In the heart of Tel Aviv, inside Israel’s military headquarters known as Hakiyra, Israel’s 21st chief of staff was sworn in on Monday. Gadi Eisenkot replaced the outgoing Benny Ganz. Eisenkot, the new chief of staff, is associated more than anyone else with the notorious Dahiya doctrine, which advocates disproportionate use of force as part of Israel’s campaign against guerrilla warfare.
When he was still the chief of the northern command back in 2008, Eisenkot revealed in an interview with Israel’s mass circulation Hebrew language daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, that Israel would use ‘disproportionate’ force to destroy Lebanese villages from which Hizbollah fighters launched rockets at its cities in any future war.
‘What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,’ he said, referring to the area of Beirut which the Israeli military flattened in sustained air raids during the summer offensive against Lebanon known in Israel as the “Second Lebanon War”.
‘We will apply disproportionate force against it, and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases,’ Eisenkot said in that same interview.
‘This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved,’ Eisenkot added, making it clear that this has become official Israel doctrine.
This doctrine was soon given a ‘theoretical framework’ by Colonel (res.) Gabi Siboni in a document he wrote for a think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, titled “Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War.”
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