A recent Times of Israel headline announced: “Israeli army cadets train for takeover of Hezbollah-held Lebanese village.”
Lest the innocent reader deduce from this phrasing that there is in fact a specific Lebanese village held by Hezbollah facing imminent assault by Israeli cadets, the article goes on to explain that the training is merely in preparation for “a future war”.
Indeed, Israel has been talking about the next war with Lebanon since, well, the last one, which took place in 2006 and resulted in the Israeli military slaughter of some 1,200 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.
Granted, the concept of civilians versus combatants can be tricky in the Lebanese context, since one can assume that many Hezbollah militants wouldn’t be militants at all if Israel had not brutally occupied the country for 22 years while perpetrating periodic massacres.
At the start of the 2006 war, former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Halutz threatened to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” - an objective that was dutifully pursued as Israel went about obliterating roads, bridges and entire neighbourhoods.
South Lebanon was particularly battered, as were Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh - also known as a “Hezbollah stronghold” in the mindless and carnage-abetting lingo of the Western media.
I visited the area a month after the conclusion of the war, and was able to witness the landscape of craters where apartment blocks had once stood. From this malevolent Israeli performance emerged the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine”, which the Times of Israel defines as a “military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against a militant entity by destroying civilian infrastructure”.
So much for the Geneva Conventions. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.