Israel Used *ME* as a Human Shield

I first visited the place I called “Israel” 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 maniac colony and decide to immigrate, and swell the Jewish ranks.

They drove us all around the country, north south east and west, on a big school bus.

On that bus was an IDF member, holding a machine gun. “Just to protect us“, of course.

Being teenagers, we were awed and dazzled by the statement that the machine gun’s presence made. It reminded us that we were intrepid and adventurous for being there.

What none of us realized at the time, was that according to Israel’s military rules of engagement, the presence of the IDF member 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!

According to Israel, if militants 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 militant.

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 militant who was hiding among them.

The loss of civilian life is a tragedy, but it’s solely the fault of the militant 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 known as 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 parents would have no one to blame but Israel, for being cowardly and despicable enough to hide an IDF member among us – thereby using us as human shields.

That is Israel’s logic.

Not my logic. Israel’s.

It also means that all of the “rocket attacks” from Gaza toward Tel Aviv are justified – (NOT ACCORDING TO ME – ACCORDING TO ISRAEL’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT) – because every Israeli house has at least one IDF member living in it. Remember, Israel has universal military conscription. 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 house, every building, every sidewalk, every park, every random crowd of Israeli civilians, has combatants among it, and is therefore a legitimate target for attack (NOT ACCORDING TO ME – ACCORDING TO ISRAEL’S RULES).

And even if there are true civilians (e.g. children) among the crowd, blowing them up is again justified (NOT ACCORDING TO ME – ACCORDING TO ISRAEL) – 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 (ACCORDING TO ISRAEL, NOT ME), 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.

In fact, the entirety of downtown Tel Aviv is one gigantic human shield.

So therefore, no Palestinian terror attack in the past 80 years was really a terror attack. They were all legitimate military operations. (AGAIN, NOT ACCORDING TO ME – ACCORDING TO ISRAEL’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT).

How does that feel, guys?

When you hear this demon-logic 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 Israel, until there’s nothing left of the ship, and the entire world sinks.

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

Is the world OK with this?