The Christian Science Monitor - 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."
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Safwat al-Kahlout contributed to this report from
Gaza City.