Maureen Clare Murphy
The Electronic Intifada / September 27, 2024
All of humanity is less secure after a year of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and as Israel now unleashes its wrath on Lebanon.
“The region is on the brink of a catastrophe,” the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general warned last Friday after Israel escalated attacks in Lebanon in previous days.
But Israel’s unchecked aggression – leaving some 500 people dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and forcibly displacing tens of thousands in Lebanon on Monday alone, and the apparent use of bunker buster bombs in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, bringing entire apartment blocks to the ground without warning – will have profound repercussions felt far beyond western Asia as Tel Aviv drags Washington into a regional war.
The failure of states to meet their legal and moral obligations to end the genocide against the Palestinian people “jeopardizes the entire edifice of international law and rule of law in world affairs,” dozens of independent UN experts recently warned.
They added that the world stands on a knife’s edge and “either we travel collectively towards a future of just peace and lawfulness – or hurtle towards anarchy and dystopia, and a world where might makes right.”
Israel’s actions over the past days and months amount to a full assault on the fundamental precepts of international humanitarian law – the rules governing the conduct of belligerents during war.
Modern international humanitarian law is based in large part on the Geneva Conventions, the first of which was signed by 16 European nations in 1864.
Today, nearly 200 states are party to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which build on earlier treaties to protect war victims. The broad endorsement of the conventions demonstrates the universality of the principle that civilians, including health and aid workers, and civilian objects such as hospitals and schools, must be protected during war.
The laws of war represent “the very minimum rules to preserve humanity in some of the worst situations known to mankind,” according to Eric Mongelard, an official at the UN human rights office.
Litany of war crimes
Respect for international humanitarian law has never been absolute and victims of war the world over have yet to receive justice for violations of those rules.
But in the case of Israel, blatant disregard for international law is at the core of its military doctrine and the normalization of its crimes degrades the security of all humanity, with terrible precedents now set in Gaza.
Nearly 300 humanitarian aid workers, most of them UN staff, are among the nearly 42,000 Palestinians confirmed to have been killed in Gaza over the past year amid “the total absence of an effective protection of civilians,” according to António Guterres, the UN secretary-general.
Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s hospitals and other medical facilities, categorizing them as military objects in a total affront to the laws of war and more than 500 health workers have been killed since last October.
Hundreds of health workers have been detained and disappeared, many of them during raids on hospitals, including hospital directors. Prominent Palestinian doctors, including Adnan al-Bursh and Iyad al-Rantisi, have died in Israeli detention after being subjected to torture and ill-treatment.
Israel has increasingly targeted UN facilities used to shelter displaced civilians in order to pressure Hamas during ceasefire and prisoner swap negotiations, with more than 1,100 Palestinians killed in such attacks.
Israel has conferred de facto combatant status on all Palestinian men of “military age” in Gaza, stripping teens and men not participating in hostilities of their status as protected civilians.
International doctors who volunteered in Gaza report that children are being deliberately shot in the head and stomach by Israeli troops.
Videos from Gaza show Israeli troops gunning down grandmothers and other civilians carrying white flags or while they otherwise pose no conceivable threat (three Israeli citizens held captive in Gaza were also executed by Israeli troops in similar circumstances).
More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza, according to the government media office in the territory, alleging in some cases that the targeted media workers were operatives of armed groups.
Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said after the killing of an Al-Jazeera reporter and cameraman in early August that “the Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists, which is in total contravention of international humanitarian law.”
Dahiyeh Doctrine
This is an utterly incomplete list of ways that Israel has shredded the protection of civilians sanctified under international humanitarian law during its nearly year-long campaign in Gaza.
And now it is doing the same in Lebanon.
During a briefing to the UN Security Council last Friday, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that the explosion of thousands of communication devices in Lebanon days earlier represented “a new development in warfare.”
Those attacks – which reportedly killed at least 37 people, including two children, and injured more than 3,400, many of them permanently – have been widely attributed to Israel, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.
“Law exists to defend values central to our societies, and to our world,” Türk told the Security Council.
He said that the “simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack” violates international law.
Türk said it was “difficult to conceive how … such attacks could possibly conform” with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution – the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
He called the attack “a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians” – in other words, terrorism.
Although unprecedented in its scale and manner, the communication device attack is hardly the first time that Lebanon – which was invaded by Israel in 1978, 1982 and in 2006, and occupied by its troops for 15 years – has been subjected to wholesale violations of the laws of war.
The use of overwhelming force against civilians is known as the “Dahiyeh Doctrine” – named for the southern Beirut suburb heavily bombarded by Israel in 2006.
By using indiscriminate and disproportionate force and by deliberately inflicting suffering on noncombatants – an inherently criminal strategy – Israel aims to restore deterrence and turn the targeted civilian population against the armed resistance, whether it be Hizballah in Lebanon or Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
Mowing the grass
The Dahiyeh Doctrine has never succeeded in turning the people against the resistance, despite the increasingly high cost paid by Palestinians in Gaza since the term was coined nearly 20 years ago, around the same time that Israel imposed a devastating blockade of collective punishment on the territory.
This failure has compelled Israel to periodically “mow the grass” in Gaza – in the horrifying term used by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, who prescribed the strategy in a 2013 paper – to degrade the capabilities of the resistance and achieve temporary deterrence in a longer low-intensity war of attrition against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Those episodes of intensive attacks on Gaza by air, land and sea ever since Israel redeployed to the territory’s periphery in 2005 have invariably involved the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including residential and mixed-use high-rise buildings.
In the days leading up to a ceasefire ending the 51-day war in the summer of 2014, Israel ordered the evacuation and then bombed four residential and mixed-use towers in Gaza, levelling three of them to the ground and causing significant damage to a fourth tower that was eventually demolished. No one was killed in the attacks on those four buildings.
The attacks on the landmark buildings – described by Amnesty International as “extensive, wanton and unjustified” – were aimed at pressuring Palestinians to accept a ceasefire deal “on Israel’s terms,” according to Al-Mezan, a human rights group based in Gaza.
That tactic is being used in Gaza today at a horrifically distorted scale in the repeated massacres of displaced civilians sheltering at schools to increase pressure on Hamas during now moribund indirect negotiations with Israel.
Strategic failure
But amid all the death and destruction, Israel has not won any obvious decisive victories in Gaza while it transfers an elite brigade from that territory to the Lebanese front.
It is often said that in asymmetrical warfare, all a guerrilla or resistance organization needs to do to win is to not lose. In the case of Gaza, that calculus is confirmed by Israeli and American insistence from the outset that any permanent ceasefire before Hamas is completely destroyed would amount to a defeat for Israel.
After almost a year of Israel’s merciless onslaught, Hamas’ persistence, ability to regroup and sustain the fight, denying Israel effective control over any part of Gaza, represents a strategic failure for Israel.
That failure is not mitigated by Israel’s mass murder, wanton destruction or the assassination of senior Hamas figures, any more than Washington’s killing of millions of people in Southeast Asia changes the fact that it lost the war in Vietnam.
Eitan Shamir, one of the Israeli professors who coined “mowing the grass,” stated that the strategy had “completely collapsed” following Hamas’ surprise attack on 7 October 2023.
According to Shamir, writing that same month, the only way to reverse the “severe defeat” suffered by Israel that day would be to “dismantle the Hamas regime in Gaza and destroy its military capabilities.”
“If the threat in Gaza is not removed when the war ends,” Shamir warned, Israelis living in communities near the boundary with Gaza “will not return to their homes.” People may not return to Israeli settlements evacuated along the Lebanese border either, he added – “an unprecedented achievement for Israel’s enemies.”
Israel has not succeeded in eliminating Hamas as a military force in Gaza, despite what some of its defense figures are telling the press in an apparent effort to curry public favour for a deal to release the Israeli captives still held in the territory.
Netanyahu’s cabinet is meanwhile considering a proposal to forcibly transfer civilians from the north of the territory before laying siege on it. The logic is that this would reverse the severe strategic defeat of 7 October by de facto annexing more occupied Palestinian territory.
But at present, the Israeli military is turning its attention to its more formidable foe in the north, Hizballah, with the stated aim of “bringing the residents of the north back to their homes safely,” according to defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Israel also seeks to delink the battle with Hizballah in Lebanon from the fight with Hamas in Gaza, thereby breaking the unity of fronts maintained over the past year and fragmenting the regional resistance.
Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the Lebanese resistance group, reportedly the target of Israel’s massive strikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, has consistently reiterated over the past year that Hizballah’s rocket fire from the north will not stop without a ceasefire in Gaza in the south.
‘Displacement and paralysis’
A prevailing analysis in the Israeli press holds that Nasrallah, who has said that Hizballah is ready for a high-intensity war with Israel, but does not seek one, had recently found himself isolated and in a bind.
According to this analysis, as Israel climbs ever higher up the escalation ladder, eliminating Hizballah’s top commanders, Nasrallah was left with few options for retaliation that won’t lead to an all-out war that would presumably leave Lebanon destroyed.
But what this analysis doesn’t account for is that time is on the side of Hizballah, which “is aiming for longer term strategic objectives despite some tactical losses it has endured over the past week,” analyst Amal Saad said on Tuesday.
“While Israel’s approach has been one of displacement and massacre, Hizballah’s strategy has focused on displacement and paralysis,” Saad added.
“It’s resistance forces aim to weaken the [Israel military’s] resolve and erode the resilience of Israel’s home front through a strategy of combined military and economic attrition.”
Justin Podur, another close observer, said in a situation report on his YouTube channel on Thursday that “Hizballah is doing operations that they believe will lead to winning the war.”
“What I think is the calculation is this: On the Israel side, terrorize civilians, and eventually victory follows, or commit genocide and victory will follow,” Podur said.
“The resistance calculation and Hizballah’s calculation is that we are going to demilitarize northern Israel or what the resistance calls northern occupied Palestine,” he added.
Israel’s escalated attacks on Lebanon by its already tired and demoralized military will only prolong the evacuation of residents and has actually increased the number of people displaced from the northern settlements.
Meanwhile, some family members of Israelis being held captive in Gaza say that the offensive in Lebanon will also delay a deal to release their loved ones – whose return Netanyahu claimed to be a “sacred mission” during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday
Having already initiated a de facto war, Israel has no more rungs on the escalation to climb, and a ground invasion of Lebanon seems ever more likely. This would not be advantageous to Israel, to say the least, as it would leave its troops “sitting ducks for the resistance’s advanced hybrid warfare tactics,” as analyst Amal Saad put it.
In the event of a ground invasion, the euphoria experienced by Israel’s military establishment after several days of major blows against Hizballah will in all likelihood become a distant memory and memories of the humiliation and retreat of 2006 will soon come flooding back.
From tactical success to strategic defeat
Tactical achievements aside, in neither Lebanon or Gaza will Israel find a clear victory or surrender by the resistance. In any event, no matter the fate of Hamas or Hizballah, there will always be resistance to the settler-colonial state violently implanted and maintained in the region.
Israel’s pre-state forces used military force and terrorism to conquer and hold on to Arab land, and that violence has been a through line throughout the state’s history.
“There is no room in the Middle East for weakness,” according to Eitan Shamir of “mowing the grass” infamy, reflecting a mentality that has informed Israeli decision-making since the state’s inception.
“This war might not be existential in the immediate sense of a threat to conquer all of Israel’s territory,” Shamir wrote back in October, “but it is certainly existential in the long-term sense of proving Israel’s ability to continue to exist in this region.”
The increasingly high cost being paid in human lives to maintain a Jewish state in Palestine is also coming at a dear price to Israel in terms of international legitimacy.
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favour of the dismantlement of the occupation this month following a watershed World Court advisory opinion asserting the illegality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, Israeli leaders anticipate that the International Criminal Court will issue arrest warrants against them any day now.
It may not seem like decisions made in international fora have any bearing on what happens on the ground. But Israel has cemented itself as an international pariah, leaving itself isolated on the world stage and enabled by and dependent on the US – a situation that will eventually prove unsustainable.
Existential war
Any security achieved by Israel through force will prove temporary and illusory at a time when Israel’s existence is as fragile as ever.
Both Hamas and Hizballah were formed in response to Israeli occupation and the brutal oppression of any and all attempts to liberate their land.
Israel’s existential wars against the two resistance organizations stem from its precarity as a colony populated by foreign settlers that was founded after the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population – a reality that will never be accepted by people in the region, no matter how many normalization deals Israel reaches with Washington’s regional allies.
“Israel’s war is not with you, it’s with Hizballah,” Netanyahu told Lebanese citizens in a video message on Tuesday.
“Don’t let Hizballah endanger Lebanon,” he added in a thinly veiled threat implying that civilians and the state itself would bear the brunt of war.
After rejecting a truce proposed by the US, Netanyahu said that Israel was “fighting for its life,” with the “curse” of Iran behind the “savage enemies” at its doorstep during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday.
Netanyahu made the preposterous claim that Hizballah fires “rockets and missiles after they place them in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon.”
The Israeli prime minister thereby made it clear that Tel Aviv’s target bank in Lebanon would primarily be civilians and civilian objects, causing the same levels of death and destruction as it wrought in Gaza over the past year – “effectively a call to genocide,” according to Amal Saad.
Underlining the existential nature of its wars with Hamas and Hizballah, Netanyahu said that “Israel will win this battle. We will win this battle because we don’t have a choice.”
The Israeli prime minister reiterated that Israel’s war was with Hizballah, not against the Lebanese people. But as Saad stated, Netanyahu’s “declaration that Israel must defeat Hizballah and that it can’t accept a ‘terrorist army’ on its doorstep is a declaration of forever war on Lebanon.”
She added that “unable to destroy Hizballah directly, Israel strives to eradicate the ‘resistance community’ and social fabric which supports and sustains it.”
There is no separation between people and the resistance, with the former giving rise to the latter, whether in Gaza or Lebanon. And that is why Israel puts the weight of its military on the necks of civilians in both places.
The inherent human reaction to resist brutal subjugation by any means necessary, now organized and sharpened with decades of experience in both Palestine and Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, is why Israel has not and will not find any decisive victory in either.
If the US doesn’t force Israel to choose diplomacy over warfare, and there is little reason to believe Washington will, “we may witness the onset of a ‘Great War’ that could consume the entire region and pose an existential threat to Israel itself,” Saad stated.
Israel is destroying any semblance of international law, but it is also destroying itself. Only once it goes the way of other pariah colonial regimes, like Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, will it be possible to build anew from the ashes and ruin the Zionist project will leave behind in Palestine.
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada
Ali Abunimah contributed analysis
