The Dahiya Doctrine and Israel’s Use of Disproportionate Force

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Written by IMEU, Institute for Middle East Understanding IMEU, Institute for Middle East Understanding

Published: 04 August 2014 04 August 2014

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A central tenet of Israeli military policy is "deterrence." This is embodied in the so-called "Dahiya Doctrine," which dictates the use of overwhelming and disproportionate force - a war crime - and the targeting of government and civilian infrastructure during military operations. It received its name from the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah, which Israel destroyed almost completely during its assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

• In October 2008, Gabi Siboni, Director of the Military and Strategic Affairs Program at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a quasi-governmental think tank with close ties to the Israeli political and military establishments, published a policy paper entitled "Disproportionate Force: Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War." It stated:

  'With an outbreak of hostilities [with Hezbollah], the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. 'Israel's test will be the intensity and quality of its response to incidents on the Lebanese border or terrorist attacks involving Hezbollah 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.'

• In an analysis piece also published in October 2008 entitled "IDF plans to use disproportionate force in next war," military correspondent Amos Harel of Israel's Haaretz newspaper quoted a senior Israeli General, Gadi Eisenkot, commander of Israeli forces in the north, describing the Dahiya Doctrine as applied to a future war with Lebanon:

  'We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases... This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.'

• Two and a half months later, after breaking a ceasefire that had been in place for six months, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a devastating three-week military onslaught that killed approximately 1400 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, including more than 300 children.
• Subsequent investigations by the United Nations as well as Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the disproportionate use of force, the use of white phosphorous in heavily populated areas, and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. In May 2009, Amnesty International released its country report for Israel and the occupied territories, which found:

  '[During Cast Lead] Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians.'

• In February 2009, shortly after the end of Cast Lead, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a cabinet meeting:

  'The government's position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate.'

• The Israeli army continues to operate according to the Dahiya Doctrine, despite huge civilian casualties inflicted in Cast Lead and other military operations and the condemnation of human rights organizations.

Read the IMEU's Casualty Comparison Fact Sheet here.

Soros fund drops shares in Israel’s SodaStream

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Written by Mahmoud Kassem Mahmoud Kassem

Published: 04 August 2014 04 August 2014

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Soros Fund Management, the family office of the billionaire investor George Soros, has sold its stake in SodaStream, the soda making appliance producer that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and was made popular by actress Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement.

The decision comes as a number of big international investors, including the fund linked to the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, join in a burgeoning financial boycott of Israel amid a push by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians.

SodaStream, headquartered in the Israeli city of Lod, has its main factory in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

“Soros Fund Management does not own shares of SodaStream,” Michael Vachon, a spokesman for the fund, told The National, declining to comment further on when and why it sold the shares.

In a May filing with the US markets regulator, the fund said it had bought 550,000 shares of SodaStream during the first quarter. Bloomberg reported that the fund acquired the shares for $24.3 million, with the new holding making up 0.3 per cent of the fund’s $9.3 billion stock portfolio.

“After pressure from Soros partners in the region and the world, they dropped SodaStream and promised, in private letters so far, to issue guidelines similar to those adopted by the EU to prevent any investment into companies that sustain the Israeli occupation and settlements in particular,” said Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian activist and co-founder of the BDS movement.

Several western investors said earlier this year that they had sold off holdings in companies that make money from business in occupied territories. Norway’s $810bn sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, a Dutch pension fund, and the Presbyterian Church in the US are among those that have excluded some Israeli and US companies from their portfolios this year. The companies operate in the occupied territories, where settlements built by Israel have been deemed illegal by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice among others.

Financial and economic boycotts have been tried before, most notably when Saudi Arabia and other Opec members stopped selling oil to the West in 1973 in reaction to the support given by the US and other nations to Israel during its war with Egypt.

But with the 1979 peace agreement that heralded a political and economic rapprochement with Egypt and eventually other Arab nations, the momentum fizzled away.

It is only in the past decade that there has been a revival of the boycott movement looking to end the Israeli occupation of land captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, allow Palestinians refugees to return home and end discrimination against Palestinians.

Analysts say that as the two-state solution – the framework in which peace negotiations have been undertaken for the past two decades – flounders, a growing anti-apartheid movement is filling its shoes.

This year has been a strong one for BDS. The Gates Foundation Asset Trust, which manages investments for the $40bn Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said in June that it sold its stake in the UK security services firm G4S, one of the companies targetted by BDS. The movement has also been in focus during the Israeli assault on Gaza and the widespread anti-war protests against the killing of hundreds there.

Earlier this year, Israel’s finance minister acknowledged the impact that a European-wide boycott could have on the country, depriving the economy of $5.7bn and putting almost 10,000 people out of work immediately. The prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also acknowledged the threat posed by BDS. In a March speech in the US, Mr Netanyahu launched an attack on the movement, branding them as racists.

“In America, BDS has really started to pick up in the last year, and there are a couple of other examples apart from the Presbyterian church, such as universities that have taken positions against Israel,” said Andrew Hammond, a Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The whole movement is picking up not so much because the BDS movement is so powerful, but because people want Israel to come to a peace agreement.”

In January, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund decided to ban Africa Israel Investments (AFI Group) and its subsidiary Danya Cebus from its portfolio because of their involvement in building settlements in the West Bank.

In the same month PGGM, the second-largest Dutch pension fund, which manages more than $200bn in assets, said it had liquidated holdings in five Israeli banks for their role in financing settlement building.

In June, the US Presbyterian church said that it excluded three companies – Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola – from its investment portfolios because they were used by the Israeli government in the occupied territories and were not in compliance with its policy on socially responsible investing.

Norway is one of the few countries that have an ethics oversight council to review investments made by its sovereign wealth fund. In January, the finance minister, on advice from the council, told its sovereign wealth fund to sell its holdings in AFI Group and Danya Cebus.

Since the outbreak of fresh violence in Gaza, there have been no new announcements of boycotts by big investors, but funds such as Norway’s are constantly reviewing their investments according to the ethics council that monitors its holdings.

“We cannot comment on companies or cases that we are working on presently,” said Pia Goyer, senior adviser at the secretariat of the ethics council to Norway’s government pension fund. “You have to wait until we issue a recommendation. It takes some time to get all the facts on the table, the involvement of a company in any particular situation. The council only meets once a month and discusses what we should proceed with.”

Lisa Stonestreet, the programme director at the London-based UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, a non-government trade body that promotes sustainable investment, said that institutional investors were increasingly focused on ethical factors.

“First of all there is a public demand for it in terms of people calling into account larger organisations across the board to look at what the impact is in terms of sustainability, in terms of what the impact is and social issues,” she said. For some investors, the main aspect is profitability.

The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, which manages more than $200bn, has investments in a number of Israeli companies, including SodaStream and Bank Halpolim, as part of its foreign portfolio of stocks. Those holdings were part of its indexing investment strategy and the fund had no plans to sell them as it focused only on potential for profit, said its spokeswoman, Linda Sims.

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“Concentrate” and “exterminate”: Israel parliament deputy speaker’s Gaza genocide plan

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Written by Ali Abunimah Ali Abunimah

Published: 04 August 2014 04 August 2014

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Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has published a plan for the total destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

His detailed plan, which calls for the use of concentration camps, amounts to direct and public incitement to genocide – a punishable crime under the Genocide Convention.

In a 1 August posting on his Facebook page, Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, calls for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”

“This is our country – our country exclusively,” he writes, “including Gaza.”

Read more: “Concentrate” and “exterminate”: Israel parliament deputy speaker’s Gaza genocide plan

Israel spied on John Kerry during peace effort – report

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Written by AFP in The Guardian AFP in The Guardian

Published: 03 August 2014 03 August 2014

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• Der Spiegel says Israelis eavesdropped on phone calls
• US secretary of state’s mediation effort broke down in April

theguardian.com, Sunday 3 August 2014 09.14 EDT


Israel eavesdropped on the US secretary of state, John Kerry, during doomed peace talks with the Palestinians last year, the German news weekly Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.

The article said the Israelis and at least one other secret service listened in on Kerry’s conversations as he tried to mediate, in a development that Der Spiegel said was likely to further strain ties between Israel and the United States.

Kerry regularly spoke by telephone with high-ranking officials throughout the Middle East during the negotiations that finally collapsed earlier this year.

Der Spiegel, which cited “several sources among secret services”, said that he used not only secure lines but also normal telephones with satellite connections which were vulnerable to tapping.

“The government in Jerusalem used this information in the negotiations on a diplomatic solution in the Middle East,” it said.

Der Spiegel said Kerry’s office and the Israeli government declined to comment on its report.

Kerry made reviving Middle East diplomacy a central priority at the start of his term and coaxed the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, back to the negotiating table in July 2013.

But in April this year, Israel made a surprise announcement of plans for 700 new housing units in settlements on occupied territory and refused to free a last batch of Palestinian prisoners after earlier releases. Abbas in turn sought Palestinian membership in 15 UN conventions and the peace drive eventually broke down.

Kerry has attempted to mediate during the current Israeli military offensive in Gaza and flew to Israel last week. But he has failed to bring about a lasting truce in the 26-day confrontation that has claimed more than 1,700 lives.