Last Friday, Israel attacked a meeting of Hezbollah leaders in the southern Beirut neighborhood of al-Qaem. It was an assassination operation following the detonation, days before, of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been packed with explosives.

In al-Qaem, the Israeli military boasted of a “precise strike” in the “heart of Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut.” The language conjured images of a brazen operation against a well-protected military compound, a Pentagon of its kind, a wholly valiant endeavor.

In reality, this was a massive strike that completely leveled a residential building, one that killed Hezbollah leaders just as much as it did countless families inside. Many of those families remain under the rubble, with others still missing.

Almost every time news emerges from south Beirut, the Western news media parrots the language of the Israeli military, as if “Hezbollah stronghold” is part of the neighborhood’s name. Defenders of this kind of language may point to the usage of “strongholds” to describe bases of support for the Democratic Party or U.K.’s Labour, but these are usages in a Western context, a use nobody is confused by.

In Lebanon, the connotations are obvious. And they directly serve Israeli interests.

Casting south Beirut, colloquially known in Arabic as Dahiya, as a military stronghold, gives Israel license to apply massive force — targeting civilian infrastructure as part of its main thrust, just as it would Hezbollah leaders. The stated aim is to deter any future attacks by hitting Hezbollah’s most concentrated base of support. Israel makes civilians pay the price for whatever Hezbollah ostensibly does and, thereafter, blames Hezbollah for the deaths the Israelis themselves cause.

The strategy even has a name: the Dahiya Doctrine, coined after Israel almost destroyed the area in the 2006 war with Hezbollah. It would go on to become Israel’s modus operandi in future wars, and the road map for today’s total destruction of Gaza.

Now, with Israeli attacks on Lebanon rapidly escalating, the Dahiya Doctrine is coming back home — justified by the language of the area as a militant “stronghold.”

“Dahiya Doctrine”

Dahiya is a collection of mostly majority Shia Muslim neighborhoods just outside the city limits of Beirut, where hundreds of thousands live. It is far more densely populated than the capital proper. Within Dahiya, several refugee camps for Palestinians and other groups exist, even more densely populated than the urban municipalities surrounding it.

In the 1980s during the country’s 15-year civil war, the area was subject to massacres by members of Israeli-backed right-wing Lebanese Christian paramilitaries. Dahiya then suffered immense killing again in 2006 when it was subject to massive Israeli bombardment during the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Groups like Hezbollah that opposed the organizations that wrought this destruction enjoy significant support in the area. Hezbollah is a political party, with both military and civil wings, an organization that interacts with state institutions and runs in elections just like any other political party in Lebanon does. Walking through Dahiya, especially these days, you would need to be blind to miss photo after photo of fallen Hezbollah fighters or portraits of the Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

Though the name “Dahiya Doctrine” would come later, shortly after the war, Israeli military officials spoke openly about their approach in Dahiya and declared a policy explicit in its intention to make no distinction between civilian and military infrastructure.

In a 2008 interview, Israeli Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who helped formulate the doctrine, made it clear that disproportionate attacks against civilian infrastructure was the strategy, not an unintended effect.

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” he said. “We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

He added, “This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Lebanese lives are expendable in the fight against Hezbollah, plain and simple. The reverberations of this explicit shift have made themselves even more clear in the Gaza Strip.

Gaza as Hamas Base

For months now, we have borne witness to report after report declaring that virtually everything in the Gaza Strip is a Hamas base — a place harboring Hamas terrorists, a Hamas command center.

Mosques, hospitals, and schools are all explicit targets for the Israeli military, and their connections to Hamas are oftentimes never elaborated on. When explanations are forthcoming, they rely on any interaction at all with Hamas — the ruling government of the territory in which they existed.

Western mainstream media has dutifully gone along with this language, laying the groundwork for places like al-Shifa Hospital to be destroyed without much fanfare — or much evidence. The revival of the Dahiya Doctrine in Lebanon uses the same logic: Anything that touches Hezbollah automatically becomes a military target in the most expansive way possible. 

The Western media, however, would never tolerate this kind of language used against Israelis. No American news outlet would ever seriously entertain the argument that the Israel Defense Forces is using “human shields” by having its headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.

The IDF, for its part, reacted to a Yemeni drone strike in Tel Aviv with an illustration of the area showing its proximity to important civilian infrastructure and decrying its recklessness — apparently not sensing any irony.

The point of this language is clear: to erase the existence of these places, cities, towns, and neighborhoods like Dahiya as vibrant population centers, ones with political complexities as many other places have, but primarily the homes to millions of people going about their days.

As long as they exist outside the American and Israeli spheres of influence, the lives of these people are considered disposable, made to be thrown aside as collateral damage in ways Americans and Israelis would never tolerate. Their lives are only given importance when they can be used as a cudgel against groups the West opposes, and when they refuse to go along, they are forgotten just as quickly.

Dahiya, with all its people, should not have to prove its humanity to the world. It should be a given.