Doctrine

Israel has killed almost 600 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 750,000 in less than two weeks. This is the opening act of Israel’s Gaza doctrine applied to a new front. The formula is consistent: Displace – either by ordering people to leave or by destroying their means of survival. Demolish civilian infrastructure to prevent return and expand territory through so-called “buffer zones”. Fragment any coherent governance by carving territory into disconnected enclaves where military action continues at a lower intensity.

I spent three years working in Palestine before being expelled by Israeli authorities. I watched this doctrine develop in real time. Now, from Beirut, I am witnessing its replication.

In the West Bank, Israel has spent decades fragmenting territory and denying Palestinians any contiguous geography. Water wells sealed with cement, homes demolished over impossible-to-obtain permits, herders pushed from their land by illegal settlement outposts. In Gaza, the same logic was applied with far greater speed and fury.

In October 2023, Israel announced that every Palestinian north of Wadi Gaza had to leave immediately. Days earlier, Israel’s defence minister had declared a complete siege: No electricity, no food, no water. By labelling an entire population as the enemy, Israel created a class of expendable people. The military released maps with Gaza divided into numbered blocks. When your number was called, you were forced to leave. Evacuation orders became the alibi for the crimes that followed. People were ordered into al-Mawasi, a stretch of coastline Israel designated a “safe zone”, a concentration area for hundreds of thousands living in tents, where air attacks continued. So-called evacuation zones were depopulated and destroyed.

Classic counterinsurgency logic would have entailed “clear, hold, and rebuild”. Israel’s approach was radically different: Destroy, displace, dismantle. The goal was not to pacify territory but to empty it. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel has treated civilian populations as indistinguishable from the resistance they support. Their displacement is the objective. The collapse of their political representation is a condition Israel seeks to make permanent. This is settler-colonial logic in contemporary military form.

The same playbook has now arrived in Lebanon, but with a revealing difference from previous Israeli operations here. In the first Lebanon war in the 1980s, Israel sought to install a sympathetic government. Gaza has shown that Israel has abandoned that aspiration. The goal is no longer to determine who governs a territory but to ensure that no coherent governance exists at all. Nor is Israel alone in this; the UAE’s approach in Yemen and the Horn of Africa – and its support to Israel in Gaza – reflects the same preference for isolated enclaves. What has emerged is a regional doctrine of fragmentation shared between aligned powers.

Israel has issued evacuation orders for the entirety of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. The familiar map that appeared on my screen in Beirut last week had the same design and the same deadly ambiguity as the ones we dealt with in Gaza; announced evacuation zones failed to match those shown on the map. In Gaza, those who crossed the invisible lines were killed.

Hundreds of thousands of people are now on the move. Schools have become shelters, health workers have been killed, and people are sleeping on the seafront where just two nights ago a tent was bombed. Israel has threatened to attack Lebanese state infrastructure if the government fails to act against Hezbollah – extending its aims from displacement and infrastructure destruction towards the forced destabilisation of the state itself. The Lebanese government has responded by forbidding Hezbollah from firing. This is precisely the internal fracturing that Israel’s strategy appears designed to provoke.

But Lebanon is not Gaza. Hamas was fighting with an improvised arsenal inside a besieged strip of land, and this already proved challenging for Israeli forces. Hezbollah commands more sophisticated weaponry, hardened infrastructure, and decades of preparation for this kind of war. It has shown it can absorb heavy blows and strike back, surprising both Israel and outside observers with the depth of its capabilities. Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa have already met significant resistance. It is here that the doctrine may encounter its limits – not through diplomatic pressure, which has failed to materialise, but through asymmetric military reality. Iran has made Lebanon’s fate explicitly part of any ceasefire calculus, signalling a unification of fronts that Israel had thought were weakened.

A doctrine built on the assumption of impunity has encountered little resistance in the conference halls of a so-called rules-based order. The Gaza doctrine is the expanded version of what Israel previously called the “Dahiyeh doctrine” – the use of overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure – now weaponised towards a larger end: The permanent redrawing of the region’s geography, demography, and political order.

This doctrine has developed in a vacuum of accountability. The International Court of Justice has been ignored. The Security Council has been paralysed. Governments have continued trading with Israel as it steadily normalised the unacceptable. Daniel Reisner, who headed the international legal division of Israel’s military advocate general’s office, was candid in saying that “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it […] International law progresses through violations.”

The United States is not a bystander to this failure; it is an active participant in deepening it. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the transatlantic alliance in ethnonationalist terms and cast colonialism as a Western achievement. At an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee expressed confidence that Washington would “neuter” both the ICC and the ICJ – the very institutions through which accountability might otherwise be pursued.

What is unfolding in Lebanon is the political continuation of an ongoing settler-colonial project. The evacuation orders are precursors to mass destruction, designed to prevent return and permanently alter the landscape. Stability in the Middle East demands more than ceasefire agreements that manage fragmented populations while permitting lower-grade warfare to continue. It requires unconditional enforcement of international law, full accountability for those prosecuting this doctrine, and the right of return and reconstruction – from Beit Hanoon to Beirut.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

When a state’s political leadership announces a ceasefire and its military keeps firing, the instinct is to reach for deception as the explanation. In Iran’s case, the more unsettling answer may be structural. The gap between what Iranian presidents say and what Iranian forces do reflects not a coordinated lie but a command architecture deliberately engineered to operate without central direction. In a serious conflict, the consequences of that architecture would be felt well beyond Iran’s borders.

A Command Architecture Designed to Survive Decapitation

In September 2008, IRGC Commander General Mohammad Ali Jafari oversaw a sweeping restructuring that divided the force into thirty-one provincial corps, each empowered to conduct military operations within its zone without requiring authorization from the center. As Michael Connell of the Center for Naval Analyses noted in his analysis for the United States Institute of Peace, the intent was to strengthen unit cohesion and ensure operational continuity under degraded command conditions. He flagged explicitly that the decentralization could produce unintended escalation dynamics, particularly in the Persian Gulf.

That warning deserves serious attention. The IRGC’s Mosaic Defense doctrine was not designed to make Iran more responsive to political leadership in a crisis. It was designed to ensure that military operations could continue regardless of what happened to that leadership. A force structured that way does not stop firing because a president gives a speech.

The Apology That Wasn’t

The internal contradiction becomes clearest when traced through a hypothetical cascade. A president announces a ceasefire and attributes the directive to an Interim Leadership Council. A fellow council member publicly declares that heavy strikes will continue. A hardline cleric addresses the president directly, calling his position untenable. By the time the president’s original statement is reposted, the ceasefire language has been quietly removed.

The IRGC’s own posture in this scenario resolves the ambiguity on structural grounds. It endorses the president’s language, then appends a caveat that renders it inoperative: all US and Israeli military bases and interests across the region remain primary targets. Since every GCC state hosts American forces, that framing preserves full operational freedom while allowing the presidency to project restraint. The contradiction is not incidental. It is the doctrine functioning as designed.

The Theological Dimension

Iran is not simply a military organization. It is a theocratic state whose constitutional legitimacy flows from velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, which vests supreme authority in a single clerical figure whose religious and political mandates are inseparable. Remove that figure, and the system’s legitimating architecture is suspended rather than transferred. The Assembly of Experts is constitutionally mandated to elect a successor, but wartime conditions would disrupt that process at precisely the moment its resolution matters most.

A RAND Corporation analysis prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense identified the IRGC as the institution best positioned to shape any post-Khamenei transition, with the organizational reach and economic weight to determine outcomes that civilian institutions cannot contest. The result, in a decapitation scenario, is a theocratic state operating without its theological anchor and a military operating under pre-delegated authority with no one capable of recalling it.

Durability Without Effect

The Mosaic Defense doctrine would prove, above all, durable. A decentralized force can survive catastrophic leadership losses and sustain operations. But durability is not the same as capability, and sustained fire is not the same as strategic effect.

Iran’s theory of regional attrition, the calculation that sustained strikes against Gulf infrastructure and American basing would fracture GCC cohesion and coerce Arab neighbors toward neutrality, has produced no evidence of working. The GCC bloc has held. Individual member states have coordinated their responses rather than fractured under pressure. The country absorbing the sharpest volume of Iranian strike activity, the UAE, has demonstrated air defense performance that has exceeded even optimistic prewar assessments. Publicly available figures suggest UAE systems have defeated upward of ninety percent of inbound threats, a result that reflects years of sustained investment, deep integration with American and Israeli platforms, and an operational tempo that has stress-tested those systems at genuine scale.

The picture that emerges is not one of Iran winning a war of attrition. It is one of an Iran burning through accessible inventory, losing launch infrastructure faster than it can regenerate, and discovering that the regional architecture it spent years attempting to destabilize has proven considerably more resilient than it calculated.

That resilience carries its own strategic meaning. A weakened force operating under pre-delegated authority, without a supreme leader to set limits, remains dangerous in a narrow tactical sense. But it is operating without a coherent end state, and the environment it faces is not the one it anticipated. The GCC’s collective posture and the demonstrated effectiveness of layered air defense across the Gulf have closed off the strategic outcomes Iran’s doctrine was written to achieve.

The scenario is instructive for what it reveals about the limits of decentralized military design. A force built to keep firing regardless of political direction is also a force that cannot be steered toward an exit. But the Gulf states have demonstrated something of equal importance in response: that resilience, properly built and consistently resourced, can outlast a doctrine designed for chaos, and that the regional order Iran sought to unravel has shown itself capable of absorbing the blow.

US forces launched a military attack against Venezuela on January 3, reportedly killing over 100 people and kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores, who also serves as a National Assembly deputy.

Western corporate media have played an active role in recent years in legitimizing escalated US aggression against the Venezuelan people, from whitewashing economic sanctions that killed tens of thousands (FAIR.org, 6/4/21, 6/13/22) to outright calling for a military intervention (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 11/19/25). They also exposed themselves once again as the fourth branch of the US national security state, opting not to publish information they had prior to the January 3 operation in order to “avoid endangering US troops” (FAIR.org, 1/13/26).

The brazen act of war has elicited zero dissent from the Western media establishment, no urge to challenge Trump’s return to early 20th century “gunboat diplomacy.” Worse, with the White House pushing to impose a semi-colonial protectorate and plunder Venezuela’s wealth, corporate outlets continue working overtime to normalize US imperialist predations.

Damage control

In the weeks since the attack, Western media have made a point of referring to Maduro as “arrested” (NBC, 1/5/26), “captured” (PBS, 2/10/26) or “ousted” (ABC, 1/5/26). The choice is far from innocent. By not stating that the Venezuelan leader was “kidnapped” or “abducted,” in a blatant violation of international law, establishment journalists are normalizing the US’s rogue actions, denying Maduro the proper protections of prisoner of war status (FAIR.org, 1/20/26).

But it is not just through semantic distortion that corporate outlets have quarantined any critique of the administration’s lawlessness. Another common feature has been a certain “damage control” in covering up Trump’s most outlandish statements.

After the January 3 military operation, Trump stated in a press conference that “many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years…died because of [Maduro].” No corporate outlets reported the outrageously false statement. (A couple of factchecking pieces—CBS, 1/6/26; New York Times, 1/8/26—addressed his adjacent, essentially unfalsifiable claim that “countless Americans” died due to Maduro.)

The attempts to make Trump’s Venezuela policy claims appear more rational are not new. For instance, in presidential press conferences, he constantly said that Venezuela had “emptied” its mental institutions into the US (X, 10/15/25, 11/2/25, 12/3/25, 1/3/26). But throughout 2025, the New York Times  (11/4/25) mentioned this absurd statement just once, and the Washington Post (10/22/25, 12/21/25) did so twice.

On the domestic policy front, corporate journalists have had fewer qualms labeling Trump claims as “false,” when it comes to ending wars (CNN, 1/20/26), immigration (NBC, 2/4/26) or the 2020 US election (Guardian, 1/12/26). But they seem happy to carefully conceal or openly parrot false accusations that build the case for wars of aggression, whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and now Venezuela (FAIR.org, 8/1/05).

The vanishing cartel

In recent years, and especially in the second half of 2025, US officials justified escalating attacks against Venezuela on the grounds that Maduro and associates ran a drug trafficking operation, the so-called Cartel of the Suns. Trump himself, during his January 3 press conference, claimed Maduro “personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles.”

While experts consistently questioned the cartel’s existence, and specialized agencies, including the DEA, found Venezuela to play a marginal role in drug trafficking, media outlets reproduced the warmongering claims without scrutiny, citing only the denials from the Venezuelan president they have systematically demonized for over a decade (e.g., New York Times, 10/06/25; NPR, 11/12/25; CNN, 11/14/25).

But the biggest rebuff came from the Justice Department itself. When the time came to indict Maduro, US prosecutors dropped the accusation that the Venezuelan leader headed an actual drug cartel, and downgraded the Cartel of the Suns to a “patronage system.” In other words, the Justice Department was aware that the cartel charge had no substance, and instead accused Maduro of a much looser “drug trafficking conspiracy.”

But this remarkable about-face brought no accountability for the media establishment. Having spent years echoing claims that US prosecutors admitted would not hold in court, corporate outlets chose to ignore the new development, rather than exposing their shameful stenography over the years and taking responsibility for its deadly consequences. FAIR used Google to search for reporting on this crucial about-face in outlets including the Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, NBC and NPR, and found no results.

The one notable exception in this quasi-state corporate media circus was the New York Times‘ Charlie Savage (1/5/26), reporting on the administration’s quiet dropping of its casus belli. Savage wrote that this “called into greater question the legitimacy” of the administration’s designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization. However, the piece stopped short of challenging the US military operation and illegal kidnapping of Maduro, referring to the Venezuelan leader as “captured” and “removed from power.”

The paper of record was quick to compensate for the vanishing of a flimsy regime-change trope by bringing up another one, focusing on a tried and tested dishonest narrative: Venezuela’s alleged ties with Hezbollah, one of the main opponents of the US and Israel in West Asia (FAIR.org, 5/24/19). Under the headline, “What to Know about Hezbollah’s Ties to Venezuela,” Times reporter Christina Goldbaum (1/19/26) offered nothing but a laundry list of unsubstantiated claims from anonymous officials.

Media connivance with Washington’s official narratives to justify imperialist attacks only pave the way for new iterations. Recently, in tightening the murderous blockade against Cuba, the Trump administration proffered the totally baseless claim of the Cuban government “providing a safe haven” for Hamas and Hezbollah. While the New York Times (1/30/26) uncharacteristically reminded readers that Trump offered no evidence, other outlets (NBC, 1/29/26; CNN, 1/30/26) were happy to echo the accusation uncritically.

Holding a country hostage

The media establishment’s support for US foreign policy did not end with the January 3 act of war. Since the attacks and presidential kidnapping, the Trump administration has taken control of Venezuelan oil exports at gunpoint after a month-long naval blockade that involved seizing tankers in the high seas for allegedly transporting Venezuelan crude in violation of unilateral US sanctions.

Under an initial agreement, Venezuela surrendered 30–50 million barrels for White House–picked intermediaries to transport and sell. Proceeds were deposited in bank accounts in Qatar, with a portion being returned to Carácas at the administration’s discretion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/21/26, 1/29/26). Analysts have argued that this arrangement explicitly violates the Venezuelan constitution.

Some articles have given space for Democrats to oppose the Trump deal, but mostly on the grounds of lack of transparency or opportunities for corruption (CNN, 1/15/26; Politico, 2/11/26; New York Times, 2/11/26). Readers will find no opposition on principle to the Trump administration’s Mafia-esque extortion of a sovereign nation’s natural resources, from the president himself saying the US will “keep some” of the hijacked Venezuelan oil (CNBC, 1/22/26) to Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing that the administration is “prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation” (New York Times, 1/28/26).

It is hard to find double standards, because no other nation on Earth unleashes this kind of gangster imperialism. But concerning Russia, Western media did not hold back from denouncing its “stealing,” “robbing” or “plundering” of Ukrainian minerals or grain, despite these resources being in territory that Russia occupies and claims sovereignty over (Washington Post, 8/10/22; Guardian, 12/11/23; DW, 8/28/23; New York Times, 6/5/22).

In a nutshell, when Washington imposed deadly sanctions against Venezuela, corporate pundits said these only targeted Maduro and were meant to promote democracy (FAIR.org, 6/14/19, 6/4/21, 6/13/22, 6/22/23). When the White House ramped up military threats, mainstream journalists parroted drug trafficking allegations (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 11/19/25). When the drug trafficking charges were exposed, Western outlets reheated baseless stories about Hezbollah. And when Trump seized Venezuelan oil at gunpoint, the only mild concern was whether he would use it to enrich himself.

True to its roots in the “yellow journalism” of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the liberal media establishment is fully on board with Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine.” They have undoubtedly earned the title, to paraphrase Gen. Smedley Butler, of “gangster journalists for capitalism.”

Source: FAIR