Silent shields: international humanitarian law at the limits of audibility

Abstract

In my contribution to this forum, I want to focus on the silencing of human shields within the prevailing frames of war/law. Focusing on the destruction of al-Jalaa tower by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), I argue that Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire enables us to see how the figure of the human shield was invoked to legitimize this violence whilst denying the victims a voice within debates about the harm inflicted upon them. Although the book enables us to trace how the discourse on human shielding works to dehumanize and depoliticize the victims, I encourage the authors to think about the silences and omissions in their own work and to think about what could be done to contest these silences. I draw on the work of Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Rancière, and Banu Bargu to illustrate my concerns about the problem and potential solutions to this problem.