LESLIE LONDON: Benatar’s defence of human shield claims relies on IDF propaganda

David Benatar’s defence of his claims about human shields in Gaza is both illogical and deeply troubling (“A reality check for Leslie London: Gazans are being used as human shields”, January 19). I asked: where is the evidence that human shields are being deployed? Benatar provides none, but simply repeats what the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has said.

There are two main reasons not to believe the IDF about human shields. First, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon have meticulously detailed in a peer-reviewed academic paper how IDF propaganda has constructed this claim over past decades to justify the extraordinarily high civilian death toll in waging war against urban populations.

By characterising everyone as a human shield, regardless of whether they are actually serving as shields, the protections applicable to civilians during times of war are dispensed with. They all become potentially “killable subjects”. The claim is made during the war, but never justified with evidence. As the adage goes, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes true. Benatar has either not read the paper or is ignoring it. 

Second, IDF claims have failed to satisfy independent scrutiny. Al-Shifa hospital is the obvious case. In the lead up to the siege and capture of the hospital, IDF propaganda claimed it hosted an underground military command centre. Not just guns or captives, but a command centre. We were treated to modelled images of what the command centre looked like.

Once al-Shifa was captured, no such evidence emerged. In fact, the Israeli legal team at the International Court of Justice made an extraordinary straight-faced statement to the judges that the IDF had “successfully” blown up the command centre. Why, if you had evidence of such a centre, would you destroy it rather than show the evidence to the world?

The IDF also subsequently admitted that claims that captives were held at al-Shifa were untrue. As Gordon and Perugini predicted in 2016, claims that medical facilities were being used for military purposes as human shields are deployed to legitimise their destruction. Once destroyed, no proof is provided. 

Benatar’s main argument rests on the idea that co-location of military infrastructure with civilian residents is the same as human shielding. If that is the case, he will have to explain how it is that the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv are located in Kirya, alongside civilian infrastructure, in a heavily built-up area linked by a bridge to the Azrieli shopping mall. If Hamas bombed that target and killed civilians, would those deaths be the result of human shielding by the IDF?

Clearly not, and Benatar would be correct in denying it. But if Israel bombs a target in Gaza (using 2,000kg bombs) and kills civilians, then Hamas is to blame for using human shields. In Benatar’s analysis it is not what is done that decides whether civilian proximity is human shielding, but who is doing it. If it is Hamas, then it is a shield. If it is Israel, it is not. That is illogical. 

Benatar also excoriates me for entering territory for which I am seemingly not qualified, accusing me of armchair judgments about military matters. But that’s exactly what he does in his analysis. I question the logic of destroying 70% of Gaza’s infrastructure, while Benatar simply accepts it has some defensible logic without being “privy to all the military and other intelligence on the basis of which the IDF is operating”.

If I have transgressed some desiccated academic hierarchy requiring a PhD in moral philosophy to decide what is morally correct, then I am guilty as charged. Because I care about all lives, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, I make no apologies for offering views about what is right and what is wrong. The difference is that I do so using evidence.   

On the other hand, Benatar plunges, with no expertise, into a demographic assessment of whether the killings in Gaza constitute an unreasonable death rate, again citing the IDF as his source. He subtracts 9,000 combatant deaths from the total and comes to the astonishing conclusion that this is “a surprisingly low collateral death rate”.

Aside from the veracity of IDF figures, let’s explore the numbers he proposes. If 9,000 of the 24,000 Palestinians fatalities were combatants, and speculatively 1,000 are deaths from “friendly fire” (highly unlikely) then 14,000 are civilian deaths. In the discipline of public health we know that you can only interpret rates with a population denominator.

If you do that the cumulative rate of deaths per population in Gaza (without the “combatants” and “accidental” deaths) that emerges is higher than the cumulative death rate from Covid-19, declared a global emergency in 2020 by the World Health Organisation. The rate is also 83 times higher than the equivalent civilian death rate per month in the Ukrainian war.

The proportion of the civilian population killed since the start of that war is 30 times higher in Gaza, and children are 10 times more likely to be fatalities than adults when compared with Ukraine. These are staggeringly high figures. Bear in mind that deaths will increase in Gaza soon due to disease and malnutrition, both from the war and the intensification of the blockade of basic essential goods imposed by Israel at the start of its attack.

The pretence that “a single innocent’s death is tragic” cannot be reconciled with accepting 8,000 children dead as “surprisingly low”. What is therefore grotesque is not my reference to the heroic struggles by Jewish partisans using underground tunnels in the Warsaw uprising, but the callous indifference to such staggeringly high death rates in Gaza. 

Lastly, Benatar argues that because Israel takes prisoners the IDF doesn’t shoot people indiscriminately. This is a non sequitur. It is an argument against a claim that the IDF always shoots civilians, a claim I did not make. The fact that the IDF has arrested many Palestinians, including health workers delivering healthcare to Gazans is, tragically, quite compatible with the fact that it does shoot Palestinians indiscriminately, such as two women sheltering within the compound of the Holy Family Parish church in Gaza on December 16.

I asked Benatar at what point would the civilian death toll reach an unacceptable level. I did not get an answer. The reason is clear. Benatar’s view is that there should be no limit to civilian deaths because “any international pressure arising from civilian deaths that leads to an early termination of the war threatens Israel’s goals”.  This is the reality of genocide. 

• London is professor of public health medicine at the University of Cape Town. This correspondence is now closed.