Neve Gordon - Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire

AS PART OF HER SENIOR - YEAR PROJECT at Evergreen College, twenty-three-year-old Rachel Corrie traveled to the Middle East, intending to initiate a sister city project between her hometown Olympia, Washington, and the Palestinian town Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. She flew into the area at the very height of the second Palestinian uprising, and after a two-day seminar in the offices of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the West Bank, she continued on to Rafah to join other ISM activists who were trying to prevent Israels massive demolitions of houses on the Egyptian border. Less than two months after her arrival, on March 16, 2003, Corrie was crushed to death as she tried to prevent an Israeli Caterpillar D9R military bulldozer from destroying the home of local pharmacist Samir Nasrallah.

During the subsequent trial, the military spokeswoman defended the bulldozer driver and accused the ISM of carrying out illegal and violent activities by serving as human shields for wanted people or for the homes of Palestinians. In the militarys eyes, the fact that Corrie had used her body as a shield to try to deter bulldozers from demolishing homes was proof that she had engaged in an act of combat, and thus the person who killed her had not violated any law. Rachel Corries horrific death and the acquittal of the soldier who killed her pose a number of questions around human shielding. Why was the killing of a voluntary human shield, an unarmed person who deploys nonviolent forms of protection, deemed legal? Why are voluntary human shields considered criminals by some and heroes by others? And what might a history of people in the line of fire teach us about the laws of war and the changing political and social forces that have shaped the global order?

The phrase human shield actually emerged only following the Second World War, even though the practice of human shielding had been common for a very long time. In the seventh century, for example, the Chinese used barbarian tribes on the Turko-Mongol frontier as human buffers, while the Mongols deployed prisoners as shields during their conquests. Unlike Rachel Corrie, these were involuntary human shields, people who were coerced to serve as a buffer, and a careful reading of the historical records revealed that their use was not uncommon.

The practice of human shielding also appears in many notable novels, memoirs, poems, and films, but since its not explicitly mentioned, its easy to miss. Human shielding occurs in one of the key scenes in Harper Lees novel To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. Set in a southern United States town in the early 1930s, the story follows the lives of two children and their lawyer father, Atticus Finch, who is charged with defending Tom Robinson, a black man wrongfully accused of raping and beating a white woman. The night before the trial, Robinson is brought back to the local jail, and Atticus, who thinks that some of his white neighbors might want to murder the prisoner, decides to sit in front of the jailhouse to protect his client with his own body. Sure enough, an angry mob of men arrive and demand that Atticus move aside so that they can carry out the lynching, but his two children and another boy suddenly appear, and by standing on the steps of the jailhouse, unwilling to budge, the lawyer and the three children manage to fend off the would-be killers (figure 1).

FIGURE 1. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch and the children shielding Tom Robinson from an angry mob. Credit: YouTube clip.

This scene pre-dates the activities of the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, but it too depicts an action that today we would call voluntary human shielding, where a person or group of people risks their lives to protect someone or something that is under attack. It is a nonviolent act of resistance not only against the deployment of violence but, as Lees novel suggests, also against oppressive social normsin this case the white supremacy that dominated the southern US town. This is but one of many instances of voluntary shields who challenged militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, and environmental plunder. Such people willingly put their lives in the line of fire to advance a cause they perceive as ethical.