Not 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........

© TRT World