, fighting from an occupied territory economically controlled and blockaded by israel, is turned into Nazi Germany (a world power at the time). Goliath is turned into David and David into Goliath (this by the way is also how Israel treats young children who it claims has thrown rocks).
Throughout, they have also sought to portray Palestinian children as enamoured by Nazis and Hitler. That is, as the Israeli President claimed, Palestinians are inherently bad. Including children.
Along with all that Israel also, as in 2006 and 2014, continues to claim that Hamas is hiding behind human shields.
For example, Israel claimed that Al Shifa hospital was being used as Hamas Command Centre before they attacked the hospital. That was of course before Israel started attacking other hospitals in Gaza with impunity and without any outcry from the West. They now claim that incubators are sites of weapon storage.
The US is an active partner in all this.
Indeed, the US administration (and Western media) reinforces the same message as Israeli government and military. The US, including the POTUS, repeated the claims about Al Shifa in advance of the attack on the hospital. Washington Post has a story now showing that the claim is false (the US and Israel though continue to claim otherwise).
The US administration is critical of countries standing in solidarity with Palestine or asking Israel to stop pounding Gaza. From the transcript of Secretary of State Blinken’s end of year press conference:
And what is striking to me is that even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict, which we would all like to see, I hear virtually no one saying – demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that. This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that. And how could it – how can it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor and only demands made of the victim. So it would be good if there was a strong international voice pressing Hamas to do what’s necessary to end this. And again, that could be tomorrow.
When asked for comment on babies being left to die in incubators in Al-Nasr hospital that IDF had attacked and was occupying, this is what Dept of State spokesperson Mathew Miller had to say.
And it is why we have made clear that far too many Palestinians have been killed in this conflict, and that of course includes far too many Palestinian children, and of course Palestinian babies. And it is why we have taken every measure we could to speak loudly and clearly to the Government of Israel that it needs to do everything it can to minimize civilian harm, and it’s why we have worked to try and move humanitarian assistance in. And it is also why, I will say, we have said that Hamas should stop hiding its fighters in hospitals. So —
Even if you set aside the fact that neither Israel nor US has provided evidence for Hamas actually hiding in hospitals, babies left to die in incubators in a hospital that IDF occupied and forced the evacuation of can hardly be said to be because Hamas is hiding there at that moment.
These messages are in addition to support straight from the POTUS such as him repeating the false 40 babies beheaded story and claiming that Palestinian death counts in Gaza are not trustworthy when there is evidence to prove that they are—and for which he apologised privately but not publicly. (Even as recently as a couple of days back, Malcolm Nance was tweeting the same lie).
The result is the view that civilian deaths—if to be trusted—in the case of Palestinians are at best collateral damage and at worst, well-deserved, since they are beyond redemption and are not as human or civilised as Israelis, the US and the West.
The Purpose of the Discourse
As demonstrated, Israel is using the international law on human shields as justification for tens of thousands of civilian deaths and associated destruction of the possibility of life in Gaza. Their message makes it possible for their supporters to value Palestinian lives less; view their deaths as less morally reprehensible or even morally justified compared to Israeli (or USian or white European) lives as Kos said in October; and defend their actions to any critics.
The discourse also makes it possible for Israel and its supporters to claim that Israel is acting within the parameters of international law.
Let us stop here a moment and go back to the beginning of our discussion: Why are Palestinian deaths tolerable to the powers in the US and the West and their supporters? Because they claim, Hamas uses human shields.
But that is not the original question. The original question, which Israeli and US messaging answers while eliding it is: Why are there so many Palestinian deaths?
The answer from Israel and the US is that Israel does its best to limit civilian harm. Palestinians die in large numbers because Hamas uses human shields.
Let us examine that first claim.
Is Israel Doing Its Best to Limit Civilian Harm?
The answer is no.
An Israeli military doctrine that comes into play is the Dahiya Doctrine. Ishan Tharoor of the Washington Post explains,
The so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” took shape in the wake of the bruising 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya refers to the southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah maintained its strongholds and which were pummeled by Israeli jets after hostilities began when Hezbollah fighters abducted two Israeli soldiers. The onslaught then took Hezbollah by surprise, whose senior leadership had not expected to see their headquarters turned into rubble nor had planned for such a relentless bombardment. “I said that we shouldn’t exaggerate, that Israel will just retaliate a bit, bomb a couple of targets and that would be the end of it,” a Hezbollah operative told former Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid in 2006. The doctrine that emerged out of the conflict was most famously articulated by IDF commander Gadi Eisenkot. “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases,” he told an Israeli newspaper in 2008. “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.” Around the same time, former Israeli colonel Gabriel Siboni wrote a report under the aegis of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies that argued the necessary response to militant provocations from Lebanon, Syria or Gaza were “disproportionate” strikes that aim only secondarily to hit the enemy’s capacity to launch rockets or other attacks. Rather, the goal should be to inflict lasting damage, no matter the civilian consequences, as a future deterrent.
Since that war, Dahiya doctrine or at least, disproportionate harm to civilians has been Israeli policy. Though as the story of Sabra and Shatila and other massacres before and since such as Qana suggests it is not an entirely new policy.
From approximately 18:00 on 16 September to 08:00 on 18 September, the Lebanese Forces carried out the massacre while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had the Palestinian camp surrounded.[12][13][14][15] The IDF had ordered the militia to clear out the fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Sabra and Shatila as part of a larger Israeli maneuver into western Beirut. As the massacre unfolded, the IDF received reports of atrocities being committed, but did not take any action to stop it.[16]
Is Israel aware that civilians are being killed? Do they have the technological know-how for that?
If you ignore the sniper attacks on refugees sheltering in a church, use of bulldozers to bury alive people outside a hospital, rounding up and murdering men before their families, and the statements from Israeli politicians claiming that there are no innocent Palestinians, do they attack civilians without trying to minimise harm, really?
The answer is yes.
Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”). The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it. Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
The Israeli sources in this article claim that this is due to a relaxation of rules and where dozens of civilian deaths for a single Hamas member was allowed earlier, now, hundreds are allowed. However, Palestinians say that houses that had no Hamas affiliates were also targeted. Plus, the IDF sources also say that they target ‘power targets’ that do not have Hamas associations but are targeted to force civilians to pressure Hamas.
Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
Examples include Poet/Professor Dr. Refaat Alareer’s home, which was targeted; physicists, writers and poets. The journalists who have been killed in Gaza or Lebanon, the universities such as Islamic University. As both 972 Magazine and the Guardian report, these are not strikes without foreknowledge. The IDF official claims that they are attempting minimal harm but facts on the ground suggest otherwise.
“Look at the physical landscape of Gaza,” said Richard Moyes, a researcher who heads Article 36, a group that campaigns to reduce harm from weapons. “We’re seeing the widespread flattening of an urban area with heavy explosive weapons, so to claim there’s precision and narrowness of force being exerted is not borne out by the facts.”
As AP and (others such as FT before it) have said, the destruction in Gaza in two months of Israeli bombardment and ground invasion has been more than that in many of the most famous conflicts such as WWII, war on Iraq and Ukraine.
JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group. The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.
As the New York Times reports that Israel used its most destructive bombs (supplied by the US) in areas that it designated as safe places for civilians to withdraw.
During the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians, according to an analysis of visual evidence by The New York Times. The video investigation focuses on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety. While bombs of that size are used by several Western militaries, munitions experts say they are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore.
The Sky News reports that Israel encouraged people to withdraw to specific places and then bombed them there.
Days earlier on 1 December, a temporary ceasefire had collapsed. In preparation for an invasion of southern Gaza, Israel published an interactive map which divided the territory into hundreds of small zones. The map, Israel said, would be used to give clear and precise evacuation orders to try to keep civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip away from active combat zones. Using on-the-ground footage, satellite imagery and mapping software, a Sky News visual investigation found that Israel's evacuation orders have instead been chaotic and contradictory and that a neighbourhood in Deir al Balah was hit one day after the IDF said evacuees could flee there. Our investigation comes after a separate strike in Gaza was caught on camera by a Sky News team. It too came in an area that was supposed to be safe.
There is also the spectre of mass starvation and disease as humanitarian organisations have warned.
There is a risk of Famine and it is increasing each day that the current situation of intense hostilities and restricted humanitarian access persists or worsens. The intensification of the hostilities, further reduction in access to food, basic services, and lifesaving assistance, and the extreme concentration or isolation of people in inadequate shelters or areas without basic services are major factors that contribute to increasing this risk. Between 24 November and 7 December, over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) was in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) was in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5). Between 8 December and 7 February, the entire population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.2 million people) is classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country. Among these, about 50% of the population (1.17 million people) is in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and at least one in four households (more than half a million people) is facing catastrophic conditions (IPC Phase 5, Catastrophe). These are characterized by households experiencing an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities. Even though the levels of acute malnutrition and non-trauma related mortality might not have yet crossed famine thresholds, these are typically the outcomes of prolonged and extreme food consumption gaps. The increased nutritional vulnerability of children, pregnant and breastfeeding women and the elderly is a particular source of concern. The latest data shows that virtually all households are skipping meals every day. In four out of five households in the northern governorates and half the displaced households in the southern governorates, people go entire days and nights without eating. Many adults go hungry so children can eat.
And of ethnic cleansing as UN OCHA reports.
GENEVA (22 December 2023) – Israel is seeking to permanently alter the composition of Gaza’s population with ever-expanding evacuation orders and widespread and systematic attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in southern areas of the besieged enclave, a UN expert warned today. “Israel has reneged on promises of safety made to those who complied with its order to evacuate northern Gaza two months ago. Now, they have been forcibly displaced again, alongside the population of southern Gaza,” said Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs). “Where will the people of Gaza have left to go tomorrow?” she said. “As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Gaza’s housing and civilian infrastructure have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel,” she said.
Israel does not try to limit civilian harm in Gaza. In fact, as per its own military doctrines, the intent is to harm civilian targets as well. That is if you ignore the genocidal intent in official comments clearly pointed out by genocide scholars.
Does Hamas Employ Human Shields?
After reading what I have written so far, someone will ask, but doesn’t Hamas use human shields in Gaza? Why have you not talked about that?
Because that argument is pointless and should never be used to excuse wanton destruction of civilian life.
Because insurgency by its very nature may make use of urban landscapes but that should not be a reason for an attacking power to let go of attention to and care for civilian life.
Because the discourse of human sheilds is never used against the West but only against the rest (Neve Gordon says it is used against non-state actors, but the examples such as Mosul suggest a more discriminatory rhetoric).
The use of civilian sites by paramilitary groups was in no way unique to Mandatory Palestine. When the Prussians occupied France in 1870, the French francs-tireurs or free shooters were ‘farmers by day and fighters by night’. From the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam as well as Algeria, Angola and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians in what we now call people’s wars. Given the asymmetry of power between non-state paramilitary groups and national armies, the ability to blend into the civilian population was necessary for military survival. Today, hi-tech state militaries deploy new surveillance technologies and enhanced weapon systems to find and kill militants much more easily, driving paramilitary groups across the globe to move into densely populated urban settings where they can conceal themselves more easily. Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier. [...] In recent years the ‘human shield’ accusation has been adopted by several state militaries trying to justify the killing of civilians in Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria and elsewhere. This justification, however, functions only in one direction. When state actors kill civilians, it’s become standard to describe them as human shields. But when non-state actors attack military targets in urban settings, the civilians they kill are still recognised as civilians. [...] Besides the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, the primary school in Ramat Gan and the medical facility in Netanya, there are more than fifty other buildings in Israeli cities that have plaques commemorating how they were used to hide combatants and weapons before 1948. The British armed forces sent infantry troops to raid civilian sites that they suspected of being put to military use. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli armed forces have sent in ground troops only after bombing. Thirty thousand tons of bombs have so far been dropped on Gaza, and more than two hundred mosques, two hundred schools and over forty hospitals and other medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed. More than five thousand children and around ten thousand adults have been killed. Most of them were civilians. The attempt by the Israeli authorities to justify their carpet bombing and blame Palestinians for bringing disaster on themselves through the use of ‘human shields’ is not only political sophistry, but forgetful of Israel’s own history.
And finally because this logic is dangerous.
It will be deployed beyond Palestine. If ten years from now, the exigencies of global warming leads the West to decide that they need to attack an Asian, Latin American or African country directly, they will use this same discourse. They will claim innocence and precision AI tools and rest the blame for mass deaths on the country or people they attack.
Conclusion: The Danger of the Discourse on Human Sheilds
The discourse on human shields dehumanise Palestinians and make their deaths acceptable. This discourse is marshalled, especially when there is documented attempt by Israel to enhance civilian harm, to provide legal and moral cover. That is the reason for high tolerance for mass deaths in Palestine. And that is a reason why that discourse must be resisted and another paradigm imagined.
But that is not the only conclusion. There is another. Just as important.
The international law may claim that the attack on human shields is legal as long as it is proportionate. That consensus, driven by the Western liberalism, might in the future, as I mention above, enable West to employ that rhetoric against countries and peoples in Africa, Asia, or Latin America to drive mass deaths (and starvation and disease as a corollary to armed attacks). Just as the US has used drone warfare to what they claim is accurately target military targets and have then gone on to excuse numerous civilian deaths in those attacks.
It is a sword of domocles that hangs over all of us, but especially those in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
It would be a means not just to dehumanise us in future but a means for the erosion of humanity of Europeans and Euro-origin people and their descendents (whatever is left of that). Because it is not just the victim that is dehumanised. The perpetrator is as well (as Guilaine Kinouani describes in detail in White Minds: Everyday Performance, Violence and Resistance).
It must thus be resisted.
We must learn to mourn every life with the full power of our heart so that our brain is not engaged in justifying that violence. Because the rhetoric of justification reproduces the conditions for the next war and thus, more violence. Such war will never bring just peace. Without just peace, there will never be freedom.
For all of us to be free, we must first learn to value all lives.
Reference
Note
It took me more than a month and a week to write this piece. I started writing this in early November as I tried to come to terms with what I saw as widespread disinterest in the West and here at Daily Kos in acknowledging Palestinian civilian deaths and an unwillingness to accord them equal value with Israeli lives and to mourn them. However, fear of being accused of propaganda, as it happened when I wrote the rather anodyne piece on the death count from Gaza, made me dither.
It took me a month to realise that I am not wrong to be repelled and hurt by the death and destruction I see and the lack of concern for that among the powerful in the US (and their supporters) and if anyone accuses me of propaganda, antisemitism or the myriad other epithets directed at people who want Palestinians to live and to be free, that will not stop merely because I try to make my article perfectly objective (I will have to write on the Global South perspective on this war but not today).
Indeed as Sara Roy says,2
The issue of objectivity as a utopia for scholarship is not a given, despite current protestations to the contrary. The great philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that truth cannot be found in the aggregate but in the subjective, on the individual’s consciousness, “on what could not be regimented in the totally administered society.”3 The philosopher Stuart Hampshire echoed a similar sentiment when, writing during the Vietnam War, he decried the subordination of scholarship and critical analysis to society with a big “S,” which he said is often defined as “some giant boarding school in which we’re all required to prove ourselves as of sound character.”4 The inevitable result of such intellectual subordination, said Northrop Frye, is a dystopia—“a society maimed through the systematic corruption of its intelligence, to the accompaniment of piped music.”5
Thus, in the past week, I got down to actually writing most of it. And, I am now publishing it here.
After a month and a week of effort.
If it will be read at all, if it will move minds to reflect and reconsider, I have no idea.
But the fact that I am publishing it means that I choose to hope despite despair.
May there be just peace for all of us across the world.
A further note: I noticed while reviewing the article that some of the links had disappeared. I have added them back but I don’t know if they will disappear again. If so, please let me know and I will add them back.
[END]
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