On Saturday, July 27, a rocket attack killed at least 12 Druze children in the village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel blamed the strike on Hezbollah, declaring it had “crossed every red line” – an accusation that Hezbollah, which is usually not shy about admitting its actions, vehemently denied.
Regardless of who is responsible, it is absurdly obscene for Israel to think it has the right to talk about “red lines” when the Israeli military is currently committing blatant genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been officially killed in Gaza. A recent Lancet study suggests the actual death toll could be as high as 186,000.
Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kish urged the government to respond “with all its might” to the Majdal Shams attack and threatened “all-out war” with Hezbollah. Again, threatening war in retaliation for an attack on illegally occupied territory requires a special kind of logic.
But this is how it works in Israel: the invader becomes the victim, the occupier becomes the rightful owner, and genocide becomes self-defense.
It is worth mentioning the threat of “all-out war” in Lebanon, where Israel has killed more than 500 people since October, including more than 100 civilians. It already seems like a pretty “all-out war.”
This is not the first time Israel has massacred Lebanese. Consider the 34-day war Israel waged in Lebanon in July and August 2006, which killed about 1,200 people and gave birth to the so-called “Dahiyeh doctrine,” which the Times of Israel describes as “a military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against armed groups by destroying civilian infrastructure.”
In other words, don’t worry about international law or anything known as the Geneva Conventions.
The doctrine is named after Dahiye, a southern suburb of Beirut, which the Western media likes to call a “Hezbollah stronghold.” While hitchhiking across Lebanon after the 2006 war, I witnessed firsthand the consequences of the “disproportionate force” used in Dahiye and other areas. I saw apartment buildings turned into craters and towns reduced to rubble.
One can only assume that the doctrine of Dahiya will be a major issue in all future conflicts.
In addition to destroying civilian infrastructure in 2006, Israel dropped millions of cluster bombs on Lebanon, many of which failed to explode on impact, and continued to kill and injure people even in situations where full-scale warfare did not occur.
There were also incidents such as the 2006 Marwahin massacre, when an Israeli helicopter following an evacuation order killed 23 people, mostly children, at close range.
If there is such a line, it would seem to be a “red line”.
Or turn the clock back to 1996 and Israel’s enticingly titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” in which Israeli forces massacred 106 civilians sheltering at a UN compound in the southern Lebanese city of Qana.
If we rewind further, we find the event that gave birth to Hezbollah: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. This coincided with the 22-year, torture-crazy Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in infamy in May 2000 thanks to the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah.
Now, as Israel’s belligerent rhetoric over the Majdal Shams incident grows, fears are growing that a major regional tension is about to escalate. The government has warned its citizens against traveling to Lebanon, and various airlines have canceled flights to and from Beirut, a fair precaution given Israel’s repeated bombings of Beirut airport in 2006. On Monday, an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon reportedly killed two people and wounded a child.
In a statement responding to claims that Hezbollah had “crossed every red line” in Israeli-occupied Majdal Shams, the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared, “This is not an army fighting another army, but a terrorist organization deliberately shooting civilians.” If you didn’t know who said this or the context, you might think it was a reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Here we are faced with a rhetorical question: If Israel cares so much about civilians living in occupied territories, why does it slaughter Palestinians?
In June 2006, the Israeli army launched the romantic “Operation Summer Rains” in Gaza. American scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pape described it as “systematic genocide” and “the most brutal attack on Gaza since 1967.” A few weeks later, Israel decided that Lebanon also needed rain, and the July War began.
As the saying goes, when it rains, it rains. And Israel may have found a convenient excuse to shift the storm to Lebanon.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
