After Israel’s phenomenal precision strike against the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah on Tuesday, which killed about a dozen people and wounded thousands more, the Jewish state’s critics kicked into overdrive. Israel rigged pagers distributed by Hezbollah to its operatives with just enough explosive material to kill or harm the terrorist possessing them and as few bystanders as possible. Yet this finely calibrated response was still a bridge too far for the chorus of those who have never met an Israeli military action they found legitimate. After 11 months of Hezbollah missile attacks aimed at Israel’s civilian centers, resulting in tens of thousands of evacuations and dozens of deaths—including children murdered on a Golan Heights playground—the rules of proportionality and just war have shifted. Even one civilian harmed now renders an Israeli attack illegitimate.
“Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon detonated thousands of handheld devices across a slew of public spaces, seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians,” New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on X. “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law.” Ocasio-Cortez did not specify which provision, nor could she. A strike carefully designed to target only individuals carrying Hezbollah-issued technology would pass muster under any traditional standard. It is an extraordinarily humanitarian way to conduct war.
Kenneth Roth, the anti-Israel fanatic who ran Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, condemned Israel’s “use of booby traps—objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use.” He believes, apparently, that these pagers are children’s toys or were sold to the Lebanese public at the Beirut RadioShack. Of course, this is not the case. These were devices procured and distributed by Hezbollah to its operatives to evade Israeli surveillance, with the ultimate goal of coordinating attacks against the Jewish state. Roth conveniently leaves out these facts. He would prefer that his audience mistakenly believe Israel is sowing chaos by rigging ordinary consumer items to maximize civilian suffering.
This criticism is particularly rich considering Israel’s ongoing operation in Gaza to root out Hamas. While Roth and others spend their days condemning Israel for not doing enough to prevent civilian casualties, Israel puts its soldiers at risk by sending them into dense urban-war environments, going above and beyond what is required of it under the laws of armed conflict and basic ethics. One major source of risk for Israeli troops is Hamas’s well-documented use of booby traps, including a reported 14,000 rigged structures in Rafah alone. Yet Roth finds a way to thread the needle, faulting Israel for insufficient care on both fronts without pointing out that Hamas and Hezbollah put vastly more civilians in harm’s way.
A host of academics and media commentators chimed in with similar criticisms of Israel’s pager operation. Maryam Jamshidi, a law professor at UC–Boulder, lamented that “Israel sent a series of messages [to] the pagers to ensure that users would be likely to look at them when the explosion happened. . . . this attack was designed [to] traumatize & terrorize.” To traumatize and terrorize whom? She doesn’t say, because the answer is that those “users” were not random civilians but combatants in a war. Brandon Friedman, an entrepreneur and former Obama administration official, added that “the Israeli government is, again, normalizing war on civilians. These attacks took place in markets, in homes, among family members, and elsewhere. This is a terror attack on the general population under the guise of pinpoint targeting.”
It’s worth noting the unreasonable standard these criticisms set for Israel. Everyone else can fight wars that result in civilian casualties, as long as they don’t kill civilians to an extent unjustified by legitimate military goals. That’s what the international-law principle of “proportionality” means. But Israel is not allowed to harm civilians at all. Even traumatizing civilians renders an attack illegitimate in these critics’ eyes. If rigging Hezbollah pagers issued to combatants with tiny amounts of explosive material is a “war on civilians,” then it’s hard to imagine what acceptable war conduct looks like.
There are only two ways to make sense of these strained criticisms. First, Israel’s critics might not believe that Israel and Hezbollah are at war (or that Hezbollah is a military organization). But such an argument would be self-discrediting: Hezbollah has murdered and injured dozens of Israelis in missile strikes over the past year and has caused the mass evacuation of civilians in Israel’s north. This war was started long ago, and not by Israel.
The second explanation is more plausible, and more telling: Israel’s critics are not humanitarian critics at all. Rather, they do not believe the Jewish state has the right to conduct war, period. The hysterical reaction to what was probably the most remarkable precision strike ever conducted confirms it: for Israel’s critics, the only acceptable Israeli military action is no military action at all.
By trying to turn Israel’s ingenuity and precision into something shameful, the critics have shown themselves to be rejectionists who believe the country has no right to exist, and who will be satisfied only when Israel stops fighting back altogether and eventually disappears. Whether Americans will awaken to the fact that such critics are effectively running interference for designated foreign terror organizations remains to be seen.
Photo by Bilal Jawich/Xinhua via Getty Images