Abstract:
This article, a chapter in a larger work on the global costs imposed by the actions of the state of Israel, examines the cost paid through the selective application of human rights, the doctrine invoked to justify decades of Western war and then suspended when it would have condemned an ally. It establishes the documented toll of the wars waged under the banner of freedom since 2001, the 905,000 to 940,000 killed directly and the 3.6 to 3.8 million killed indirectly across Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, a total approaching four and a half million, with 38 million displaced, per the Costs of War project. It sets this record against the suspension of every such concern when the subject became Palestine and the conduct of Israel. It argues that this selectivity is not ordinary hypocrisy but something more corrosive, the conversion of human rights from a principle into a license, invoked where it justified intervention and discarded where it would constrain an ally. The deepest cost, it contends, is the destruction of the protective power of the concept itself, so that human rights, once exposed as a flag of convenience, can shield no one.
Main Article:
A principle that applies only to the enemies of its holder is not a principle. It is a weapon wearing the costume of a principle, and the moment it is revealed to be applied selectively, it loses the one quality that made it valuable, its claim to stand above the interests of those who wield it. For decades, the Western powers conducted their conduct in the world under the banner of human rights, democracy, and freedom, and that banner justified a great deal, including a very great deal of killing. The treatment of Palestine, and of the state whose conduct toward it the West has shielded, is what finally exposed the banner for what it had become. Not a principle. A license.
Begin with the killing done under the banner, because the scale of it is the foundation of everything that follows.
In the decades since 2001, the wars waged by the United States and its allies in the name of counterterrorism and the defense of freedom have produced a human toll that is documented, and staggering, and almost never spoken of in proportion to its size. By the accounting of the Costs of War project at Brown University, the most comprehensive independent tally that exists, these wars directly killed between 905,000 and 940,000 people, of whom more than 432,000 were civilians, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. [1] And the direct deaths are the smaller number. The same research estimates that between 3.6 and 3.8 million people died indirectly, from the destruction of health systems, economies, infrastructure, and food supplies that the wars caused, bringing the total death toll to between 4.5 and 4.7 million people, with 38 million more driven from their homes. [2] These are not the casualties of the enemies of human rights. They are the casualties of the wars fought in its name.
And the manner of much of this killing matters, because it reveals how little the proclaimed concern for human life actually governed the conduct.
Consider the doctrine of the signature strike, the practice by which the drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere targeted people not for any identified act but for fitting a pattern, for being military-age males in a designated zone, counted as legitimate targets by virtue of their location, their age, and their sex, even when unarmed, even when surrounded by women and children who would die alongside them. [3] Consider the documented aftermath in places like Fallujah, where the bombardments left a seventeen-fold increase in birth anomalies and uranium detected in the bones of the population. [2] Consider the man recently killed by a strike, claimed as a senior militant, who turned out to be a father of ten tending his sheep. [3] This is what was done under the banner of human rights, and it was done for two decades, to millions, with the proclaimed concern for the dignity of human life invoked throughout as the very justification for the killing.
Now set against this record the treatment of Palestine, and the contradiction becomes total.
When the subject turned to Palestine, and to the conduct of the state of Israel, the entire apparatus of human-rights concern that had justified decades of intervention fell silent, or worse, reversed itself. The same powers that had invoked the protection of civilians to justify the bombing of seven countries declined to invoke it to restrain their ally. The same governments that had built a doctrine of humanitarian intervention, of the responsibility to protect, of the duty to act against mass atrocity, discovered, when the atrocity belonged to their ally, that they had no such duty after all. The rulings of the international courts were ignored. The findings of the human-rights organizations were dismissed. The very language of human rights, deployed so freely to justify Western wars, became, when applied to Palestine, a thing to be attacked as bias, as extremism, even as hatred. The standard was not merely lowered. It was inverted. What had been the justification for war became, in this one case, the thing that must not be said.
This selectivity is the heart of the matter, and it must be understood precisely, because it is more corrosive than simple hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is the failure to live up to a principle one genuinely holds. What is revealed here is something worse, that the principle was never held at all, that human rights functioned not as a constraint the powerful accepted upon themselves but as a license they issued to themselves, invoked when it authorized what they wished to do and suspended when it would have forbidden it. A principle that is applied when it justifies intervention against an adversary and discarded when it would condemn an ally is not a principle that is being imperfectly observed. It is a weapon that is being consistently used, always in the same direction, toward the interests of the one who wields it. The consistency is the tell. Across decades and continents, the banner of human rights has been raised to justify the use of force against the enemies of the West and lowered to excuse the conduct of its friends, and a standard that bends so reliably to interest was never a standard. It was an instrument.
And here is the deepest cost, the one that reaches beyond Palestine and beyond the millions already killed, to everyone who will ever need the protection of the idea.
When human rights is exposed as a license rather than a principle, the concept itself is destroyed as a source of protection. The power of human rights, the reason the idea matters, lies entirely in its universality, in the claim that it applies to everyone equally, that it stands above the interests of the powerful and shields the weak precisely because it cannot be selectively withdrawn. The moment it is shown to be selectively applied, that power evaporates. A principle that protects only those whom the powerful have no interest in harming protects no one, because it offers nothing that interest did not already offer. Every future victim of every future atrocity who might once have invoked the universal language of human rights to demand protection now invokes a language that has been publicly revealed as a flag of convenience, raised and lowered at the discretion of the strong. Palestine did not only expose the selectivity. It spent the concept, drained it of the credibility that was its only power, and left every weak people on earth with a weaker shield than they had before.
So the cost catalogued in this chapter is not only the millions killed under the banner, terrible as that is. It is the banner itself.
The wars killed their millions, and that is a cost beyond reckoning. But the selective silence on Palestine added a further cost, harder to see and longer to last, the destruction of the one idea that the weak of the world had been told would protect them. For if human rights can be invoked to justify the killing of four and a half million people in the name of freedom, and then suspended entirely when the victims are Palestinian and the perpetrator is an ally, then human rights has been revealed to mean nothing more than the will of the powerful, dressed in the language of morality. That revelation is a cost paid by everyone who is weak, everywhere, because it strips them of the one appeal that was supposed to stand above power. The banner that flew over the wars and then dipped for Palestine was the same banner, and watching it dip taught the whole world what it had always been.
That is the license, and its exposure is the cost.
The doctrine of human rights was supposed to be the great achievement of the postwar order, the principle that placed certain things beyond the reach of power, that said some acts are wrong no matter who commits them and some lives are protected no matter whose interest is served by ending them. The decades of war waged in its name, killing millions, already strained that promise. The treatment of Palestine broke it, by demonstrating, in full view, that the principle was suspended the instant it became inconvenient to the powerful. What remains is the form of human rights without its substance, a language still spoken but no longer believed, invoked by the strong against the weak and unavailable to the weak against the strong. The millions killed under the banner are the visible cost. The hollowing of the banner itself, so that it can no longer shelter anyone, is the cost that will be paid for generations, by every people who reaches for a principle and finds, where it used to be, only a license that was never meant for them.
References:
1. Costs of War project, Watson Institute, Brown University. "Human Costs" and "Costs of the 20-Year War on Terror," brown.edu and costsofwar.watson.brown.edu, on the estimated 905,000 to 940,000 people killed directly by post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, of whom more than 432,000 were civilians.
2. Costs of War project, Brown University, "Civilians Killed and Displaced" and "Findings," on the estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths bringing the total to 4.5 to 4.7 million, the 38 million displaced, and the documented environmental aftermath including the seventeen-fold increase in birth anomalies and the uranium and lead contamination found in the population of Fallujah.
3. Bureau of Investigative Journalism and academic studies of the drone campaigns, on the doctrine of signature strikes targeting individuals by pattern, location, age, and sex rather than identified conduct, and counting military-age males in strike zones as presumed combatants; and Arab Center Washington, "Millions Dead from Post-9/11 US Wars," November 9, 2023, on the killing of a fifty-six-year-old father of ten tending his sheep, initially claimed by the military as a senior militant.