[WCUSP] Fw: Palestinian human shields give Israel pause

[Libby and Mort Frank]

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From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
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Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2006 9:11 PM
Subject: Palestinian human shields give Israel pause


> Palestinian human shields give Israel pause
> 
> By Joshua Mitnick
> Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
> from the November 20, 2006 edition
> http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1120/p01s02-wome.html
> 
> TEL AVIV -- In perhaps the most effective act of
> nonviolent protest in the six-year Palestinian
> uprising, hundreds of Gazans forced Israel over the
> weekend to call off airstrikes on the residence of a
> militant leader by swarming the house as human shields.
> 
> In recent months, Israeli security forces have used
> telephone calls to warn Palestinian militants and
> others near alleged militant safe houses and weapons
> caches, giving them up to a half hour to evacuate. When
> militia leader Mohammed Baroud got the call Saturday,
> he enlisted neighbors to protect his house from the
> Israeli military. They've now set up a system of shifts
> to protect the house around the clock.
> 
> Palestinian leaders are hailing this as a moral victory
> that will be replicated. If so, it may herald a
> significant tactical shift from attacks by tiny
> secretive militant groups to nonviolent civilian
> protest, a change that will force Israel to adjust its
> strategy. It also underscores the difficulty of
> fighting militant groups embedded in a civilian
> population - whether it be in Iraq, Afghanistan, or
> Gaza.
> 
> "The Palestinians are creative and this is something
> amazing," says Maher Miqqdad, a Fatah spokesman. "Maybe
> in the past six years of the intifada, the focus was on
> military resistance. But we shouldn't deny the
> importance of peaceful resistance. There is an
> importance in increasing the peaceful struggle."
> 
> An Israeli army spokesman who spoke on condition of
> anonymity said the attack was scrapped after the
> military realized that dozens of Palestinians were
> demonstrating on the roof of Mr. Baroud's home.
> 
> Having backed down, Israel's military might have to
> rethink its methods of striking at militant targets.
> Israel's army prefers attacking from the air to risking
> soldiers' lives by sending infantry and armored units
> on raids. And the advance warning of raids is meant to
> avoid civilian casualties, the Israeli military says.
> 
> But now, less than two weeks after the killing of at
> least 20 Palestinians in northern Gaza brought a storm
> of international criticism against Israel, this tactic
> may have backfired by creating the risk of even more
> innocent victims.
> 
> "This is definitely a problem," says the army
> spokesman. "The reason why we warn ahead is to avoid
> innocent injuries. Instead, they are using the warning
> to do what they did yesterday. We'll see how we can
> deal with it."
> 
> Baroud is a member of the Popular Resistance Committee,
> a militia which participated in the abduction of Israel
> Cpl. Gilad Shalit and frequently fires Qassam missiles
> into southern Israel.
> 
> "It's a victory. They forced the army to change
> direction," says Sliman A-Shafi, a Gaza correspondent
> for Israel Channel 2 who said the Palestinians
> protested under the slogan "Either we live together or
> we die together."
> 
> The success of the mass protest is stirring nostalgia
> for the first Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s
> and early 1990s, a battle with Israel seen as a popular
> uprising fought with stones and Molotov cocktails
> rather than with missiles and suicide bombers.
> 
> Palestinians credit the first intifada as winning self-
> government and international recognition, while the
> economic hardship and anarchy accompanying the recent
> uprising has made it much more difficult to celebrate.
> 
> "People realize that we might go back to the popular
> resistance as we had in the first intifada," says Omar
> Shaban, a Gaza political analyst. "People are becoming
> convinced that the popular resistance is more effective
> than the military resistance."
> 
> But one human rights activist expressed reservations
> about the use of human shields to ward off the Israeli
> army.
> 
> "In principle, it's forbidden for militants to draft
> people to protect them," says Sarit Michaeli, a
> spokewoman for the Israeli human rights monitor
> B'tselem. "The idea of citizens coming to protect a
> house which is a military target is problematic, to say
> the least."
> 
> And yet, Ms. Michaeli says that whether or not the
> human shield protest constitutes a human rights breach
> depends on whether the protesters participated
> willingly or were coerced, whether minors were
> involved, and whether the house was a genuine military
> target.
> 
> On Sunday, 10 Palestinians were injured in a botched
> Israeli strike on Hamas operatives accused of being
> involved in manufacturing rockets. To be sure, under
> constant pressure from Israel's campaign against
> militants, many Gazans are unlikely to disavow the role
> of fighters who retaliate against the attacks.
> 
> "This kind of [peaceful] resistance cannot replace the
> rocket resistance," says Jamila Shanti, a female member
> of Hamas who helped organize a permanent presence of
> female human shields around the house. "The popular
> resistance is to protect the people from the bombing.
> The rocket resistance is to confront the Israeli
> machinery."
> 
> -------
> Safwat al-Kahlout contributed to this report from
> Gaza City.
> 
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