-Essay-
BEIRUT — “Collateral damage” has become the catch-phrase of Israel’s brutal war against the people of Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon.
Israel has invested so much time and effort to promote the claim that the Arab residents killed in the Occupied Territories and neighboring countries are just fragile shields standing between them and their declared enemies.
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When Israel is confronted with claims that these supposed shields do not participate in the fighting and that they are all human beings deserving of protection, even if they happen to live on an open battlefield, the response is ready: the rules of war criminalize the use of humans as shields, but does not criminalize killing them.
If you object by saying that those same rules set harsh penalties for targeting civilians and their facilities, even accidentally, they respond: they are not human beings in the first place, and those facilities are where terrorists”and their weapons hide.
Thus, the argument proceeds in a way that conceals just beneath the structure an integrated racist structure that makes some humans (people of color and minorities, including Arabs and Muslims, etc.) legitimate targets for easy, unjustified killing.
Israel invests a lot of effort to justify the killing of innocent civilians in vast numbers, while it seeks to crush armed resistance groups that live and operate among the people, in the heart of Gaza, Beirut and Damascus.
So Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to brag and declare at the United Nations last month that his forces are capable of hitting any target throughout the Middle East, while his fighter jets were bombing residential neighborhoods and killing children and other innocent victims in Lebanon, in raids that led to the death of Hassan Nasrallah.
Technically, there is no doubt that the Israeli army can do this, and it has done so relentlessly and with a continuous escalation in scope, force, targets and number of civilian casualties since Israel’s establishment in 1948.
This increasing investment in military justification and the construction of a legal arsenal has been used to stigmatize armed resistance (legitimate and illegitimate) as “terrorism.”
Israel now has complete cover of justifications to strike any target without distinguishing between what is military and what is civilian; and without any proportionality whatsoever between the expected military benefit and the heavy losses among civilians.
It also does so without fear of the reaction of the capable and concerned parties, most of whom, from Washington to Moscow, have become either indifferent to these bloody practices or are themselves directly involved in these practices— sometimes against their enemies and opponents.
Bomb all kitchens!
Netanyahu summed up this position in the same speech at the UN General Assembly. He claimed that Hezbollah is responsible for endangering the lives of the Lebanese because it “places a missile in every kitchen” inside civilian homes. The Likud solution is thus revealed: bomb all kitchens, in the homes and neighborhoods where Hezbollah and similar organizations may be active.
The Lebanese or Palestinian thereby loses his humanity and becomes a shield for liquidation and a worthy military target for Israel as long as there is some belief, even if it is weak, that there is a military advantage that the Israeli army will gain from crushing the bones of the Palestinian and killing his children. This advantage may be the elimination of a Hamas fighter or an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander with dozens of civilians next to him.
In the case of the Palestinians specifically, the ultimate objective — which is impossible to declare explicitly, even if its implementation is clear to any fair observer — appears to simply be to get rid of all Palestinians, or at least reduce their numbers. They have become half of the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under the control of the state that believes in giving priority to the Jews over all other inhabitants of that region.
Killing them in huge numbers becomes acceptable to achieve a military goal.
Western military academies coined the term “collateral damage” to describe the killing of innocent civilians during armed conflicts, meaning that the killing was not intentional but incidental while seeking to kill a legitimate target.
International law has regulated this through several principles and warnings, including:
Distinction: A distinction must be made between military sites that can be targeted and civilian sites, even if they are adjacent and close to them.
Military benefit: The legitimate result must be greater than the collateral damage – which is very difficult to measure – but the stark numbers of civilian casualties and their gratuitous targeting in the past decades refute the claims of Israel and similar actors (Bashar al-Assad in Syria, for example!)
Proportionality: When a response includes striking legitimate targets, there must be some proportionality to the act that called for this retaliation.
What is happening now is a violation of all of these principles, and more.
“Human animals”
What is happening is simply the enshrining of the view of certain human groups as less important than others, “less human” or “human animals” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant declared last October, so that killing them in huge numbers becomes acceptable to achieve a military goal.
This enshrining is accompanied by the weakening and disregard of the rules of international and national laws and international governance institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.
Thus, what Israel is doing now becomes acceptable, and the price paid is worth it from the point of view of its supporters from Washington to Amsterdam and from Abu Dhabi to Cairo (yes, they have supporters in several Arab capitals, and among many ordinary Arabs).
These racist positions at their core become understandable to us even if they remain reprehensible and barbaric and a quick slide into bloodbaths, and it is mostly the blood of the weak groups — our blood.
This racial discrimination between human groups was prevalent and accepted in theory and practice until the middle of the 20th century, as the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law did not clearly protect the inhabitants of the colonies and the local population. So when Western colonizers were killing en masse the inhabitants of the Congo or South Africa, in Libya or Iraq, in India or Vietnam, their actions were not yet a violation of international law.
This changed only with the end of the colonial era and the establishment of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. The amendment established a complex problem for states involved in new forms of colonialism, most notably Israel, almost the only remaining colonial state in the present era.
The problem facing military planners or internal security services in these states is how they can wage wars and organize security operations that result in massive loss of life among people not participating in the fighting who happen to be near the target, and at the same time maintain the claim that they respect international humanitarian law, especially with regard to proportionality, military advantage and making the utmost effort to protect civilians.
Stigma of savagery
Therefore, for the Israelis, the simplest and most effective solution has not been legalistic, but rather mediatic, ideological and ultimately racist: these dead creatures are not human beings. So there is much effort made to portray them as savages and barbarians who “use their children to protect missiles, not missiles to protect their families,” as Netanyahu said several years ago.
The stigma of savagery and barbarism can easily be extended from the militants to those around them, and to those who are candidates to become members of the resistance group — or as one European commentator put it: every Palestinian woman carries in her womb a terrorist project.
The theorizing to justify the killing of civilians relies on a huge machine, as Israeli human rights researcher Dave Gordon explains. There are a number of research and policy centers that provide legal and propaganda frameworks to justify killing. They include the Mossad-affiliated Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which has 65 pages of studies and reports analyzing and justifying the killing of civilians as collateral damage.
Who needs legal details as long as the civilians killed were of people color, Arabs or Muslims!?
This center was established in 2001, when Israel and the Western world realized after the September 11 attacks that the techniques of waging irregular warfare required justifying the killing of a huge number of civilians, not only in confrontations with an enemy that was shooting at them, but even in preemptive attacks and strikes that sought to kill opponents and weaken their equipment.
Israel and its supporters published a large number of visual material to create a justification for killing civilians, most of which contained sketches of houses or civilian facilities with weapons inside, or as it did during the attack on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, when it published a video made on a computer program, to give the impression that the Hamas command center was under the hospital.
What these pictures perhaps deliberately ignore is that the presence of weapons or gunmen in places containing civilians does not automatically justify an attack. But who needs these legal details as long as the civilians killed were of people color, Arabs or Muslims!?
Undeclared goal
There is undoubtedly an undeclared purpose behind waging this war against civilians. It’s a goal that makes Israel potentially equate with any terrorist group in the conventional sense: to spread panic and terror in the hearts of any population groups of the same nationality, ethnicity or race as the enemy, regardless of whether these groups are involved in fighting or violence, in order to drive a wedge between them and the armed resistance groups, and to deprive these groups of their vital environment.
The United Nations’ General Assembly supported the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the same year in which most of the organization’s countries agreed on an international declaration of human rights. Most of the world’s countries later amended the laws of war to grant civilians deeper protection.
It now appears that Israel itself — backed by a number of militarily and economically powerful countries that claim to abide by international law and human rights — continue to destroy these standards that are based on the equality of all human beings.
We’re not shields
What is left for us? How can we resist this barbaric rampage? And resist an actual alliance whose features have become apparent between Israel, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, even if the evidence of the public alliance is absent? Who can stand with us, and we stand with them against this madness?
Without answers that offer some hope and a path to action, Hezbollah will rise again.
Who can stand with us — the people and not the governments — to rearrange human society and establish rules and build new institutions that regulate wars and peace, or reform the existing ones, like the dysfunctional United Nations, and the obscene vulgarity of academics, commentators and politicians who are ultimately a worn-out cover to provide a legal and moral justification for the ongoing massacres!
Without answers that offer some hope and a path to action, Hezbollah will rise again, perhaps in ways and with alliances that are even more harmful to everyone. ISIS and other militias will return, perhaps with new names. And the armies and militias of multiple countries will kill us as they carry slogans of respect for violated international law and bankrupt liberal morality.
