U.S. Media Parrots Israeli Propaganda to Justify Bombing Lebanese Civilians

Last Friday, Israel attacked a meeting of Hezbollah leaders in the southern Beirut neighborhood of al-Qaem. It was an assassination operation following the detonation, days before, of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been packed with explosives.

In al-Qaem, the Israeli military boasted of a “precise strike” in the “heart of Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.” The language conjured images of a brazen operation against a well-protected military compound, a Pentagon of its kind, a wholly valiant endeavor.

In reality, this was a massive strike that completely leveled a residential building, one that killed Hezbollah leaders just as much as it did countless families inside. Many of those families remain under the rubble, with others still missing.

Almost every time news emerges from south Beirut, the Western news media parrots the language of the Israeli military, as if “Hezbollah stronghold” is part of the neighborhood’s name. Defenders of this kind of language may point to the usage of “strongholds” to describe bases of support for the Democratic Party or U.K.’s Labour, but these are usages in a Western context, a use nobody is confused by.

In Lebanon, the connotations are obvious. And they directly serve Israeli interests.

Casting south Beirut, colloquially known in Arabic as Dahiya, as a military stronghold, gives Israel license to apply massive force — targeting civilian infrastructure as part of its main thrust, just as it would Hezbollah leaders. The stated aim is to deter any future attacks by hitting Hezbollah’s most concentrated base of support. Israel makes civilians pay the price for whatever Hezbollah ostensibly does and, thereafter, blames Hezbollah for the deaths the Israelis themselves cause.

The strategy even has a name: the Dahiya Doctrine, coined after Israel almost destroyed the area in the 2006 war with Hezbollah. It would go on to become Israel’s modus operandi in future wars, and the road map for today’s total destruction of Gaza.

Now, with Israeli attacks on Lebanon rapidly escalating, the Dahiya Doctrine is coming back home — justified by the language of the area as a militant “stronghold.”

“Dahiya Doctrine”

Dahiya is a collection of mostly majority Shia Muslim neighborhoods just outside the city limits of Beirut, where hundreds of thousands live. It is far more densely populated than the capital proper. Within Dahiya, several refugee camps for Palestinians and other groups exist, even more densely populated than the urban municipalities surrounding it.

In the 1980s during the country’s 15-year civil war, the area was subject to massacres by members of Israeli-backed right-wing Lebanese Christian paramilitaries. Dahiya then suffered immense killing again in 2006 when it was subject to massive Israeli bombardment during the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Groups like Hezbollah that opposed the organizations that wrought this destruction enjoy significant support in the area. Hezbollah is a political party, with both military and civil wings, an organization that interacts with state institutions and runs in elections just like any other political party in Lebanon does. Walking through Dahiya, especially these days, you would need to be blind to miss photo after photo of fallen Hezbollah fighters or portraits of the Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

Though the name “Dahiya Doctrine” would come later, shortly after the war, Israeli military officials spoke openly about their approach in Dahiya and declared a policy explicit in its intention to make no distinction between civilian and military infrastructure.

In a 2008 interview, Israeli Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who helped formulate the doctrine, made it clear that disproportionate attacks against civilian infrastructure was the strategy, not an unintended effect.

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” he said. “We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there.

From our perspective, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

He emphasized, “This is not a suggestion. This is a strategy. And it has been authorized.”

Lebanese lives are considered expendable in the battle against Hezbollah, plain and simple. The repercussions of this explicit shift have become even more evident in the Gaza Strip.

Gaza as Hamas Base

For months now, we have seen report after report stating that nearly everything in the Gaza Strip is a Hamas base — a place housing Hamas terrorists, a Hamas command center.

Mosques, hospitals, and schools are all specific targets for the Israeli military, and their ties to Hamas are often not fully explained. When explanations are provided, they usually rely on any association with Hamas — the governing body of the region in which they are located.

Mainstream Western media has obediently adopted this narrative, setting the stage for places like al-Shifa Hospital to be razed without much attention — or substantial evidence. The resurrection of the Dahiya Doctrine in Lebanon employs the same rationale: Anything associated with Hezbollah automatically becomes a military target in the most expansive manner.

However, Western media would never accept this kind of language when directed at Israelis. No American news outlet would seriously entertain the notion that the Israel Defense Forces are using “human shields” by locating their headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.

In response to a Yemeni drone attack in Tel Aviv, the IDF produced an image of the area highlighting its proximity to vital civilian infrastructure and condemning its recklessness — apparently without any sense of irony.

The intention behind this language is unmistakable: to erase the existence of these places, cities, towns, and neighborhoods like Dahiya as thriving population centers, places with political complexities like many others, but primarily the residences of millions of individuals going about their daily lives.

As long as they are outside the spheres of influence of America and Israel, the lives of these individuals are deemed expendable, treated as mere casualties in ways that Americans and Israelis would never tolerate. Their lives are only deemed significant when they can be used to condemn groups opposed by the West, and when they resist, they are quickly forgotten.

Dahiya, with all its inhabitants, should not have to validate their humanity to the world. It should be a given.

Please rewrite this sentence.

Source link