- This ostensible distinction between the active – and therefore punishable – ‘combatant’ and the passive – and therefore innocent – ‘civilian’ has been exploited time and time again by imperial powers to undermine anti-colonial resistance efforts. And the contemporary Zionist state continues to rely upon this logic. When every civilian can be repositioned as a potential combatant and so become a ‘human shield’, or when Hamas are allegedly hiding under hospitals, or within neonatal incubators – violence against the population as a whole is legitimised. The enemy is everyone, everything, everywhere, all the time. Starvation caused by the destruction of objects necessary to life (bakeries, agricultural lands, mills, sewage systems, electricity, schools, homes, roads) – and the subsequent withholding of aid – then becomes merely the tragic ‘humanitarian’ consequence of a legal and necessary military objective, instead of an intentionally genocidal endeavour.
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