Israel’s Military Doctrine: Targeting Homes, Shelters and Shelter Seekers

Scholars in, from and on Palestine have witnessed—and personally lived—the ongoing displacement of Palestinians as remaining one of the world’s most-pressing humanitarian crises, compelling for scholarly inquiry and meaningful action. On this context, the International Migration and Refugee Studies Program at Birzeit University organized a critical exploration of the dimensions of forced migration and colonialism to foster well-informed understanding of these challenges while Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people raged on.

This inquiry culminated in special virtual workshop “Palestinian Displacement and Colonialism,” on 25 November 2024, as a platform to discuss the pivotal issues surrounding forced migration, particularly in light of recent escalations in Gaza. It also marked the launch of a Special Working Papers Series, addressing themes of displacement, dispossession, Palestinian diaspora, colonial appropriation, and migrant narratives. This effort provided an opportunity for deep academic discussion and advocacy on Palestinian displacement.

HIC-HLRN’s contribution to this was inquiry has been in the form of a Working Paper on displacement of Palestinians—or, more specifically, the serious crime of population transfer—as Israel’s raison d’état carried out through its consistent military practice of targeting Palestinian homes, shelters and shelter seekers.

Israel’s founding military doctrine has involved destroying the Indigenous Palestinian People’s civilian homes and human settlements, forcibly displacing inhabitants into columns and clusters of shelter seekers, whereupon Israeli forces often bomb them in their places of refuge. The emerging pattern includes attacking refuges that Israeli military commanders deemed ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones. While most dramatically manifest in the serial wars against Gaza, Israel’s military and military administration in the occupied Palestinian territory have adapted this doctrine to unhouse and dispossess the Indigenous People repeatedly throughout historic Palestine—and beyond.

Beginning with the present, the paper connects what are often reported as incidental dots to trace military doctrine to its colonial origins in the 1948 Plan Dalet. The paper does not expound on the international law dimension, but does suggest that expressed and institutionalized state ideology and patterned practice demonstrate the serious crime of population transfer (defined in the processes of International Military Tribunals after World War II) as synonymous with Israel’s raison d’état, manifest in widespread and systematic targeting of civilian homes, shelters and shelter seekers as deliberate Israeli practice and long-demonstrated military doctrine.

Attend the recorded session online here.

Read the full paper here.

Image: Artwork from the virtual workshop “Palestinian Displacement and Colonialism.” Source: BZU.