“The Israelis, as we know, have targeted schools, open play grounds, and UN compounds. So in what sense could such assaults be construed as justifiable self-defense? Still the hyper-defensive claim is made that this is Hamas fault–the use of children as human shields–and we hear the same argument against Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.

I am wondering: are all children human shields? Only some? Are we supposed to understand Palestinian children as nothing but so many shields? If this Israeli view is right, then the children who have been killed by Israeli military aggression were already transformed into military instruments, shields that let attackers attack. If one “feels” for the children or, indeed, if one comes to regard the children as those whose lives are being unjustly and brutally destroyed in an instant, and in grotesques and appalling ways, then that kind of “sentiment” has to be over-ridden by a righteous and cold military rationality. Indeed, it is not only a cold military rationality, but one that prides itself on its ability to see and feel past the vision of massive human suffering in the name of an infinitely expanding rationale of self- defense.

We are asked to believe that those children are not really children, are not really alive, that they have already been turned to metal, to steel, that they belong to the machinery of bombardment, at which point the body of the child is conceived as nothing more than a militarized metal that protects the attacker against attack. The only way to defend oneself against this attack is, then, to kill this child, all the children, the whole cluster; and if the United Nations defends their right, then the UN facility should really be destroyed as well. If one were to conceptualize the child as something other than part of the defensive and manipulative machinery of war, then there would be some chance of understanding this life as a life worth living, worth sheltering, and worth grieving. But once transformed into duplicitous shrapnel, even the Palestinian child is no longer living, but is, rather, regarded as a threat to life.

Indeed, there is no life other than Israeli life that counts as life to be defended at all costs. And though we can count the number of Palestinian civilians and children dead, we cannot count them. We have to continue to count them again and again. We have to start to count them, as if we have never yet learned how to count. How and when does a population begin to count? What radical changes in matrix and frame allow for the breaking out of those numbers as the animated traces of so many lives? And under what condition to those numbers efface the trace of the living, and so fail to count? Under what conditions does the grievability become possible?

Judith Butler, introduction to paperback edition of Frames of War (2010)