A drone strike in Beirut’s posh southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold, killed senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri last Tuesday. He and five other Hezbollah militiamen who also died in the explosion are, in a sense, simply six more ‘kills’ added to the 22,600+ death toll last week in the ongoing Israeli military offensive against the tiny Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, nearer home, in Bangladesh, the National Parliamentary Elections are to be held today and the incumbent Awami League Government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed is expected to easily win. This is because the main Opposition parties are boycotting the polls, claiming political repression by the Government.
The main Opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), nominally led by the currently ailing former Premier Begum Khaleda Zia, and its allied parties are refusing to participate. Most political commentators are not surprised, given that many of the Opposition coalition’s top leaders and organisers are either in detention, or have been convicted on charges that constitutionally disqualifies them from involvement in electoral activity. Others are in exile for fear of either arrest or assassination.
China is likely to be happy with Sheikh Hasina’s continuation in to a historic fourth term in power given the way the Bangla-China economic ties have blossomed in recent years. Dhaka is keen to link up with China’s developing Southern Economic Corridor (SEC) of road and rail links now being built from Chin’s southernmost Yunnan Province, through Laos and Myanmar, to a major new port being built on Myanmar’s coast in the Bay of Bengal.
Meanwhile, India, while nervous about China’s increasing proximity, will grit its teeth and still welcome Hasina’s expected retention of power. New Delhi knows full well that whoever comes to power in Dhaka, India and Bangladesh will continue to have far closer economic, cultural and political relations than Beijing can ever hope for. Bangladesh is one of the four South Asian countries having elections this year, the others being India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Brazen genocide
In any case, the whole world is simply absorbed with the unspeakably violent and destructive geopolitics in West Asia, especially the brazen genocide in Gaza. As noted in previous columns, the war against Palestine currently waged by Israel and its Western backers, has shaken the world community to the core.
Firstly, the sheer savagery of the Israeli military operation from Day One has caused human and environmental devastation hitherto unmatched in modern times, in terms of the small area of such terrible effect. While there have been battles in the two World Wars that cost tens of thousands of lives in similarly short periods, they were waged across vast swathes of warfronts incomparably bigger than the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank and, more alarmingly, those casualties were among military combatants.
In Palestine, according to all observer accounts – except that of Israel – the 22,600-plus dead, including nearly 10,000 children and nearly 60,000 wounded, are almost all civilians. Very little of the constant audio-visual and written reportage of the fighting in Gaza, done by numerous media agencies as well as humanitarian organisations, including the UN itself, depicts any Palestinian combatant units.
The vast bulk of the war coverage shows continuous shelling, infantry firing, tank and aerial attacks by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) against what clearly seem to be civilian centres, including medical, commercial, residential and refugee facilities and even socio-cultural centres. There are no Palestinian combatants or firing points to be seen in these views of the combat zones. Most shocking is the hugely disproportionate scale of the death and destruction being inflicted in Gaza.
Secondly, the world community is shocked by the coldblooded, deliberate insistence by Israel as well as the Western powers militarily and politically supporting it, to continue with this destruction and mass murder for four months – and ongoing. All multilateral agencies and authorities as well as the vast majority of UN Member States, have been demanding that the war be halted for the past three months but they are totally ignored by the aggressor forces both Israel, the immediate perpetrator as well as those Western powers actively helping the perpetration.
What has shocked the world is that these very same Western powers, which preach the most about ‘world order’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, are not actively intervening to stop the genocide and apartheid in Palestine as they belatedly did in the two other episodes of post-Nazi genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. Instead, these same Western powers – the ‘Free World’ – are the very ones vigorously enabling the continued genocide for months and openly insisting that it must continue until the end, whatever that means.
As commentators across the world are beginning to point out, Nazi Germany did not publicly insist that they were rightfully operating the death camps and forced labour camps. Neither did Apartheid South Africa publicly bomb the ‘Bantustans’ in which the Whites had enclosed the Black populations.
World commentators and humanitarian monitors now repeatedly insist that all this killing and urban destruction is totally ‘disproportionate’ to the 1,200+ Israeli death toll in the October 7 attack by Hamas. News audiences are, by now, familiar with this constant charge of ‘disproportionality’ being made against Israel, a charge that seems to be no more than a description of the inevitable mass destruction caused by modern warfare.
But this vast imbalance in death and destruction between the Western-backed Israeli onslaught, on the one hand, and, on the other, the single day’s attack by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Gazan militia on Israeli siege lines encircling the Strip, purely supposedly un-intended ‘accidental’ damage – as claimed by both Israel and the US, NATO and EU?
Or, is this ‘disproportionality’ actually deliberate military policy – a professional military doctrine long ago formulated and asserted by not only Israel or even its superpower backers, but also now a standard state military doctrine across all states?
People waiting for food in Gaza
It may not be mere coincidence or accidental irony that the well-to-do Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh was the location of the drone assassination of Hamas leader Al-Arouri last Tuesday.
In 2006, Dahiyeh was already a thickly populated, cosmopolitan, mix of mainly Shia Arabs along with Sunni, Christian and Druze Arabs, when this urban neighbourhood was encircled by invading IDF personnel during the massive invasion of South Lebanon in 2006.
At that time, South Lebanon was home to Palestinian refugee militia groups and sympathetic Lebanese Arab militia, all hostile to Israel as the invader of Arab lands and displacer of indigenous Arab populations. This has been the situation ever since Israel drove out the incumbent population of Palestine into neighbouring Arab countries (especially Lebanon, Jordan and Syria) in the 1940s and declared a new ‘State of Israel’ in 1948.
Even today, over 70 years later, Lebanon is home to nearly a million displaced Palestinian refugees living among highly sympathetic fellow Arab Lebanese of various faiths. Since these decades have been ones of constant military exchanges, and especially heavy Israeli military strikes, the borderlands have always remained militarised on both sides. Hence the number of armed militia on the Lebanese and Syrian sides facing a vastly superior IDF.
In 2006, Israel got impatient and upgraded its frequent cross-border missile and aerial bomber strikes against the Arab resistance militia into a full-scale military invasion of South Lebanon. The world watched aghast at the scale of that Israeli offensive, also openly backed and politically defended by the Western power bloc.
The IDF in 2006 encircled various militia infested zones in South Lebanon and proceeded to indiscriminately smash their way into these areas which were typically congested urban areas. The hundreds of thousands of residents naturally suffered heavy casualties while the buildings and infrastructure were literally flattened – just as in Gaza today. Indeed, news agencies report that people in Lebanon, watching the IDF assault on Gaza, are now recalling the devastation they underwent in 2006.
Military capability
The difference was that Lebanon is bigger than Gaza and the West Bank with a hinterland that enabled the militias to hide or withdraw to. In 2006 there were many Arab militias of varying faiths and ideologies and with varying military capability. Their larger living areas enabled far better levels of military organisation and equipment than is possible inside Palestine.
Israel’s 2006 invasion was beaten back by the combined Lebanese and Palestinian militia, including the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, in what was the IDF’s most humiliating defeat. But before their withdrawal, the IDF deliberately and systematically destroyed whole urban neighbourhoods of the South Lebanese population that supported the militias and which formed the actual constituencies of these armed movements.
The IDF invasion force commander at the time, General Gadi Eizenkot (later Army Chief of Staff) adopted what he explicitly called a ‘doctrine’ of ‘asymmetric’ warfare in which the invading force not only overwhelmed the enemy with superior firepower and numbers but also destroyed the social strength of that (otherwise militarily weaker) militia enemy. That meant the massacre of civilian support constituencies and complete destruction of this population’s living capacities, namely their habitat (the cities) and infrastructure.
Visuals of the 2006 IDF onslaught on South Lebanon and especially the suburbs of Dahiyeh, home of the Hezbollah, look remarkably like what readers and TV viewers can see of devastated Gaza today.
The first public announcement of this doctrine ‘disproportionality’ was made in an interview with General Eizenkot published by an Israeli journal in October 2008.
However, similar doctrines are already in place in the military establishment of many Great Powers. It is certainly a strategic policy formulation developed through a typical process of research into ongoing and past warfare and theoretical planning. If ancient Chinese military theoretician Tsun Zu could call his formulations “The Art of War”, why not a science today? The ‘disproportionality’ doctrine, apparently, is classified as ‘4th Generation’ warfare.
But there is certainly nothing academic or theoretical about what is being implemented in Palestine today by ‘Western civilisation’. The world waits to see whether brave South Africa, which has cut off diplomatic ties with Israel, will succeed in obtaining some judicial relief for Palestine and the world through its current litigation in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
