Tracing the roots of Israel’s Gaza war strategy

 By James M. Dorsey

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The images of Israel’s reduction of Gaza to a pile of rubble and destructive West Bank raids speak as much about the Strip’s devastation and Israeli West Bank counterinsurgency tactics as they indicate Israel’s vision of Gaza’s post-war future and the Jewish state’s likely response to a potential long-term Hamas-led insurgency.

The building blocks of Israel’s Gaza war strategy date back to this century’s first decade.

The war’s high civilian casualty rate and degree of physical devastation highlight the military’s toxic merger of its Dahiyeh doctrine and urban warfare strategy, pumped up by dehumanising and brutalising language employed by government officials, politicians, commanders, and religious leaders, and breakdowns in military command and control.

The images of Israeli bulldozers in devastated Gazan towns and cities and holes blasted into the walls of structures still standing are tell-tale signs. So are the videos of daily Israeli raids on West Bank towns and refugee camps that turn built environments into military assets to quash a burgeoning armed insurgency in the occupied territory.

Tactics that go beyond the utility of the Strip’s erstwhile built environment, including the seeming targeting of officials of Hamas’ pre-war administration of Gaza, many of whom were on the payroll of the internationally recognised Palestine Authority, complement the merger. The targeting seems intended to diminish Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves.

Credit: Creating Rights

“Because contemporary urban warfare plays itself out increasingly through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space, architecture, and planning become among the most important reference disciplines for military men,” said Eyal Weizman, a Haifa-born pioneer of forensic architecture that focuses on the intersection of architecture, armed conflict, and violence.

Mr. Weizman describes an urban environment’s trees, terraces, and residential buildings as weapons, ammunition, and barriers.

He notes that hilltop Israeli settler homes on the West Bank have red roofs to distinguish them from Palestinian homes when the military attacks targets in the occupied territory. Mr. Weizman says the homes are an “optical instrument…a suburban-scale optical device that can survey the entire territory around it.”

What the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against occupation in the first years of the 21^st century, revealed to Mr. Weizman was how the Israeli military deliberately and destructively reorganised cities to deprive insurgents of their strategic advantage in an urban environment.

Israeli tank in Jenin in 2002. Credit: Wikipedia

Israel developed its urban warfare strategy in 2002 in battles for the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus and the Balata refugee camp.

In Jenin, widely viewed as the Palestinian resistance’s ground zero, an Israeli column walked into an ambush in the early stages of an 11-day battle. More than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in the Jenin fighting.

The military deployed bulldozers to carve out new pathways and flatten homes to avoid being exposed to the city's existing road network.

For Mr. Weizman, “the…Israeli attacks on Jenin and Nablus were the laboratory for the US to think about urban warfare in Iraq. They were training in Israeli training sites in mock-up cities built in the desert in the south,” he said.

Israeli troops in the 2002 Battle of Nablus. Credit: Wikipedia

Nablus, with a population of 150,000 residents, “was one of the biggest laboratories in 2002 for the development of a new type of urban warfare. Israelis were studying how cities operate. They understood that in order to occupy the city, they need to move in a city in a different manner,” Mr. Weizman added.

Planning for the attacks drew lessons from the seven week-long siege and bombing of Beirut in 1982, that in the words of a battalion commander, was “not particularly successful.”

The battalion commander was responding to the mission statement of the Nablus operation’s overall commander, paratrooper and later chief-of-staff Avi Kochavi, according to retired Brigadier General Shimon Naveh, Israel’s foremost military philosopher-cum-urban-theorist, and founder and former director of the Israel Defense Forces’s (IDF) Operational Theory Research Institute.

The 2002 Nablus attack sought to eliminate a group of up to 200 armed insurgents that the Israeli military believed was operating in the city and the Balata refugee camp. More than 80 Palestinians, civilians and combatants, were killed, and numerous buildings destroyed or severely damaged in the operation.

The attacks, followed by the 2006 Lebanon war, in which Israeli airstrikes turned Dahiyeh, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut, into a bewildering, postmodern wilderness of shattered buildings, and subsequent Gaza wars in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021, shape Israeli strategy in the current war.

Dahiyeh 2006. Credit: Civil Society Knowledge Centre

The assault on Dahiyeh became the basis for the ‘Dahiyeh’ doctrine, first formulated in 2008 by General Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff who recently resigned together with former Defence Minister Benny Gantz, as a member of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s now defunct war cabinet.

The doctrine legitimises the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in countering political violence and armed resistance. It holds that in asymmetric wars in which the enemy holds territory populated by a supportive population, the destruction of infrastructure and civilians’ homes with disproportionate force is essential.

“Borders are not only on the surface. You see it very clearly in Gaza through the tunnels and the rockets,’ Mr. Weizman said, referring to Hamas’ underground tunnel network and its firing of rockets toward Israel.

Like Dahiyeh, Mr. Weizman noted that Nablus became “the most influential case study for military study of operations in urban terrain… Based on and conducted through reshaping the battle space, the intention in (the Nablus) attack was not to gain territory or control it, but to be able to locate the members of the Palestinian resistance, kill them, and leave.”

Mr. Weizman’s analysis predates the current war, which validates his approach on a scale he could not have predicted.

Israel’s concept of urban warfare reverses traditional tactics in urban settings.

“The military does not kill enemy soldiers…to obtain the strategic ground they occupy, but temporarily enters strategic ground…to kill its enemies. Killing is not a by-product of military maneuver, but the very essence of the…Israeli campaign against Palestinian guerrillas and terror,” Mr. Weizman said.

Credit: War on the Rocks

The military appears unrestrained in Gaza, using the air force and navy to execute the Dahiyeh doctrine while ground troops operate based on its two-decades-old urban warfare strategy.

In the West Bank, the mix of strategies involves a more limited version of the Dahiyeh doctrine with the use of Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to destroy roads, other infrastructure, and homes, often earmarked for destruction as collective punishment coupled with tacit support for vigilante settler attacks on Palestinians.

In 2002, the bulldozers “cut literally new streets through the dense urban fabric…to allow the tanks to come in. The resistance retreated into the core of the camp, and at the end of the battle, effectively, the bulldozers collapsed the heart of the camp on those fighters,” Mr. Weizman said.

“It wasn't the first time that Israel used bulldozers, but it was the first time that the bulldozers were integrated into the battlefield. The fleet of bulldozers grew exponentially, and the bulldozers became the means of Israeli fighting in a Palestinian urban fabric,” Mr. Weizman added.

Israel’s keen understanding of architecture’s significance has inspired armed forces in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere to establish academies focused on turning built environments into military assets.

In the current hostilities, Israel has expanded the strategy by driving armed vehicles into buildings that create holes in the walls through which the military can deploy soldiers. 

Credit: Al Jazeera

In an undated video, then Lt. Col. Naveh, dressed in a T-shirt and baggy military pants, trains Israeli soldiers in his notion of urban warfare.

“By following the structure of the street, I’m giving (the insurgents) my unit on a silver platter. At that point, you say: ‘Hold on, they are looking for ‘my company.’ I have to teach them a lesson they won’t forget.’ We leave the streets empty and enter the buildings by drilling holes in the wall,” Mr. Naveh said in the video.

In an essay describing a war council in advance of the 2002 attacks, Mr. Naveh warned the troops that the insurgents “expect us to come in the old style—mechanized formations in cohesive lines and massed columns conforming to the geometrical order of the street network pattern—Balata, almost deterministically, becomes a Palestinian Stalingrad.”

Responding to Mr. Naveh’s challenge, Amir, a battalion commander, argued the troops needed to “organise ourselves for breaking through walls and moving through the houses of individual families” rather than attack from the street while avoiding civilian casualties “at all costs.”

Mr. Kochavi, the overall commander and a graduate of Mr. Naveh’s Operational Theory Research Institute, embraced Mr. Amir’s idea, adding, “Our movement through the buildings will push (the insurgents) into the streets and alleys, where we will hunt them down.”

Lost in today’s Israeli war conduct that merges the Dahiyeh doctrine with Israeli urban warfare strategy are Mr. Kochavi’s parting words at the end of the 2002 war council.

“Remember (Palestinian civilians) are victims not only of our wrath but also of the sympathy of the insurgents who exploit them. In other words, a most deadly game in which they are the ultimate victims in every sense has been imposed on them. Be careful! Show respect! And pay attention to their pragmatic needs! Mr. Kochavi cautioned.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.