There are no more civilians.

When the President of Israel says, “this rhetoric about civilians being not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true, they could have risen up, they could have fought against the evil regime which took over Gaza…” it means there are no civilians.

There are no civilians when the Defense Minister of Israel says, “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” and their Ambassador to Germany says, “we will move from containment to eradication.”

When there are hostages there are no more civilians.

There are no civilians when 2.5 million hostages are fenced in a space the size of Philadelphia.

There are no civilians when a state controls water, fuel and electricity for 2.5 million people caged in a space the size of Philadelphia, and the Defense Minister of the state declares, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” And so everything was closed, there was no water, no electricity, no fuel, no water. There were no civilians.

There are no civilians when 700,000 illegal settlers carry out 3 armed attacks every single day torching cars, homes, orchards, supermarkets, killing and injuring people in the West Bank, and Israel’s security forces of occupation intervene by killing another 179 Palestinians including journalists for good measure.

When armed service is mandatory for every citizen there are no civilians.

When Christian evangelicals cheer on the apocalypse, there are no more civilians.

And when Israeli citizens block humanitarian aid for Palestinians starving in Gaza and 2/3 of all Israeli citizens say that no Palestinians whatsoever should receive humanitarian aid at all, who are the civilians?

When 60 million global viewers tune into the Formula 1 Grand Prix in oil-rich Azerbaijan while the regime is carrying out another genocide, another genocide of Armenians, that is, in Artsakh - with arms provided by Israel, where are the civilians?

When $10 billion of the oil from that oil-rich genocidal state is bought by Israel, Italy, Germany, to fuel their cars, their tanks, their airplanes and to warm their homes – there are no civilians.

When arms, bombs, and planes from Lockheed Martin and Boeing are used on 2.5 million hostages fenced in a space the size of Philadelphia, there are no civilians.

When we fly in Boeing airliners and when Lockheed Martin employs 116,000 people across the US, with 60,000 engineers and scientists drawn from more than 60 partner universities – MIT, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Virginia, University of Illinois, Purdue… when there is a student pipeline to bombmakers there are no more civilians.

Where are the civilians when Citibank analysts call the Israel-Hamas war a positive catalyst and the price of Shell oil jumps and the WSJ says Dow Closes Higher as Israel-Hamas War Rattles Markets and capital leaks into our veins…?

…and when the owners and financiers of it all sit on the boards of MoMA and NYU and Whitney and all those places of high art and higher learning, who are the civilians?

When billionaires withdraw their money when someone says Free Palestine there are no civilians.

When NYPD has offices in Tel Aviv and officers are taken to the West Bank to watch Israeli forces in action, when US riot police use Israeli tactics to attack peaceful BLM protestors, and when Apple and Google disable mapping functions on the request of the Israeli Defense Forces there are no more civilians.

There are no civilians

When I breathe and when I can’t breathe, when I drive and when I eat, when I heat my home, take a plane, go to university, pay my taxes and get a pension fund, when I open my MacBook Air and get on to Google, when I live, and say Palestine, if I am killed, if I am taken hostage, if I am bombed, if I am stabbed, rammed, cuffed, charged, doxxed, fired, when I die… don’t call me a civilian.

Read at the Poets for a Free Palestine event at Poetry Project, Oct 26, 2023.
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When I wrote and performed this piece, it felt like a visceral statement surging out of the urgency of the moment. But behind it lay a few years of thinking, teaching and talking about sovereignty, imperialism, sacrifice, killing, genocide, terrorism. The editors of Makhzin rightly urged me to contextualize the piece more and I am doing so here using some material from a talk at a conference in Ramallah in 2015 ^[1] . I am writing as I receive horrific images of the most recent attacks on Tal as-Sultan and Jabalia camps. The public comments on the BBC and Yahoo! News feeds are equally horrific: the relentless claim by a Western audience that this was deserved or that it was Hamas’ fault for using ‘civilian shields.’ According to these comfortable civilian commentators, there are no civilians left. Just shields that have to be broken through.

My interest has been in the non-innocence of the Western civilian and the limitations of the category by which the international community justifies state violence. My disassembling of the category strikes many of my friends and colleagues as a terrible idea. A human rights activist and friend said, “We have to hold on to some distinctions or else we don’t have anything.” From a strictly legal perspective it may be helpful. For example, even if the category of genocide is not dependent on the notion of the civilian (it depends rather on various configurations of a collective identity), it certainly has helped the ICJ make its case against Israel. But legal language is clearly not enough and at any rate is inseparable from the surrounding moral and political context.^[2]

The civilian is usually defined not in itself but by virtue of a distinction with soldier or combatant, whose intention is to participate in war and therefore be prepared to kill or be killed. By contrast the non-combatant is assumed innocent and it is precisely the underlying assumption of innocence that is mobilized or broken down when war and killing are justified.

It was not until the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (IV Geneva Convention) that ‘the civilian’ formally became a subject of treaty law. And it was only in 1977, in the Protocols Additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, that the concept of ‘civilian’ was actually defined within international law^[3]. But the roots take us farther back. It was inextricably tied to the rise of the notion of civilization, meaning that it was tied to colonial conquest and the rise of Just War theories to regulate intra-European animosity and immunity, whilst leaving the colonies outside of the law of nations, where there was neither peace nor law. The latter, in other words, was the realm of barbarism, whereas the former (Europe) was the realm of the rule of law, or of civilization.

The 20th century legal enshrinement of the distinction between civilian and soldier – known as the Principle of Distinction and understood to be the basis of humanitarian law ^[4] – emerged at a time when that distinction was clearly no longer tenable thanks largely to the actions of the very signatories – “the high contracting parties” – of the very conventions that enshrined the principle^[5] . Since World War II, vastly more civilians than military personnel have perished in wars conducted by sovereign states, the figures ranging somewhere between 90% and 60% in the most conservative estimates^[6]. In wars led by the United States since the 1950s, millions of civilians have been killed – that is not counting the more than 300,000 killed in the firebombings and nuclear bombings of Japanese cities. Here are the numbers for the top three up to 2013 ^[7]:

Korea: estimates go up to 900,000 in the south and 1 million in the north
Vietnam: some estimates put the civilian toll at 3 million^[8] Iraq: from 150,000 according to IBC, but most suggest 2 to 5 times that as probable estimate^[9].The more recent of the unending Wars on Terror, initiated by the imperial forces of North America and Europe and continued by other proxies in Syria and Yemen, have resulted in over a 1.2 million direct and indirect deaths. ^[10]

It is never easy to determine the counterfactuals, but I am not sure how much extra killing the legal enshrinement of the category of civilian has prevented. Regardless, the several million people that have already been killed in late imperial wars despite the existence of the category are obviously several million too many.

In many ways, Israel’s wars echo the War on Terror, launched against ‘terrorists,’ that is, people who supposedly cannot or do not respect the difference between civilian and other targets, between innocents and other kinds of humans. This is in large part how terrorism is defined: “The organised use of violence to attack non-combatants ("innocents" in a special sense) or their property for political purposes.” ^[11] This invocation of the distinction between people who can and who cannot abide by the principle of distinction is followed immediately by the blurring of the distinction on the part of those who make it. Indeed, it is precisely by blurring it that the conduct of their wars has been justified. Retaining the principle of distinction for the homeland front, imperial warmongers create zones of indistinction elsewhere, where everyone becomes a valid target. The millions killed don’t matter because their civilian innocence may not be assumed. The War on Terror is conducted against people who are said to not know the value of life or who simply do not value life like Americans or Europeans, like civilized people. Over and over again, US officials and media asserted this. President Bush repeated variations of the following lines for several years, traveling from Bangor to Flagstaff: “My most important job is to protect American life, to protect innocent life. I mention that because you've got to know something about these people we fight. Unlike us, they don't value life. See, we think every life is precious. Everybody counts.” ^[12]George W. Netanyahu.

While reflecting on the numbers of civilians killed in American imperial wars, note the seamless continuity in Bush’s words between innocent life and American life. The American chorus was relentless and is well-known but here is a similar reminder from Staff Sergeant Time Carter from 2008: “… there is no way to tell if he is a civilian or al-Qaida. Here a kid can run up to you to shake your hand and then later throw a grenade at you.” Simply put, there are no innocents here, not even the epitome of innocence, The Kid.^[13] That kid, of course, was in part invented in Palestine – carrying a stone… but also has an internal version within the United States, where black children like Tamir Rice waving around a toy are shot by the police for waving around what could not have been assumed to have been a toy. What could not have been assumed, of course, has nothing to do with the object waved around. What could not have been assumed is the innocence of the black child. See also Emmett Till. This was the foundation of both lynching and of the carceral state –– white nationalist bloodlust got absorbed by the apparatus of the state, anonymized, institutionalized, legalized, proceduralized as a way of protecting sovereignty from its constitutive violence: “We the white people..”

In the reversals and refusals of that original text, I felt the need to question the civilian status of non-combatants in the West. I needed to challenge the assumed innocence of liberal democratic power, that is, the innocence of the peaceful, rational citizens that are said to constitute it. That includes many of us who are enrolled in the political economy and social lives of Western institutions, where – to take one clear example – those institutions benefit from and invest in companies like Boeing that make ‘civilian aircraft’ as well as GBU-39 bombs used to burn Tal al-Sultan camp. That is partly what we mean when in protests we charge companies, investors, CEOs, University Presidents, and so on with complicity: “Mr/s civilian, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

1. Thanks go to Tonya Foster, and Miriam Ticktin for helpful comments.
2. Ticktin, Miriam. 2020. “Innocence: Shaping the Concept and Practice of Humanity.” In Human Rights and Humanitarianism: Between Palliation and Transformation, ed. Michael Barnett; Cambridge University Press. Pp. 185-202.
   3.For a thorough study of these links see Kinsella, Helen. 2011. The Image before the Weapon: a critical history of the distinction between combatant and civilian. Cornell University Press. Much of my account in this section relies on this book.
   4.Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. The ICRC Also see
3. Kinsella, op cit.
4. For a conservative take on the disputes and the numbers see Roberts 2010. He seems to think somehow that lowering the ratio to 60% makes the whole scenario morally more acceptable.
5. That is not counting Afghanistan, Cambodia or any of the proxy wars. For a comparison see, Kiernan, Ben. Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent. The Asia Pacific Journal. Volume 8, Issue 26, Number 4.
6. Conway-Lanz, Sahr. 2006. Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II. NY: Routledge.
7. Iraq Body Count has the conservative: numbers ; high estimates have come from the: Lancet
   10.https://caat.org.uk/homepage/stop-arming-saudi-arabia/the-war-on-yemens-civilians/#:~:text=The%20war%20in%20Yemen%20has,crisis%20caused%20by%20the%20war.
   https://www.globalr2p.org/countries/syria/
8. C. A. J. Coady. 2004. Terrorism and Innocence. The Journal of Ethics,
   Vol. 8, No. 1, Terrorism (2004), pp. 37-58. For a different definition and history of the term see Palmer-Fernandez, Gabriel. 2005. Terrorism, Innocence, and Justice. Philosophy & public policy quarterly. Volume 25. Issue 3. Page 22 - 27.
9. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15
   Also see
   13.Also see Faulkner, Joanne. 2008. The Innocence of Victimhood Versus the “Innocence of Becoming”: Nietzsche, 9/11, and the “Falling Man”. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Issue 35/36, Spring/Autumn 2008, Pp. 67-85.