From Dahieh to Gaza: Israel’s Doctrines of Destruction

The dehumanization of the Shi’a community by mainstream, right-wing Christian figures and affiliated media, as well as liberal “independents,” parrots Israel’s rhetoric, casting them as “foreigners” or “Iranians,” and accusing them of embedding fighters among displaced civilians and hiding weapons in homes. Some have seized on this war to tacitly endorse collaboration with Israel in efforts to disarm Hezbollah. This narrative has been crafted over years, beginning with the Beirut blast in 2020, when the racialization of the Shi’a, and the spread of phrases like “they don’t look like us” became commonplace.

Alongside inciting Christian parties to take up arms against Hezbollah, Israel is also working to heighten fears within Christian and other host communities sheltering displaced Shi’a. This includes amplifying baseless claims that Shi’a are hiding weapons in their homes, striking mixed-sectarian areas where Shi’a have sought refuge, targeting buildings housing refugees, and even threatening landlords who are renting flats to displaced Shi’a. Although all sects, including Christians, have generally been welcoming to displaced Shi’a, there have been numerous reports of landlords and tenants evicting Shi’a families, and businesses refusing to serve them in grocery stores and other services due to these growing fears.

This is what I call the immiseration of the community. On top of a physical erasure in terms of killing them, and targeting them primarily as a form of collective punishment for supporting Hebzollah, driving a wedge between them and Hezbollah, I do think there is a belief that you can’t eradicate Hezbollah unless you eradicate the entire community, which is the same logic being applied in Gaza. So I don’t think it’s necessarily any inherent hatred of Shi’a, it’s just that they happen to be the sect that overwhelmingly supports Hebzollah. It’s essentially about targeting the welcoming environment  — bia’a el hadine — or let’s say the society of the resistance community. Because Hezbollah is a grassroots movement.

There is a belief that you can’t eradicate Hezbollah unless you eradicate the entire community, which is the same logic being applied in Gaza.

As for robbing them of their land: when you displace people, you are robbing people of their land, of their livelihoods. When you hit Dahieh, you’re destroying thousands of businesses, with each bombing of these buildings. I was reading the other day that hundreds of businesses in that street will close down so they actually don’t just try to politically disenfranchise the Shi’a, they also want to completely impoverish them as well, by destroying any socio-economic gains they’ve made over the decades, which they have, because originally the Shi’a have been the most marginalized community in Lebanon, historically speaking. Living in the poorest areas of Lebanon, I’m talking about the 1960s and 1970s here, having the lowest numbers of university and high school graduates and so on. Those figures drastically changed over the decades. And now we see there is a parity between the Shi’a and other groups, so Israel is determined to set them back decades.

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It’s an attempt to re-engineer that marginalization which has diminished considerably in terms of socio-economic status and which Hezbollah has also helped curb — not just through individual efforts by the community, in terms of it becoming more socially upwardly mobile, through education and through their careers, and so on. But also through Hezbollah’s social services, which have enabled the community to rise socially and economically over the decades. So hitting those institutions is not just because Israel is out to target banks, but because it’s morally bankrupt and compensating for its lack of military gains, aiming to hold back the entire community, economically and socially.

Israel’s ultimate strategic objective appears to be to encourage Christians to form their own cantons, a long-held ambition of right-wing Christian parties like the Lebanese Forces and the supposedly more “centrist” Kataeb. This would effectively push the Shi’a into isolated, homogeneous territories that could be turned into kill zones, similar to what was done to Gazans — trapping them in areas marked for systematic extermination.

Encouraging Christians to form their own cantons would effectively push the Shi’a into isolated, homogeneous territories that could be turned into kill zones, similar to what was done to Gazans — trapping them in areas marked for systematic extermination.

I don’t think it’s likely [right-wing Christians parties] are going to take up arms at all. They would have to be incredibly delusional to do that. And when [leader of the Lebanese Forces Samir] Geagea called for that broad meeting for all opposition groups [in Maarab on October 12], no one showed up. I think there’s a very real understanding, among most groups at least that Hezbollah can’t be confronted militarily. My biggest fear when I was writing that thread was about how this could lead to the sort of clashes we saw in Hamra, for example, where there was a clash between the army and displaced people that were unjustly evicted. Things like that. It could be between ordinary Shi’a people and security forces, it could be between different communities like Christians versus Shi’a, so I’m talking here about the part that happens before a kind of armed confrontation, which could very likely happen because groups like the Lebanese Forces do have their own kind of militiamen in various areas of Beirut. This has happened in the past, in Ain el-Remmaneh, and Tahwita, if you recall, a couple of years ago. Things like that happen, these clashes between individuals or small cells and that could potentially happen at some point using the pretext of displaced Shi’a.

The overwhelming majority of Shi’a already see Hezbollah as a protector against the existential threat posed by Israel, but now they will rally even more strongly behind it, viewing it as their only defense against this new danger from a right-wing threat which has a history of massacring Palestinians in Lebanon.

The real fear, I think, is the fate of the displaced. We’re talking about a million people here, I presume the overwhelming majority of whom are Shi’a and just based on so many I know — it has become sectarian, like racial profiling. It’s happened with so many of my friends who feel so unwelcome in, sadly, certain Christian communities, and the problem is that a lot of this fear is quite legitimate among other communities in that Israel is randomly targeting residential buildings where displaced Shi’a people happen to be, they’re not targeting only Hezbollah officials. This is quite a legitimate fear and because people are either ignorant or fooled by right-wing media in Lebanon, be it MTV or LBC or others, they believe in the narrative that there are armed elements among the displaced or weapons in their midst, which is what [leader of the Kataeb and MP] Samy Gemayel and others are claiming.

On the other hand, there are very real fears, for example, of landlords being threatened by Israel to evict people. It’s that whole environment; you have a very vulnerable community and a very paranoid social milieu even if it was originally the case that the majority of the Lebanese of different sects sympathized with the displaced people. It’s basically about: What about their fate? Is this a form of not just displacement, but is Israel actually trying to ethnically cleanse them not only with its own strikes but also internally? This seems to be a two-pronged strategy to ethnically cleanse [the Shi’a community] and leave them with nowhere to go but back to where they came from. I saw a woman on TV in Hamra who said “I’d rather go back to Dahieh and die there.” So is that what is happening? I do think we are seeing the first signs of ethnic cleansing in that respect and Israel would like other sects in Lebanon to help achieve that goal. I don’t think it will happen.

The overwhelming majority of Shi’a already see Hezbollah as a protector against the existential threat posed by Israel, but now they will rally even more strongly behind it, viewing it as their only defense against this new danger from a right-wing threat which has a history of massacring Palestinians in Lebanon.