Dual Abuse
by Sahar Tavakoli and Chris Hesselbein.
On October 17, 2023, the Israeli army bombed the parking lot of al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, killing 471 refugee civilians and injuring 342 more. Between this event and today, every one of Gaza’s hospitals and their adjacent infrastructures have been bombed by Israel. Most—if not all—have been bombed more than once. Attacking health infrastructure—hospitals, ambulances, clinics, and the like—is a violation of International Humanitarian Law, known also as the Law of War.[1] So too is the deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian objects.
In the days following the bombing, the ‘world’s most moral army’ released two different statements about the bombing. First, that the hospital had been struck by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In this first statement—reproduced by Reuters, the BBC, the AP, and Human Rights Watch the hospital retains its status as a health infrastructure and its resident civilians their status as noncombatants: the act is a war crime but one for which the Israeli military denies responsibility. Second, that al-Ahli had been hit by Israeli rockets in a lawful attack. The hospital, in this telling, is reframed as part munitions depot; its refugee occupants recast as Hamas operatives or enablers. Civilian objects are defined in contrast to military objectives. Military objectives—“objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose partial or total destruction, capture, or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite miliary advantage”—could be anything, really.
Emerging in the aftermath of World War II and referring in its earliest uses to the varied potentials of chemical compounds and nuclear technology in warfare, the term ‘dual-use’ presently refers to technologies, materials, and goods with both civilian and military potential. On this basis, the United States has withheld the export of medical machinery to Cuba lest a respirator be repurposed as tool of torture. Similarly, the European Union has blocked the export of encryption software to the Russian Federation, software that could be used for the private exchange of text messages between civilian teens or military personnel.
In the context of Israeli policy, dual-use has taken on a far more expansive meaning. Sites such as hospitals can be dual-use weapons if they might be imagined as munitions sites. Educational materials are dual-use if learning emancipates a population under siege. Musical instruments too are of dual-use if they enable the reenactment of a cultural life seen as fundamentally incompatible with Israeli security. In 2018, the Israeli Defense Forces tweeted that “Hamas can turn anything into a weapon of terror,” listing, under this claim, such weapons as children, disabled civilians, and rope-tied-to fence. When babies are reimagined as potential enemies, existence is a dual use threat.
Few entities, if any, fall neatly into binary categories. Weapons are easy to mistake as exceptions to such ambiguity: We are quick to scoff at the notion that people rather than guns kill people—not because we imagine guns routinely firing of their own accord, but because the violence of the artifact feels so central to its design. At the same time, headlines from the last 23 months have shown many murdered by the passive voice. People do, after all, kill people.
At first blush, the term ‘dual use’ appears to acknowledge the instability of the weapon-as-category. Look once more and the term shifts the site of division. Now not only are the objects around us split into arrangements of ‘legitimate’ versus ‘sinister,’ so too are their potential wielders: the rational, responsible, self-proclaimed most moral actors against the inherently violent Other.
The Israeli army’s invocation of ‘dual use’ here is not simply descriptive, it is strategic. It militarises legitimate objects and forms of resistance, as well as non-violent people and things. By casting children, civilians, and fence-bound-rope as threats, the military entity collapses the boundary between the civilian and the combatant, all now legitimate targets under the logic of ‘pre-emption.’
Where Palestinians are portrayed as dangerously innovative for repurposing rudimentary materials—kites, tires, stones, jam—the Israeli state transforms everyday objects such as radios and pagers, cans of food, and toys into bombs and deploys some of the most sophisticated weapons and surveillance systems on earth. The paradox of ‘dual use’ is that it allows Israel to flatten all distinctions: between military and civilian, resistance and terrorism, food and threat. Hospitals become enemy infrastructure as tent camps become munitions depots. The colonial ethnostate that brands itself the world’s “most moral army” not only destroys life with Western-supplied arms, but with the very terms used to distinguish acts of war from the conditions of life.
That ‘dual use’ lacks commonsense meaning is immediately apparent. Any technology can be repurposed: chairs can become ladders or prop open doors; kitchen items become the stuff of symphony; mounting a MiG-21 jet engine atop a T-34 tank transforms two vehicles of war into a fire extinguisher, one that can both pump water and blast air at high pressure. One of the many obfuscations of ‘dual use,’ then, is that it fails to account for triple use, quadruple use, quintuple—and beyond.
As the genocide in Gaza approaches its 23rd month, its starved population continues to be denied basics such as fuel and food on the claim that such items might either directly or indirectly nourish Hamas. Once more, human being use concepts to transform other human beings into technological objects, their bodies into weapons in need of containment and extermination.
[1] Set out in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Lacking or declining signatory status to these conventions, Israel cannot formally ratify its treaties. This is easy to confuse with the notion that Israel is not bound to its laws. The Law of War is, however, distinct from laws of governance: though Israel may set the conditions under which it declares war, once declared, that war must abide by these international laws. Various signatory violations enabled this atrocity: Israeli rockets are US rockets, UK rockets, EU, Australian, and Canadian rockets.
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