https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/the-pager-attack
Adam Shatz

Since 7 October, the Biden administration has given Israel virtually everything it has asked for, from F-15 fighter aircraft and white phosphorous bombs to diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have underwritten the destruction of Gaza, and the ‘Gazafication’ of the West Bank, where Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than six hundred people in the last year, including a 26-year-old American citizen, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was shot dead at a peaceful protest near Nablus. (Eygi’s parents have yet to receive a phone call from the Biden administration, which claims to be ‘gathering the facts’.) With apparent carte blanche from Washington, the Netanyahu government has also escalated its long-running shadow war with Iran, carrying out assassinations of Iranian officials in Damascus and of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

The Americans did, however, have one red line, and that was an Israeli war against Lebanon, for which the Netanyahu government reportedly sought approval within days of 7 October. Netanyahu wanted to open a second front in the hope of destroying the Lebanese Shia organisation Hizbullah, an ally of Hamas, but the Americans were opposed, so the Israelis shelved their plans. The low-intensity border war with Hizbullah continued, but within limits largely respected by both parties. Hizbullah launched rockets against border towns in the north of Israel, killing two dozen civilians and forcing nearly a hundred thousand to evacuate their homes. Israel killed hundreds of people in southern Lebanon, many of them civilians, and displaced more than a hundred thousand. But, until this week, both Hizbullah and Israel appeared to calibrate their responses to each other’s attacks to avoid full-scale war. As Israel’s assault on Gaza dragged on, its enthusiasm for a second front seemed to wane: how could its army confront Hizbullah if it couldn’t even defeat Hamas?

Hizbullah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, too, has had good reason to avoid escalation. He does not want a repetition of the 2006 war, which led to the devastation of parts of Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, and the killing of well over a thousand Lebanese civilians; after the war Nasrallah made an extraordinary apology for having provoked Israel’s offensive. He also knows that Iran, his major patron and ally, does not want Hizbullah’s missiles, which are intended as a shield against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear programme, to be wasted on Gaza: solidarity with Palestine has its limits, even for the leader of the ‘axis of resistance’.

Why, then, has Hizbullah stepped up its rocket attacks on northern Israel since 7 October? Israeli commentators have argued that Hizbullah bears responsibility for this conflict because it has failed to withdraw to the Litani river, and because Gaza is supposedly not its war. But Nasrallah insists that he is holding up his end of Hizbullah’s alliance with Hamas, Iran and the Houthis (the so-called ‘unity of arenas’ strategy), and offering a modicum of support for the besieged people of Gaza, who have been all but abandoned by other Arab regimes. He has also made plain that the rockets will stop as soon as a ceasefire is reached. As Amos Harel, Haaretz’s military correspondent, has noted, Nasrallah has exhibited considerable restraint in the face of repeated Israeli provocations, notably the assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Hizbullah’s senior leaders, in Beirut.

It’s hard to see how Nasrallah’s prudence will survive the pager and short-wave radio attacks of this week, which have killed at least 37 people, including four children, and injured thousands. With this operation – which has been in the works since 2022, according to the New York Times; long before 7 October – Israel has succeeded, if nothing else, in carrying out one of the most spectacular simultaneous attacks in recent history. Israel struck twice, in consecutive days; it did not lose any of its own men; and it forced its enemies to surrender what no one in the modern world wants to give up: their electronic devices. (There were scenes in Lebanon of people crushing their own phones.) The short-term psychological blow is incalculable.

Let’s imagine a militant organisation, such as Hizbullah, had carried out a similar attack in Israel, detonating explosives in the phones of soldiers and reservists, and murdering Israeli children. The Americans would not have waited to ‘gather the facts’ before denouncing the attack. The response of much of the Western press has been striking, too, full of fascination for Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger ingenuity. What you won’t see in these accounts is the word ‘terrorism’, which is as taboo as the word ‘genocide’ when the perpetrator is Israel.

Terrorism, the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political aims, is a form of propaganda, a message both to the enemy and to one’s own constituency. What, then, is the message of the pager attacks? To the Israeli Jewish public, still traumatised by 7 October, and particularly to Israelis who’ve fled their homes in the north, the message is that Israel is restoring ‘deterrence’, the third pillar of the ruling ideology (the others are instrumentalised remembrance of the Holocaust and consolidation of the settlements). To Hizbullah and the people of Lebanon, the message is that Israel can hit you anywhere, at any time, and that it cares little about civilian casualties (that message is redundant, since Israel is already notorious in Lebanon for its indifference to Lebanese lives).

Some Lebanese citizens hostile to Hizbullah at first took vicarious pleasure in the attacks: Hizbullah effectively controls much of Lebanon, notably Beirut airport, and its influence is often resented. But once it became clear that this was an attack on Lebanon, and that it could be the prelude to an Israeli invasion – like the destruction of the Egyptian air force on 5 June 1967, which preceded the Six-Day War – people stopped laughing at Hizbullah’s expense. Still reeling from its financial collapse and the 2020 port explosion, Lebanon is less likely to survive an Israeli invasion than Hizbullah is.

Nasrallah is in a bind. Hizbullah’s communications system has been badly damaged and there may be leaks within the organisation. Building back that system and rooting out spies will be his priorities. But he cannot respond with the patience of the Iranians, whose style is to promise retaliation and then wait years to deliver, because Hizbullah is in the front lines of the battle with Israel. If Nasrallah fails to respond, his restraint will look like cowardice – hardly the message he wants to send to his supporters. But if he miscalculates, or responds in a way that offers the Israelis a pretext for invasion, he could have a war on his hands that far eclipses the catastrophe of 2006, imperilling Hizbullah’s position in Lebanon.

Israel hasn’t taken official responsibility for the attacks, but it is gloating. The short-term success can hardly be denied. The pager attacks have put Hizbullah and Iran on the defensive. They have distracted attention from the horrors Israel continues to visit on Gaza and the West Bank, from the obscenity of Sde Teiman, a torture and rape centre in the Negev where dozens of prisoners from Gaza have been murdered, and from the hostage ordeal, the biggest threat to Netanyahu’s premiership. But what next? Is Netanyahu betting on a Hizbullah overreaction? Is he trying to open a second front and to drag the Iranians – and the Americans – into war? Are the attacks part of his effort to return Donald Trump to the White House, or is he simply trying to stay in power with a show of military force? The war in Gaza has made him more popular than ever, in spite of mass protests in favour of a ceasefire.

Whatever his motivations may be, Netanyahu has made war much likelier, and it would be a much harder war than Gaza has been for Israel’s already exhausted and demoralised troops. Hizbullah, which emerged in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, is a formidable antagonist, probably the most effective Arab fighting force the Jewish state has confronted since its founding. Its fighting force of roughly 45,000 may be outnumbered and outgunned, but, unlike the Israelis, they would have the advantage of fighting on their own land. Israeli soldiers spent two decades under fire in southern Lebanon before Hizbullah forced them to withdraw unilaterally in 2000. The pager attack, a tactical success by any measure, appears at first glance to be a reckless escalation, without a strategic horizon.

But the line between tactics and strategy may not be so useful in the case of Israel, a state that has been at war since its creation. The identity of the enemies changes – the Arab armies, Nasser, the PLO, Iraq, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas – but the war never ends, because Israel’s entire existence, its relentless search to expand the territory under its control, is based on a forever war with the Palestinians, and with whoever happens to support Palestinian resistance. Escalation may be precisely what Israel seeks, or what it is prepared to risk, since it views war as its destiny, if not its raison d’être. Randolph Bourne once remarked that ‘war is the health of the state,’ and that is certainly the view of Israel’s leaders. But it is civilians, Arab and Jewish, who end up paying the price for the state’s addiction to force. The region will continue to be engulfed in flames so long as Israel’s intelligence and creativity are dedicated to the pursuit of war rather than peace.