Dr Dan SteinbockNot so long ago, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “nothing can justify the obliteration of Gaza that has unfolded before the eyes of the world”.
Last week, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the late far-right rabbi Meir Kahane – notorious for his promotion of racism and ethnic cleansing – visited an Israeli prison where he had a large photo of the obliteration in Gaza hung for Palestinian security prisoners to see.
In a widely-circulated video, Ben-Gvir is heard saying, “This is how it’s supposed to look.”
The ultimate objective of obliteration is the total destruction of something so that nothing of it remains. But actually, this hellish nightmare was first tested by Israel two decades ago.
The pioneering obliteration doctrine was first outlined in 2005 by Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israeli military commander.
Interestingly, he is not an extremist. He subsequently became an influential politician who supports democracy and a two-state solution for the creation of a Palestinian state.
But as a military strategist, he opened a Pandora’s Box that both Israel’s right-wing Likud and Messianic far-right would subsequently embrace.
Two decades ago, Eisenkot’s strategy was based on the idea that the Israeli military would have to severely damage the Beirut suburb of Dahiya to create effective deterrence against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The assumption was that the deployment of disproportionate power would end Hezbollah for good, or at least for a sustained period.
When the Israeli military embraced what came to be known as the Dahiya Doctrine, the Cold War was history, and ad hoc international criminal tribunals had been set up.
The Genocide Convention was in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the UN even had its special adviser with a mandate for warning the UN on the prevention of genocide.
So, ostensibly, things were in place to deal with a military doctrine that explicitly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Yet, when Eisenkot stated in public that Israel would embrace a new military doctrine—that of extreme disproportion which virtually ensured genocidal atrocities—there was no consequential international outcry, not to speak of intervention.
It was this silence that made a war of total obliteration a matter of time rather than a matter of principle.
Civilian devastation as a strategic objective
Armed with this doctrine of obliteration, the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure to wreak massive suffering on the civilian population, presumably seeking to establish an effective deterrence.
Following the 2006 Lebanese War, the doctrine was deployed again in the 2008–2009 Gaza War, which caused the deaths of 1,200–1,400 Palestinians. Over 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless.
As Eisenkot saw it: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which shots will be fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction.”
After these efforts, the doctrine was effectively in place. Civilian devastation was no longer unfortunate collateral damage, but the very focus of a new military doctrine.
So, 17 years before October 7, 2023, there was a broad public consensus among both the Israeli military and political elites that in the next war, the Israeli military would deploy disproportionate force and feature heavy firepower and immense destruction.
Oddly enough, the very public launch of and debate on what was then described as the Dahiya strategy attracted little attention from international bodies and authorities ostensibly dedicated to genocide prevention.
Nonetheless, after just one month into the ongoing Gaza war, Eisenkot charged the Netanyahu cabinet of “near-criminal behaviour” as the PM tried to hide protocols, leak lies to the media and sway war goals to appease the Messianic far-right.
Eisenkot had lost his own son and two nephews in a war he now opposed. Yet, the strategy that was foundational to Israel’s project to annihilate Gaza was to a great extent his handiwork.
In November 2023, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, took the doctrine even further.
He argued – just as the Messianic far-right had done since the days of rabbi Meir Kahane and the ultra-nationalist rabbis in the 1970s – that since most Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas, all women in the enclave are the mothers, sisters, and spouses of “Hamas murderers”.
So, Israel was not only entitled but morally obligated to ignore the pain of Palestinians.
In this view, collective punishment was not a violation of international law or a perverse moral code. Somewhat like Joseph Conrad’s protagonist Mr. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (1899), Eiland seemed to concur: “Exterminate all the brutes!”
It was the ultimate ethical dictum of inhumanity.
Just as the Nazis evoked collective punishment against Jews, Poles, Communists and gypsies in the 1940s, Eiland seized on it to suggest that what the military might not achieve, biowarfare could. “Epidemics in the South [of Gaza] will bring victory closer and will decrease casualties among IDF soldiers.”
These arguments unleashed a broad Israeli and international condemnation, but they were aligned with the strategic objectives of the Israeli doctrine.
Origins of the obliteration doctrine
In historical view, the kind of obliteration seen in Gaza in the last two years is reminiscent of the scorched-earth policy, a longstanding military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military to fight a war, including the critical infrastructure, military and state institutions, buildings, crops, livestock, security and so on.
Twentieth-century examples feature the American Civil War and American Indian Wars, and Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union.
Yet, the Israeli strategy goes further insofar as it aims at either devastating the entire infrastructure of the target population or destroying it, to achieve “voluntary” mass displacement, dispossession and ultimately extermination.
Another historical component of the doctrine is collective punishment, which violates the principle of individual responsibility since it targets individuals who are not responsible for the perpetrated acts.
By the same token, it undermines modern legal systems, which restrict criminal liability to individuals. Yet, it has been widely deployed throughout history, particularly in postwar anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The third historical element of the strategy is civilian victimisation, or the purposeful use of violence against non-combatants in a conflict.
It has featured lethal force, including killings, and non-lethal forms of violence, such as forced expulsion, torture, and rape, as evidenced by the US Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War.
The deployment of the scorched-earth policy against non-combatants is banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions. Collective punishment is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflicts. Civilian victimisation is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
Yet, thanks to support from Washington and inactivity by Brussels, Israel has been able to ignore all these prohibitions.
Since the post-war era, obliteration has also been accompanied by largely indiscriminate, massive area bombardment.
In Gaza, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, it set a historical precedent. Since October 7, 2023, the US has spent at least $22.8 billion on military aid to Israel and related operations in the region.
Based on its historical precursors, massive bombardment and the deployment of artificial intelligence to maximise death and devastation, the result has been the obliteration doctrine.
By late April 2024, after barely half a year of hostilities, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the World War II bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined.
The scale of destruction in Gaza has been viable only with the incessant flow of US weapons, guaranteed by US military aid and funding to finance it.
This aid is a result of half a century of bilateral military cooperation in the dark shadows of history, starting with Israel’s military ties with apartheid South Africa and participation in the US ‘dirty wars’ in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and even Asia since the 1970s and ’80s.
The targets in Gaza are typical of the kind of mass atrocities and infrastructural devastation that are covered by the Genocide Convention.
Worse, by most accounts, more than two-thirds of the perished in Gaza are women, children and elderly – and the final figure is likely to prove significantly higher.
Erasing Gaza, expunging nations
As I demonstrate in The Obliteration Doctrine, the eradication of Gaza has been predicated on a deliberately targeted campaign with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians and the Palestinian people as a national, ethnical, and religious group.
This purposeful obliteration ranges from physical devastation of critical infrastructure, urban hubs and settlements, public buildings and hospitals, to both combatants and non-combatants and the entire ecology of the environment, with Gaza devastated and uninhabitable, and over 62,000 Palestinians killed and almost 160,000 injured.
Another aspect of the goal of obliteration suggests a more figurative eradication: removing something from memory. Hence, the Israeli obliteration of Palestinian museums, libraries, institutions of learning, arts and culture or what Raphael Lemkin used to call “cultural genocide”. Out of sight, out of mind, gone forever.
Third, the doctrine has gone hand in hand with the concerted effort to curtail, reverse or undo future development, and thus entirely undermine all economic progress.
The net impact has affinities with de-development and undevelopment, as evidenced by the plummeting of Gaza’s GDP by more than 80 percent already in mid-2024.
In the big picture, the obliteration of Gaza and the efforts to eradicate and cleanse its Palestinian residents in real time with “the whole world watching,” reflects the West’s long and dark track record of neocolonial mass civilian destruction.
But what has happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. Left unrestrained, the obliteration doctrine is likely to serve as a prelude to new and far more destructive genocidal atrocities in the future.
(The commentary features exclusive excerpts from the author’s latest book, The Obliteration Doctrine)
