Israel is implementing the Dahiya Doctrine in Palestine at the moment, argued Michael Ratner, legal adviser to Wikileaks. The doctrine is named after the village of Dahiya, in Beirut, which was destroyed during the 2006 Lebanon War (also known as the Israel-Hezbollah war).
In an interview with The Real News, Michael Ratner, also President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, discussed his work with 2008 Wikileaks cables fom the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In the cable from the U.S. embassy Israeli army officers mentioned the “Dahiya Doctrine”. One of them, General Eisenkot, said that, in relation to the doctrine, “Israel will use disproportionate force upon any village that fires upon Israel … causing great damage and destruction.”
Eisenkot was very clear that it was not a recommendation, but an already approved plan – from the Israeli perspective, these are “not civilian villages, they are military bases.”
In Ratner’s opinion, it is clear that the Dahiya doctrine – the deliberate use of disproportionate force, and the targeting and destruction of entire civilian areas – is currently being executed on the Gaza strip, as three quarters of the over 2,000 victims so far have been civilians, and one quarter were children, while 10,000 people have been injured, and 350,000 displaced, according to the latest United Nations’ estimates.
The lawyer added that Israel “intentionally committed war crimes” and should be brought to an international court.
“The killing of civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, whether in Lebanon then or Gaza today, is no mistake. It’s on purpose, a purpose that is flagrantly illegal under the Geneva Convention. Israeli soldiers, Israeli leaders, and Israeli generals could be tried for the crimes that the Germans were tried for in Nuremberg, for carrying out the intentional killing of civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure,” he said.
The lawyer argued that Israel’s aim was to end the resistance in Gaza, not by exclusively targetting Hamas members, but by destroying Gaza itself, “What they’re doing makes the resistance even stronger. But perhaps the hopes of Israel are to make Gaza uninhabitable over the years to drive the Gazans out.”
Further, the U.S. government is also responsable, Ratner argued. He said the U.S. embassy informed the administration about the Dahiya doctrine, and despite that, the U.S. government is still funding the Israeli state.
The newspaper Haaretz recently revealed that U.S. financial assistance to Israel amounts to more than US$1 trillion since 1962, but that has only been dedicated to military purposes in recent years. In the beginning of August, an emergency fund of US$225 million was unblocked by the U.S. Senate in order to improve Israeli antimissile equipment.
The Dahiya doctrine was revealed in 2009 by The Goldstone report (the UN Fact Finding Mission on the 2008 Gaza Conflict), and later backed-up by the UN Human Rights Council Report.
The former stated, “The Israeli military conception of what was necessary in a future war with Hamas seems to have been developed from at least the time of the 2006 conflict in southern Lebanon. It finds its origin in a military doctrine that views disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals.”
[Source…]
