The Human-Shield Defense

It's not hard to see why using "human shields" is a nasty, offensive, evil tactic. Whether the "shields" are volunteer martyrs or hostages, one thing is clear: the whole thing distorts the numbers.

Of those 1,300 some Palestinians who died in Israel's January siege, who's to say after all how many of those were "civilians" and how many Hamas "militants"?

Or take Sri Lanka, where the government is trying to root out the last of the Tamil Tigers. The International Red Cross says 250,000 civilians are trapped in "combat" zones. The Sri Lankan government disputes that number.

According to a February 5 article in the New York Times,

Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa said in a telephone interview from Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, that government forces could swiftly seize the bastion of the rebel leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, and his subordinates were it not for a shield of civilians they had placed around them.

Damn civilians! Just imagine a scenario where there were none. (Is this the kind of world George W. Bush or Ariel Sharon live in?) In this thrilling video-game world, you can have at the "enemy" with your machine guns and bombing and white phosphorus and so on--all without worrying that you're harming "innocents" or creating "casualties." Pretty sweet, huh? Pure, unadulterated War.

Except that video game is just that: a video game. Unfortunately (or is it incoveniently?), "militants" don't sprout out of the ground. They have "civilian" friends and family. Indeed, under international humanitarian law, a civilian is defined simply as someone who is not a member of his or her country's armed forces. It's difficult to say who is or isn't a Palestinian civilian by this definition because we're talking about a people without a country. Check out this BBC article for more on the jargon's sticky terrain.

The BBC reported that Israel's siege left 400,000 Gazans without running water. The Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Health, claims that about 5,400 Gazans were injured, including 1,890 children. The dead include 437 children, aged under sixteen, 110 women, 123 elderly men, 14 medics, and four journalists.

How many of those 437 dead children were being used as human shields? It's hard to say. Has Israel ever done this? Yep. Perhaps a more illuminating question is, Should it make any difference?

In the days surrounding the Gaza siege, U.S. Senators became famous, it seems, for whipping up some easily digestible pro-Israeli analogies:

Democratic Senator Harry Reid: "I ask any of my colleagues to imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada, into Buffalo New York. How would we as a country react?"

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: "The Israelis ... are responding exactly the same way we would."

Deconstructing the levels of the Senators' glibness is perhaps in the purview of another blog, but I wonder if couching the "human shield" bit in a simple analogy would clarify my argument for them...

If I'm attacking my neighbor and my neighbor grabs a small child off the street and says, "If you keep attacking me, Princess here dies"--should I continue attacking without regard for that child? Even if Princess has volunteered for the job?

Is my neighbor a jerk? Absolutely. Did he attack me first? Yes. Do I still have a child's blood on my hands? Definitely.

I don't buy the Human-Shield Defense. If you can find a way to wage war without endangering "civilians," go for it. Till then, I'm with Gandhi:

"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary."