I Was a Human Shield for Israel

I’ve been to Palestine. And at the time I went there, I called it “Israel.”

I went there on a Taglit Birthright trip – one of those all-expense-paid luxury tours where they wine you, dine you, and hope that you’ll fall in love with their parasite colony and decide to immigrate, and swell the Jewish ranks.

While we were there, one of the hotels we stayed at was the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem. They told us that the hotel was bombed, backed in the 1940’s, killing a whole bunch of people. But they apparently “forgot” to mention that it was Jews who bombed it. So for the next two decades, I thought Arabs bombed it. An honest oversight on Taglit’s part, I’m sure.

They drove us all around the country, north south east and west, on a big school bus. On that bus was an IDF soldier with a machine gun. “Just to protect us.” Being teenagers, we were easily awed and dazzled by the statement that the machine gun’s presence made. We thought it was really cool. It reminded us that we were intrepid and adventurous for being there.

What none of us – not a single one of us – realized at the time, was that according to Israel’s military rules of engagement, the presence of the soldier and his gun made us legitimate, legal targets for Palestinians to attack. “Human shields”, as Israel calls it. We were all human shields.

I was a human shield, and didn’t know it.

Now that I do know, I feel indignant at Israel, for putting me in that situation.

According to Israel, if soldiers and civilians are in the same place, the civilians are “human shields”, and it’s therefore legal and ethical to blow up the entire group, civilians and all, in order to kill the soldier. In such a case, the loss of the civilians is known as “collateral damage”, and is justified, because of the “greater good” of having killed the combatant who was hiding among them. The loss of civilian life in such a scenario is a tragedy, but it’s solely the fault of the soldier and the army he reports to – not the fault of the people who blew them all up. It’s the soldier’s army’s fault, because they decided to place the soldier among civilians, thus turning each and every one of those civilians into the famous monstrosity called a “human shield.”

If Hamas or the PLO or any Palestinian were to launch a grenade at our merry school bus, blowing us all to bits, we would be “collateral damage”, and our poor grieving families would have no one to blame but Israel, for being cowardly and despicable enough to hide an IDF member among us – using us as human shields.

That is Israel’s logic. Not my logic. Israel’s.

It also means that all of those suicide bombings of the past – you know, the stereotypical terror attack where they put on a bomb vest, walk into a pizza shop, shout “Allah akbar”, and blow everyone up – those attacks are justified also, because every Israeli pizza shop has at least a few IDF members in it. Remember, Israel has universal military conscription. Every Israeli has to join the IDF when they turn 18. In any group of Israelis, the vast majority will be members of the IDF, even if they’re currently inactive (i.e. reservists). So every random crowd of Israeli civilians is a legitimate target for attack, because they’re not really civilians. And even if there are true civilians (e.g. children) among the crowd, blowing them up is again justified as “collateral damage”, because they are being “used as human shields” by all the IDF members mixed into the crowd all around them. Even if it’s one IDF reservist surrounded by a crowd of 20 children, all 21 people can be blown up, legally and ethically, and the blower-upper is not responsible for those 20 children’s deaths. Israel is, because it hid a combatant among the children, turning them all into human shields.

So therefore, no Palestinian terror attack in the past 80 years was really a terror attack. They were all legitimate military operations.

Again, not my logic. Israel’s own logic.

When you hear it spit back at you with the identities reversed, it sounds diabolical. But I assure you, it’s no less diabolical in the other direction – the direction in which you’ve heard it repeated on TV for all these years.

Israel’s legitimacy rests upon warped, twisted, demonic reasoning, such as what I just described. Morality, ethics, decency, and Reason, all butt up against Israel’s narrative; and therefore, in order to justify Israel, you must cannibalize reality, one bit at a time, aspect by aspect, moral by moral, devouring one ethical principle after another. Defending Israel requires us to carve chunk after chunk out of the hull of the ship known as Reality, and offer them up as burnt offerings to Yahweh, until there’s nothing left of the ship, and the entire world sinks.

That’s where Israel leads – to the destruction of the world.

Humanity must stop Israel. We must dismantle it. Now.

It’s Israel or Humanity. It can’t be both.