Short­ly after the con­clu­sion of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, a 34-day affair that dis­pensed with approx­i­mate­ly 1,200 (main­ly civil­ian) lives in the lat­ter coun­try, my friend and I embarked on a hitch­hik­ing trip through the rub­ble. One of our stops was the town of Bint Jbeil, locat­ed 2.5 miles from the Israeli bor­der and known as the ​“cap­i­tal of the Resis­tance.” A for­mer focal point of the Hezbol­lah-man­aged strug­gle against Israel’s occu­pa­tion of south Lebanon, which was forcibly ter­mi­nat­ed in May of 2000, Bint Jbeil was sav­age­ly attacked by Israeli forces in 2006, part­ly as pay­back. Much of the town now lay in ruin.

“When all civilians are potential human shields, when each and every civilian can become a hostage of the enemy, then all enemy civilians become killable.”

The destruc­tion of prop­er­ty, not to men­tion friends and loved ones, had some­how not inter­fered with the south Lebanese capac­i­ty for hos­pi­tal­i­ty, and my com­pan­ion and I were quick­ly ush­ered into one family’s liv­ing room for cof­fee. This par­tic­u­lar fam­i­ly of five had spent the first 10 days of the war in a base­ment with a mul­ti­tude of rel­a­tives and neigh­bors before flee­ing north­ward in a con­voy of white flag-wav­ing vehi­cles, the last of which was pul­ver­ized by an Israeli missile.

Thanks to this expe­ri­ence, our hosts’ four-year-old daugh­ter now pan­icked at the slight­est sound. She nonethe­less appeared more resilient than my friend and me: After learn­ing that there was a two-foot-long unex­plod­ed Israeli aer­i­al bomb lying in the unoc­cu­pied house next door, we spent the rest of our vis­it hyperventilating.

Dur­ing the 2006 war, the Israeli mil­i­tary sat­u­rat­ed south Lebanese homes, yards, and fields with up to 4.6 mil­lion clus­ter bombs, a good per­cent­age of which failed to det­o­nate on impact and thus con­tin­ue to maim and kill to this day. One of Israel’s excus­es for such behav­ior was that Hezbol­lah was using south Lebanese civil­ians as human shields, stor­ing weapon­ry in area homes and launch­ing rock­ets from civil­ian areas. Expand­ing on the Israeli fab­ri­ca­tion that much of Hezbollah’s arse­nal was locat­ed under civil­ian beds, then-Israeli For­eign Min­is­ter Tzipi Livni rea­soned: ​“When you go to sleep with a mis­sile, … you might find your­self wak­ing up to anoth­er kind of missile.”

Of course, even if you didn’t go to sleep with a mis­sile, you were still fair game for a per­son­al­ized Israeli wake-up call, as plen­ty of civil­ians could attest to — like the south Lebanese chil­dren mas­sa­cred while flee­ing their vil­lages under Israeli orders. It appears, indeed, that the Lebanese ​“human shields” so ubiq­ui­tous­ly detect­ed by Israel were in fact only ele­vat­ed to the ​“human” lev­el at the moment that their human­i­ty could be exploit­ed to demo­nize the ​“Par­ty of God” and jus­ti­fy a thor­ough­ly inhu­mane response to alleged trans­gres­sions. More broad­ly speak­ing, human rights are grant­ed to vic­tims of Israeli aggres­sion only long enough for said rights to be vio­lat­ed by the likes of Hezbol­lah or Hamas — at which point the vio­la­tion is mag­i­cal­ly avenged via indis­crim­i­nate Israeli slaughter.

As schol­ars Nico­la Perug­i­ni and Neve Gor­don demon­strate in their new book The Human Right to Dom­i­nate, ​“the use of human rights to val­i­date and legit­i­mate dom­i­na­tion can be seen very clear­ly … through the dis­course sur­round­ing human shields.” In the book, dom­i­na­tion is defined as ​“a broad array of rela­tion­ships of sub­ju­ga­tion char­ac­ter­ized by the use of force and coercion.”

In the case of the 2006 war on Lebanon, Perug­i­ni and Gor­don write, con­ser­v­a­tive Israeli polit­i­cal actors essen­tial­ly hijacked human shield­ing ter­mi­nol­o­gy hereto­fore used to crit­i­cize Israeli mil­i­tary habits like forc­ing Pales­tini­ans to walk in front of sol­diers in order to deter attacks. Now, Hezbollah’s alleged human shield­ing was denounced by Israel as a war crime and vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al law, while Israel’s assault was adver­tised as being in accor­dance with that same inter­na­tion­al law. The Intel­li­gence and Ter­ror­ism Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, a think tank with offices locat­ed inside Israel’s Min­istry of Defense, explained that inter­na­tion­al law ​“does not grant immu­ni­ty to a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion delib­er­ate­ly hid­ing behind civil­ians, using them as human shields.”

What this meant for Lebanon, in the words of Perug­i­ni and Gor­don: “[T]he death of ​‘untar­get­ed civil­ians’ is mere­ly col­lat­er­al — and thus legit­i­mate — damage.”

The bulk of The Human Right to Dom­i­nate focus­es on Israel/​Palestine, an area that embod­ies this kind of dom­i­na­tion rather nice­ly. The Gaza Strip in par­tic­u­lar has served not only as a lab­o­ra­to­ry for var­i­ous forms of repres­sion but also as the back­drop for a sort of crash course in dis­plac­ing the blame for mil­i­tary atroc­i­ties onto those atroc­i­ties’ vic­tims. Call it ​“Human Shield­ing 101.”

Dur­ing Oper­a­tion Pro­tec­tive Edge, Israel’s 2014 for­ay into Gaza that killed 2,251 Pales­tini­ans (most of them civil­ians, includ­ing 551 chil­dren), the Israeli army went into social media over­drive in an attempt to warp out­siders’ per­cep­tions of the real­i­ty on the ground in Israel and Pales­tine to the former’s favor. Perug­i­ni and Gor­don show­case a series of handy graph­ics that pro­lif­er­at­ed on offi­cial mil­i­tary Twit­ter accounts, Face­book pages and blogs, empha­siz­ing that human shield­ing had become ​“a cen­tral trope in Israel’s semi­otic warfare.”

One image takes the form of a quiz of sorts, pos­ing the ques­tion: ​“Where do Gaza ter­ror­ists hide their weapons?” Lest we think too hard, the answer is read­i­ly pro­vid­ed along with sim­ple illus­tra­tions: in hous­es, mosques, hos­pi­tals and schools. And what do you know — this pret­ty much gives Israel carte blanche to attack any and all of these struc­tures, regard­less of their human content.

Oth­er graph­ics include a poster reit­er­at­ing that hous­es can be legit­i­mate mil­i­tary tar­gets, a poster warn­ing that ​“Hamas uses civil­ians to pro­tect its weapons” and a split-screen com­par­i­son between Israel and Hamas: ​“Some bomb shel­ters shel­ter peo­ple. Some shel­ter bombs.” Anoth­er poster car­ries a quote from for­mer Israeli mil­i­tary chief of staff Ben­ny Gantz assert­ing that Israel is aware that there are civil­ians in Gaza, but that Hamas ​“has turned them into hostages.”

Using such log­ic, Israeli forces can thus ratio­nal­ize what­ev­er vari­ety of mil­i­tary obscen­i­ty and excess hap­pens to tick­le their fan­cy. As Perug­i­ni and Gor­don note: ​“When all civil­ians are poten­tial human shields, when each and every civil­ian can become a hostage of the ene­my, then all ene­my civil­ians become killable.”

Fur­ther­more, the authors observe, the Israelis’ dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign works to obscure the ​“rad­i­cal­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate pow­er dif­fer­en­tial” that exists between them­selves and the res­i­dents of the Gaza Strip — who, for exam­ple, have no access to bomb shel­ters despite being on the receiv­ing end of bom­bard­ments by F‑16s and drones rather than makeshift rock­ets that a small num­ber of Israelis near bor­der areas with Pales­tine are sub­ject to (many of which are inter­cept­ed, anyway).

This pow­er dif­fer­en­tial nat­u­ral­ly trans­lates into dis­pro­por­tion­al casu­al­ty fig­ures on the ground: dur­ing Oper­a­tion Cast Lead, Israel’s 2008-09 offen­sive in Gaza, Pales­tin­ian civil­ians per­ished at a rate of 400:1, in com­par­i­son to their Israeli coun­ter­parts. But because ​“inter­na­tion­al law favors the high-tech states,” as Perug­i­ni and Gor­don point out, the glar­ing dis­crep­an­cy is some­how dis­ap­peared on account of Israel’s ever-expand­ing arse­nal of pre­cise weapon­ry, the pur­pose of which — the law assumes — is to ensure that utmost care is tak­en to avoid civil­ian casualties.

The prob­lem, of course, is that while high-tech vio­lence is seen to be more civ­i­lized, ​“sur­gi­cal strike” capa­bil­i­ties in the hands of a state built on a pol­i­cy of eth­nic cleans­ing don’t exact­ly cohere with the idea of civ­i­lized restraint. It also bears men­tion­ing that clus­ter bombs, an Israeli weapon of choice in Lebanon in 2006, are the dia­met­ri­cal oppo­site of pre­cise — unless one’s pre­cise goal is to kill indiscriminately.

Mean­while, to but­tress its offi­cial­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed pro­pa­gan­da, the state of Israel relies on an inter­na­tion­al mob of vol­un­teer pro­pa­gan­dists. Take New York Times for­eign affairs colum­nist Thomas Fried­man, who endorsed Israel’s strat­e­gy of ​“inflict[ing] sub­stan­tial prop­er­ty dam­age and col­lat­er­al casu­al­ties on Lebanon at large [and] exact[ing] enough pain on the civil­ians … to restrain Hezbol­lah in the future.” This strat­e­gy, he said, ​“was not pret­ty, but it was log­i­cal,” and should also be imple­ment­ed against Hamas. In polite soci­ety, you’re not actu­al­ly sup­posed to advo­cate for civil­ian deaths, but such con­ven­tions seem to be eas­i­ly brushed aside when Pales­tini­ans are the ones dying.

Addi­tion­al philo­soph­i­cal assess­ments have been put forth by for­mer Har­vard law school pro­fes­sor Alan Der­showitz, who in 2006 sug­gest­ed that there weren’t that many full-fledged ​“civil­ians” in Lebanon and Gaza in the first place. Propos­ing a ​“con­tin­u­um of civil­ianal­i­ty” to deter­mine just how civil­ian-like any giv­en indi­vid­ual was, Der­showitz con­tend­ed that, because the Israeli army had instruct­ed Lebanese civil­ians to flee the war zones in the south, ​“those who vol­un­tar­i­ly remain behind have become com­plic­it” in ter­ror­ism. Not estab­lished was the degree of ​“civil­ianal­i­ty” per­tain­ing to those civil­ians killed by the Israeli army while fleeing.

It might be worth draw­ing up just such a con­tin­u­um for Israel, a high­ly mil­i­ta­rized soci­ety that oper­ates on a uni­ver­sal draft, where upwards of 90 per­cent of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion has been known to sup­port any giv­en mur­der­ous assault on Gaza. As it so hap­pens, though, a con­tin­u­um of civil­ianal­i­ty de fac­to exist­ed long before it was artic­u­lat­ed by Der­showitz — a con­tin­u­um of human­i­ty per­pet­u­al­ly skewed against Israel’s victims.

Perug­i­ni and Gor­don stress that ​“lib­er­al human rights orga­ni­za­tions also pro­duce a hier­ar­chy between civil­ians,” by virtue of sub­scrib­ing to the notion that civil­ian vic­tims of pre­cise weapon­ry con­sti­tute legit­i­mate col­lat­er­al dam­age, while Israeli casu­al­ties of impre­cise weapon­ry — although much few­er and far­ther between — are vic­tims of war crimes. Fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of the Israeli gov­ern­ment and its think tanks — which, Perug­i­ni and Gor­don write, ​“for­mu­late … sov­er­eign acts of killing as a human right” — lib­er­al NGOs end up ​“us[ing] human rights to ratio­nal­ize the deploy­ment of sov­er­eign vio­lence against the dominated.”

Of course, Israel/​Palestine is not the only venue in which the human rights dis­course fails to jibe with any approx­i­ma­tion of the pur­suit of jus­tice. When, for exam­ple, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al cam­paigns against the with­draw­al of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan, or Human Rights Watch refus­es to con­demn U.S. drone attacks across the board, the very con­cept of ​“human rights become[s] organ­ic to dom­i­na­tion,” lend­ing itself to the dom­i­nant pow­ers’ inter­ests and fre­quent­ly entail­ing ram­pant vio­la­tions of these very rights.

Because inter­na­tion­al human rights and human­i­tar­i­an laws so often func­tion on behalf of the dom­i­nant, Perug­i­ni and Gor­don con­clude, what’s required is a cri­tique of these laws them­selves. Oth­er­wise, it seems, the divid­ing line between expend­able and non­ex­pend­able lives will remain firm­ly in place, and moral wrongs rather than human rights will con­tin­ue to be the order of the day.