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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Activists are flocking to the West Bank to serve as human shields, protecting Palestinians and protesting the Israeli occupation. Are they part of the solution -- or part of the problem?
Jan 15, 2003 | If you ask Matt Horton what he did with his summer vacation, be prepared to set aside a good part of the afternoon for his answer. Sitting on a futon couch in his apartment in Pasadena, Calif., with incense balanced carefully on a hookah and Arab singers playing on the stereo, the dreadlocked and wispily goateed 23-year-old college student launches into a two-hour speech denouncing Israeli treatment of Palestinians, the importance of nonviolent resistance, and the duty of American activists to help out their Middle Eastern brethren.
Last summer, Horton spent two months in the West Bank working as a human shield. His tasks: placing his body between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians, escorting medical supplies to hospitals, occupying Palestinian homes that were due to be bulldozed, and generally trying to use his presence as a white American to protect Palestinians from what he considers Israeli brutality.
Horton had to enter Israel under false pretenses, pretending he was a backpacker going to party at the beaches. Once he got past suspicious immigration officers, he went straight to a training session with pro-Palestinian activists in Tel Aviv. There, he role-played interactions with Israeli soldiers, learned first aid and received useful military tidbits: how to tell the difference between live fire and rubber bullets, for example, or what to do if a smoke bomb goes off next to you. And then, with a group of two dozen other activists, he headed for the West Bank city of Hebron to spend two months on the front lines of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Today, Horton speaks with casual aplomb about being shot at by Israeli soldiers. "You don't know what Israeli soldiers are going to do; they are really brutal. They'll just come into a neighborhood and start shooting, unannounced," Horton explains. "It is shocking, and really loud. You have to take a deep breath and compose yourself. The training helps, and knowing that you are there as observers and so you do have certain privileges -- that helps too. But while other people run away, you gotta hold your position out in the open and hold your hands up."
Horton was one of nearly 2,000 activists who have gone to the occupied territories in the last year to work as human shields under the auspices of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a coalition of Palestinians and so-called "internationals" who fervently believe the Palestinians are being wronged by the Israelis.
The human shield movement has become increasingly popular with today's young activists. Indeed, the movement is branching out: Many activists are planning to go to Iraq, hoping their presence will help prevent the U.S. from attacking.
"I think human shield work is the wave of the future. This is the new way to do activism," says Mark Levine, assistant professor of modern Middle East history, culture and Islamic studies at UC-Irvine. "It will take several years for there to be an emerging paradigm for where and when to do it, but it is definitely becoming a much more powerful force, because all other directions are becoming hopeless and futile."
The human shields activists in the Middle East have emphatically chosen sides in the most bitterly divisive foreign policy issue in America today. They believe that Israel's presence and tactics in the occupied territories are morally unacceptable. Their critics regard them as bleeding hearts, or worse, who are defending terrorists and (literally) standing in the way of Israel's legitimate defense needs. In April 2002, Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of the conservative National Review, denounced the human shields activists, writing that they "aren't 'peace activists': They're supporters of the Palestinian war on Israel, who want the war to succeed."
Not surprisingly, the Israeli government is also strongly opposed to the movement, which it regards as biased and playing into the hands of Israel's enemies. Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev calls the human shields "misguided," adding that "the ISM are so one-sided they are almost mouthpieces for Arafat's propaganda." Israel has cracked down on obvious activists, refusing to allow them to enter the country.
The Israeli government denies that Israeli troops and settlers are unnecessarily brutalizing innocent Palestinians, arguing that Israel's harsh tactics in the West Bank and Gaza -- including blanket closures, checkpoints, and military actions -- are necessary security measures and insisting the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) go to extraordinary lengths to spare civilians. Regev says, "If [civilians are targeted] it's against our policy, it's regrettable. We make every effort to hit the combatants; the civilians are not our enemies."
Regev also criticizes the activists for not showing as much concern about Israeli lives as Palestinian ones. "From an Israeli point of view, it would be nice if they would give human shields to Israelis too. These are innocent people who are being slaughtered. I think anyone who's looking at the Palestinian conflict in a moral way, it's very clear there is one side that deliberately targets innocent civilians, makes no distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and another that makes distinctions."
The activists retort that such answers ignore the basic political reality: Israel is an illegal occupying power, which undercuts its claims to be acting in legitimate self-defense when it operates outside its pre-'67 borders. (Israel captured the occupied territories, comprising the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, from Jordan, Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war.) They reject Israel's claims that it exercises special care not to harm civilians as absurd on their face: In their view, the very nature of the Israeli military presence in the occupied territories relegates Palestinians to a wretched life. Israeli troops, they charge, routinely engage in acts that have nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with brutalizing and humiliating Palestinians.
International human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem and respected Israeli journalists such as Amira Hass, support the activists' claims, finding that the IDF has engaged in persistent human rights violations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including collective punishment, assassinations, destruction of homes, indiscriminate fire directed at civilian targets, beatings, detainment of medical personnel, unjustified restrictions on movement, and other such practices. International bodies, including the United Nations, have also warned of a critical deterioration in basic standards of living in the occupied territories: Many Palestinian children are now suffering from malnutrition, sick people are often unable to get to a doctor, and education has been severely affected.
Israel has acknowledged engaging in some of these practices, including collective punishment and so-called targeted assassinations, but justified them as necessary to fight Palestinian terror. Polls have shown that a majority of Israelis are prepared to close down the settlements and give most of the occupied territories back to the Palestinians, if Israel's security needs are met. However, the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, following the collapse of the Barak-Clinton-Arafat peace talks, has led most Israelis to be severely skeptical about Palestinian intentions -- which explains their support for hard-line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Many if not most Israelis now fear that the Palestinians want not only the occupied territories, but Israel proper -- that, in effect, they want to re-fight not just the war of '67, but the war of '48, when the state of Israel came into being. The rash of suicide bombings, many inside the so-called "Green Line" that denotes the '67 borders, has deepened this existential fear.
Human rights groups have also harshly criticized Palestinian suicide bombers, and some of the human shields activists have joined them. But other, more radical activists are less willing to condemn any tactics used by the Palestinians. Asked by e-mail whether he thought suicide bombing was a legitimate military tactic, Matt Horton took a softer line than Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has publicly condemned the practice as immoral and counterproductive. "It is not my place to dictate the tactics of struggle to the Palestinian people," Horton replied. "My place is to discuss the Israeli brutality and violence because in the end, I do not fund Palestinian fighters with my tax dollars, I fund the Israeli military, who received over 4 billion dollars in direct military aid from the United States. The blood of the Palestinians is on my hands, and this is where my responsibility lies."
