Description
One of the primary discourse of justification of the ongoing Zionist genocidal war on Palestinian people has been through the logic of ‘human shield.’ As an international law category, this logic enables militaries to collapse the civilian/combatant distinction, as civilians supposedly lose their protection through their alleged use by combatants for military advantage, and as such, their murder becomes justifiable collateral damage. Despite its IL veneer, there has been an enormous push back on this logic from activists, politicians, and legal scholars - both for the lack of evidence, as well as its systematic contravention of categories of distinction and proportionality, which has also became the legal basis of the case of genocide against Israel.
As the genocidal war expands to Lebanon, In this paper, we propose a critique of the widespread adoption of IL paradigms of civilian/combatant within critical scholarship and radical politics in order to analyze the current genocidal onslaught. Rather than wagering the case of genocide on disproving the allegations of human shield, using examples and formulations from earlier era of anticolonial/antiimperial resistance movements, genocide becomes a rational military strategy for colonial states, precisely as population became an intractable vector of resistance, rather than normatively accepting submission in face of extreme forms of oppression.
The primary reason the civilian/combatant distinction appears blurred within anticolonial context has to do with the fact that forces of armed struggle emerge form the population, and must be understood as people’s institution rather than through IL categories of war. By becoming immanent to the categories of IL, we unwittingly take part in foreclosing the legitimacy and strategic interests of people’s war, and cede ground to the colonial strategic interest in order to separate the resistance forces from the people as the sinews of its strength and legitimacy.
