[Scholarship suggests the overwhelming violence unleashed on the
strip is not just a violation of international law — it is
militarily ineffective]
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COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT IN GAZA WILL NOT BRING ISRAEL SECURITY  
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Wendy Pearlman
October 30, 2023
New Lines Magazine
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_ Scholarship suggests the overwhelming violence unleashed on the
strip is not just a violation of international law — it is
militarily ineffective _

Israeli flares descend on bombed-out buildings in the Gaza Strip on
Oct. 30, 2023., Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images

 

Responding to Hamas’ horrific killing of some 1,400 Israelis on Oct.
7, Israel has targeted the Gaza Strip with one of the most devastating
military assaults of modern times. By day six, according to Middle
East analyst Charles Lister, Israel had dropped more than twice as
many bombs on this densely populated civilian area as the anti-Islamic
State coalition dropped per month on an area 126 times as large. By
day nine, Israel had pummeled 2.2 million civilians with the
equivalent of “a quarter of a nuclear bomb,” according to the
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. By day 19, bombardment had destroyed or
severely damaged at least 200,000 housing units or 45% of the housing
stock in Gaza, leaving around 629,000 civilians to shelter in 150
U.N.-designated emergency shelters. By day 23, Israel had killed more
than 8,300 people, including 3,400 children, and injured 20,240, while
another 1,800 remained missing or trapped under the rubble.
Bombardment has been accompanied by Israel cutting off water,
electricity, food, medicine and fuel — forms of collective
punishment that are illegal under international law.

While the ferocity of Israel’s military campaign is unprecedented,
the logic driving it is not. Political scientist Boaz Atzili and I
documented similar drivers in our 2018 book “Triadic Coercion:
Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors.” There is
a long history of Israel’s use of collective punishment against
Palestinian civilians, dehumanization and denial of Palestinian
peoplehood and forced displacement as strategies of war. But there is
another key factor shaping why, how and against whom Israel has used
military force: what political scientists call “strategic
culture,” or the engrained system of beliefs, values, assumptions,
habits and institutionalized practices that shapes how states approach
conflict.

For the first 40 years of its statehood, Israel’s military doctrine
was oriented to wars with other states. By the early 1990s, however,
its main challenges were no longer conventional armies but nonstate
actors. A shift in Israel’s thinking and behavior came to the fore
with bombing campaigns on Lebanon in the 1990s and reprisals against
the second Palestinian Intifada in the 2000s. A strategic culture
crystallized that shifted from the use of military force to achieve
specific on-the-ground objectives to, instead, intense concern about
the appearance of weakness. Our book traces several alarming features
in this evolving strategic culture, all of which are reaching
frightful heights in the current war.

The first is a belief in the inherent rather than instrumental utility
of military actions. A key pillar of Israel’s security doctrine has
always been deterrence: the use or threat of force to convince
adversaries not to challenge Israel because the costs will be high.
Since the 1990s, Israel has increasingly adopted the logic that when
its deterrence fails — as it did on Oct. 7 — even more
overwhelming violence is needed to reestablish that deterrence. For
decades, however, the effectiveness of extreme punitive responses has
been more assumed than critically evaluated. Genuine exploration of
nonmilitary options has all but disappeared. Pounding the enemy —
“raining down hellfire,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
expressed it last week — has become the solution to every problem.
It is a goal in and of itself.

The second feature is justification of military reprisals on grounds
that are moral as much as strategic. Israel’s belief that it is
justified in using military might, even in violation of the
international legal requirement of proportionality, is rooted in its
historic sense of existential vulnerability and conviction that right
is on its side in the fight against foes bent on its destruction.
While this belief in its own righteousness has long infused Israel’s
strategic culture, it has taken on a more sweeping moralistic tone
over time. Indeed, the rationale guiding military actions has
increasingly shifted from the “logic of consequences” (rational
action calculating expected returns from alternative choices) to the
“logic of appropriateness” (whereby action seeks to fulfill social
norms about what is good and proper). This comes to the fore in the
current war, which Netanyahu has described as a fight of “good over
evil, light over darkness.” Strategic utility is thus not the only,
or perhaps even the primary, rationale for military force. Rather,
Israel bombards the enemy because it claims that it is justified in
doing so. 

A third feature of Israeli strategic culture is a lack of nuance or
differentiation in the targets of military force. In principle, the
Israeli army endorses the notion of “tailoring” deterrence
policies to address specific circumstances. In practice, however,
Israel has increasingly turned to blanket, indiscriminate and brute
force without meaningful attention to context, root causes or the real
drivers of conflict. For more than a decade, this has been on display
in recurrent shows of overwhelming military strength in Gaza that
security elites refer to as “mowing the grass.” The metaphor is
telling. Grass has neither feelings nor intelligence. As long as grass
is alive, it is destined to grow; the only thing that can limit its
growth is periodically taking a blade to shorten it. In using this
analogy, Israel’s security establishment suggests that its enemies
are similarly undeterrable and their belligerence inevitable. It does
not seriously consider their motivations or the possibility that they
may respond to incentives other than violence. 

The current siege of Gaza has shifted from mowing grass to uprooting
it entirely. Indeed, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration
that Israel is “fighting human animals” points to an even more
startling biological metaphor. It not only casts all of Gaza as a fair
target, but also deploys dehumanizing rhetoric of the kind that
scholars have long recognized as genocidal. 

In the history that we examined in our book, these three elements came
to a climax in the “Dahiyah Doctrine.” Named after Israel’s
crushing of the Dahiyah suburb of Beirut during its stalemated 2006
war with Hezbollah, this concept endorses overwhelming and
disproportionate use of force to punish and deter attackers, as well
as destruction of government and civilian infrastructure. As Maj. Gen.
Gadi Eisenkott described the model:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village
from which Israel is fired on. … We will apply disproportionate
force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our
standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

The current bombardment of villages, towns, hospitals,
telecommunications and other pillars of civilian life in Gaza is the
“Dahiyah Doctrine” intensified to a previously unimaginable
degree. Fueled by a strategic culture that invokes moralistic
justifications for extreme, undifferentiated military force as an end
in itself, Israel’s current punitive campaign is of dubious security
utility. Israel has carried out four devastating wars against Gaza, in
2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, with the aim of deterring or defeating
Hamas. But during these years Hamas has only grown more sophisticated
in its capacities and more brazen in its efforts, as the Oct. 7 attack
demonstrated. Even if Israel now succeeds in destroying Hamas as an
organization, it risks strengthening Hamas as an ideology and
expression of Palestinians’ resolve to fight occupation and
subjugation.

The only achievement of Israel’s prior assaults on Gaza, to say
nothing of the 16-year blockade that the U.N. has judged as making the
enclave “unlivable,” is unspeakable suffering for millions of
Palestinian civilians and the inevitable recurrence of another war.
The same is the case today. Bombardment, siege, forced displacement
and the denial of humanitarian access might satisfy the desire for
revenge, but these actions cannot bring Israelis security. As long as
self-determination is denied, Palestinian resistance will continue, be
it in ever-more deadly forms of violence heralded by Hamas’ latest
attack or in the myriad nonviolent forms that Palestinians have also
undertaken for over a century.

There is no military solution to the irreducibly political problem of
two peoples seeking to live with freedom and dignity on the same small
piece of land. Security requires peace, which can only be obtained
through a meaningful negotiations process grounded in respect for
international law and the human rights of all peoples.

_WENDY PEARLMAN is professor of political science and director of the
Middle East and North Africa studies program at Northwestern
University_

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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Hamas
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* military doctrine
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* international law
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