As a cool ceasefire remains in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians continue to assess the damaged inflicted by Israel over the past month. The UN estimates that over 70 per cent of the more than 1,900 Palestinians killed are civilians, including over 400 children. Israel bombed basic Palestinian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, mosques and even the Gaza Strip’s sole power plant, rendering the Gaza Strip’s 1.8 million Palestinians [the majority of whom are refugees] without any safe haven. Navi Pillay the UN Commissioner for Human Rights noted “the same kinds of attacks occurring now on homes, schools, hospitals and UN premises.”
For its part, Israel claimed that this very high civilian death toll [in the face of precision-targeting and guided missiles] is the result of “human shields” thereby blaming the high number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians. Not to be outdone, US politicians and spokespeople sang the same tune for weeks. But these statements do little to alleviate Palestinian civilian suffering. Instead, they exacerbate it.
Despite repeated Israeli assurances that Palestinians are used as human shields, Israel has yet to provide any evidence from any of its three major attacks on the Gaza Strip over the last six years. To the contrary, international organisations such as Amnesty International and international journalists have attested in previous Israeli attacks and continue to state that Palestinian civilians are not being used intentionally to shield locations or individuals from military attacks. Ironically, the converse is true: Israel routinely uses Palestinians as human shields during its many military operations. Moreover, Israel has indicated that it will refuse to comply with a UN-sanctioned international investigation to examine these and other claims, just as it has refused to comply with other international investigations. In short, Israel refuses to provide evidence to the public, the international community or any investigators to back up its specious claims.
This is not to say that Palestinian fighters have not used public spaces or tunnels to store their weapons. The recent uncovering of a few rockets in three unoccupied schools has been shamelessly used to by Israeli officials to spread confusion and the suggestion that schools with people in them have been hit because of these previous discoveries. Some television anchors have given credence to these Israeli assertions by seeming to think that if rockets are found in empty School A it’s acceptable to hit crowded School B.
Yet, as unsavoury as this is, Palestinian fighters are no different than the other organisations seeking their freedom — whether the Vietnamese who dug tunnels to store their weapons or the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto who hid their weapons in synagogues, private homes, and in tunnels — and later in synagogues in Mandate Palestine. Unlike these examples, however, Israel houses key military sites, such as the Ministry of Defence and its nuclear reactor, in heavily populated civilian areas. Were a country to attack Israel’s Ministry of Defence in the heart of Tel Aviv, would it be acceptable to claim that the civilian casualties that ensued were the result of using Israelis as human shields?
To be clear, the Israeli claim that Palestinian fighters use civilians as “human shields” is not a new one. Israel has always sought to blame Palestinians for their own deaths and absolve itself of its responsibility to protect Palestinians and in particular Palestinian civilians. As Israel well knows, bombing civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, ambulances, schools, mosques and power plants is illegal. But the human shields’ argument is not only designed to absolve Israel of responsibility, it deprives Palestinians of their humanity.
Just as Israeli politicians use racist speech such as one Israeli MK calling Palestinian mothers “snakes” and the deputy speaker of the Knesset referring to Palestinians as “savages of the desert” with the “only innocents being the IDF,” so too the unquestioned human shields refrain allows Israel to portray Palestinians as faceless, nameless, and willing pawns flocking to their own death.
Such speech, like the hate speech that accompanies it, only serves to desensitise the world towards the death of Palestinians and shelter Israel’s actions. It would not be possible to conduct such mass killing without the hate speech. For how is it that the world can turn a blind eye to the killing of civilians unless their killing is justified? If Israel is allowed to engage in an all-out war against Palestinians where Palestinian civilian deaths are merely brushed aside as the product of “human shields,” it will not be too long before we see still-greater horrors.
Diana Buttu is a Ramallah-based analyst, former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organisation Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Adviser to Al Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.
