The "Dahiya doctrine"

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on …

“We will apply disproportionate force on it [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…

“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”.

That was IDF Northern Command chief Gabi Eisenkot, openly threatening to kill Lebanese civilians and destroy entire villages yesterday in Israel’s leading daily paper. Eisenkot calls this the “Dahiya doctrine“, after the poor, densely populated Shi’a suburb of Beirut that Israel flattened in 2006, killing or displacing almost the entire population. Human Rights Watch condemned the “massive destruction” that was inflicted on Dahiya as “both indiscriminate and disproportionate”, describing how “Israeli forces attacked not only Hezbollah military targets but also the offices of Hezbollah’s charitable organizations, the offices of its parliamentarians, its research center, and multi-story residential apartment buildings in areas considered supportive of Hezbollah.”

This is what the IDF has in store for the people of Lebanon.

In promising “disproportionate force” against whole villages, Eisenkot is threatening a war crime (.pdf):

“Direct attacks against civilian objects are prohibited, as are indiscriminate attacks. Indiscriminate attacks are those which strike military objectives and civilian objects without distinction. One form of indiscriminate attack is treating clearly separate and distinct military objects located in a city, town, village or concentration of civilians, as a single military objective. If two buildings in a residential area are identified as containing fighters, bombardment of the entire area would be unlawful.

Disproportionate attacks, also prohibited, are those in which the “collateral damage” would be regarded as excessive in relation to the direct military advantage to be gained.”

Incidentally, the Reuters article linked above (oh, alright) reporting the General’s remarks asserts that Israel’s accusation that Hizbullah launched rockets from civilian homes during the war was “echoed by human rights groups who also accused Israel of using excessive force that claimed the lives of innocent civilians.”

This is a quite remarkable distortion. In fact, Human Rights Watch conducted an extensive study of this particular allegation and discovered it to be an almost complete fabrication. While Hizbullah “at times” failed to “take all feasible precautions to avoid firing rockets from populated areas”, HRW “did not find evidence … that the deployment of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon routinely or widely violated the laws of war”. Hizbullah did not “routinely [locate] its rockets inside or near civilian homes” (in fact it “stored most of its rockets … in uninhabited fields and valleys”) and nor, barring a few exceptions, did it “[fire] its rockets from populated areas”. Quite the contrary:

“The available evidence indicates that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started and fired the majority of their rockets from pre-prepared positions in largely unpopulated valleys and fields outside villages.”

Finally, Reuters might recall that human rights organisations did not accuse Israel merely of employing ‘excessive force’. Rather, they accused Israel of “serious violations of international humanitarian law“, “reckless indifference to the fate of Lebanese civilians” and “war crimes” (.pdf).

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

2 Comments

heathlander on October 4, 2008 at 10:02 am

Eisenkot’s description of civilian villages as “military bases” recalls Justice Minister Haim Ramon’s claim during the 2006 war that “[a]ll those now in south Lebanon are terrorists” (Ramon similarly declared, referring to Gaza, that “[w]e will set a price tag for every Qassam, in terms of cutting off infrastructures” – with Justice Ministers like this…), and his threat to destroy villages in ‘retaliation’ for Hizbullah rockets echoes the IDF Chief of Staff at the time of the war, who reportedly (see the HRW report linked above) “ordered the military to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut for every Katyusha rocket strike on Haifa.”

For other examples – only a few of many – of senior Israeli officials openly advocating collective punishment, see here, here and here.

In other words, this “Dahiya doctrine” is hardly new – it has long been the IDF’s standard operating procedure.

heathlander on October 5, 2008 at 1:58 pm

Eisenkot is not alone:

“Colonel (Res.) Gabriel Siboni recently authored a report through Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies backing Eisenkot’s statements.

The answer to rocket and missile threats from Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, he believes, is “a disproportionate strike at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot, in which efforts to hurt launch capability are secondary. As soon as the conflict breaks out, the IDF will have to operate in a rapid, determined, powerful and disproportionate way against the enemy’s actions”,

and

“Major General (Res.) Giora Eiland, formerly head of the National Security Council, belongs to a similar school of thought, and even goes a step further.

He believes Israel failed in the Second Lebanon War and is liable to fail in a third such war, because it is fighting the wrong enemy: Hezbollah, instead of the state of Lebanon itself.

Writing for an INSS publication set to come out this week, Eiland states it is impossible to beat an efficient guerrilla army supported by a state immune from retribution. The fact that Hezbollah has rebuilt its strongholds beneath the Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon will make any IDF maneuvering efforts difficult, he writes, adding that targeted strikes against rocket launch sites will not decrease the number of rockets fired at Israel.

“Hezbollah operates under optimal conditions from our perspective. A legitimate government runs Lebanon, supported by the West, but it is in fact entirely subordinate to the will of the Shi’ite organization,” he writes.

Eiland recommends preemptive action: that Israel pass a clear message to the Lebanese government, as soon as possible, stating that in the next war, the Lebanese army will be destroyed, as will the civilian infrastructure.

“People won’t be going to the beach in Beirut while Haifa residents are in shelters,” he writes.

While Eisenkot and Siboni deal primarily with striking Shi’ite strongholds, Eiland sees Lebanon’s infrastructure as a primary target, in a plan highly reminiscent of the one proposed by then-IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, which was eventually shot down by U.S. opposition.”

That last sentence is weird – the plan was “shot down”? All the evidence shows that in fact it was the operative principle duriing the 2006 war, and has been since.

heathlander on October 4, 2008 at 10:02 am

Eisenkot’s description of civilian villages as “military bases” recalls Justice Minister Haim Ramon’s claim during the 2006 war that “[a]ll those now in south Lebanon are terrorists” (Ramon similarly declared, referring to Gaza, that “[w]e will set a price tag for every Qassam, in terms of cutting off infrastructures” – with Justice Ministers like this…), and his threat to destroy villages in ‘retaliation’ for Hizbullah rockets echoes the IDF Chief of Staff at the time of the war, who reportedly (see the HRW report linked above) “ordered the military to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut for every Katyusha rocket strike on Haifa.”

For other examples – only a few of many – of senior Israeli officials openly advocating collective punishment, see here, here and here.

In other words, this “Dahiya doctrine” is hardly new – it has long been the IDF’s standard operating procedure.
heathlander on October 5, 2008 at 1:58 pm

Eisenkot is not alone:

“Colonel (Res.) Gabriel Siboni recently authored a report through Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies backing Eisenkot’s statements.

The answer to rocket and missile threats from Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, he believes, is “a disproportionate strike at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot, in which efforts to hurt launch capability are secondary. As soon as the conflict breaks out, the IDF will have to operate in a rapid, determined, powerful and disproportionate way against the enemy’s actions”,

and

“Major General (Res.) Giora Eiland, formerly head of the National Security Council, belongs to a similar school of thought, and even goes a step further.

He believes Israel failed in the Second Lebanon War and is liable to fail in a third such war, because it is fighting the wrong enemy: Hezbollah, instead of the state of Lebanon itself.

Writing for an INSS publication set to come out this week, Eiland states it is impossible to beat an efficient guerrilla army supported by a state immune from retribution. The fact that Hezbollah has rebuilt its strongholds beneath the Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon will make any IDF maneuvering efforts difficult, he writes, adding that targeted strikes against rocket launch sites will not decrease the number of rockets fired at Israel.

“Hezbollah operates under optimal conditions from our perspective. A legitimate government runs Lebanon, supported by the West, but it is in fact entirely subordinate to the will of the Shi’ite organization,” he writes.

Eiland recommends preemptive action: that Israel pass a clear message to the Lebanese government, as soon as possible, stating that in the next war, the Lebanese army will be destroyed, as will the civilian infrastructure.

“People won’t be going to the beach in Beirut while Haifa residents are in shelters,” he writes.

While Eisenkot and Siboni deal primarily with striking Shi’ite strongholds, Eiland sees Lebanon’s infrastructure as a primary target, in a plan highly reminiscent of the one proposed by then-IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, which was eventually shot down by U.S. opposition.”

That last sentence is weird – the plan was “shot down”? All the evidence shows that in fact it was the operative principle duriing the 2006 war, and has been since.

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