Israel takes its Dahiya Doctrine back where it began: Lebanon

Israel’s genocidal Dahiya Doctrine was forged in its defeat in Lebanon in 2006. Now the settler-state has gone full circle, imposing Dahiya on the same place it was created back in 2006 — Beirut’s southern suburb. The southern ‘Dahiya’ in Arabic.

This is how we got here:

Israel violated the US-brokered Lebanon 2024 ‘ceasefire’ over 15,400 times since it was signed. Must be a world record. Yet a short salvo from Hezbollah 2 March was framed as a signal outrage by legacy media. That attack has been cited by the settler-colonial state as a pretext to invade.

Not satisfied with pulling the US and her allies into a runaway war with Iran, Israeli troops have pushed into Lebanon with airstrikes pummelling the capital Beirut.

Some key background…

The Canary reported the early moments of the new war here. You can read about the secretive Israel-US ‘side letter’ pact which gave Israel carte blanche to keep bombing through the ‘ceasefire’ here. And our extensive coverage of Israel’s ceasefire regular breaches here.

Israel enforces mass displacement

The number of civilians who’ve fled the Israeli attack is staggering, as the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported:

The exodus is a result of Israel issuing a series of preposterous mass displacement orders:

For Zionists with an apocalyptic vision of ‘Greater Israel’ the entire region is theirs. Their strategy to acquire it is the genocidal Dahiya Doctrine.

Dahiya’s scorched earth implications

Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies, explained Dahiya in the context of Gaza in December 2023. Surveying the early devastation in the enclave, he said the horror spoke to a:

specific Israeli way of war that has evolved since 1948, through to its current Dahiya doctrine, which is said to have originated in the 2006 war in Lebanon.

Rogers said:

In July of that year, facing salvoes of rockets fired from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah militias, the IDF fought an intense air and ground war.

However:

Neither succeeded, and the ground troops took heavy casualties; but the significance of the war lies in the nature of the air attacks. It was directed at centres of Hezbollah power in the Dahiya area, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, but also on the Lebanese economic infrastructure.

It was there in Dahiya that Israel’s genocidal impulses mutated into a new policy of annihilation.

Disproportionate force

Rogers explained:

This was the deliberate application of “disproportionate force”, such as the destruction of an entire village, if deemed to be the source of rocket fire.

One graphic description of the result was that “around a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed, a third of them children. Towns and villages were reduced to rubble; bridges, sewage treatment plants, port facilities and electric power plants were crippled or destroyed.”

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In short, Israeli policy goes far beyond fighting ‘terrorists’ and aims to destroy the very means of life.

The policy came to fruition two years after the 2006 war via the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. The university published a report titled Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War:

Written by IDF reserve Col Gabi Siboni, it promoted the Dahiya doctrine as the way forward in response to paramilitary attacks. The head of the Israeli military forces in Lebanon during the war, and overseeing the doctrine, was General Gadi Eizenkot. He went on to be the IDF chief of general staff, retiring in 2019, but was brought back as an adviser to Netanyahu’s war cabinet in October.

Rogers wrote:

Siboni’s paper for the institute made it crystal clear that the Dahiya doctrine goes well beyond defeating an opponent in a brief conflict, and is about having a truly long-lasting impact.

Disproportionate force means just that, extending to the destruction of the economy and state infrastructure with many civilian casualties, with the intention of achieving a sustained deterrent impact.

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That doctrine, born in Lebanon, was then pressure tested in Gaza over the course of several wars. And while a core Israel war aim in Gaza after 7 October was to destroy Hamas:

The longer-term aim is to make it utterly clear that Israel will not stand for any opposition. Its armed forces will maintain sufficient power to control any insurgency and, backed by its powerful nuclear capabilities, will not allow any regional state to pose a threat.

The Israeli military is back in Lebanon — if it can ever be so to have left — and as it pushes north it intends to impose this doctrine. Fine-tuned over two decades, the doctrine is with intentional civilian harm at its centre. And as a new regional war accelerates, the dogs of war are baying for blood.

Featured image via Aljazeera