Jonathan S. Tobin
The criticism of the tactics and the fact that it inspired some laughter from besieged Israelis speak volumes about the moral sickness afflicting many Western liberals.
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Israeli soldiers evacuate wounded people who was severely injured when a missile fired from Lebanon hit the Ramim Cliff area, near the Israeli border with Lebanon, on Sept. 19, 2024. Photo by Ayal Margolin/Flash90.
It was the covert operation that inspired thousands of Internet memes. The simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers in the possession of Hezbollah operatives followed a day later by a similar mass explosion of terrorist walkie-talkies was the top story across the world this week.
The strikes on Hezbollah leadership that occurred a few days later might have been just as important in seeking to cripple the terrorists’ ability to continue its ongoing missile strikes on northern Israel and possible threats of a possible land attack on the Jewish state. Nevertheless, the attack on members of the organization (and its associated sponsors and string-pullers, like the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who reportedly also had a Hezbollah beeper and lost an eye when it blew up) carrying around those relics of 1980s technology triggered both the imagination and the indignation of international opinion.
We can’t know for sure just how much damage Israel has done to Hezbollah’s morale, let alone its capabilities to inflict terror and pain on Israelis as well as Lebanese citizens. There may be some truth to what the doomsayers among New York Times analysts and Israeli left-wingers who claimed that any harm would be superficial and transitory.
More important was the angry reaction inspired among many Western liberals who denounced the attacks because they don’t believe in Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorists and because they no longer believe that any Western nation has the right to fight even the most just wars.
Not an ‘escalation’
The claim that this was an Israeli “escalation” is entirely untrue since it is Hezbollah that initiated the current round of strife. No matter how many terrorists were killed, maimed or wounded in the strikes, the Iranian proxy shows no sign of halting its firing on not just northern Israel but now other areas since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas in the south. Hezbollah’s rockets have essentially depopulated Israeli communities along the country’s northern border, turning tens of thousands of its citizens into evacuees holing up in hotels in the center of the country alongside those who were similarly affected by the assault on southern Israel.
No spy caper—no matter how ingenious or expertly targeted to harm as few innocents as possible—means much if it doesn’t contribute to Israel’s strategic goal: pushing Hezbollah forces away from its border and ensuring safety to the north. It may be, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has recently hinted, that this objective may only be achieved by a cross-border offensive involving the use of land forces.
But there is no avoiding the fact that the enormous attention devoted to what analyst Michael Doran satirically called “Operation Grim Beeper” told us not only about the role that Jews and Israel still play in the Western imagination but also about what a great many people in the West now think about armed conflict.
‘Magical’ Jews
One side of this reaction is not entirely bad. As much as the still-powerful myth about Jewish power is at the heart of antisemitism, the belief in what might be termed the “magical Jew” who is smarter and more resourceful than other people sometimes works to benefit Jews.
Britain’s 1917 decision to issue the Balfour Declaration in favor of the creation of a Jewish National Home, which gave Zionism a crucial boost at a critical time, is often ascribed to the philo-Semitsm as well as the belief of several British statesmen, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s in the authority of the Bible, which has a thing or two to say about to whom the land of Israel belongs. More important was their misplaced belief in the unchecked power of the Jews (whom they were persuaded would be won over to the Allied cause by the declaration) to ensure that the United States stayed close to British objectives and to keep Russia an active participant in World War I, something that was far beyond the capabilities of either Jewish community.
Yet the heart of the deterrent power of Israel’s defense and intelligence forces is the fact that many of the Jewish state’s enemies see it as a mighty power that can’t be beaten.
This reputation has been honestly earned by Israel’s many military victories and intelligence coups over the decades. The latter, in which technology masterminds working inside Israel’s Mossad has dispatched with ingenious methods a long list of those working to harm Jews—Arab terrorists, German scientists working in Arab countries to produce weapons of mass destruction, those involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and, in recent years, Iranians working on building the Islamist regime’s nuclear program—are already well-documented.
This sense of their own invincibility has sometimes also worked against Israelis. The tragic errors made by its intelligence establishment before Oct. 7 showed the price of such hubris. The same geniuses that helped pull off the exploding beepers this week were members of the organization that failed so badly to prevent the largest mass slaughter of Jews since World War II and the Holocaust.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies (employed only because Hezbollah was already convinced that modern means of communication involving cell phones and the Internet were inevitably going to be compromised by the Israelis) will join that list. But as with every Israeli achievement, including the innumerable technological and medical innovations produced by that tiny country’s scientists, tech specialists and engineers that have inspired great praise (and made Jews everywhere proud of what their people have done), it will also inspire more harmful conspiracy theories that contribute to hatred for Jews. This proves again that although times and circumstances changed, the Jews remain the primary boogeymen of Western thought.
Along with those more traditional tropes of antisemitism, the reactions to what we all must presume (though Hezbollah and Iran have many enemies, such as the United States, which currently lacks the will to strike them and many others who don’t have the capability) was an Israeli operation, the moral disdain it aroused among some needs to be understood and put in context.
The attack provoked condemnation from among supposedly high-minded people who labeled the scheme a “terrorist” attack or claimed that it violated international law—as did Human Rights Watch, a group that has time and again been exposed for its bias against Israel and antisemitism. As predictably negative articles published by NPR and The Intercept noted, so-called experts from the United Nations agreed. Other entities irredeemably committed to undermining Israel’s right to exist and defend itself decried that the exploding devices were evidence of a massive “war crime.”
An Israeli tank during military training in the Golan Heights on April 19, 2024. Photo by Michael Giladi/Flash90.
Is it acceptable to laugh at the situation?
Even more insufferable was the moral opprobrium directed at the many Israelis and people everywhere, Jew and non-Jew alike, who found humor in the misfortune of the terrorists, as was made clear in a tsunami of jokes and memes about their stupidity as well as the grievous injuries suffered by many of them.
Let’s specify that many of these jibes were not in the best of taste. Maybe all of them were tasteless. The notion that we should in some ways recognize the common humanity we share with members of Hezbollah or that we are obligated by our own faiths to grieve with our enemies, even as we resist them, is well grounded in Jewish as well as Christian traditions.
After all, one of the highlights of a Passover seder is the ritual of removing drops of wine from our cups at the mention of each of the plagues sent by God to punish the Egyptians for their enslavement of the Jews. Moses’ own sister, Miriam, was punished for celebrating the deaths of the Egyptians who drowned when the Red Sea reconstituted itself after letting the escaped slaves pass.
But dipping our fingers in a wine cup is easy enough when trying to atavistically recall an event that happened more than 3,000 years ago. Israelis have been living with the trauma of Oct. 7 for the past year and decades of terrorism before that. Jews elsewhere are facing a surge in antisemitism the likes of which have not been experienced in the living memory of most people. We are all only human and are entitled to take some satisfaction when those dedicated to murdering Israelis, Americans and other Diaspora Jewish communities encounter some misfortune.
This is not dissimilar to reactions to the deaths of Nazis in the past, even though as many as a million or more German civilians were killed in both Allied bombings and the invasions of Germany needed to overthrow Adolf Hitler’s regime. When human beings engage in mass murder, as members of Hezbollah have repeatedly done, they forfeit the right to sympathy when reaping the whirlwind they have sown. Anyone who disagrees with that has lost their moral compass.
Although the deaths of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, there is no other example that I am aware of such a mass-targeted killing of terrorists that was so clearly crafted to avoid such casualties. In the past year, Israel has often been falsely accused of making no effort to spare civilians, even though they do more than any nation in that respect. But when it does something that is so transparently directed only at terrorists—who else would have a Hezbollah pager?—it is still attacked with the same unfairness charge. As in so many other ways, this proves again that Israel is assaulted verbally, legally and physically not so much for what it does but for what it is.
Israel can do nothing right
At the root of this the same belief in Israel’s illegitimacy as a “settler/colonialist” and “apartheid” state that motivates the mobs who have marched in the streets of American cities and on college campuses in support of Hamas’s efforts to purge Jews “from the river to the sea.”
To such people, there is nothing that Israelis could do to defend itself under any circumstance that would be justified. And, as they have also shown, there is nothing that those who wish to eradicate Israeli—even the genocidal Islamists of Hamas who perpetrated an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7—can do that can’t be characterized as an act of justified “resistance” against “settlers” and “white” oppressors.
Just as important as that is the way the attack on Israel’s efforts to stop Hezbollah tells us about the way many in the West have lost any belief that there is such a thing as a just war.
The immediate reaction to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, reminded the overwhelming majority of Americans that there were times when you had to fight to defend yourself and your country. That was a matter of consensus among the generation that fought in World War II but had gone out of fashion in the Vietnam War era. Amid the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed 9/11, it is once again being attacked by the left.
Some wars are just
That sense that there is nothing worth fighting or dying for has been compounded by the success of the left’s long march through our institutions in recent years as a generation of American students were indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist myths about critical race theory and intersectionality. This is not just a war against America and its history but against Western civilization itself. By this means, many Americans have been intellectually disarmed against threats to their values and their nation. Along with it comes a belief that “white” Westerners are, like Israelis, inherently illegitimate and should not resist those who label themselves (as does Hezbollah) as members of a class of victims who seek to do them harm and topple their civilization.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, one liberal intellectual who had protested America’s involvement in that conflict sought to map out a way to think about war that would be free of mindless pacifism, in addition to chauvinism and war fever. His 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars, is a classic that has withstood the test of time and bears revisiting. It teaches that while unnecessary and aggressive wars are unjust, those waged to defend against murderous regimes and those who seek to victimize the powerless are just. Most of all, a war waged to defend a nation’s existence is fully defensible and should be supported by anyone with a set of moral values.
But many contemporary Western liberals have either forgotten that or have embraced anti-Western and Marxist ideology that would render even the most obviously moral wars, such as those waged against Hitler’s regime and the perpetrators of Oct. 7, as somehow immoral. In this way, they are prepared to condemn Israel’s exploding beepers that are clearly aimed at killing only terrorists as much as they do anything to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and their Iranian paymasters from continuing to inflict suffering on Israel and the West. In their worldview, the terrorists should be protected from attack, and their Israeli and Western victims deserve none.
The issue this week isn’t so much whether it’s OK to laugh at the predicament of terrorists who have had the tables turned on them. It’s whether it’s ever right for Israelis or any citizen of a Western country to defend themselves against murderers with blood on their hands, and who wish to create more mayhem and death. Ethical people understand that there is only one answer to that question. The anger directed at Israel is because they have once again shown that they are prepared to try to make the killers pay for their crimes.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
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