What is your pager malfunction, numb nuts?
The Promising Land #8: The Grim Beeper pays a visit to Hezbollah.
Seven weeks ago, Hezbollah fired an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket at the Israeli town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights.
It was one of more than 5,000 rockets that Hezbollah has rained down on Israel in the past eleven months. The Islamist terror group initially boasted about the attack but reversed course and denied responsibility when it emerged that the rocket had struck a soccer field and killed twelve children. Twelve Arab children, for Majdal Shams is a predominantly Druze town. The incident was quickly forgotten by an international community that is only interested in memorialising Arabs when they are killed by Jews.
At the time, I wrote in The Spectator that we should expect Israel to extract a price for the soccer field murders, but added:
‘[W]hen that price comes to be paid, expect the UN and the NGOs and the British Foreign Office to scold and condemn and denounce. There is no restraint Israel could show that would satisfy the one-eyed umpires of warfare etiquette. They simply do not regard Israeli self-defence as legitimate.’
Whether the detonation of booby-trapped Hezbollah pagers that killed nine and injured thousands on Tuesday was retribution for Majdal Shams or the other 5,000 rockets, we don’t know and likely never will. Mossad takes no credit for its audacious operations. But there have been predictable tantrums from Israel’s detractors, with accusations that the Jewish state had violated international humanitarian law or was endangering civilians or had acted recklessly and without precision.
International law — real international law, not the fan fiction version penned by radical activists in multilateral institutions, NGOs and law schools — doesn’t preclude sabotage against an enemy, in this case a recognised terrorist organisation that has been attacking Israel. (Where the subject of sabotage is a non-military target but of strategic importance to the enemy, there might still be a case for justification. This is the position taken by Czechia on the alleged Ukrainian sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.)
As to endangering civilians, any act of sabotage carries that risk, especially in societies where terrorists are integrated among the civilian population. Civilian casualties should of course be avoided where at all possible but this operation appears to be a textbook case of minimising harm to civilians, involving a highly-targeted strike on terrorist assets, instead of, for example, aerial bombardments which increase the risk of civilian casualties in densely populated locations.
Which brings us to the issue of precision: there could scarcely be a more pinpoint tactic than detonating small devices that are worn on the person and issued by a terrorist organisation. There is a risk that some of these devices might have ended up in the hands of non-combatant civilians, and that is a possibility that must be factored into deployment of this tactic.
Those decrying this operation are not, for the most part, disputing the legitimacy of sabotage in warfare or counter-terrorism operations. Change the context to another conflict or scenario and most could not be stirred to form an opinion on the matter. Their objection is to Israel using this tactic against an enemy which has been attacking it and murdering its citizens. Handwringing Israel — the Israel of Haaretz, north Tel Aviv, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — is forever fashing over the pronouncements of foreign politicians, journalists, academics and institutions who will never be receptive to good faith engagement because they are bad faith actors.
That does not apply to all critics of Israel but it applies to a good number of them. They cannot be convinced of the merit of any action by which Israel defends itself because they do not recognise Israel’s right to defend itself, except in a bloodless, abstract and meaningless sense. It is not that they want Hezbollah to win, but that the price of Israeli security, no matter how low it is set, will always be too high for them.