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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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?)
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