Hezbollah, an armed terrorist group in Lebanon that, by a bizarre kind of courtesy, people call a non-state actor even though it is much stronger and wields more power than the hapless Lebanese government, has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since October 8, when it began attacking to express support for what Hamas had done the day before. Since then, tens of thousands of Israelis have had to flee their homes in the north of the country. It is insane—I mean the word literally, “unable to think in a clear or sensible way”—to think that Israel was not perfectly entitled to invade Lebanon, occupy as much of its territory as necessary to make the attacks stop, and destroy Hezbollah and its power to make war.¹Yes, I know that there are pacifists in the world who believe war is always wrong, no matter the cause. I am not talking about them. And yet, occupied with the fight against Hamas in Gaza and no doubt attuned to the insanity of world opinion, Israel hasn’t done so. But with the threat from Hamas in Gaza seriously degraded, Israel has ramped up its attacks on Hezbollah with the aim of regaining control of the north of the country. This stage of the fight began with an audacious attack on Hezbollah’s method of securely communicating with its fighters through pagers and walkie-talkies that the world, of course, has condemned as an illegal use of “booby traps.”²My point here is not legal but moral and ethical. As I never tire of saying, I am not an expert in the relevant law. But it seems crazy to me to think that the pagers should be treated as ordinary civilian objects that could be booby traps, given that all the Hezbollah fighters who received them knew that they were for secure communications with Hezbollah. There might well be innocent victims who happened to be standing nearby when one of these pagers exploded. On Friday, Israeli strikes killed Ibrahim Aqeel, a Hezbollah leader wanted by the United States “for his role in two bombing attacks in 1983 that killed more than 350 people at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks,” according to the New York Times. Many other leaders of an elite Hezbollah unit were killed in the same attack. Here is what those leaders were talking about when they were killed, according to an Al-Monitor report cited on the Times of Israel website:

The US-based Al-Monitor outlet cited a source close to Hezbollah as also saying the meeting had been called to work on the longstanding plan for a major invasion of the northern Galilee region, to be launched in the wake of a pair of unprecedented attacks last week in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploded, killing 37 people and wounding thousands. That attack was widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

The members of the elite Radwan Force were studying “plans for a ground invasion at the heart of the occupied territories,” the source told Al-Monitor. (Hezbollah seeks to destroy Israel and sees all of its sovereign territory as “occupied.”)

And on Saturday, Israel attacked hundreds of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and Hezbollah responded with rocket attacks deep into Israel, most of which, thankfully, were intercepted.

The United States says it hopes to avoid a large-scale war. I think everyone shares that goal. In practice, I think that means putting as much pressure as possible on Hezbollah and Iran to back down and allow a solution that gives Israel some permanent assurance of quiet in the north. Is that realistic? This isn’t really my field, so I don’t know, but comments like this, from Lina Khatib, a fellow at Chatham House, make me hopeful:

“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”

Of course, the United States and others in the West still have to have the will to exert pressure on Hezbollah and Iran, and it is not so clear to me that we have the will. But if we do want to avoid a wider war, this would be a good time to find it.

Image credit: אבישי טייכר (CC BY)

• 1
  Yes, I know that there are pacifists in the world who believe war is always wrong, no matter the cause. I am not talking about them.
• 2
  My point here is not legal but moral and ethical. As I never tire of saying, I am not an expert in the relevant law. But it seems crazy to me to think that the pagers should be treated as ordinary civilian objects that could be booby traps, given that all the Hezbollah fighters who received them knew that they were for secure communications with Hezbollah. There might well be innocent victims who happened to be standing nearby when one of these pagers exploded.