One of the features of the war in Gaza, now in its seventh month, is the indiscriminate nature of Israeli military operations. Over 32,000 Gazans have been killed so far, with perhaps as many as 75,000 wounded.
Yet the government of Israel, according to Ron Dermer, Minister of Strategic Affairs has been making “unprecedented” efforts to limit collateral damage and civilian death. “If we wanted to do it fast,” he said, we’d harm a lot more civilians.” We can count on Dermer to be truthful, since, as he said recently, “I know what's happening in Gaza, because I sit in the Israeli war cabinet and day after day we get the reports.”
This conflict has many sources, including the horrendous Hamas attack on Israeli villages of October 7, and the politics of revenge in the current Israeli government. But I want to focus here on war doctrine and targeting technology that are playing a major role in the civilian damage we see every day.
The inhumane, large scale killing of the innocent we see is not only a result of a passion for revenge run amuck. It grows, in part, out of the doctrine the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) relies on – the “Dahiya Doctrine” – and the use of artificial intelligence in a targeting system called “Lavender.”
The Dahiya Doctrine and Lavender have led, inevitably, to overkill. The Dahiya Doctrine emerged from the 2006 Israeli destruction of the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, during Israel’s assault on Lebanon in 2006.
Thanks to the Institute for Middle East Understanding, I can quote at length from a 2008 strategy paper by Gabi Siboni, Director of the Military and Strategic Affairs Program at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), entitled "Disproportionate Force: Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War."
'With an outbreak of hostilities [with Hezbollah], the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's 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….Israel again will not be able to limit its response to actions whose severity is seemingly proportionate to an isolated incident. Rather, it will have to respond disproportionately in order to make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt the calm currently prevailing along its borders. Israel must be prepared for deterioration and escalation, as well as for a full-scale confrontation. Such preparedness is obligatory in order to prevent long term attrition.’
The doctrine appears to have been put into almost immediate effect in Gaza, during the three-week-long Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 Israeli response to Hamas shelling operations. Cast Lead killed roughly 1400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 300 children. In its country report, Amnesty International asserted that “Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians.” As then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it: “The government's position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate.”
The Dahiya Doctrine is on steroids in the current war, with “deterrence” as its objective.
Military technology now being used by the IDF further amplifies the disproportionate killing of civilians. The IDF is determined to wipe out Hamas. Using artificial intelligence, the “Lavender” system identifies and locates Gazans who are potentially Hamas military operatives. The system was reported in a lengthy investigative piece by +972 Magazine (the international telephone code for Israel) and Local Call, related progressive news sources in Israel. According to +972 the Lavender system is designed to identify all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. Their sources in the IDF told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which counted as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
The AI capacity of Lavender software scrutinizes intelligence data on the 2.3 million Gazan residents. It ranks Gazans in this data as to how likely they are to be active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. There is so much intelligence data that AI is the most efficient tool for this purpose. But independent human screening of the results is thin.
The use of AI and the relative lack of independent scrutiny of its results, combined with the targeting and technology used to fire drone-carried munitions, has led directly to the widespread collateral damage we have seen. Because the decision was made to scrub the data all the way down to anyone potentially involved, regardless of military importance, 37,000 Gazans have been identified as Hamas military militants, according to the +972 reporting (based on interviews with six IDF operators of the Lavender system). The IDF denies such a “kill list” exists, but given the Israeli determination to eradicate Hamas in this operation, it is plausible that it does.
The system kicks out a target. A location of the target is needed to execute a strike. IDF has found that targeting homes makes sense, as that is easy to track (possibly using cell phone data). Once the target is identified, the home is the focus (one of the identification systems is called “Where’s Daddy?”). Once the target is home, a drone strike can be executed swiftly.
The system is designed to move fast. There are few external, independent, human analyses of whether the target choice is accurate; according to the investigation, only the gender is reviewed – men are the targets. Moreover, because the system focuses on lower-level militants, it is not cost-effective to check out every target in detail.
The same applies to weapons technology. IDF has only a given number of highly accurate weapons; those tend to be reserved for high value targets – leadership and intelligence operatives, for example. Lower-level militants get a “dumb” bomb, which is less accurate, but also less expensive. According to US intelligence (as reported by CNN) Israel’s strikes have been 45% dumb bombs, with greater collateral damage and civilian death.
To add to the risk to civilians, the IDF is reported to have set a permissive ceiling for civilian casualties, sometimes 15 or 20 civilians to one militant target. Called “collateral damage degrees,” various ratios of acceptable civilian deaths have been reported – with 15-20 per militant being common. (Senior Hamas operatives as targets might lead to much higher collateral damage degrees as much as 100 to one), according to the investigation.
This murderous strategy and technology in the present day reminds me of Vietnam, which which, according to the government of Vietnam, led to over 2 million civilian deaths on both sides (along with 1.1 million in North Vietnam/Viet Cong deaths and perhaps 240,000 South Vietnamese military deaths, according to the Pentagon). Like Lavender, the military system was demanding results in the form of statistics. In that case, the “body count.” There was a false precision to that count, just as this current war lends itself to a false precision. Killing bodies was the goal, not the careful identification of targets, leading to many innocent deaths amply described in Nick Turse’s book Kill Anything that Moves.
As for the truthfulness of Dermer and the policy-makers, shades of Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and scores of Vietnam War military briefers. The Israeli government did not invent bending the truth while military operations are carried out according to other algorithms. There appears to be no force that can stop the killing; it is now running its course. The truth and the innocent are paying the price.
I'm not going to go into the history and persecution of the Jews. Nor am I going to talk about the vileness of Hamas' attack on Israel. Nor am I going to talk about how Hamas is holding Israelis hostage. All of that is wrong. But the Israeli reaction of "kill them all" is an act of great cowardness. They have the means ( tragically with our help) of decimating the 17 square miles that is Gaza.
The reason the casualties in Gaza are so high is because Israel is attacking people in a cage with no means of getting out of the way. Israel controls the two exits to Gaza. They control the waters that provide the fourth wall of the cage. It is ridiculously easy to just obliterate everything. The stated goal is to destroy Hamas. But Hamas is not an organization with headquarters and people in uniforms. Hamas is woven into the population the way a religious group is woven into the population of a country. But Israel's apparent strategy is to kill them all because if they all are dead then Hamas is dead.
I'm not going to go into the history and persecution of the Jews. Nor am I going to talk about the vileness of Hamas' attack on Israel. Nor am I going to talk about how heinous it is that Hamas is holding Israelis hostage. All of that is wrong. But the Israeli reaction of "kill them all" is an act of great cowardness. They have the means ( tragically with our help) of decimating the 17 square miles that is Gaza and are doing so systematically and with careful planning. It is a simple minded solution. It is the act of a child who thinks an eye for an eye is the solution to an age old problem.
The solution is not in violence. You can't "kill" an ideology. Both sides have deep ideological stances. Murder will not change someone's beliefs. It deepens it. It is one of the reasons the United States strategy of trying to get rid of "terrorist" organization is so ineffectual. An ideology -- especially a religious ideology -- is not changed with violence or the threat of violence. But I digress.
The solution is in dialogue -- adult to adult. Dialogue means listening, debating and compromising. Dialogue is slow and difficult. It is based if not on mutual respect at least on an understanding that the dual, intertwined histories have equal weight.
But that takes courage that Israelis and Palestinians seem to lack. It takes courage for both sides to back down from their absolutist positions. So Hamas hides in the rubble of Gaza while Israelis slowly and methodically kill them all.
This whole War is ghastly!!!!