On Human Shields in Gaza

One of the most prominent claims repeated by the Israeli government throughout the 2014 Gaza war is that Hamas uses human shields and therefore it is to blame for the killing of hundreds of civilians during the military campaign. The constant reiteration of this trope—the use of civilians as human shields—is fascinating particularly due to its relative absence in the coverage of other contemporary Middle East theatres of violence, such as Syria and Libya, where civilians are caught in the midst of urban warfare. Why is human shielding a prominent topic of discussion in relation to Israel/Palestine and almost completely absent when analyzing violence in its neighboring countries? What does the legal concept human shield do? And why does the accusation of using human shields apply only to certain actors? In this talk, Neve Gordon will address such questions by providing an overview of the use of human shields in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is also a founding member of Hagar school for Jewish Arab education for equality. Prof. Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation (University of California, 2008) and co-author (with Nicola Perugini) of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford 2015). He has edited two volumes on human rights and written numerous scholarly articles primarily on issues relating to Israel/Palestine, human rights and political theory. In addition, Gordon is a contributor to a variety of media outlets including The Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, LA Times, The Guardian, The Nation, The London Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Gordon was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a visiting scholar at Berkeley, Brown and the University of Michigan.

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies