Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide
Organising genocidal violence
According to international law, both in the Geneva Conventions and in the Additional Protocols, safe zones must be recognised in an agreement between the fighting parties. However, in conflicts, this rarely happens and safe zones – and the legal technologies associated with them – can become tools for the organisation of violence.
The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.
