10 THE ITALIAN LAW JOURNAL NOS. 1-2 (2024)
Gaza’s Young Adult Male Noncombatant as a Legitimised Target Under Patriarchal Laws of War: Probing the Routine Killing of Civilian Men Amid Feminist Abstention, Terrorism Ambiguities, and Genocidal Tensions
by Riccardo Vecellio Segate Unlike torture or slavery, war was never outlawed by international lawmakers. International humanitarian law, and the laws of war generally, have merely instituted minimal protection requirements for civilians, aligned with longstanding customs. Contemporary ‘humanising’ developments, fostered inter alia by feminist advocacy, have deepened the interfaces between such requirements and international human rights law doctrines of intersectional vulnerability, advocating enhanced protection for vulnerable groups of noncombatants. In pledging their waging of compliant, or even ‘humanised’ wars, today’s armies emphasise their minimisation of casualties among mentioned groups, primarily ‘women and children’. The cognitive habit is so profound that the media applaud, institutions acquiesce, public opinions are appeased. Meanwhile, a victim of ancestral tropes and nonevidential beliefs, the male noncombatant has further slipped into disposable invisibility. Killing civilian men attracts only residual blame, and responds to ancient mating competition instincts. Men are dangerous, suspicious, probably terrorists, gene-spreaders, and worth exterminating; ‘their’ women will be violated, but their life spared. Except for, eg, Cavarero, with her work on female horrorism, feminists have refrained from challenging the wartime massacre of male civilians, apparently accepting enemy sexual subjugation as relatively preferable. Not even counted, Gaza’s annihilated men represent the latest embodiment of feminist male-discriminative normalised hypocrisy. DOI 10.23815/2421-2156.ITALJ ISSN 2421-2156
