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).
Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian | 34 Comments
Tags: collective punishment, Gabi Eisenkot, Hizbullah, IDF, Lebanon, Reuters, war crimes
-
-
Subscribe to The Heathlander feed
-
Site Meter
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.
Okay, so let’s say you’re right and Israel don’t play nice — so here’s a thought: Don’t play with Israel.
I’m of the opinion that HizbAllah violated more international laws when it purposefully fired on civilian population, then crossed the border to abduct soldiers and then continued to fire on civilian population in response to Israeli Airforce destroying its long range missiles beyond the Litani.
But you know, it’s not a blame game; If you don’t want to play with a global actor you consider a ‘cheater,’ then next time, just don’t fire across the ‘good fence’ and abduct Israelis, and you’ll be fine.
Even if you think the firing on civilians and abducting soldiers was justified – it cannot be denied that it gave Israel a casus belli to do what it pleased in Lebanon for a long while. Not even Arab governments condemned Israel’s response. Because, quite frankly, they’d o the same. Or more. Assad’s Hama Massacre in Syria, Saddam’s Halabja Massacre in Iraq, Black September in HK Jordan… And that’s just off the top of my mind.
Bottom line: Don’t f*ck with fire, you won’t get burned.
Well, Israel refuses to withdraw from what everyone agrees is occupied territory and what Hizbullah and Syria consider to be occupied Lebanese territory. Moreover, in the past few decades Israel has invaded Lebanon some five times, always on either the flimsiest of pretexts or no meaningful pretext at all. In an opinion poll conducted before the war, most Lebanese expressed support for Hizbullah actions directed at capturing Israeli soldiers to exchange for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. This is quite understandable – for decades Israel routinely captured and tortured Lebanese civilians and combatants. Indeed at one point Israel became the only country in the world to legalise torture. It’s not surprising that Lebanese want their people back, and are willing to capture Israeli soldiers to that end.
That said, I share your opinion that Hizbullah should not have attacked Israel and should certainly not have targeted Israeli civilians. But that’s completely irrelevant to the issue of Israel’s far more extensive targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.
The Arab dictatorships had their own cynical reasons for their stance on the Lebanon war, principally their dependence on the U.S. and their hostility to Iran (and thus Hizbullah). But what’s your point? We all know that those regime are brutal, vicious and repressive. How is that in the least bit relevant to a discussion about Israel’s war crimes in Lebanon?
“it cannot be denied that it gave Israel a casus belli to do what it pleased in Lebanon for a long while”
I guess it’s a ‘casus belli’ if one is willing to completely ignore the character of the historical and continuing relationship between Lebanon and Israel. If you take this approach, it seems that you end up with something like this (particularly in the case of the Occupied Territories); we’re being oppressed and our prospects for any kind of serious national liberation will continue to deteriorate if we use the same tactics. But if we resort to armed struggle, then Israel will have a ‘casus belli’ to bomb the crap out of us, so we should not resist.
The point is that Israel doesn’t really NEED a ‘casus belli’ to do this kind of stuff – it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Israel will continue to build settlements, fragment the Occupied Territories, impoverish Palestinians, launch cross-border raids, forcefully repress demonstrators, wrongfully arrest and beat civillians, etc. REGARDLESS of what Hamas or Hizbullah or any other organization does. If Hizbullah had not launched a cross-border raid in order to take the heat off of Hamas and Gazans, a reason would have been concocted for Israel to bomb Lebanon to pieces anyways.
Sure, Hizbullah should not have fired notoriously inaccurate and flimsy rockets into Israel, and there’s no doubt they knew exactly what they were doing – they should certainly be condemned for doing so. The criticism that they were ‘irresponsible’ in their capture of the Israel soldiers (i.e. they underestimated the reaction), I think, also stands. But we should know by now that whatever Israel wants to do in the region, it will do – or at least attempt to do – regardless of the existence of a supposed ‘casus belli’ or not.
‘Casus belli’ reasoning just leads to some strange conclusions. Do Iraqis now have ‘casus belli’ to destroy American infrastructure and target civillians? Obviously not – so we can’t argue that Israel had ‘casus belli’ to treat Lebanon as a free-fire zone either.
It just seems to me that ‘casus belli’ reasoning (and ‘Just War’ theory) in general is pretty much useless ahistorical moralizing, and that it provides very little in the way of serious conclusion.
“But if we resort to armed struggle, then Israel will have a ‘casus belli’ to bomb the crap out of us, so we should not resist.”
Just to follow up, this kind of logic can even be applied to demonstrations or individual actions. Why demonstrate if we know that we’ll probably be arrested? Why resist the police if we’re going to end up shot? Just accept pacification, don’t disrupt things, don’t give them a ‘casus belli’ and we’ll all be fine… right?
Obviously not. One of Israel’s goals in Lebanon was precisely to inculcate this kind of sentiment in the Lebanese population, particularly the Shi’a south – i.e. things will be better if you just accept your miserable fate, because if you don’t, things will get far worse. No doubt things did quickly become far worse as the IDF tried to demonstrate to the Lebanese the benefits of servility. The objective was to punish a significant portion of the Lebanese for supporting an organization with deep ties to their community, an organization that has played a large part in rebuilding the poorer areas of the country – primarily by bombing them, in an attempt to convince them that these same people who had helped them were in fact the cause of their misery. Naturally, this had the effect of more deeply entrenching Hizbullah, and consolidating support for them.
‘Casus belli’, in the case of the July War, seems to have had the exact opposite effect as was intended.
I kinda thought the point of international law was that it was – y’know – international. Bombing the crap out of somewhere because you allege it harboured fighters of the other side is in violation of international law. When that allegation is shown to be false, this magnifies the crime under international law.
I’m not sure what level of abuse of international law threatening someone with equal treatment as another neighbourhood which-you-bombed-the-crap-out-of-because-of-a-false-allegation falls under, but given the lack of international reaction defending the precepts of international law, presumably this shows that international law means nothing very much. So we’re back to ‘the winners are the ones holding the biggest guns’. Disappointing, but I guess we can remember that the next time a government talks of ‘international law’ it means nothing at all.
dksu: agree with almost everything you said, except the contention that Hizbullah’s attack was motivated by Israel’s offensives in Gaza and the West Bank. I know that’s what Nasrallah said, but the operations (as he has acknowledged) were planned months in advance, long before Shalit was kidnapped.
I think Hizbullah’s cross-border raid and capture of two soldiers was both irresponsible and illegal, but it was part of a low-level border conflict that had been simmering since the ceasefire in 2000.
It wasn’t a ‘casus belli’, as the other commenter claimed, for a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. People who argue that it was must also accept that Palestinians and Lebanese have had the right to do the same to Israel – to relentless bombard Israeli population centres for a month, to kill over 1,100 Israeli civilians, to deliberately destroy large swathes of Israeli civilian infrastructure, and so on – for decades. After all, in Lebanon Israel routinely kidnapped, tortured and held hostage Lebanese civilians and combatants. In the oPt Israel kidnaps civilians on a weekly, probably even daily, basis, and remember that the kidnap of civilians is far more serious than capturing a soldier. Does that mean Palestinians and Lebanese have the right to invade Israel and destroy tens of thousands of homes, kill hundreds of people and saturate the country with over a million cluster bomblets? No – and if it’s not true that Palestinians and Lebanese have this ‘casus belli’ then neither did Israel.
Eisenkot is not alone:
and
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.
“dksu: agree with almost everything you said, except the contention that Hizbullah’s attack was motivated by Israel’s offensives in Gaza and the West Bank. I know that’s what Nasrallah said, but the operations (as he has acknowledged) were planned months in advance, long before Shalit was kidnapped.”
Ah, that’s fair. They used the opportunity, then, to execute the raid (which was planned in advance). But yeah, my point about ‘casus belli’ and seeing it as a barrier to action can just be reduced to absurdity.
OK so we agree on all points, then.
Yep ;p. BTW here’s an interesting article;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/iran.israel.ahmadinejad
“Since most Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, the Iranian president is, in effect, agreeing to Israel’s right to exist and opening the door to a peace deal that Iran will endorse.
Ahmadinejad made this apparently extraordinary shift in policy during an
interview last week when he was in New York to address the UN general assembly. ”
Hrm… Wasn’t this always his position? That a referendum would be the way for Palestinians to decide a future state? Or am I confusing this with Nasrallah?
Yeah, I saw that – as you say, it wasn’t an “extraordinary shift in policy” at all, but rather a repetition of Iran’s standard official position on the conflict. Namely, that the a referendum should be carried out among all Palestinians (by which I think he means Palestinians in the occupied territories, the refugee camps and within Israel, as well as Palestinian Jews – i.e. Jews, and their relatives, who were in Palestine before the Zionist waves of immigration), and whatever choice they make should be implemented.
That’s Iran’s general rhetorical position, but Iran’s actual position is almost certainly support for a two-state settlement. Khamenei has even stated that Iran shares the Arab League position on the Israel/Palestine conflict, which as you know is a two-state solution.
The (Lebanese) Daily Star:
“…And how did the Western media report the general’s criminal threats? The headlines of the three main wire services tell that story (although not the one that they should have dealt with): “Israeli general warns Hezbollah of harsh response,” “Israel warns Hezbollah war would invite destruction” and “Israel general warns Hezbollah of harsh riposte.” Nothing about the people Eisenkot was openly threatening: They, it seems, do not count.
This is why his threats stand a very good chance of being made good upon if and when Israel and Hizbullah come to blows again: The Israelis are not held to account for their atrocities, even when they go to the trouble of announcing them ahead of time.”
Yaron London, writing in Yedioth Aharonot, is relieved that Israel has finally realised that “Arabs” are all accountable for their leaders’ actions. He summarises this “new strategy” thus:
Israel’s “sophisticated attempts to distinguish between innocent individuals and sinning leaders” are at an end, because Lebanon is now “a state that is entirely malicious”. In short,
and they must be killed accordingly.
I don’t know what’s more frightening – the article or the comments =S (actually, I’d have to say the article wins – the systematic plan to punish an entire race of people is immensely fucked. The passionate racist one-liners are just disturbing).
And I think this pretty much puts him in-line with the bin Laden position.
“We need to make the fear we sow among them greater.”
Wow.
Great post. You should’ve also mentioned that according to HRW findings, it was Israel, rather than Hezbollah, that located artillery and soldiers’ encampments near — and in many cases INSIDE — inhabited towns/villages. Examples abound. One of those examples is the case of Kfar Giladi, where 12 soldiers were killed. Those 12 could’ve easily been civilians. The area was a legitimate military objective, given that soldiers had set up base inside and around the kibbutz. Of course, Israel tried to cover up, to the best of its abilities, on the true extent of human shielding that its army conducted in Israel during the war (in many cases, these were Arab villages, which also had no adequate protection/shelter). That said, what is clear is that a lot of shielding took place (the fact that little kids were photographed at an artillery position near the border, writing on shells ready to be fired also attests to human shielding being a widespread phenomenon), and some of it is being exposed 2 years after the war, via unrelated articles in the press. One article, in Yediot Ahronot, talking about child trauma, presented the example of a kid who kept asking her mother why the soldiers were not at her school anymore, whether they would be coming back. Turns out, the soldiers had set up base inside a school during the war. While it’s true that schools were out at the time, the activity of turning it into a military base is still despicable. The school was effectively rendered a legitimate military objective. Suppose rockets had landed on the school and destroyed much of it? Wouldn’t Israel have presented it as an example of “indiscriminate” attack on civilians and civilian facilities? You bet. Anyway, clearly, many things happened in Israel that Israel will never admit to. It’s quite telling that Israel refused to provide HRW data on how many military targets were actually struck by Hezbollah rockets, which would’ve allowed the HRW to form a more-or-less accurate picture of whether Hezbollah fire amounted to indiscriminate attacks.
A blogger from Lebanon: cheers. Yes, HRW reported that,
It continued:
For more on this, see my post here. It discusses a report by the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA), which concluded that,
As an aside, it is interesting to note the difference in language HRW uses to describe Israel’s and Hizbullah’s location of military targets among or near civilians and Hizbullah’s respectively. For example, while it notes Israel’s “failures”, it does not, unlike with Hizbullah, investigate the possibility that Israel committed deliberate ’shielding’, a war crime.
A couple of points, though. Firstly, you seem to imply that the presence of a military base or a few soldiers in a civilian area automatically makes that area a “legitimate military objective”. That’s not necessarily the case, just as the presence of some Hizbullah military equipment (e.g. rockets) in the Dahiya did not make the entire area a “military target” and it did not justify Israel’s indiscriminate bombings. Other requirements must be met as well in order for an attack to legal, chief among them that all feasible steps be taken to avoid harming civilians and civilian infrastructure. To the extent that Hizbullah failed to do this, its attacks were illegal even when directed against legitimate military targets. There’s also the additional requirement of proportionality – that the likely damage caused to civilians and civilian infrastructure not exceed the direct military advantage gained by the strike. Israel’s is definitely bound by this requirement. I’m not sure whether Hizbullah is – they are not a party to the relevant treaty, but the ‘proportionality’ constraint might now constitute customary international law (and would thus be binding on everyone).
Secondly, there’s a difference between a failure to take all feasible precautions to minimise the risk to civilians, which is a violation of international law, and human “shielding”, which is a war crime. The difference is principally one of intent – where military equipment or personnel are located among or near civilians with the intent of using those civilians as ’shields’, that’s “shielding”. The HRA report did not accuse Israel of “shielding” because it “[did] not have the necessary tools” to investigate that properly. HRW watch didn’t accuse Israel of shielding because it chose not to investigate that issue, in accordance with its quite established pro-Israel bias. What we can say for sure is that Israel committed the exact same crime it accused Hizbullah of perpetrating, and, in all likelihood, it did so far more extensively than did Hizbullah.
“A couple of points, though. Firstly, you seem to imply that the presence of a military base or a few soldiers in a civilian area automatically makes that area a “legitimate military objective”.”
Uh, no, you misunderstood. I wasn’t saying that just because soldiers were stationed inside the kibbutz means that the entire kibbutz becomes a military object that can legitimately be targeted. When I said that those 12 soldiers could’ve easily been civilians, I was talking about the fact that Israel was basically practicing human shielding — because some of these kibbutzim and villages were still inhabited by civilians (even if most of the population had left for the relative security of the country’s center). And regarding the reference to the school, I was saying that the school itself had become a legitimate target, under international law.
That said, I am not very sure if Hezbollah’s rocketing of non-military targets was a matter of policy or a matter of not having guided rockets. On the one hand, what is clear is that they DID hit some, if not many, military targets, and I am not sure if these were just lucky strikes. On the other hand, there were many cases of seemingly random rocket firing. Were these really random? Or were they deliberate targeting of civilians, to terrorize them? A sort of deterrence? Or, perhaps, there were military targets nearby? I understand from the HRW that a good number of the civilian facilities that were hit were nearby, sometimes even next to or across the street from military facilities. That doesn’t make it justified, but I think the motivation/intention does matter (if not in terms of international law, then at least ethically speaking). And, in these cases, Israel does bear partial responsibility, for locating these facilities near civilian ones… But, international law is not very kind for groups like Hezbollah that don’t have rockets with pinpoint accuracy… I mean, if Hezbollah were to abide by international law, it should’ve refrained from launching those rockets, which would’ve probably meant that it would’ve lost the war (because the rockets and the effect it had on the people sitting in shelters, did up the pressure on the commanders and politicians to end the war). The problem with international law — if I may call it a problem — is that it does not take into account the capabilities of the warring parties, only the consequences of their actions. If both parties were to abide by it, then the outcome might be the same as if they were both to violate it. But we all know that the strong often violate international law because they don’t have any incentive to abide by it, while the weak violate it because they can’t afford not to. Hm, come to think of it, maybe it’s time for me to go to bed, before I say something totally off the mark.
“Secondly, there’s a difference between a failure to take all feasible precautions to minimise the risk to civilians, which is a violation of international law, and human “shielding”, which is a war crime.”
This is true, but I was using the word shielding because in one of the earliest reports that came out after the war (can’t remember if it was HRW or Amnesty), it was reported that Israel deliberately placed artillery positions and staging ground near Arab towns/villages, and ignored residents’ requests to distance these positions from the villages. That’s human shielding, whether or not it was called that by the overly politically correct HRW and Amnesty.
OK, I misunderstood you about the first point. Yeah, I agree that soldiers stationed inside a school makes that school a legitimate military target, unless there are children inside the school as well, in which case it becomes a bit more complicated.
By the way, do you have a link to that article about the soldiers bunking up in the school?.
As for Hizbullah – it’s clear that they did often direct their fire towards military targets, probably much more than we will ever know thanks to Israel’s military censorship rules. However, at least if one goes by the HRW report, it’s also clear that Hizbullah deliberately fired on civilian populations, sometimes without the presence of any legitimate military target nearby. HRW arrived at this conclusion both from an examination of some of the sites Hizbullah rocketed and also from many statements made by Hizbullah to the effect that while Israel targets Lebanese civilians, Hizbullah would do the same to Israeli civilians. It’s plain, in other words, that during the Lebanon war Israel violated international law on a scale that dwarfed anything attributable to Hizbullah, but Hizbullah also violated the law when it fired either deliberately (in which case they would qualify as war crimes) or indiscriminately at civilian populations.
I agree with you about the issue of inferior weaponry – I think HRW’s interpretation of international law is a bit off here. The key point, as far as I can see, is for parties to do whatever possible to minimise the risk to civilians, to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and to avoid strikes that would cause a disproportionate amount of civilian suffering (as I say, I’m not sure whether that last restriction legally applies to Hizbullah).
The question of the legitimacy of “belligerent reprisals” also arises here – HRW claim it doesn’t apply to Hizbullah’s rocketing of Israeli towns, but it might not be so straightforward. In any case, this whole business about possibly legalising deliberate attacks on civilians seems very dodgy to me – the important point for our purposes is that whatever the crimes of Hizbullah, Israel committed far worse.
Reports like this just make it clearer that the destruction of the state of Israel in its current form is inevitable. I give it twenty years, max.
“By the way, do you have a link to that article about the soldiers bunking up in the school?”
Yeah.
“The family resides near a school, which was turned into a military camp during the war. The girl could not understand where the soldiers were upon returning to school from summer vacation, and eventually asked the teacher why the soldiers were not coming back to school. “Then I began to understand that maybe there was some connection to the war. Suddenly everything came together,” the mother said. ”
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3567192,00.html
Cheers!
In 2006 Hezbollah knew exactly what they were getting into. They fired rockets from civilian centers because they knew civilian casualties would shift world opinion towards them and more against the Israeli response. Obviously the Israeli bombings were very unproportional to Hezbollah’s rocket fire, which deliberately targeted civilians, but if I was an Israeli government official, I would support them because they are the only way to deter radical terrorist. Hezbollah militants and leaders are just as bad and radical as the terrorists who are responsible for 9/11.
By the way JamieSW, stop being biased and racist. Israel didn’t start the war. Hezbollah did. Israel doesn’t send suicide bombers to kill civilians, Hezbollah does (Argentina bombings of 1994). Israel is a democracy, Hezbollah is organization that is branded as a terrorist group by both the US and EU. I’m not telling you to love Israel, and I don’t support the occupation of the Palestinian territories, but get your facts straight.
Erm, thanks for that Guy. Can’t say you’ve managed to persuade me, but, um, well done for trying.
“Hezbollah ..(Argentina bombings of 1994)”
So what exactly connects Hezbollah to the Argentina bombings of 1994?
I wonder if you ever actually read international agreements, or are you just hoping that your reader’s will be duped by cheap anti-Israeli rhetoric? If a village is used as a staging ground for military operations and if military projectiles are fired from it, then it becomes a legitimate target under the international law. International law is not a suicide pact, as a very eloquent article by Professor Louis Renee Benes (available on my blog) explains.
If you truly care about Arab civilians, I suggest that you try to persuade Hezbollah, Hamas and their ilk to stop using civilians as human shields. They do not simply neglect civilian lives. Causing as many Arab civilian deaths as possible is an integral part of the strategy employed by those organizations.
People are not stupid. It is clear to every fair-minded and informed human being that Israel exercises much greater restraint in its military operation than any Western democracy in history, never mind all the others.