Firing on Palestinians waving white flags, shelling a house in which they were forced to gather, refusing to allow the wounded to evacuate or ambulances to respond—while none of these acts by the Israeli military would be out of place in its current assault on Gaza, this list comes from a 2009 report by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Known as the “Goldstone Report,” after South African judge Richard Goldstone, it covers Israel’s war on Gaza from 2008 to 2009, in which 1,444 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed.
In an attempt to justify the Israeli military’s violence against civilians, Israel claimed they had issued pre-raid warnings via calls, leaflets, and radio broadcasts, as well as conceding some “operational errors.” But the Goldstone Report also cites the apparent application of the “Dahiya Doctrine,” Israel’s intentional and explicit targeting of civilians as a fundamental part of its military strategy.
The Dahiya Doctrine is named after the Dahieh (also transliterated as Dahiya) suburb of Beirut, a political stronghold of Hezbollah, the Shia political party and militia in Lebanon. During Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2006, known civilian targets in Dahieh were deliberately and widely attacked by the Israeli military, virtually wiping out the entire neighborhood. And Israeli general Gadi Eisenkot told an Israeli newspaper two years later:
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 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.
The “plan,” as Eisenkot put it, was to respond to any attack with intentionally disproportionate violence—not to necessarily defeat the attackers, but to punish the entire population through the deliberate killing of civilians and destruction of civil infrastructure.
“The Dahiya Doctrine is the use of collective punishment, including civilian, in response to an insurgency that cannot readily be controlled,” says Paul Rogers, professor emeritus of peace studies at Bradford University in the United Kingdom.
As Rogers explained in an article for The Guardian, during Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2006, the Israeli military was unable to advance in its ground offensive but dominated the skies above. Dahieh, along with villages in southern Lebanon, were generally defenseless against Israeli bombers, which razed homes, bridges, power plants, sewage treatment plants, and port facilities, killing around 1,000 Lebanese civilians, including more than 300 children.
Shareef Sarhan/United Nations (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
A Palestinian resident walks beside a building destroyed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza, 2014.
The Dahiya Doctrine has since become a legitimate strategy in the eyes of the Israeli military. Sylvain Cypel, author of The State of Israel vs. The Jews, adds context to the Israeli rationale behind the Dahiya Doctrine in his book by situating it in the “War on Terror,” as opposed to conventional wars between nation-states.
“In a nutshell, this strategy considers that in today’s asymmetric wars, the laws of war adopted in 1949 after the Second World War are no longer valid,” Cypel tells The Progressive. “The only way for a state to prevail is to destroy the terrorist enemy’s base, i.e. the society devoted to it.”
Under the Doctrine, non-state actors like Hezbollah militants are not proper soldiers of any state and are, therefore, not protected by international law. And because such militants are not a conventional armed force but guerillas operating alongside civilians, the only way to effectively defeat them is to destroy the society that surrounds them.
Nevertheless, destroying an entire society is a war crime. As the Goldstone Report highlights, armed forces are required to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians and exercise proportionality, “weighing the military advantage to be gained against the risk of killing civilians.” According to Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, the Dahiya Doctrine cannot be reconciled with the prevailing laws of war—and it does not appear as if it was ever seriously intended to.
“The Dahiya Doctrine directly contradicts one of the most fundamental norms of customary international law,” Falk says. “Namely, disproportionate force is prohibited, being considered a form of excessive force, and has the clear intended prohibited effects of targeting civilian sites and inflicting collective punishment, as specifically regarded to be a war crime.”
Legality aside, the Israeli military has stuck to the Dahiya Doctrine despite its failures in the past.
“It justifies its point of view by the fact that Shia Hezbollah militia moved about like fish in water,” Cypel wrote in The State of Israel vs. The Jews. “But this hides the critical fact that Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon was a political and military failure.”
What could be said of the Dahiya Doctrine in Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006 could be said of its ongoing genocide in Gaza today. During the war on Lebanon, the Israeli military killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians, but did not free the two Israeli soldiers whom Hezbollah had captured, igniting the war. Israel’s current war has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, as well as at least thirty Israeli hostages held by Hamas. If the past is any indication, the Dahiya Doctrine will not get the 100 remaining Israeli hostages home—only a negotiated end to the conflict will.