Israel's always-critics
Back in June, when the IDF rescued Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv from captivity in Gaza, I wrote here about the remarkable disappointment some people seemed to feel that Israel had successfully rescued four hostages through their own ingenuity and force of arms. It went against tradition, I wrote - the historic tradition in which Jews accept their helpless victimhood and don’t fight back - and it was obvious that some commentators were irritated by the reversal of this old, customary way of doing things. These are Israel’s always-critics, and they have been on display yet again this week.
On Wednesday, thousands of pagers used by Hizbollah members as a lo-tech communications system designed to avoid Israeli eavesdropping suddenly exploded. The following day, almost exactly 24 hours later, the same thing happened to the hand-held radios used by Hizbollah as an alternative to the pagers that had blown up the day before. The combined attacks killed over 30 people and injured thousands, some critically. Two of those killed were children, tragically so, while it appears that many, if not most, were Hizbollah members: martyrdom images issued by Hizbollah showed them in military uniform.
Israel has not claimed responsibility, but it’s safe to assume that Israel is responsible, and it is an operation that has instantly taken its place amongst the most heralded, mythical actions in that murky area that straddles warfare, intelligence and counter-terrorism. John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts in urban warfare, wrote that he could not think of any “similar intelligence/military operation with such secrecy, lethality, ingenuity, audacity, impact… nothing so targeted lethal use of force, precise - proportionate & distinction, as many enemy hit, over such a wide geographic area.”
However, it is no surprise that Israel’s most enthusiastic and committed critics feel differently. Social media - and the regular media, for that matter - has been flooded with instant judgements that this operation is indiscriminate terrorism, that it posed unacceptable risks to bystanders, that it breaks all sorts of human rights laws, and so forth. All of which was expressed by people who knew nothing other than the bare facts about what had happened.
In the 24 hours immediately following the pager-borne assault on Hizbollah, very little was known about the people who were injured. No details had emerged of how many of those killed or injured were the Hizbollah members carrying the pagers or nearby civilians caught in the blast. We do know that these pagers were specially ordered by Hizbollah for their internal communications, and terrorist organisations don’t usually give out that kind of equipment to random strangers. In addition, the initial visual evidence suggested that passers-by were unlikely to be caught: one of the first CCTV clips to emerge showed a pager exploding in the bag of a man standing at a fruit stand (it’s here, if you want to watch), and while the injured target falls to the floor, another man standing next to him runs away seemingly unscathed.
No matter. They give themselves away, these always-critics. Their usual criticism is that Israel bombs Gaza indiscriminately, from the air or with artillery and tanks, and doesn’t care who it kills. Then, when Israel comes up with a mode of attack that is as directly, individually targeted as a personal pager, they don’t say “that’s a better way to do it”. They don’t acknowledge any distinction at all. Any attack by Israel is an illegitimate escalation by definition, because Israel has done it. It is no coincidence that the buzzword of the always-critics this time is “indiscriminate”: it is gaslighting, given the specifically discriminating nature of this particular attack.
This is where we see the difference between Israel’s honest critics and its true enemies. There are a lot of people who were appalled by the Hamas atrocities on October 7 and have no time for terrorism, and who are also horrified by the scale of suffering in Gaza and have called on Israel to find a different way, to negotiate a ceasefire, to take more care over the lives and humanitarian needs of Gazan civilians. These are legitimate - you might say essential - issues to discuss and disagree over, but that’s not what is happening here. The always-critics never acknowledge Israel might have a point, that a threat to it might be real and not of Israel’s own making, that sometimes, just sometimes, Israel isn’t the bad guy in the story.
In so doing, they pick a side. The sheer imbalance in their commentary and condemnations, the lack of nuance or selectivity in their criticisms of Israel, and the vacuum of compassion for Israelis or interest in understanding their stories and their fears, means they effectively place themselves on the opposite side in whatever conflict Israel is engaged in. This may not be conscious, and to be clear, when I talk here about ‘sides’ I do not mean combatants: but rhetorically, politically, and in their instinctive sympathies, they choose to side with whoever is fighting against Israel.
And what is the side they have chosen, when they look at the conflict over Israel’s northern border? Unlike the Palestinians, Hizbollah has no grievance against Israel other than Israel’s very existence. There is no land dispute between Israel and Hizbollah, and there was no need for Hizbollah to start firing rockets into Israel on 8th October. This is an organisation whose leader has said that it is a good thing the State of Israel was created, because then all the Jews will gather in one place to be killed. Its TV station, Al-Manar, was the first to broadcast the claim that 4,000 Jews or Israelis did not go to work in the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, based on alleged advice from Israeli security services. It has a long record of terrorism against Jews and others around the world: in recent years Hizbollah and its Iranian sponsors have planned terror plots in over a dozen countries, targeting synagogues, Israeli businesspeople, tourist venues, Iranian dissidents and others. Before October 7, the worst massacre of Jews anywhere in the world since the Holocaust had been Hizbollah’s terror bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Argentina in 1994 which killed 85 people. Thousands of Hizbollah fighters joined the civil war in Syria, not to oust President Assad as dictator but to keep him in power, killing untold numbers of Syrian civilians in the process. This is not a benign resistance movement: it is a terror organisation driven by extreme ideology and riven through with antisemitism.
The always-critics may not be driven by antisemitism in their criticisms. Some surely are, while others certainly are not. But either way, they end up rhetorically choosing the side of an antisemitic organisation trying to destroy the Jewish state, that has a record of antisemitic propaganda and terror against Jews inside and outside Israel. If they are comfortable with that position, they may as well be antisemites themselves. It makes little difference in the end.
None of this means that every Israeli action against Hizbollah is legal or wise, and it may turn out that the pager-bombs were neither. But the always-critics do not make an evidence-based assessment of such matters before expressing their outrage. Any Israeli military action is deemed illegitimate simply because it is an Israeli military action. The always-critics will never recognise that Hizbollah is an antisemitic terror group pledged to Israel’s destruction, nor will they show sympathy or concern for the 60,000 internally displaced Israelis, forced by Hizbollah’s rockets and drones to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border for almost a year. And they absolutely refuse to recognise any difference between a 2,000lb bomb dropped on a residential block of flats in Gaza, and a 20g pager bomb in the pocket of a terrorist in Beirut.
This will happen again, of course. Israel will do what it thinks is necessary to defend its people and destroy its enemies, and while reasonable people try to discuss whether they have done the right thing or not, the always-critics will dominate the debate with their self-righteous certainty that whatever Israel does will always be wrong.
I think you are being too generous toward the "legitimate" critics of Israel. Of course, everyone should have compassion for the innocent Palestinian civilians being victimized in the war against Hamas. But to demand a unilateral ceasefire from Israel, or to blame Israel for Palestinian victimization, is to excuse Palestinian "leadership" from its responsibility for the fact that there could have been a Palestinian state 75 years ago, or 20 years ago, had they simply accepted Israel's right to exist and signed a peace treaty with them.
Every civilian death is a tragedy, but I also believe every civilian death is the fault of Hamas and all nations surrounding Israel that refuse to accept the right of Israel to exist.
Exactly this. There is an assistant professor of "international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory" who gets called upon occasionally by the news and current affairs producers at the CBC to opine on such matters as South Africa's application before the ICJ. On October 8th, she was busy on X claiming that Hamas et al had license to commit what would otherwise be deemed war crimes. Following the news of Hezbollah's exploding pagers, said professor was back on X arguing with Oz Katerji that the IDF was guilty of more war crimes, now against the innocents of Hezbollah. Oz was having none of it, naturally. The problem is that this professor's students and the CBC's average audience members have no idea how "dubious" this professor's opinions really are.