{"id":57895,"date":"2015-05-11T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=57895"},"modified":"2015-05-08T15:59:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T14:59:50","slug":"the-day-after-the-israeli-defense-forces-new-tactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/the-day-after-the-israeli-defense-forces-new-tactics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day After: The Israeli Defense Forces\u2019 New Tactics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turning Civilians into Legitimate Targets<\/em><\/p>\n

4 May 2015 – <\/em>Several months ago, a young woman working in Kibbutz Dorot\u2019s carrot fields noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground with a short inscription in Arabic. It looked like a treasure map. She put it in her pocket. Some time later, she gave it to her friend Avihai, who works for Breaking the Silence<\/a>, an organisation of military veterans who collect testimony from Israeli soldiers to provide a record of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Avihai was in the middle of interviewing soldiers about their experiences during Operation Protective Edge, Israel\u2019s assault on the Gaza Strip last summer. He recognised the piece of paper as a leaflet that had been dropped by an Israeli plane above Palestinian neighbourhoods in the northern part of the Strip; the wind had blown it six miles from its intended landing point.<\/p>\n

The leaflet helps explain why 70 per cent of the 2220 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians. The red line on the map traces a route from a bright blue area labelled Beit Lahia, a Palestinian town of 60,000 inhabitants at the north edge of the Strip, and moves south through Muaskar Jabalia to Jabalia city. The text reads:<\/p>\n

Military Notification to the Residents of Beit Lahia<\/strong><\/p>\n

The IDF will be undertaking forceful and assertive air operations against terrorist elements and infrastructure in the locations from which they launch their missiles at the State of Israel. These locations include:<\/p>\n

From east Atatra to Salatin Street. From west [unclear] to Jabalia Camp.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You must evacuate your homes immediately and head toward southern Jabalia town along the following road:<\/p>\n

Falluja Road, until 12 noon, Sunday 13 July 2014.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The IDF does not intend to harm you or your families. These operations are temporary and will be of short duration. Any person, however, who violates these instructions and does not evacuate his home immediately puts his own life as well as the lives of his household in danger. Those who take heed will be spared.<\/p>\n

\u2018The significance of this leaflet,\u2019 Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, \u2018cannot be appreciated fully without reading our new report.\u2019 The report<\/a> is made up of 111 testimonies, provided by around seventy soldiers who participated in the fighting.<\/p>\n

One thing is immediately clear from the interviews: the IDF\u2019s working assumption was that once the leaflets were dropped, anyone who refused to move was a legitimate target:<\/p>\n

Q: You said earlier that you knew the neighbourhood was supposed to be empty of civilians?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: Yes. That\u2019s what they told us \u2026 they told us that the civilians had been informed via leaflets scattered in the area, and that it was supposed to be devoid of civilians, and civilians who remained there were civilians who apparently chose to be there.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: Who told you that?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: The commanders, in off-the-record type conversations, or during all kinds of briefings.<\/em><\/p>\n

The IDF has the technology to tell whether people had actually left, but the claim that \u2018no civilians should be in the area\u2019 is a recurring refrain.<\/p>\n

The land invasion began on 17 July and was generally limited to within a mile of the border. An infantry soldier deployed either in or near Beit Lahia described a typical incident:<\/p>\n

There was one time when I looked at some place and was sure I saw someone moving. Maybe I imagined it, some curtain blowing, I don\u2019t know. So I said: \u2018I see something moving.\u2019 I asked [permission] to open fire toward that spot, and I opened fire and [the other soldiers] hit it with a barrage \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: What were the rules of engagement?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: There weren\u2019t really any rules of engagement \u2026 They told us: \u2018There aren\u2019t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.\u2019 Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn\u2019t a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it\u2019s cool, no big deal. First of all because it\u2019s Gaza, and second because that\u2019s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us \u2013 they told us, \u2018Don\u2019t be afraid to shoot,\u2019 and they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians. <\/em><\/p>\n

It seems safe to assume, however, that most of the civilians who died weren\u2019t killed by infantry troops. One of the IDF\u2019s basic doctrines is to try to guarantee zero risk for its troops. The region was \u2018softened\u2019 by artillery fire for nine days before the ground forces were scheduled to invade. Planes, helicopters and drones (though the IDF does not admit to using killer drones) bombarded the region from the air, and there was heavy artillery fire from inside Israel. As one soldier put it,<\/p>\n

We knew that by the time we got there on Friday there were not supposed to be any people in the area, since leaflets were dispersed and also because there wasn\u2019t very much left of the place. The artillery corps and the air force really cleaned that place up.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Israeli zero risk doctrine was developed with the help of Asa Kasher, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and one of the authors of the IDF\u2019s ethical code. Kasher interprets just war theory and international humanitarian law as stipulating a hierarchy of protection: Israeli civilians must be protected at all costs, then come IDF soldiers, and only then do the enemy\u2019s civilian population enter into the equation. \u2018When it is impossible to accomplish a military mission without endangering the lives of a terrorist\u2019s non-terrorist neighbours,\u2019 Kasher writes in \u2018The Ethics of Protective Edge\u2019, \u2018as much compassion as possible under the circumstances must be shown without aborting the mission or raising the risk to Israeli soldiers.\u2019<\/p>\n

As the troops prepared to enter Gaza, artillery and intelligence officers determined which targets should be eliminated before the ground invasion: tall buildings overlooking the incursion route, for example, and places from which rockets had been launched at Israel. One soldier describes a high-ranking officer looking at an aerial photo on which targets had been circled, and then pointing at several other Palestinian houses and instructing the artillery officer to eliminate them too.<\/p>\n

The Israeli military fired 34,000 artillery rounds during the war: 12,000 smoke, 3000 illumination and 19,000 explosive. With an American-made Howitzer 155-millimetre cannon, a strike is considered precise when the round falls anywhere within 100 metres of the target. Howitzer shells can kill anyone within 50 metres and injure anyone within 100 metres.<\/p>\n

There is this perception that we know how to do everything super accurately, as if it doesn\u2019t matter which weapon is being used \u2026 But no, these weapons are statistical, and they hit 50 metres to the right or 100 metres to the left, and it\u2019s unpleasant. What happens is, for seven straight days it\u2019s non-stop bombardment, that\u2019s what happens in practice. <\/em><\/p>\n

The artillery officer has to ensure the target is a certain distance from sensitive sites, such as UN facilities, schools, clinics and hospitals. These distances are not set in stone, but determined by what the IDF terms \u2018activity levels\u2019. If, for example, the activity level is one, then the target of a 155-millimetre projectile can\u2019t be within 500 metres of a school. But if the activity level is changed to three, then the safety range is decreased dramatically. An officer explains:<\/p>\n

First level means you can fire artillery up to a certain distance from civilians, or from a place where you think it\u2019s likely there\u2019ll be civilians \u2026 For fighter jets and the bigger bombs of one ton, half a ton, it\u2019s defined verbally \u2026 as \u2018Low level of damage expected to civilians.\u2019 Next is the second level. The mortar ranges stay the same, and for artillery the distance from civilians decreases. For jets, it says, \u2018Moderate harm to civilians\u2019 or \u2018Moderate harm to civilians is expected,\u2019 or \u2018Moderate collateral damage\u2019, something like that. This means something undefined, something that\u2019s according to the way the commander sees things and the mood he\u2019s in: \u2018Let\u2019s decide ourselves what \u201cmoderate\u201d means.\u2019 In the third level, the artillery\u2019s [safety range from civilians] gets cut by about half. I\u2019m not talking about jets, where there\u2019s already significant damage and it\u2019s considered acceptable, that\u2019s the definition. We expect a high level of harm to civilians. Like, it\u2019s OK from our perspective, because we\u2019re in the third level. They aren\u2019t given a specific, defined number, this is something I remember clearly. That\u2019s left to the commander.<\/em><\/p>\n

Another soldier adds that the activity levels reflect \u2018the degree of collateral damage you\u2019re allowed to cause. [They] reflect the means that you\u2019re permitted to use, and the distance you need to maintain from sensitive locations when you shoot. They reflect a whole lot of parameters concerning the activation of fire.\u2019<\/p>\n

There can be many reasons for changing the activity level. Some have to do with the intensity of the fighting. When Hamas blew up an armoured personnel carrier in Shuja\u2019iyya and killed seven Israeli soldiers, the activity level immediately changed:<\/p>\n

There were many, many targets that [weren\u2019t attacked] because they didn\u2019t qualify under the firing policy, and then after Shuja\u2019iyya for example, suddenly some of those targets did get approved. The sort of problematic targets that were at a certain distance from some school \u2013 suddenly stuff like that did get approved.<\/em><\/p>\n

The activity level may also change due to specific intelligence, or simply because the only remaining targets are not within the range permitted by level one, \u2018because the \u201ctarget bank\u201d had been depleted.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Hamas is pushing for a display of victory,\u2019 that\u2019s always the expression used \u2026 this sweeping expression that\u2019s used at the end of every round [of fighting]. [There is talk that] the delegations are in Cairo, or on their way to Cairo, or will soon be arriving in Cairo. But the fighting keeps going on, and even if you think it\u2019s about to end \u2013 you have to keep acting like nothing\u2019s about to end. So that\u2019s why you go up a level, to turn the threat around and also as a show of force. And so it\u2019s possible that the target will be approved if it\u2019s justified, if there\u2019s a good reason, if it\u2019s a valuable target, or if there\u2019s a good chance to hit it in a way that\u2019ll look good to the Israeli audience, and look bad for the Palestinian audience. That\u2019ll hurt the military rocket-firing capabilities of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or of other organisations \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: Collateral damage means only bodily harm, or also damage to property?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: Bodily harm.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: Property isn\u2019t counted at all?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: Not as far as the levels \u2013 the levels are practically binary. These are the levels of collateral damage, and the grading is based solely on human lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

After the 2006 Lebanon war, the IDF realised that its strictly hierarchical command structure had hindered the war effort. The idea, which is now common in the US military as well, is to create a network of interconnected decentralised cells with significant autonomy to make executive decisions. In the words of General Stanley McChrystal, who headed the US Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, \u2018to defeat a networked enemy, we had to become a network ourselves.\u2019 Each cell is made up of officers from different branches \u2013 infantry, artillery, air force, military intelligence, secret service agencies \u2013 who work together on the basis of shared information and shared strategy. The way the IDF cells function is classified, but it seems likely there are two main kinds: \u2018attack cells\u2019 and \u2018assistance cells\u2019. Attack cells would include \u2018hunting cells\u2019 whose goal is to hunt down Palestinian militants and assassinate them. There are also thought to be \u2018fishing cells\u2019, whose task is to monitor a particular area to determine who the \u2018big fish\u2019 in it are; and \u2018real estate cells\u2019, which identify and monitor strategic buildings and facilities so that they can be destroyed at the right moment if necessary.<\/p>\n

One soldier, who was very likely a member of an \u2018attack cell\u2019, was asked what happens when the target bank is depleted, i.e. whether the IDF attacks the houses of lower ranking Hamas activists when most higher ranking targets have already been eliminated. The soldier replied:<\/p>\n

Absolutely. See, you start the fighting with a very clear \u2018target list\u2019 that has been assembled over a long period of time, and there are also units whose objective is to mark new targets in real time. When we start running out [of targets], then we begin hitting targets that are higher on collateral damage levels, and pay less and less attention to this. But there are also all sorts of efforts aimed at gathering intelligence that\u2019s specifically for establishing new targets like, for example, which areas are being used to launch [missiles or mortars toward Israel], statistics on where rockets are being fired from, where mortars are being fired from. [The co-ordinates] are calculated in a pretty precise way, and are used to try and figure out where it\u2019s likely that there is a rocket-launching infrastructure. And you say: \u2018OK, I\u2019ll strike that piece of land, because every morning at 7 a.m., ten mortar shells are fired from there.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

After the nine-day artillery assault on the Gaza Strip, the troops marched in. The testimonies suggest that every infantry brigade was accompanied by a tank battalion, an engineering battalion and several D9 bulldozers, and had back-up artillery at its disposal as well as constant reconnaissance that was communicated to the officers on the ground through an assistance cell. The soldiers say that the ground troops had instructions to kill any person within range. Before they entered Palestinian houses, a tank would shoot a shell to create a way in or soldiers would use hand-held missile launchers. Anyone inside would be incapacitated and so unable to surprise the troops. Once they were in, any movement outside was considered suspicious.<\/p>\n

Several soldiers said that at first there were arguments about how they should behave in the Palestinian houses they occupied. In briefings, soldiers were instructed not to loot or plunder, and some argued that they shouldn\u2019t sleep on the mattresses or make coffee on the stove. Others disagreed:<\/p>\n

The way I saw it, I pictured this family returning to their house and seeing it totally wrecked: the windows all broken, the floors torn up and the walls messed up by grenades; and they say: \u2018The sons of bitches ate my cornflakes, I can\u2019t believe it.\u2019 No chance. They wouldn\u2019t care if you used their cooking gas, if you used their kitchen. That\u2019s total bullshit in my opinion. I don\u2019t think that type of quandary is complex at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many others began to understand that the ethical dilemmas raised in the briefings were a farce:<\/p>\n

We knew that we were entering a house and that we could be good kids, on our best behaviour, but even then a D9 [armoured bulldozer] would show up and flatten the house. We figured out pretty quickly that every house we left, a D9 would show up and raze it. The neighbourhood we were in, what characterised it operationally was that it commanded a view of the entire area of the [Israel-Gaza border fence] and also some of the [Israeli] border towns. In the southern and some of the eastern parts of Juhar ad-Dik, we understood pretty quickly that the houses would not be left standing \u2026 At a certain point we understood it was a pattern: you leave a house and the house is gone; after two or three houses you figure out that there\u2019s a pattern. The D9 comes and flattens it.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the Dahiya doctrine in action, named after the Beirut neighbourhood which Israel turned into rubble in 2006. According to Gabi Siboni from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, the IDF needs<\/p>\n

to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy\u2019s 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. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritise damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.<\/em><\/p>\n

According to the 2009 Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the essence of the doctrine was \u2018widespread destruction as a means of deterrence\u2019. Soldiers talk of the \u2018day after\u2019 effect:<\/p>\n

Part of the [military] engineering rationale, of what\u2019s called \u2018the day after\u2019 \u2013 I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the term that\u2019s published \u2013 is that when we blow up and flatten the area, we can in effect sterilise it. Throughout the period of combat, one keeps in mind that there is this thing called \u2018the day after\u2019, which is: the day we leave [the Gaza Strip], the more [areas] left wide open and as \u2018clean\u2019 as possible the better. One decides on a certain line \u2013 during the days after Operation Cast Lead it was 300 metres from the fence \u2013 and this area is levelled, flattened. Doesn\u2019t matter if there are groves there, doesn\u2019t matter if there are houses, doesn\u2019t matter if there is a gas station \u2013 it\u2019s all flattened because we are at war, so we are allowed to. You can justify anything you do during wartime \u2026 Everything suddenly sounds reasonable even though it isn\u2019t really reasonable. We had a few D9s in our battalion and I can attest that the D9s alone destroyed hundreds of structures. It was in the debriefing. There were a few more structures that we blew up in the end. Obviously there were all kinds of other things, but the D9 was the main tool, it doesn\u2019t stop working. Anything that looks suspicious, whether it\u2019s just in order to clear a path, whether it\u2019s some other thing, it takes it down. That\u2019s the mission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Another soldier describes the last hour before a ceasefire:<\/p>\n

There was a humanitarian ceasefire that went into effect at 6 a.m. I remember they told us at 5.15: \u2018Look, we\u2019re going to put on a show.\u2019 It was amazing, the air force\u2019s precision. The first shell struck at exactly quarter past five and the last one struck at 5.59 and 59 seconds. It was crazy. Fire, non-stop shelling of [a] neighbourhood [east of Beit Hanoun] \u2026 Non-stop. Just non-stop. The entire Beit Hanoun compound in ruins.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: When you saw this neighbourhood on your way out, what did you see?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: When we left it was still intact. We were sent out of Beit Hanoun ahead of the ceasefire, ahead of the air force strikes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: And when you went back in [after the air strikes], what did you see of that neighbourhood?<\/em><\/p>\n

A: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Like the opening scene in The Pianist. There\u2019s that famous photo that they always show on trips to Poland that shows Warsaw before the war and Warsaw after the Second World War. The photo shows the heart of Warsaw and it\u2019s this classy European city, and then they show it at the end of the war. They show the exact same neighbourhood, only it has just one house left standing, and the rest is just ruins. That\u2019s what it looked like.<\/em><\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Neve Gordon<\/em>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0Israel\u2019s Occupation<\/a>\u00a0as well as \u2018The Human Right to Dominate<\/a>\u2018 (co-authored with Nicola Perugini, forthcoming June 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 lrb.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turning Civilians into Legitimate Targets<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}