The IDF's 'Dahiyah Doctrine', applied in Gaza
Kudos to Inter-Press Service's Daan Bouwens for this piece of reporting in which he reminded readers that Israel's strategic decisionmakers had integrated a policy of major, intentional destruction of civilian targets into their war-planning for certain contingencies considerably before they launched the assault on Gaza, December 27.
Bouwens quotes Valentina Azarov, a legal expert with the Israeli human-rights group HaMoked as arguing that the IDF's operations in Gaza, "were part of the military strategy called the 'Dahiyah policy', being that of indiscriminate killing and the use of excessive, disproportionate force."
Azarov and Bouwens were at pains to point out that this was Azarov's own personal assessment. However, she had adduced considerable evidence to back it up.
'Dahiyah' is, in this context, a reference to the the heavily populated southern suburb (dahiyeh) of Beirut, in which Hizbullah maintained its headquarters for many years prior to the Israeli assault of summer 2006-- and which it has substantially rebuilt since 2006.
But during Israel's 33-day war against Lebanon that year, it just about leveled the entire Dahiyeh, which was a neighborhood of densely packed eight- to ten-story buildings, most of them residential, but including numerous schools, mosques, shops, and so on, along with more than a few offices for Hizbullah's extensive social-service bodies, political bodies, and yes, also their military bodies.
The best online resource about the Dahiyah Doctrine is this contribution that Ben White made to the Guardian's 'Comment is free' section last October. This Wikipedia page on the 'Dahiya Strategy' is also helpful.
The White piece has good hyperlinks, including to the then-recent interview in which the GOC of the IDF's 'Northern Command', Gadi Eisenkot, talked openly about the Dayiha Doctrine in these terms:
"What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army's northern division.
In terms of "deterrence theory", this is a pretty standard threat of "massive retaliation." (Added to, I guess, a specifically Israeli version of Henry Kissinger's "Madman theory of deterrence", as indirectly alluded to here.)
"We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases," Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
"This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved," Eisenkot added.But the results-- whether in the Dahiyah or in Gaza-- have been devastating.
Back in October-November of last year, when Eisenkot was making his pronouncements about the doctrine and Israelis were commenting on it-- sometimes with great approval-- just about all the discussion seemed still to be solely about Lebanon and Hizbullah, and future prospects in that theater.
But as we know, Israel's military planners were meanwhile already working hard to plan an upcoming operation against Gaza-- one of the key goals of which was to "restore the credibility of Israel's deterrence" and to wipe away the stale traces of defeat, flat-out operational ineptitude, and flawed leadership decisionmaking that had marked Israel's previous war of choice, in 2006.
Only a few of the commentaries in Israel-- e.g., this one from Gabriel Siboni-- noted the applicability of the Dahiyah Doctrine to Gaza.
Siboni wrote:
With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher. Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite.
It was left to one of Siboni's colleagues at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National security Studies, Zaki Shalom, to raise some significant questions about the new doctrine.... This approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well. There, the IDF will be required to strike hard at Hamas and to refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers. The IDF should not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves, but by means of imposing a ceasefire on the enemy...
The last of his questions had particular significance to the situation in Gaza:
Finally, how will the plan be applied if it becomes evident that village inhabitants are shunning a mass exodus? Would the IDF activate massive fire that results in hundreds or possibly thousands of civilians killed?
Okay, forget about "village". (Israelis tend to just assume that all Palestinians live in "villages". The Dahiyah is not a village, and most of the residents of Gaza don't live in villages, either.)But what, more germanely, happens to the plan if there is no place for the civilian residents of the area targeted to safely flee to-- as was certainly the case in Gaza?
... Anyway, it seems clear that my longtime acquaintances Richard Falk and Richard Goldstone, both of whom are charged by the UN with investigating Israel's conduct during the war on Gaza, have an ample paper trail to look to-- and hopefully, also to follow up further on-- regarding the specific intent of Israel's political and military leaders to engage from the get-go in avowedly disproportionate operations inside Gaza, including against specifically civilian targets.
Goldstone had a generally good track record in the waning days of his country's apartheid system, in investigating some of the grosser excesses of the "securocrats", including the high level securocrats, who ruled the country in those days. Let's hope he brings that same sensibility, that same doggedness, and that same refusal to be rolled by all the securocrats' many excuses, special pleadings, and specious arguments, to his current task regarding Israel.
Threats to East Jerusalem Palestinians, Youtubed
Clayton Swisher has two super short pieces on Al-Jazeera English about the threats to the Palestinian communities in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In the first of those, he finds a US diplomat who's been sent to "fact-find" with one of the threatened Sheikh Jarrah families.
Yes, "fact-finding" is fine. But really, how much more of it needs to be done? The numerous expropriations, home demolitions, and other gross rights abuses the Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem have faced throughout 42 years of occupation have all been excellently documented.
The US government position still in fact tracks with the international law position that holds that East Jerusalem is indeed occupied territory. (Though for the past 16-plus years, US government officials have always tried to squirm their way out of admitting as much in public.
The fact that this portion of the city is occupied territory means that the implantation of Israeli settlers into colonies/settlements in and around it has been quite illegal under international law, as have all other steps taken to change the status of the this portion of the occupied West Bank. (Yes, of course including its annexation/Anschluss to Israel.)
The 270,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the built environment they hold so dear (and sacred) are under acute threat these days. EJ Palestinians pay high Israeli-style taxes but receive nothing like he kinds of municipal or other kinds of government services that the city's Jewish-Israeli population receives. They are prohibited from holding any kinds of public political gatherings. Though they live in a city Israelis claim has been "unified", they are subject to all the sanctions available to the military occupation authorities in the rest of the West Bank, including endlessly renewable terms of detention without trial. (As applied, also, to the legislators they elected back in January 2006.)
In addition, thousands of EJ Palestinians have hanging over their heads either the threat of confiscation of the special blue ID cards ("pass books") that allow them to continue living in the city of their birth, or the threat of demolition of their family home. Hundreds of demolition orders-- maybe more than a thousand?-- are outstanding. The East Jerusalemites never know where the municipal demolition crews will be sent to next month, or next week, in their endless forays around the city.
Many East Jerusalemites feel quite abandoned by the Lords of Ramallah, judging that the situation of their city took a marked turn for the worse after Oslo.
So let's hope Sen. Mitchell and the rest of the "international community" finally do something this time to buttress and restore the protections that international law accords to the East Jerusalemites, as to the Gazans and all other populations under military occupation.
We need only recall that the special protections that the Fourth Geneva Convention accords to residents of territories under military occupation were adopted by the world's nations in 1949 in the specific light of the gross violations that the vulnerable populations (including of course Jewish and Roma populations) of Eastern Europe had been subjected to during the foreign military occupation they had then so recently suffered.More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?
Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)
Stein's important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named "suspected Israeli agent" that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Stein writes,
Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
Ah, but what she didn't know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA's wiretap program... And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to... Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress-- far less the citizenry.
It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.
After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman's skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)
Stein writes:
And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.
(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that-- whether she knew it at the time or not-- had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.
Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.
Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.
But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.
According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.
Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
He was right.
On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”
Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.
A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House-- and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.
Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.
This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US's leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.
That early-Bush-era permeability-- as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney's office, and also, certainly in Congress-- helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.
Now, today's big "question" is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.
Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war-- one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?
This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country's security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.
Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.
But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today's editions of both papers?
-mr
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