Sir, – Mark Weiss describes “former top general Gadi Eisenkot” as “the favourite to replace Israel’s longest-serving prime minister [Binyamin Netanyahu]” (“Can anyone end the Netanyahu era?”, Middle East, September 21st).
Weiss fails to mention Eisenkot’s main claim to fame: his formulation of the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb where in 2006 the Israeli army, according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding, “killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about a third of them children, and caused enormous damage to [Lebanon’s] civilian infrastructure, including power plants, sewage treatment plants, bridges and port facilities”.
Eisenkot warned that this “will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on ... We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there.”
Expecting that a transition from “the Netanyahu era” to “the Eisenkot era” will bring the Middle East any closer to a just resolution of its conflicts is delusory. The international community must insist on Israel’s compliance with international law, failing which it must be subjected to radical sanctions including a total arms embargo. – Yours, etc,
RM Block
RAYMOND DEANE,
Broadstone,
Dublin 7.
