On Saturday, July 27, at least 12 children from the Druze community were killed in a rocket attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel blamed the strike on Hezbollah, saying it was “a crossing of all red lines.” Hezbollah, which usually has no qualms about acknowledging its involvement, vigorously denied the accusation.
Regardless of who is responsible for these acts, it is simply ridiculous that Israel should feel entitled to speak of “red lines” when the Israeli military is currently committing a veritable genocide in the Gaza Strip. Since October 7, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have officially been killed in Gaza. A recent study in The Lancet suggests that the real death toll could be higher than 186,000.
Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch called on his government to respond “with full force” to the Majdal Shams attack and threatened “total war” with Hezbollah. Again, it takes a special kind of logic to threaten war in retaliation for an attack on territory that one occupies illegally.
But hey, that’s how Israel works. The aggressor becomes the victim, the occupier becomes the rightful owner, genocide becomes self-defense.
As for the threat of an “all-out war” in Lebanon, it is worth mentioning that Israel has killed more than 500 people in the country since October, including more than 100 civilians. The war already seems well underway.
This is not the first time that Israel has engaged in mass killings in Lebanon. Let us recall Israel’s 34-day war against Lebanon in July and August 2006, which reduced the country’s population by about 1,200 people and gave rise to the “Dahiyeh doctrine,” defined by the Times of Israel as a “military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against a militant entity by destroying civilian infrastructure.”
In other words, don’t worry about international law and the so-called Geneva Conventions.
The doctrine is named after Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, an area that Western media like to call a “Hezbollah stronghold.” Hitchhiking through Lebanon in the aftermath of the 2006 war, I witnessed firsthand the consequences of the “disproportionate force” used in Dahiyeh and other parts of the country. I saw apartment buildings turned into craters and villages reduced to rubble.
One can only assume that in any future conflict, the Dahiyeh Doctrine will be the name of the game.
In addition to razing civilian infrastructure in 2006, Israel also proceeded to saturate swathes of Lebanon with millions of cluster bombs, many of which failed to explode on impact and which continue to kill and maim even in the absence of… er… “all-out war.”
Then there were incidents such as the Marwahin massacre in 2006, in which 23 people – mostly children – were gunned down at point-blank range by an Israeli helicopter as they were obeying evacuation orders from the Israeli army.
This looks like a “red line” if ever there was one.
Or let’s go back to 1996 and the charmingly titled Israeli operation “The Grapes of Wrath,” in which the Israeli army massacred 106 civilians sheltering in a United Nations compound in the southern Lebanese town of Qana.
Let us go back even further and we will discover the very event that gave birth to Hezbollah: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. This invasion coincided with the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which lasted 22 years and ended ignominiously in May 2000, thanks to the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah.
Today, Israel’s bellicose rhetoric in response to the Majdal Shams incident has fueled fears of a major regional escalation. Governments have warned their citizens against traveling to Lebanon, and several airlines have canceled flights to and from Beirut—a justified precaution, given that Israel repeatedly bombed Beirut’s airport in 2006. On Monday, Israeli drone attacks on southern Lebanon reportedly killed two people and injured a child.
In its statement on Hezbollah’s alleged “crossing of all red lines” in Israeli-occupied Majdal Shams, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said: “This is not an army fighting another army, but a terrorist organization deliberately shooting at civilians.” If we did not know the author of these words or the context, we might think they were referring to Israel’s behavior in Gaza.
Which brings us to the rhetorical question: If Israel cares so much about the civilians who inhabit the territories it occupies, why does it massacre Palestinians?
In June 2006, the Israeli military launched its romantic “Operation Summer Rains” on the Gaza Strip, an attack that American scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé called a “systematic massacre” and “the most brutal attack on Gaza since 1967.” A few weeks later, the Israelis decided that Lebanon needed rain too, and voila, the July War was born.
As the saying goes, when it rains genocides, it rains cats and dogs. And Israel may have found a convenient pretext to move the storm to Lebanon.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
