Human Shield Hypocrisy
For years, in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Israeli government and military have claimed that Palestinian militant groups use Palestinian civilians as human shields. This was regularly their excuse, when they killed scores of civilians, that it wasn’t their fault, because Hamas, or whichever group was playing the nemesis at the time, was using those civilians as human shields.
There were always holes in that argument, both morally and logically.
From a moral standpoint, if militants are in fact using civilians as human shields, that does not mean that you are justified in killing those civilians. The moral strictures of most laws and religious and philosophical ideologies emphasize the importance of preserving the lives of the innocent over taking the lives of the guilty, and condemn the taking of any innocent life, regardless of whatever “justice” it’s claimed to serve. Given the disproportionality of many such incidents, where the innocent lives taken far outnumber those of combatants, they are immoral actions, regardless of whether the combatants are using the innocents as human shields.
From a logical point of view, the “human shields” excuse is weak and makes little sense. It is weak because it has often been claimed that Palestinian militants were using human shields because they were in close proximity to civilians, perhaps in the same building or in the same neighborhood. The fallacy in that argument is that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are never not in close proximity to one another. That’s the effect of forcing millions of people into increasingly more confined urban centers. Imagine forcing everyone in New York onto Staten Island. Not only would many of them be very pissed off, but there would be nowhere they could go where they weren’t surrounded by other people. Then imagine that the police were targeting suspected criminals on the island, and that everyone near a suspect was killed or maimed as collateral damage. Unless militants are literally holding civilians hostage as human shields, the accusation is nonsense.
It is even more nonsensical because what would be the benefit of using Palestinian civilians as human shields? The Israeli government and military do not value the lives of Palestinians, at all, as has been demonstrated repeatedly for decades. What is the purpose in having human shields that your enemy has zero compunction about killing? They’d be more of an inconvenience than a protection, knowing that your enemy will execute the both of you without hesitation or remorse. The Israeli military doesn’t even show restraint when their own citizens are being held hostage in besieged territories.
The “human shields” rhetoric is of particular pertinence at the moment as recent news stories have exposed the use of Palestinian civilians, including claims that they’ve used children, as human shields. Whether strapping wounded men onto jeeps, forcing people through tunnels to test whether they’ve been booby trapped, or forcing children to march ahead of soldiers as they search a refugee camp, these are examples of literally using civilians as human shields. Apart from there being documented evidence of these war crimes, there is also logic in why Israeli forces would do so, and it pokes a huge hole in Israel’s argument. The Israeli soldiers do not value the lives of Palestinian civilians, yet they are betting that the Palestinian militants do. If Hamas is cynical and evil enough to use their own people as human shields, why would they hold their fire when Israeli troops are doing so?
I do not support or have any positive feelings for Hamas. It gives me no joy to defend them or any such militant group with ideologies rooted in right-wing religious doctrine, but despite the many claims that they routinely use civilians as human shields, stretching the definition, there hasn’t been convincing evidence presented to prove it. We do, however, have evidence that Israel has literally used civilians as human shields. Apart from gross hypocrisy, that is evil, and a war crime.