Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine: Terror and Collective Punishment by Another Name

The U.S.-Israel approach to their war on Iran has reminded many observers of Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. The doctrine is named for Beirut’s southern suburb (often spelled Dahieh, which simply means suburb in Arabic), long recognized as a stronghold of the Iran-aligned Shia militia group Hezbollah. “The hills of southern Lebanon have seen more wars between Israel and Arabs than anywhere else in the Middle East, with the exception of Gaza.” This doctrine originated during Israel’s particularly vicious onslaught against Lebanon in the summer of 2006, widely condemned by human rights groups for its disproportionate force and intentional attacks against innocent people and their homes.

Presaging the shocking wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip since 2023, Israel’s 2006 attacks on Lebanon left whole towns and villages in heaps of rubble. Thousands of people were left without power, sewage treatment, roads, food – almost any of even the barest necessities of life. Of the dead, almost 1,000 were civilians, about one-third of them children. Thousands more were injured and about 1 million, almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population at the time, were displaced. According to a comprehensive report published by Human Rights Watch the following year, Israel had “labeled any visible person, or movement of persons or vehicles south of the Litani River or in the Beka’ Valley as a Hezbollah military operation which could be targeted.” This strategy of disproportionate force and total destruction was later made explicit by Gadi Eisenkot, who had been the head of the IDF’s Northern Command at the relevant times in 2006:

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.

Eisenkot’s statement was an explicit renunciation of the obligation, binding under international law, to make constant, diligent efforts to draw distinctions between legitimate military targets and civilians and civilian infrastructure. That is, the Israeli government believes it is permissible and legitimate to attack innocent people for the actions of groups like militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. The Dahiya doctrine is thus best understood as an example of collective punishment, which has long been prohibited under international law, both customary and then as contained in treaty terms:

The prohibition of collective punishments is stated in the Hague Regulations and the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions. The prohibition is recognized in Additional Protocols I and II as a fundamental guarantee for all civilians and persons hors de combat.

Collective punishment is any attempt to punish a broader group of people for actions taken by specific individuals; it is an extension and example of the general principle, recognized by international humanitarian law, that no individual should be punished for an act they didn’t commit. As the International Committee of the Red Cross points out, collective punishment has been used historically “as a deterrence tool by occupying powers to prevent attacks from resistance movements.” The 1899 Hague Convention on the laws of war, Hague II, was the first treaty to explicitly set out a ban on collective punishment. Article 50states: “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible.” As noted above, subsequent treaties have reaffirmed this general principle.

The Dahiya doctrine as expressed by Eisenkot and through Israel’s actions amounts to an open embrace of the kinds of terrorism the Israeli and American governments claim to condemn. Thus, more astute observers might simply refer to the Dahiya doctrine as a particularly intensive and sophisticated form of terrorism: it is designed and calculated specifically to target innocent people and to destroy needed civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, water and energy sources, schools, roads, and the like rather than military targets only. This is one of the many reasons that the term “terrorism” itself is so insidious. The most powerful government in the region, nuclear-armed and backed by the world’s most powerful military, can prosecute a campaign of intentional and indiscriminate terror against innocent civilians, yet this is treated as a legitimate military operation, while any attempt to fight back is branded terrorism.

In our time, use of this ambiguous term in its several forms (“terrorism,” “terrorist,” etc.) has been one of the most effective propaganda tools of major powers like the United States and Israel. In case it isn’t clear at this point, these countries’ obsessive focus on and overuse of this term is a hint at its purpose in the discourse. If you are going to make terrorism one of your core strategies, it perhaps behooves you to constantly level the accusation at your enemies. It renders any form of resistance a moral abomination, while whitewashing the intentional destruction of innocent life at massive, industrial scales. It acts as a justification for exactly the kinds of atrocities and collective punishment that are banned under international law, and attempts to create a false equivalence between attacking other armed military combatants and murdering innocent people. While this strategy around the word “terrorism” may be effective for over-entertained, over-consuming fools like us, it is far less so in the overwhelming majority of the planet that is not the U.S. and Western Europe. The rest of the world, particularly the poor, understand it for what it is: a tool for cowing and controlling the real recipients of terror.

We have lately seen this Dahiya doctrine at work during the Gaza genocide, and we are seeing it also in Israel’s approach to Lebanon since the United States and Israel began their ongoing war on Iran. As Faris Giacaman recently put it, “The new stage of the Dahiya doctrine became the Gaza genocide,” and now Israel looks to take its “conduct in Gaza outside of Palestine’s borders.” For decades, many in the West and beyond have entertained the myth that the U.S. and its allies are the guardians of a rules-based system that holds up international law and human rights, even as Israel announced in the clearest terms its rejection of any limits on the use of military force against innocent people. Americans have scrolled mindlessly, collected our Amazon boxes, and congratulated each other for our commitment to liberal democracy and human rights while our government became a state sponsor of terrorism and genocide – of a doctrine explicitly committed to brutalizing civilians.

As the U.S. and Israel prosecute their shock and awe campaign in Iran and Israel pummels Lebanon once again, all American commentators seem to be able to do is gush about the impressiveness of the two countries’ military prowess and coordination. This moral and spiritual sickness is the inevitable result of our culture’s refusal to reckon with open and sustained violations of international law from our own government and its closest allies. It is the result of watching massive, deliberate attacks on women and children as an entertainment spectacle, and applying terms like “terrorist” to everyone but the world’s most powerful and wantonly destructive government actors. If we continue our refusal to reckon with this, the root cause, the moral sickness, we will continue to see the spread of the Dahiya doctrine’s pattern of disproportionate force and deliberate civilian targeting. It remains to be seen whether Americans can come out of our trance.

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