Are There No Male Civilians in Palestine?
by Anchal Agarwal and Teresa Döring
Who do we talk about when we speak up for the civilians in Israel, in Gaza, and elsewhere? When media outlets around the world cover atrocities committed against Palestinians by Israel, they almost exclusively focus on women and particularly children. Little empathy is extended towards male Palestinians because they do not tend to be considered “innocent” and worthy of civilian protection. But this division of who gets to be a civilian is dangerous — and male Palestinian lives and human rights matter.
And because Twitter, for all its pitfalls, can be great in condensing long-winded blog posts into single tweets, consider this our TL;DR:
A changing narrative on Palestine?
Palestinian activism, resistance against oppression, and plight for highlighting the violence and settler colonialism against them are not new in the slightest — but something seems different this time. Isn’t there some kind of “new tipping point where the entire debate is being reframed”? Finally, a pro-Palestinian perspective is reaching Western media and consciousness and are being heard far and wide. Palestinians, who were denied the depiction of revolutionary heroes against the violent rule that was given to liberation movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Syria, receive coverage that goes beyond “terrorists attack Israel”. Influential news figures who had been wary of repercussions are speaking out: Trevor Noah prefaced his 10-minute video take in The Daily Show on Palestine by stating “I know that I’m being blocked on all social media and in life”, apologising all the while (and barely making any jokes). Something changed, the consensus seems to be.
There are two points we want to address about this change — the first one briefly, the second in-depth.
Firstly, sometimes the point is being raised that journalists and media outlets who report on Palestine step up and represent, show, or tell the story of those who “are voiceless”. This is a patronising misconception. Palestinians aren’t voiceless; they do have voices, and they are speaking (media outlets and people around the world just haven’t been listening). When there is talk about “reframing debates” and “a radical change in the debates surrounding Palestine”, this is necessarily a Eurocentric and West-centric idea of people who see themselves as the “core” and people like Palestinians at the “margins”. For a more in-depth explanation, check out this blog entry by Malaka Shwaikh.
Having said this, let’s dive into today’s focus: how this changing media narrative does fall short — by sacrificing male Palestinian civilians.
“They Were Only Children” is the headline of a New York Times interactive story. “Israel is killing women and children in Gaza”, the Indian news site Countercurrents.org titles. “If there is hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today”, says United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Look out for stories on Palestinians who suffer violence. In almost every article discussing those who are injured or dead in Gaza, there is this addition — how many of those are women, how many of them are children. Often, these articles are written out of a desperate effort: to turn a narrative which is decidedly pro-Israeli, to convince an audience which, when discussing Palestinians, just sees “Hamas”. And the way that is chosen to reach those who don’t know or don’t want to know, or anyone, that they should care about violence against Palestinians is to put those on the forefront who cannot, in anyone’s mind, be culpable. To present those who nobody can doubt are innocent. If those innocents are suffering, something must be amiss, right?
So, we talk about the violence committed against women, who surely could not have been terrorists, and to an even greater degree, children. Often, it is the “most innocent” of all: girls in front of destroyed buildings, girls, wounded, and girls, dead, their family grieving for them. We can tell their stories.
“Death of the Civilian”: Blurring Lines, Loss of Protection, Dehumanisation
To understand why this is problematic, we must take a step back and have a look at how the idea of the “civilian” is under active attack — Derek Gregory calls this “The Death of the Civilian”. He references Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz who attempted to introduce the concept of a “continuum of civilianity”. Some civilians, Dershowitz claimed, may be involved in aiding (or not obstructing) combatants — which makes them less innocent, and therefore less deserving of the protection that civilians are meant to enjoy. Step by step, he strips Palestinians in Lebanon and Gaza of their civilian status. First, obviously, if you shelter combatants or aid them financially, you cease being a civilian. Then, if you’ve put yourself in harm’s way to protect fighters, you’ve forfeited your right to protection.
The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some — those who cannot leave on their own — should be counted among the innocent victims.
— Alan Dershowitz
Next, as can be seen above, if you fail to leave your homes behind for destruction, you become complicit — never mind where you might go, how you might leave, or the dangers that await you during travels and as refugees. Then come so-called human shields, which cannot be spared but become “collateral damage in the form of innocent civilians who were killed, but that is the reality in a world where terrorists hide among women and children.” And even when you are considered truly “innocent”, your death may be an unfortunate but necessary casualty — according to Israeli entrepreneur Alon Arvatz.
Lastly, we see the death of the civilian clearly when we reach the stage where, even if you have done nothing of the above, you are still not a civilian, because you have the potential to be or become a “terrorist”. A telling example of the belief that all Palestinians are the “enemy” is a text (by writer Uri Elitzur) that Ayelet Shaked, an influential Israeli politician and justice minister from 2015 to 2019, had published on her social media page:
“They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
The dehumanisation of Palestinians as a people and their construction as the “Other”, a collective enemy, are strategies of alienation often applied to Arabs and Muslims. Palestinian scholar Edward Said most famously captured these forms of Othering in his influential work Orientalism. What happens when women and children do get the questionable privilege of the assumption of innocence became obvious in Fallujah, an Iraqi city which the U.S. military assaulted in 2004 with commands “to shoot dead any male on the street between 15 and 50 — even if they unarmed — if they could in any way be viewed as a ‘security threat’”.
So, by which criteria do people cease to be civilians? As we see in Palestine, it can be enough to exist as an adult or adolescent man. The fact that women are sometimes given a presumption of civilianity and innocence is not to be celebrated in the least — it shows a deeply patriarchal view of them as passive, infantile people without agency.
That is how Israel can justify its attacks on Gaza. If they claim that the majority of “casualties” were terrorists, that is chiefly because they consider the majority, if not all, Palestinians to be terrorists. The UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has rejected claims that destroyed buildings were used for military purposes and emphasised Israel’s civilian targets, but the Israeli Defence Force simply does not consider Palestinians to be civilians by and large. It is convenient because it also makes all attacks self-defence; it makes all inhabitants combatants; and it makes colonial violence a war, one people against another.
The fact that many governments, chiefly in the U.S. and Europe, happily adopt this narrative highlights Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life: states confer the “right to have rights” on their citizens through citizenship. The Palestinians in Gaza, who are stateless and cannot count on the protection of a recognised state entity have lost their status as political humans long ago. Stripped of their rights, they effectively have become “bare life”: They can be killed and they can die — but they are not murdered, because they can be killed with impunity. Being stateless — and considered enemy combatants as that — they are beyond the human rights regime, and their killing is not perceived to be a crime.
Beyond Innocence as a Qualifier for Humanity: Palestinian Men’s Lives Matter
Separation of the “good” victims from the “bad” and the “innocent” civilians from the “complicit” stems from this dehumanisation and from colonial military discourses. Hence, it is problematic to copy this idea, even when the intention is to highlight Palestinian suffering. That is not to say that gender, and age does not matter. They do — violence disproportionately affects women and children, because of pre-existing inequalities as well as gender-blind humanitarian responses. But that is not what the articles mentioned in the beginning highlight. Palestinian men are also innocent, Palestinian men are also civilians, Palestinian men also must be protected. Palestinian men’s life matter, too. They also have been victims of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing. The war crimes that Israel commits in Palestine would still be war crimes if no children or women had been harmed. Whoever only listens up when hearing about those considered “innocent” denies an entire part of society, their humanity and their human rights.
Palestinian men are innocent, but the fact that we have to stress this in the first place is an issue. Because innocence is not a qualifier for human rights. Human rights are not conditional — and they cannot be given or taken away. No matter what you do, you cannot lose them. (That is, you could say, the very point). Those who do not leave an area after being notified to do so, or shelter fighters still do not deserve death and destruction. German politician Alexander Dobrindt demanded that asylum seekers who expressed anti-semitism lose their right for asylum and face deportation. Here, as so often, critique of Israel’s military occupation is conflated with anti-semitism, but that is a point for another blog post. Even for anti-semitic behaviour and statements, no one should face losing their basic right to safety, right of protection, and the threat of being deported to a potential war zone. The right to life and dignity is not conditional, either.
Bringing innocence to the forefront is the last effort when all else seems to fail. But we must not rely on the colonial rhetoric of dehumanisation, and accept that we are sacrificing the innocence, the humanity, and the right to not be killed and occupied and hurt of one group of people (men) for another (women and children). Hedi Viterbo, in his article “Palestinian Men’s Lives Matter”, concludes with the following:
To focus only on women and children is to play it safe, because many around the world have been programed to be less compassionate to men, especially those from colonized and marginalized communities.
To conclude: men are as vulnerable as women and children and deserve the same protection and attention. The tag of being a civilian or a combatant should not be influenced by gender. Singling out women and children as “innocent” serves to label all men as “potential terrorists” — which deprives one half of the population of basic human rights and dignity.
