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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Crazy news out of the Middle East today.

While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured. People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.

Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.

From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.

That's a pretty cool trick but how is it going to achieve the political goal?

Israel has blown up leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah with bombs and now pagers. They have all these sci-fi ways of killing Iranian scientists, remote controlled machineguns and such.

No war in history has ever been won by assassination. If they want to win militarily they need to actually march in and crush Hezbollah, there's no shortcut. Hamas shows that much. If Russia blew up Zelensky, that wouldn't solve their problems. They have to smash the Ukrainian army until it stops moving, or come to a negotiated peace.

If Israel actually follows this up with an air and ground campaign that blasts through Hezbollah and achieves their surrender or obliteration, that will be really impressive. But if it just leads to more skirmishing with rocket and airstrike exchanges, then what's the point?

No war in history has ever been won by assassination.

I think it was happened in feudal times. E.g. this might be an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)

Cyrus died in battle, is that what you're talking about?

well it just first that got in my head. I don't think if Cyrus was killed by lone wolf changed anything, in the end, Greek army was left with no person they could legally install as ruler as so had so leave. Assasinating Cyrus opponent would be probably effective.

If Russia blew up Zelensky, that wouldn't solve their problems.

But it will solve Ukraine's biggest problem. Zelensky is better as martyr than as a narcissist in lead that cares only about Zelensky.

I don't think there was any intent to achieve a significant political goal, they were forced to use it because it was about to be discovered.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/09/exclusive-hezbollah-suspicions-forced-israel-expedite-lebanon-pager-attack

It was not Israel’s preferred course of action to detonate the pagers ahead of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, but security officials made an 11th-hour decision after at least two Hezbollah members suspected something was amiss with the devices.

Israel has been posturing for an invasion of Lebanon but clearly aren't ready for it just yet.

Very impressive. The question that comes to mind is the value of blowing all of these up and mostly maiming many Hezbollah agents versus having full, unfettered access to their communications. This makes me think that Israel likely has full interception capabilities, no matter how Hezbollah communicates electronically.

I think there is certainly an advantage in making your enemy distrust all possible forms of communication. If they have to abandon pagers it's on to carrier pigeons next.

Could also be that they knew the pager gambit would be compromised eventually, either by an unplanned explosion or by someone in Hezbollah tinkering and alerting the rest.

As of a few minutes ago, reports sourced by Sky News Arabia claims that Mossad had placed "Pentaerythritol tetranitrate" within the batteries, and then triggered it by remotely causing a battery overheat, so kind of an inbetween scenario for my "should I be worried that the opening salvo of a war involving my country will be my cellphone blowing up my crotch?" question.

Source

Inbetween scenario because there would have been tampering, but also it doesn't seem to have been big obvious bombs. It's concievable that China could be putting this in devices shipped to adversaries undetected.

I would be happy if we see again removable batteries in devices.

Didn't help Hezbollah despite pagers (I presume) taking AAAs.

Of course, the Guardian is not happy with this:

Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here. Per Wikipedia, "From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals." Of course, the tactics employed by Hezbollah have included suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel.

I think that if you manage to kill your mortal enemies without turning their neighborhood into rubble, that is commendable. Of course a few civilians will also die in such attacks, but certainly a lower number than would in any conventional form of warfare.

Given that the pagers were meant as an alternative to a trackable cell phone which could attract Israeli missile strikes, it seems reasonable that the persons using them were mostly people who thought that they might become a target of such strikes otherwise, that is military personnel and especially leadership.

My main beef with Mossad would be purely operational -- nine killed, (one of whom seems to be a ten years old girl who was unlikely to belong to the higher echelons of Hezbollah leadership) with 3k wounded seems pretty inefficient. Of course, without knowing how these are counted (are most of them pager owners who survived, or is everyone who had ringing ears after hearing the blast counting as injured here), it is hard to say for certain. And I get that there were operational constraints -- if the pagers suddenly weighted as much as a 1995 phone, the terrorists would have become suspicious. But even if we are generous and say that the eight killed were all military commanders, and that another sixteen were permanently injured in a way which prevents them from continuing to destroy Israel, I don't think that the outcome is very impressive.

Of course, this is just an armchair analysis. Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile because they were scheduled to be swapped for fresh, uncompromised ones in a week. Perhaps using something deadlier than mere explosives was not politically feasible.

While I think Hamas and Hezbollah are quite similar in a lot of ways, I think I still have more understanding for the Hamas grunt than for the Hezbollah grunt. The former has been raised on Hamas propaganda in fucking Gaza, which is not known for its economic growth and upwards mobility. The latter is much more likely to have heard the opinion that destroying Israel is perhaps not the most important thing in life, and has a Lebanese passport which offers economic alternatives to 'become a jihadist, Iran pays well' of which Gazans could only dream.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.

It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.

*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **

**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.

I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.

For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.

I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.

It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.

The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).

I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.

An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.

Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.

Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile

My guess is that this wasn’t a useful option for the same reason that Hezbollah opted for pagers in the first place: pagers are passive, lacking transmit capabilities, meaning that Israel would not be able to collect useful data from the pagers remotely.

That is a very good point.

Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.

If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.

Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.

TX capability also requires much more power, and these pagers run off a AAA battery.

Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.

OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.

I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.

Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.

I don't think that the outcome is very impressive

There's another point you brushed against, but moved past: the pagers were used as a safe alternative to cell phones. As a morale downer and paranoia increaser, this will hit Hezbollah pretty hard.

I agree, the impact is mostly morale. Getting maimed by your pager is certainly not the most glorious kind of martyrdom.

Of course, I would also not oversell the psychological impact. The more senior commanders will simply keep some expendable kid nearby to handle their pager.

Yeah this is psychological warfare par excellence; the message is clear that the enemy can reach you at any time and you’ll never be safe.

I think on the whole that's pretty cool, despite the harm to some innocents as collateral damage.

I think the whining about terrorism and medical professionals being harmed falls flat. If they're hezbollah members and medical professionals, they're terrorists first and foremost and therefore legitimate targets.

But I wonder about the timing? Why now? Why not in combination with something else?

Hezbollah is functionally a state in southern Lebanon; it’s entirely possible that these medical professionals were working for Hezbollah for the same reason that doctors work for the government the world over.

Why aren't people in the middle east ever allowed to engage in armed resistance when they are occupied? When Iraq was under a brutal occupation they were still labled terrorists despite having every reason and right to defend their country from occupation.

The same goes for the Lebanese. They are under attack and should be expected to fight back.

Because they are either a terrorist group that strikes outside their nation's borders, a sovereign protecting a terrorist group, a citizen who supports that sovereign, or one of the few unfortunate citizens that do not. In the last case, what they should be doing is forming a terrorist group to strike at their evil sovereign. Very few such people it seems.

I think the “terrorist” label here is irrelevant. All that /u/TowardsPanna needed to point out is that Hezbollah are enemy combatants of the IDF and consequently legitimate targets. The same is true of Israeli soldiers, of course.

Gang members who are attacked by police don't get to attack back on the grounds that the police are enemy combatants. The gang members aren't a state.

The Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. A non-state group has been conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents.

Lebanon has been bombed regularly for decades, has had large groups of Palestinians pushed into its territory and Israel is fighting wars in both Syria and Palestine. They have every reason to militarize against Israel

And yet the Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. Whether they militarize against Israel is irrelevant to that, and if they initated a round of conflict as Hezbollah did it would even further invalidate claims of the later.

Being bombed surely counts as being under attack. Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?

Being bombed surely counts as being under attack.

Depends- was this an initiation of hostilities, or a retaliation of a non-state group conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents?

Or are we going to conflate 'attack' between the contextual of 'who started it and bears moral onus' and tactical 'a retaliation is an attack'? I enjoy a good motte and bailey as much as anyone, but I will fully acknoweldge starting in the motte on this semantic dispute, as I am and was using the former sense of instigation rather than later. We can restart from that if you'd like.

Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?

Given your choice reubtal to Lebanon not being under attack was a conflict not started by Israel but from actors within Lebanon nearly two decades ago, I would propose that accusation of gaslighting would be a demonstration of gaslighting.

Whether Hezbollah is state or non-state seems fairly irrelevant to me, as they surely must enjoy broad popular support to function. (Something like 90% among Shiites, who are a majority in the parts adjacent to Israel) For all means and purposes, I think they can be modelled as a shadow government prosecuting a continuing low-key war against Israel on behalf of their people.

Lebanon and Palestine/Israel were separated by enemy action, and up until the colonization it is difficult to see the residents in the south of the French Mandate and the north of the British Mandate as separate peoples. Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands. This brings us back to the original question - why do Arabs not get accorded this right? I would be happy, in the sense of seeing a "master morality" system that is at least honest if not necessarily agreeable, if proponents of continued support for Israel simply argued that Israel is an ally, a superior civilisation and strong enough to deserve victory. However, its supporters can't seem to be able to stop to make their argument on the "slave morality" basis, saying that Israel deserves our support because they have been unfairly oppressed, undeservedly attacked and we owe them a moral debt (...to help them steal from and slaughter a third party?). I don't see how the latter can be done without trickery.

(...but all that being said, I now remember that we have basically opposite value systems and preferences regarding anything to do with international politics, and so it is probably not particularly productive for us to continue this discussion as we will both just get upset with no resulting shift in beliefs. Ceasefire?)

More comments

Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.

This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?

This is one of those - it can work only once things.

It happened again today, this time with PTT radios. This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

Do you really think that would actually happen?

Assuming you live in Israel (given your flair), would IDF soldiers randomly exploding due to surreptitiously placed Iranian bombs cause you to start treating known members of the IDF like lepers? I think it would just bolster your determination to fight back against the Iranians rather than treat the soldiers fighting for you like social pariahs. To use a specific example...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html

I don't think that murdering this 9 year old girl (which I wouldn't really call "great", personally) is making these people support Israel. In fact, from the photos of the funeral, those Hezbollah scarfs look pretty new - and the quotes they give make it sound like this attack was one of Hezbollah's greatest recruitment efforts to date. I know personally that if my 9 year old daughter was murdered by a foreign state I'd be signing up for whatever military organisation wants to fight back against them as soon as they'd have me.

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other? So everyone who isn’t a Shia Muslim isn’t really on their side anyway. Christians in Lebanon have already been blaming Hizballah for bringing Israeli wrath on Lebanon for a conflict they have no interest in. When Muslims from Beirut’s Dahieh started looking for places to move to, some Maronites and Druze simply refused to rent them. Now this is further pulling these groups apart, who would want to associate with a group that at any moment could either blow up or be bombed, and you already hated anyway?

You’re modeling this as if it’s all of Lebanon fighting Israel, while in truth it’s one part of Lebanon dragging the rest into unwanted war - AGAIN. Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other?

Yes. I just don't believe that will convince any Lebanese people who aren't already Israel supporters that the dying children are to blame rather than the nation which is currently bombing them as we speak.

Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

I don't recall ever claiming that Lebanon was some kind of land of milk and honey where all men lived together in harmony, but I don't see how this really matters. If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

You’re applying contradicting logic to the same group. Once, Shia can somehow hate Israel more because the daughter if a Hizballah operative died, then secondly non-Shia cannot hate Shia more since they’re already hostile to one another. Please pick one lane so we can further discuss.

By the way, you could just go to /r/lebanon and see what they think of Hizballah there.

The other explanation for the timing is that a limited time window to use it was closing, either because of an inherent limitation in the bomb design or because the cover was about to be blown.

a limited time window to use it was closing

If it is planted explosives, the time window to use it would have been very short to begin with as it would all be dependant on the explosives not being detected, and no accidental detonation occuring that would give away the plot. If I were planning something like that, I wouldn't wait more than a week or two after deployment. Apparently they waited 5 months.

Or because the political leadership was in crisis and needed something big and flashy to show off to the public to boost credibility. Or because there is a forthcoming military action that they needed Hezbollah leadership confused, partially-disabled, and disrupted for. There are many potential reasons this capability was triggered now.

True, I should have said "another explanation".

Technical part is not interesting.

I don't know about you, but I carry a cell phone close to my crotch daily, I am really interested as to whether this is a lithium battery detonation due to software abuse, lithium battery detonation due to physical tampering or the detonation of implanted explosives, as it would change my behavior, especially in times of heightened geopolitical tension.

If it's purely software, maybe I'll carry my phone in a bag instead of pockets. If it required physical tampering, maybe I'll reconsider used devices, or maybe it will increase my worry about letting my phone be handled by people I don't trust (airport security in a country I don't trust, for instance, or dodgy phone repair shops).

The videos I saw certainly didn't look like a plain lithium battery failure. There appeared to be much more energy in the explosion, then much less fire afterwards.

Later reporting apparently sourced from Lebanese security says that less than 20g of PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) was placed on the batteries and then detonated by remotely overheating the battery.

Which is still terrifying to me, tbh, as I have a device in my pockets that has a significant amount of components built in a country that my country could realistically be at war with within this decade.

Yeah, but Israel targeted pagers because few normies have or use them, so blowing them up is fairly constrained. On the other hand blowing up lots of cellphones is basically just carpet bombing, which is widely recognized by military theorists as pointless.

IMHO this doesn't scale well.

A few thousand targets, who are trying to stay in hiding, who you know you'll be hitting within months, who are already at war with you, and who are soldiers in that war? Sure, slip some explosives into their pagers. What are they going to say if they catch you, "Gosh, we only launched seven or eight thousand rockets at your towns this year, but now the gloves are off!"

A hundred million targets, a million of whom take their cell phones through airport explosive detectors each day, another 20,000 of whom have their cell phones dismantled for repairs each day, who are a mix of 99% civilians not at war with you and 1% soldiers who are also not at war with you but who still have a few thousand nuclear warheads ready just in case? You would have to be completely insane to start loading their phones with explosives.

China could realistically be at war with us within a decade, but it'll be a "gosh, Taipei really wanted to reunify with us and we just had to very suddenly send over a bunch of troops to what's really also our own territory to deal with the criminal terrorists who wanted to oppose the will of the people" sort of war, not a "the trouble with Pearl Harbor was it didn't piss off the US enough" sort of war. I wouldn't be surprised if every chip they manufacture for us is compromised with a you-can-find-it-under-an-electron-microscope plausibly-deniable-backdoor for SigInt or DDOS purposes, but I would be astonished if they tried to pull off a you-can-find-it-with-a-screwdriver obvious-killing-Americans-preparation for unclear purposes. Your phone may stop working when WW3 starts, or it may start transmitting every word spoken around you to Chinese AIs to sieve through for intelligence, but it's not going to explode.

It's not purely software. Too valuable to waste on such small target.

I doubt it is too, but I hope we'll find out more within the few weeks.

Or degrading hezbollah’s organizational capabilities for a few days was the goal of the operation, they won’t be able to get new devices out right away.

Maybe this phone trick only works once. But intelligent people can come up with all kinds of attack vectors. Next time it will be something else. This sends a pretty clear message: we are smarter than you and we can get to you. Whatever you do, it won't work, so don't try.

And, in fact, Middle East peace will be achieved when Arab countries stop trying to attack Israel constantly. The sooner it happens, the fewer Arab lives will be lost.

Someday, people will realize that Arabs are happy to fight wars that never end.

But today is not that day.

I don’t think the Israelis are uninformed about the Islamist view on martyrdom. But what other choice do they have? Their enemies refuse to even consider any victory condition in which they still exist, and overthrowing the Iranian government is not possible for a variety of reasons, so their only option is to continue the way they currently are.

But what other choice do they have?

Buy Sharks Bay from Australia and move there?

Huh, Shark Bay is apparantly bigger than Israel. I'd unironically be in favour of this if Australia made the offer.

As an Australian, nope. We're already going through a real estate crisis and have a population that's already causing strain on significant water systems - moving Israel there would make those problems substantially worse. But there's actually a better option on the table anyway - the Israelis should just be moved to the American deep south, where they can live with all the evangelicals who love them so much. There's plenty of room, and I'm sure the Israelis would be better migrants than the Haitians - dogs and cats aren't kosher, last I checked.

I prefer the "swap land with Taiwan" strategy, personally.

It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.

They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.

Supposedly the batteries were swapped with equivalent batteries with added explosives. Merely looking at its insides may not be informative. Are they also going to cut apart batteries and other components? On a sampling of units or every one?

As a trust issue: the next time a member of hezbollah is given a device for communication, will they trust it or fear it is a bomb or tracking device or otherwise compromised?

Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.

You any I have a different understanding of easy.

Cutting apart every component large enough to plausibly hold a bomb and correctly inspecting it by people who know what they are doing on a sampling of every incoming shipment is an enormous burden. I have spent months of my life going to other countries and telling people who assemble and test electronics "do this thing like I'm showing you now". And then later they don't do what I showed them.

I think these people would have the obvious idea to check their equipment for bombs, and then almost entirely fail to actually check their equipment for bombs.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on?

Depends. Could be their procurement or distribution functions are compromised.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

I think the main benefit is likely psychological. Conspiracies about Israel being behind everything are already very common in the Arab world, 22 year old Hezbollah recruits aren’t familiar with the specifics of what Mossad can and can’t do. If they’re handed the next pager and promised “I swear, this one won’t blow up”, they might not believe it.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

Depends what you mean by 'invalidate.' A system generally isn't validated when everything fails all the time, but when a critical mass of things fails enough that the reliability isn't high enough to keep doing. In some systems you only need one part to not work for the whole system to fail.

In this case I'd agree that pagers will probably still be used- I imagine they'd be used to prompt agents to go look at more secure means of communication- but if the psychological effect of the operation is that people don't trust the system enough to use it, you're going to the reliability issue alluded to.

Agreed. Even if they hide the explosive in the battery, using a sympathetic detonation one would still be able to find out if that battery was explosive.

Of course, next time, Mossad might not modify all of the pagers, but just 5%, so just testing a few is not enough to prove that the bunch is safe. So they either have to destroy 90% of the pagers they buy or live in fear that their pagers might explode in their face, perhaps not even granting you a martyr's death, but just maiming you for life.

Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.

If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.

The argument against ‘them’ doing Epstein was always obvious. If you want to convince a bunch of rich Jews to support Israel, you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers lol.

you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers

The operative word the media used tended to be "children", not "teenagers".

The masses are stupid enough to believe a 17 year old is a child, so it works.

True, and indeed it was rarely remarked upon in the Prince Andrew case that - unless he explicitly paid her for sex - sleeping with a 17 year old Virginia Giuffre was entirely legal under British law at the time and now.

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First thought: this is totally a hypothetical, some sort of intuition pump, and the responses will explain how actually it was about offshoring semiconductors.

Second: wait, it’s a fair description? What kind of James Bond plot line is this?

Third: I don’t think I’ve seen 200 pagers in my life. The past is literally a foreign country.

If you go to the Museum of Spies in Berlin, you'll quickly find that a lot of the "silly" gadgets from the Bond films were really not that far removed from reality. Cameras disguised as bras, dart guns hidden in umbrellas, the whole shebang.

I do wonder when people will stop picking fights with the Jews. None of them seem to learn that it never ends well.

laughs in Latin

Although if you believe that Christianity helped to take down the empire, that was kind of born out of Jewish resistance.

True. At the very least though, the Romans weren't following the current trend of ME nations impoverishing themselves for the sake of killing Jews not within their own borders.

They only have to win once, whereas Israel has to win every time. In addition, as @Tanista says, martyrdom (which Islam sees much more broadly than other Abrahamic faiths) is glorious to them in any case.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons including long range missiles and probably ICMBs and nuclear armed subs. They will without a doubt use them in the event that they are overrun on their own soil. Pardon the consensus building, but does anyone reasonably doubt they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case? Israel isn’t fighting wars of choice in which it can pack up and go home. There is no winning condition for their enemies, only death for everyone.

they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case?

So? There will be one billion Muslims (including still plenty of Arabs) who survive and who will gladly reconquer the Holy Land after the dust settles. That’s still a victory condition for them.

Painting the Jews as historical winners is definitely a take.

I wouldn't go that far, but I stand by my position that those who decide to try to persecute Jews don't tend to have great things to show for it.

(Although post WWII, you could argue they have been historical winners, which is arguably more relevant for deciding whether going to war against them is a great idea).

They're still around, in recognizable form even, and there are few from Western or Middle-Eastern antiquity who can say that. (East Asia has had a lot more continuity though.)

How many Latins have you seen around lately? Even though they were the founders of Rome and nobody tried to genocide them (well, not anymore than anyone else back in the day), by the time of Augustus they were already gone and forgotten as a people and a culture, and nothing of theirs survived. The only thing that has endured in some form is their language. Rome still exists, but its people have been entirely genetically replaced several times over, just by people moving in and out.

Meanwhile the Jews have maintained their distinct culture and even genetics, even though they were in exile for give or take 2000 years.

Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of a founder population that was apparently half-Italian, half-Jewish, so it’s not like there hasn’t been assimilation there too.

Different incentive structure? Death guarantees heaven, victory guarantees glory, and heaven. Eventually.

Israeli Terrorism?

It dovetails with our recent discussion of how Israel has normalized the practice of assassination as a core strategy of warfare. And now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around. We will get more details about the deaths/injuries, but there are rumors of an Iranian ambassador being injured and there will most likely be injuries among women and children across Lebanon and Syria.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack. Is the US going to publicly disavow this, or is rote terrorism now going to be normalized by Israeli operation in the region?

then an explosion with women and children around

That's the similarity.

The difference is these are micro-target explosions in the pockets of the targets rather than the entire market blowing up. So really quite different in the important metrics by my estimation.

nAd now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around.

One is an explosion coming from a suicide belt or backpack which is designed to harm and kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, particularly those women and children.

The other is sabotaging a pager handed out by a terrorist organization to its members with a small enough amount of explosives that even the person wearing the pager or keeping it in their pocket isn't reliably killed.

These are not the same.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front.

Are you sure? Knocking out a major communication system sure seems disruptive to me, to say nothing of putting a couple thousand officers, cell leaders, logistics people, etc. in the hospital all at the same time.

It's just a terrorist attack.

I know words are just vibes now, man, but come on. This is an attack on the participating personnel of a combatant organization during ongoing hostilities. That's not terrorism.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack

I see this attitude - you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.

What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?

you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.

How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?

Why should they not fight back when getting occupied? Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world? The neo con/globalists wars have caused massive waves of refugees to Europe. There is no critical race theory and gender studies in Iraq. They fought back and kicked the globalists out.

These wars have given us nothing but a surveillance state, migrants, and debt. It is a good thing that the locals manage to resist.

How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?

The bombing went fine. It was the pretending that building schools for girls in a muslim nation was a good idea that went poorly.

I have no qualms with Palestinians trying to reconquer everything from the river to the sea. I have a problem with them expecting any sympathy from me when they do it. No other historical border in world history is talked about in the way the "1967" borders are. That sort of thing is tiresome. If they want that land they can get good and win. Or else they can accept a peaceful 3 state solution with something similar to current borders.

This using your own women and children as human shields because you know antisemites and progressives will cry foul is totally lame.

“Skill Issue.”

I agree.

At this point enough precedent has been set to paint the Arab / “Palestinian” / Islamist resistance to Israel as what they are; sore losers and pathetic failures who start fights and continually get their asses handed to them, no matter the price to their people.

Any dialogue about this issue that conveniently skips over this very obvious point I just automatically flag in my mind as fundamentally dishonest. It’s incredibly tiresome.

Stop starting wars with Israel and losing. Or don’t, I really don’t care.

This makes me far less anti-anti_dan. What a well reasoned comment. The quadruple think required for all of this can be reduced down and you have done so. Please continue.

Why should they not fight back when getting occupied?

If the battle is to stop the occupation of Lebanese land, then Hezbollah can make some ploughshares now.

I obviously get that it's a GWOT hangup, it's the first response you get. I was being polite: I don't "get" it in the sense that I think there are significant disanalogies I often see the sorts of people making the above argument or your comparison simply ignore for unclear reeasons. If OP gave an alternative to violence, it'd explain why he thinks those don't apply.

Also, you switched the question. Nobody is really asking why Hezbollah is doing this.

The question was why Americans seem to behave with not only with absolute fatalism but also with condemnation that others don't take them at their word that, because they lost, nothing can be done. And why they think that's an option for a nation that can't just fly away and let any Afghans dumb enough to believe that they were now global citizens fall to their deaths or be beaten back into niqabs.

Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world?

Also not the question. These people, like OP, don't say they don't support it. They actively condemn. "Their bed to lie in" is totally different. Because that goes both ways.

What does "actively condemn" mean? Few people are going as far as saying that the US should bomb Israel. The condemnation is only relative to a baseline of close to unconditional material and political support. Not that I'm American (though I'm a citizen of another major IL supporter), but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself, or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

Declaring the government structures of your enemy terrorists and therefore outside of normal conventions of acceptable wartime conduct is all fun and games until it is done to you and yours. Israel has performed targeted assassinations of scientists involved with the Iranian nuclear programme; I would like to see the reaction if Islamists killed some US academic involved in DARPA, or any Israeli scientist involved in defense projects. Ukraine has killed journalists and lobbed basically unguided ordnance at Russian cities; I doubt it would be framed as an acceptable wartime move if Russia pulled something like the pager trick on Ukraine's leadership or even merely on GRU/whoever is behind the assassinations on the Ukrainian side by any of its cheerleaders.

but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself

This would be "their bed to lie in" I think.

or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

The cynical answer to perceived hypocrisy (often on the left anyway) is that it's all power all the way down. If America's enemies aren't terrorists because that is a cynical judgment on the US' part, it doesn't necessarily follow that the US are terrorists. They may all be hypocrites.

Then it's just a pragmatic judgment what you prefer.

But it often doesn't go like this. America's judgments of its opponents are false, but their judgments are correct.

What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?

No just Xinjiang is enough

Israel doesn’t have the resources or political cover to go full Xinjiang in Gaza.

The point of operation seems to be extremely clear. As a first-order effect, they just took out at least hundreds of enemy combatants at no personnel costs of their own, which is what any military would consider a good result. As a second-order effect, Hezbollah and other Israeli enemies will now have to exert a certain amount of care and nervousness over a lot of other foreign-imported gear, which will presumably have compounding hampering effects down the line.

Obviously if they want a full-scale war it makes sense to do this. I said it doesn't make sense unless they want a full-scale war.

Attacking enemy combatants while in conflict with the organisation they fight for isn't terrorism, attacking civilians to create spectacle and fear is.

I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.

I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.

Ok, what's the real equivalence? Is this attack closer to a terrorist attack, or is it closer to something the US has done in decades of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can you point to any conduct in the US in engaging in those wars that compares to this? It's unprecedented, and the closest base of comparison are terrorist attacks. If you don't agree, you can just point me to where the US has engaged in this in its own "War on Terrorism".

Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.

What exactly is the basis for objection here?

  • The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.

  • The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.

  • The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.

My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.

US drone strikes are a lot worse than is widely reported. Any male from 12 up in the combat zone was classified as a military target.

You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?

My objection is that IEDs in marketplaces are a terrorist tactic, and that we are probably closer to this becoming normalized.

You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?

"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."

Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.

  • You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.

  • You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.

A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.

The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.

These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb.

Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.

A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not.

I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.

So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command.

This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.

I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.

There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.

Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?

Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?

That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.

It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.

War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.

If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.

If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.

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Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?

That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.

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An "IED" is merely an "improvised explosive device"; whether something fits that description says nothing about whether the use of it is according to the laws of war.

Ok? It's obviously an IED. Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives. Now Israel is using IEDs for the same purpose against Hezbollah. So why object to my statement that Israel is embracing/normalizing tactics using by terrorists? Just admit they are and argue it's a good thing if you're inclined.

If it is an actual explosive, and they deliberately manufactured the devices they are no more improvised than a tank shell.

They are bombs of a sort, and bombs can be more or less targeted. It can be put on a street, it can be put under a soldiers car, or fired into an army barracks from a mortar.

Tactics used by terrorists are the same tactics used by states. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians with the intent to intimidate Japan into surrender. But that isn't regarded as a terrorist attack, even though it fits most of the criteria to a tee. States plant mines and other explosive devices that are hidden, and if they can will drone strike someone, killing them and people around them. But none of that is terrorism. So it can't be that hidden bombs or collateral damage or targeting civilians that mean it's terrorism.

Taboo the term terrorism and IED for the moment. They don't add anything concrete to the discussion.

What specifically is the issue? Risk of collateral damage/deaths? Being sneaky and underhanded? Being unfair? Lack of targeting? Something else?

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Ok? It's obviously an IED.

If they made them in a munitions factory, they're not "improvised". My point is your use of the term "IED" adds no light, it's nothing but heat.

Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives.

Insurgents in a US-occupied country using IEDs to attack American military targets are fully within the laws of war in doing so.

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I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict.

Do I have news for you. The region is in conflict. Hezbollah and Israel have been in a hotter-than-usual shooting war for nearly a year.

The point to me looks like it is to damage and degrade Hezbollah operations by attacking their communications network. Fear is an element and tool in all conflicts. If you can scare your enemy into using messenger boys on bikes instead of instantaneous, encrypted communications you've made their decision making process much slower. Presumably, the reason Hezbollah has so many pagers is that they moved away from cell phones due to Israeli capabilities and actions.

If you only accept unequivocal victory as a meaningful action in conflict, then there's no point to much of war. Maybe it's true and a sad reality that much of conflict is pointless. Rocket Attack #3019 seems pretty pointless, yet everyone seems pretty dedicated to continue without points.

It's just a terrorist attack.

Terrorist attacks typically target civilians. If reports are true, then this attack targeted Hezbollah operatives embedded in the the Hezbollah supply chain. That would explain why an Iranian ambassador was hurt.

Most civilians don't use pagers anymore. Even civilians in the African bush have fancy cell phones with big screens. I'd wager in a place like Lebanon that possession of a pager is so highly correlated to being involved in Hezbollah operations that saying "everyone that has a pager in Lebanon helps Hezbollah" is largely a fact.* Downstream of the pager supply probably includes some doctors, logisticians, and other adjacent support personnel, but it probably it includes a lot of invested decision makers and operatives as well.

  • Some professions still use a lot of pagers. For now it seems there are still functioning hospitals, so not ever doctor's pager was blown up.

Presumably, the reason Hezbollah has so many pagers is that they moved away from cell phones due to Israeli capabilities and actions.

Real life imitates The Wire.

Yeah, Israel should have been good boys and waited around for Hezbollah to attack them as they promised to.

As others have pointed out, this is about the least collateral damage that could be imagined. But no matter what it does, Israel can't win with its critics. What the critics really seem to want is for Israel to stop defending itself. As if Hezbollah would deliver one final punch and then both sides are even and the boys won't fight anymore.

Israel can defend itself and stop trying to use terrorist tactics to draw the United States into another ME war.

I am very curious to know what you and @functor would consider to be the ethical options available to Israel when it comes to defending themselves.

Fundamentally the solution to this war can't be from an Israeli perspective. We have hundreds of millions of middle easterners and then we have Europe close by. The solution needs to be one that benefits arabs and Europeans.

They have been kicked out of countries 109 times and seem to be a fairly nomadic people. If they want to settle somewhere it has to be on land that is available and doesn't cause a constant headache for the rest of us. The jewish autonomous oblast is bigger than Israel and available to jews.

That seems like a terrible deal in every way for the Israelis. Why would they agree to it?

"They're just Jews, they don't really mind wandering around, and we can stick them in a bumfuck corner of unproductive land under the control of a country that historically pogromed Jews often and is currently their enemy" is a proposal only someone who deeply hates Jews would think serious and reasonable.

You act like it's a hard question, but the United States has managed regime change and military occupations, Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war. Calling this "self defense" is not even a stretch, that's obviously untrue, it's a major act of provocation.

Israel should negotiate a settlement, but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

Israel should negotiate a settlement, but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

How? With who? Why would they think the other side would abide by said agreement? Why would YOU?

You act like it's a hard question

The last 80 years of history would suggest it is.

Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war

I find it difficult to believe that if Israel went all-in with the regime-change-and-occupation playbook, you would be less critical of their actions.

Israel should negotiate a settlement

What settlement should they negotiate with an adversary whose only win condition is "You stop existing"?

I am actually not all that sympathetic to Israel, except in comparison to their enemies. But their enemies have made it clear that there is no permanent negotiated settlement that leaves Israel extant. Israel's options are to do what you suggest, and just put a boot on half the Middle East, or keep playing a tower defense game while hoping the Arab world eventually has a generational change of heart.

but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

I think if we were fighting a war against an asymmetrical adversary who uses terrorist tactics, setting off bombs in enemy combatants' electronic devices (and accepting a small amount of civilian collateral damage) would be within our standards. It has certainly done less collateral damage than we did with drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I find it difficult to believe that if Israel went all-in with the regime-change-and-occupation playbook, you would be less critical of their actions

They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives. If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.

Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.

I think if we were fighting a war against an asymmetrical adversary who uses terrorist tactics, setting off bombs in enemy combatants' electronic devices (and accepting a small amount of civilian collateral damage) would be within our standards.

We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.

They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives.

This is not clear to me. You might disagree with our geopolitical objectives, but Israel and the US seem to be pretty much on the same page about them, even if we don't always agree on strategy and tactics.

If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.

When you said:

Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war

I claimed that you would not, in fact, consider that to be more ethical than what they are doing now. So you have now admitted that that's correct. My original question was "What can Israel do in its own defense that you would consider ethically defensible?" So the answer from you is clearly "Nothing" and the answer from @functor is "They can cease to exist, or they can fuck off to a backwater of Russia (and cease to exist)."

So now that we've gotten that out of the way:

Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.

"Insolence" implies they owe us fealty, which is ironic when you then claim we are an "occupied government." How can ZOG both be insolent and secretly ruling us?

We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.

That's not remotely close to what the IRA or the Iraqis insurgents did. I notice how very carefully you phrased this: "boobytrap civilian office supplies." It must have taken you some small amount of time to figure out the best way to describe "boobytrapped communications equipment used by the Hezballah" in a way that sounds like they were doing something like planting bombs in copy machines. Golf clap for the clever wording. But we've all seen the news and the videos. They targeted Hezballah pagers and walkie talkies, and almost nobody but Hezballah were injured. Yes, I'm sorry for that 10-year-old girl who was killed (I am certain, in fact, that I feel more genuine regret for this than you do), but no war in history has avoided civilian casualties.

Now let's be real here: you aren't morally offended by Israel's tactics. If they sent snipers to take out Hezballah leaders, you'd be accusing them of escalation. If they dropped bombs and rockets, you'd be accusing them of war crimes. If they sent troops, you'd be accusing them of unprovoked aggression and imperialism. If they used Jewish space lasers to target Hezballah leaders from orbit, you'd accuse them of space terrorism. If they had Harry Potter wands and could Avada Kedavra Hezballah soldiers with zero collateral damage, you'd accuse them of black magic. You don't actually care how Israel responds to its enemies. You object to the fact that they exist.

Which brings me to my other question which I'm sure it just slipped your mind to answer, as you so often forget to answer inconvenient points when pressed:

Israel should negotiate a settlement,

With who? What settlement? What is your brilliant plan for peace in the Middle East? @functor's idea is at least rather straightforward about acknowledging that he doesn't think Israel should exist. But you speak of a "settlement" as if you think there is some meaningful and workable deal the Israelis could actually make that allows them to continue to exist but isn't "insolent" or doesn't cause you to shed crocodile tears over dead Arab children. I remain fascinated to hear what it is.

Israel can defend itself

This is Israel defending itself against a group which has, over the past 11 months, fired tens of thousands of explosive rockets (you know, explosive devices) at random into civilian areas (i.e. your definition of "terrorism"), forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from hundreds of square miles of territory.

We have ZERO evidence that the U.S. was involved in any way in this, and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required, I place a low likelihood on the U.S. being significantly involved.

and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required

Does it? I know nothing about this area, but I'd have assumed the US would have the resources to become top performers in any field related to national security.

What Israeli tactics are not "terrorism" in your book?

The chances of the U.S. getting drawn in are very low now. Israel is winning militarily and Iran has been absolutely humbled. It's not that they don't want to do something, it's just that they can't because they are weak.

Soleimani was killed by a supply chain attack. He had couriers go to other countries and buy cell phones for him. And he kept switching phones so no one could tell which phone was his and track him.

The CIA learned about this and intercepted all of the cell phones in those markets and installed spy software on all of them. Then they waited for one of those phones to be sent to Soleimani and then travel to Iraq. Then simply bomb the phone and he is dead.

That's merely a software change. The Israelis appear to having gone one step further and performed some hardware modifications.

I feel confident various CIA suits are mad Israel deployed this before they could.

Will this lead to any kind of generalized panic about mobile phones and other electronic devices? There are already rumors spreading that there were no explosives in the pagers and that this is something potentially any mobile device could be made to do if hacked.

These obviously had explosives physically implanted in them. If someone is reporting there were no explosives, they are either 1) an Israeli operative trying to propagandize to make Israelis seem more powerful than they are or 2) someone who can't identify explosives, or someone looking at pagers that weren't modified.

The real risk for supply chain attacks is spy software and backdoors: information is power. And yeah, any country where all its electronics are made or handled by a hostile foreign adversary should be worried.

The problem is two-fold:

  1. Even if there were explosives in the beepers, the rumor is already out there.
  2. Having to worry that someone put C4 in your cellphone at some point in the supply chain is pretty bad too.

I had the same thought, although from the looks of things there were absolutely explosives planted in these pagers; batteries don't just explode like that.

Yeah, I've intentionally (and, uh, unintentionally) lit off some pretty high-capacity lipo batteries; even with direct punctures crossing multiple cells (don't do this!) it won't light off anywhere like these. Really big ones, scooter- or car-sized, can push out enough energy that people trying to put them out can inadvertently produce hydrogen gas that can detonate, but they're not fitting in a pager and you need a ton of water.

LiPo fires are scary because they burn so damn hot and so damn fast.

Yep, lithium-ion batteries will burn like a rocket and produce copious amounts of smoke, but no boom, or even pop.

Anyone who’s watched Mythbusters knows that high-explosives look very different from overpressure failures.

This looks like high-explosives to me.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured.

I've seen posts on Twitter suggesting the casualty numbers could be in the thousands.

Not sure I entirely trust the surely unbiased statistics I receive from JewishWarrior13.

That's fair, I was feeling lazy and posted the last account I saw reporting it. FWIW I'm pretty sure I heard it being reported to be in the thousands by the national broadcaster in Sweden.

Yes, it's thousands. My 200 number was the number of seriously wounded.

Ah I misread 200 as referring to people affected. My bad.

Reuters and other mainstream sources are saying thousands.

People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them.

An interception during shipping is surely possible, but that isn’t really ‘confiscation’. Anyway, it is impressive, if pointless. I suppose the idea is to inculcate some degree of fear, but I don’t think anyone in Hezbollah thinks they aren’t at very high risk of being killed in an Israeli attack if a war breaks out.

I don’t think anyone in Hezbollah thinks they aren’t at very high risk of being killed in an Israeli attack if a war breaks out.

This is the war. It’s happening right now.

A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion.

... that's a line from The Longest Day, isn't it?

Anyway, it is impressive, if pointless.

I've seen it suggested that one of the main aims of this incident was to throw H's communications into disarray. They were already avoiding standard modern telecoms for fear of being spied on, now they've found out that their alternative isn't safe either.

Having big chunks of your chain of command and logistics network in hospital or recuperating at the same time is a major hit to capability as well.

That makes more sense.

On one hand, it's impressive that they actually could pull off such a scheme that seems like it's straight out of the movies; on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage, and I can't help but think that my feeling of being impressed is very similar to how I felt about the 9/11 attacks. I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get. Is this a sign that they do want to accelerate the timeline towards a big showdown, perhaps thinking that delaying it for longer would only make their enemies stronger (Iran getting the bomb?) and their allies weaker/more distracted (derivative of public support in the West negative anyway, plus US/EU might get occupied by Russia and eventually China)?

on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage

How so? A pager is mainly made of plastic and can’t hold all that much high explosive (especially if you’re not gutting the internals). It’s not even a 100% guarantee that such a device will kill the wearer, let alone anyone else near by.

I’ve seen several videos posted of these pagers blowing up while the wearer is beside other people, and in all of them, it seems only the wearer was harmed. Obviously this does not confirm that zero bystanders have been injured, but based on the size of the explosions in those videos, I don’t see how there’s going to be “a lot” of collateral damage.

Yeah, it seems like they aren't really trying to play the PR game anymore.

But attacks like this make enemy leaders think they can be killed at any time. It might be an effective strategy. I think there's a bit of grift involved for high-end leaders of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. By fanning the flames of hatred they bring money into their organizations and get rich personally. Attacks like this alter the calculus, as now these leaders have to think about their own personal safety. No longer can they just send teenage zealots into a market with a suicide vest. They, personally, will be found and killed.

In any case, this is a lot better than aerial bombing.

Israel routinely kills Hamas and Hezbollah's leaders, they are fully aware that they are in grave danger. Before they got the head of Hamas, they wiped out about 60 of his relatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh#Killing_of_family_members_by_Israel

Characterizing these guys as grifters is a bit far, they have always had skin in the game. They are true believers. Israel's been trying to assassinate them for years, this is nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh#Killing_of_family_members_by_Israel

Attacks like this alter the calculus, as now these leaders have to think about their own personal safety. No longer can they just send teenage zealots into a market with a suicide vest. They, personally, will be found and killed.

Uh, no? There's no need for those leaders to alter the calculus or think any more about personal safety than they already do. They were already thinking of their own personal safety and have for an incredibly long time - it isn't like Soleimani was the first leader to get whacked. What it will actually do is force them to take a long, hard look at their supply chains and how they actually procure electronics. The biggest change I can see coming from this is a market opportunity for Chinese/Russian pager manufacturers.

what about open source?

The Chinese can be bribed and there are plenty of rich Jewish Russians in senior positions in industry and manufacturing, so it’s unclear that that’s a great path for them.

If the Chinese are so easy to bribe why aren't they giving Israel their full-throated support right now? From where I'm sitting it looks to me like China has no real motivation to assist Israel and they definitely don't act like it (understandably, in my view, given how Israel has treated their last imperial patron). As for Russia, I don't actually believe in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that jews are a fifth column who will abuse their economic power to subvert the will of the nation they live in - so I don't think the presence of jews in industry/manufacturing actually means anything when it comes to geopolitics.

I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get.

Really? I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position. Having seen a video of one of these pager bombs going off, the explosions don’t seem large enough or destructive enough to cause significant collateral damage to anyone who wasn’t carrying such a pager on his body. How much evidence do we have that a large number of individuals who aren’t Hezbollah employees/members/contractors were harmed?

I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position

Some of us don't want a regional war, but Israel obviously does. What is the point of this except provocation? Intermingling hidden explosives among civilian populations is not impressive, it's called terrorism.

Israel intermingled explosives among the enemy combatants. Intermingling said combatants among the civilian population was, as usual, the decision and the primary tactic of their enemy.

The precision repeatedly shown by Israel in such conditions is, indeed, impressive.

What war has ever contained enemy combatants entirely separately from the civilian population? Even when a massive percentage of the military is deployed to a warzone, there are certainly plenty of personnel who still go home to their families each night.

It seems to me that the real argument becomes what qualifies as a warzone, and when.

Please. There's the usual grey-zone mixing of combatants and civilians, and then there's the Western islamophilic media front that the Palestine and co primarily fight on as opposed to the physical warzone.

Gaza is roughly 141 square miles, with around 15.6k inhabitants per square mile. It's not like they'd have room for a military base even in the upside-down world where Israel allowed them to. They've been fenced in and treated like literal prisoners. So obviously any militant uprising is going to be near civilians by virtue of having zero alternate choices.

None of this should surprise anyone, and none of it should have happened in the first place.

True, but it’s also true that for many years the status quo was that Palestinians could live and work in Israel relatively freely until they started committing large numbers of terrorist attacks against civilians.

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I mean this is just one more permutation of the classic problem in the Middle East, which is that in many of these countries terrorists (or people who are employed by terrorist organizations) are walking around intermingled with the civilian population, and therefore fighting those terrorists inherently risks significant harm to civilians. I’m sympathetic to the position that in such a scenario, it should be considered unacceptable to expose those civilians to risk even if it means forgoing a clear tactical victory, but I’m also equally sympathetic to the opposite view. I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it, but I’ve made my weakly pro-Israel position clear, and this certainly didn’t move the needle away from that position for me.

I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it

That's a really silly perspective. So if it causes a lot of damage to your home country- economically, politically, geopolitically, militarily, you don't care as long as you don't know someone who was conscripted?

Yes, it's called nationalism.

It’s not clear to me that such a war would cause all of that damage to the United States. It seems like it could go all sorts of ways! I simply do not feel as though I have a strong enough grasp of all of the possible outcomes to have a strong opinion on the issue. When faced with this level of uncertainty and complexity, I think it’s pretty reasonable for a person like me - a random civilian whose job and livelihood seem not to stand much of a chance of being seriously impacted either way - to throw up my hands and say, “Not my problem!”

Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria all being strong data points that ME war has negative effects on the home-front doesn't persuade you? Or maybe you don't think Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syrian wars have had negatives impacts on the US and Europe?

Iraq and Afghanistan had terrible effects on the home front in America primarily because American troops themselves were fighting those wars, at great expense to the United States.

Syria doesn’t appear to have had any massive negative effect on the American home front. It has had a very bad effect on Europe, because European countries pursued incredibly stupid immigration/refugee policies. (I know, you likely believe that Israel or Global Jewry strong-armed them into those policies, but I just don’t think the evidence is there.)

I don’t see that previous wars in the Middle East - say, the Iran-Iraq War, or the wars Israel fought against its neighbors in the 60s and 70s - did actually have a significant long-term negative impact on countries outside of the region. Perhaps I’m simply too ignorant about the subject.

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I don't know, I thought that the whole Mossad/Krav Maga memeplex of Israeli hypercompetence had already persuaded those who would be attracted by strength regardless of the ends. Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position? If anything, there it was more realistic that there would have been converts, because Arabs were not known as legendarily competent while you can't swing a cat in memespace without hitting some form of hostile or friendly praise for Israeli skill.

There was the video of the pager exploding while being placed on the counter at a grocery store, which at least suggests that the owners do not always keep them on their body, and reports of injured hospital staff (who would plausibly be handed pagers if the de-facto rulers obtained a large stash of them) and children. I'm sure Israel and media allies will deny and cast doubt upon those as only reported by Hezbollah (as it's not like there's some other agency on the ground keeping track that could not be painted as biased), but my sense was that even in cuckold countries like Germany people have lately been dismissive towards the routine Israeli claims that only militants were hit as those appeared a little too automatic and unrealistic.

Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position?

Support for the 9/11 hijackers outside of the Arab world seems pretty nonexistent, largely because the primary target (or at least the target that ended up getting all the news coverage) was a pair of buildings occupied by thousands of civilians. If they’d just stuck to ramming planes into the Pentagon and the halls of government in DC, I frankly think that there would have been a much larger sense of “Holy shit, I don’t agree with these guys’ worldview, but that was extremely impressive.” Instead people can’t really separate the means from the ends because of the very visually-evocative optics of a bunch of middle-class office workers leaping to their deaths or crushed under rubble. Similarly, while even people who broadly support Zionism still mostly squirm over the carnage in Gaza, I doubt many people feel all that bad for guys who work for Hezbollah.

it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage

How is that clear? How many people, who are not the people holding them, can an exploding pager hurt? Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.

Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.

Even if it's not killing these operators, consistently maiming them seems like an obvious way to prevent them from blending into the civilian population. If I were Israel planning a ground invasion of Lebanon, temporarily injuring my unwitting enemies is great, but being able to filter out those with hip injuries for additional screening or capture seems a potentially-existential threat for such an organization.

But I can't speak to whether a ground invasion is actually likely, and I haven't been following the region very closely in the last few weeks.

First thing I though of:

”Losing a conflict with a high-powered cognitive system looks at least as deadly as ‘everybody on the face of the Earth suddenly falls over dead within the same second’.”

Israel has 20 IQ points max on the Arabs, and this is already what it looks like.

Here is a Reuters link.

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