Indiscriminate Slaughter of Civilians Is Israeli Military Doctrine

May 17, 2021 | revcom.us

On May 15, Israeli jets bombed a three-story house in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, killing eight children aged 14 and under and two women from an extended family. The hundreds of thousands of people living in refugee camps, are, or are descendants of, people driven from Israel during the Nakba—the explosion of terrorist ethnic cleansing of Palestine that “cleared the ground” on which the state of Israel was built in 1948.

In fact, indiscriminate slaughter of civilians is at the core of Israeli military doctrine. Since the Nakba, this doctrine has been escalated and explicitly articulated as an essential element of Israeli military strategy. A 2008 article in the journal of the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, “Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War,” publicly discusses this and the genocidal logic behind it.

Written in the aftermath of fifteen years of the brutal and unsuccessful Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon, the article sums up lessons Israeli political and military leaders took from that:

Israel does not have to be dragged into a war of attrition with Hizbollah [also spelled Hezbollah, the Islamist militia that was the target of the Israeli invasion of south Lebanon]. Israel’s test will be the intensity and quality of its response to incidents on the Lebanese border or terrorist attacks involving Hizbollah in the north or Hamas in the south. In such cases, Israel again will not be able to limit its response to actions whose severity is seemingly proportionate to an isolated incident. Rather, it will have to respond disproportionately in order to make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt the calm currently prevailing along its borders. Israel must be prepared for deterioration and escalation, as well as for a full-scale confrontation. Such preparedness is obligatory in order to prevent long term attrition. [Emphasis added]

The doctrine and morality (or lack thereof) of any military force is a concentration of its objectives and values. And in the case of Israel, those objectives are defending its role as an enforcer of U.S. interests in a world of exploitation and oppression, and the values of anything that serves the perceived interests of our people is justified, and no crime against humanity is too egregious.

Bodies of two women and eight children killed by an Israeli air strike on Gaza City, May 15. Photo: AP/Khalil Hamra