Matthew Kroenig: Hi, Emma. I am looking forward to our debate. But, before we begin, it seems my beeper is going off. Please give me a moment.
Emma Ashford: Matt, do you still keep a pager in your pocket? Because I have some worrying news, if so.
MK: I didn’t know anyone still used pagers in 2024, but apparently Hezbollah does—or at least did. What a crazy story!
For people living under a rock, Israel pulled off what may be one of the most audacious intelligence operations in history—blowing up the pagers of thousands of Hezbollah operatives simultaneously. Then, the next day, they did the same thing to hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies.
This is, of course, taking place in the midst of an escalating Israel-Hezbollah conflict in southern Lebanon. I think these developments make a good topic for this week’s debate.
What is your take?
EA: Well, it’s an impressive demonstration of tradecraft. And it’s sneaky, underhanded, and ethically dubious—all the hallmarks of Israel’s Mossad spy agency and its “flexible” approach to the laws of war. But I’m not really sure what they achieved other than scaring the bejeezus out of folks in Lebanon and killing and injuring some Hezbollah fighters and those unfortunate enough to be near them. Is this really a strategic blow to Hezbollah’s ability to fight?
MK: Well, first, can I comment on the impressive demonstration of tradecraft? Think about all the steps involved. First, Mossad needed to map and penetrate Hezbollah’s supply chain. Second, it needed to design lethal explosives that could be inserted into pagers undetected. Third, it needed to detonate them all at the same time. Any one of those steps would be difficult, and if any of them goes wrong, the whole thing fails, but they managed to pull it off. Moreover, how clever to allow the enemy to do the targeting for you. You build the bombs and then let Hezbollah place them in the pockets of all of their operatives.
As my colleague Michael Doran put it, it was both a targeted and a mass casualty attack.
EA: Let’s not get carried away. Hezbollah was sloppy—they apparently sourced their pagers from a Hungarian front company without doing due diligence. And it turns out the company was just Mossad. They didn’t penetrate an existing supply chain so much as inserted themselves into the market as manufacturers. It’s not that technically difficult to insert explosives in a small device. And it’s not too hard to do simultaneous triggering of a bomb that’s literally wired into a telephone. So it’s an impressive feat, to be sure, but despite all the folks over on Twitter speculating about cyberattacks and batteries, it’s a much more mundane form of sabotage.
And while it had impressive reach, I do think we should be cautious about calling it a “targeted” attack. There was no guarantee that all those pagers would be delivered to militants, and several children and other bystanders were injured or killed in the explosions. No less a figure than former CIA Director Leon Panetta described the attack as a form of terrorism!
The attack raises the same question I have about the region more broadly these days: What is Israel trying to do? I can’t figure it out. They seem to be antagonizing everyone, repeatedly razing areas of Gaza, and now trying to start a war in Lebanon. It’s irrational.
MK: OK, so there are two aspects we should discuss: Were the attacks effective, and were they moral?
Let’s start with morality. The famous just-war theorist Michael Walzer had a widely read piece in the New York Times in which he argued that the pager explosions were immoral. He acknowledged that Hezbollah operatives are legitimate targets, but he rested his argument on the principle of distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants. He wrote that “the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women and children.”
The argument is unpersuasive. It is hard to imagine an attack that could have been more discriminate. Hezbollah operatives had pagers in their pockets. Innocent civilians did not.
Yes, innocents were harmed, but as Walzer knows better than anyone, the presence of collateral damage does not make an attack unlawful or immoral if principles, such as target discrimination, are followed, as they clearly were in this case.
After all, the pager attacks are much more targeted than Hezbollah’s indiscriminate lobbing of rockets at Israeli population centers.
EA: I was surprised to see Walzer make this argument, given his previous statement that the Israelis are “trying to adhere to the rules [of war] in an environment that probably requires some loosening of the rules.” He is absolutely correct that this specific attack was questionable in how “discriminate” it was.
But to be honest, it doesn’t seem worse to me than anything that Israeli forces are doing farther south in Gaza. There’s a lot of indiscriminate bombing there, displacement of the population, tens of thousands of noncombatants killed. So my biggest question on the morality side of things really is why the pager attack became such an issue for debate in the West when some of these other actions are not.
But again, I stick with my view that the pager attack was mostly—or at least borderline—ethical; it just wasn’t strategically that useful.
MK: OK, then let’s move on to strategy. I think it was useful.
The Israelis have believed that a big war with Hezbollah was inevitable, and it seems that they have decided that now is the time. Hezbollah, of course, is a terrorist group, created and supported by Iran, dedicated to Israel’s destruction. It has been stockpiling missiles and rockets, and since Oct. 7, 2023, it has been launching attacks into Israel, which has forced Israel to evacuate some 67,500 people away from the northern border.
Previously, Israel needed to worry about a three-front war with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. But now Hamas has been largely neutralized, and the war in Gaza is stabilizing. Israel learned that Iran’s ability and willingness to hit Israel directly is limited—Israel and its allies effectively shot down the big Iranian missile and drone attack in April, Iran has not really retaliated for Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Tehran, and Israel struck this week while Iran’s leaders were in New York at the U.N. General Assembly.
The Iranians apparently declined Hezbollah’s request for assistance, stating that they would not be able to help during UNGA week. They seemed to be using bad public relations as an excuse, but I think they are just scared to get into a big fight with Israel or the United States.
So it seems that Israel has decided that it is a good time for confrontation with Hezbollah. In addition to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, Israel also conducted massive airstrikes against Hezbollah targets on Tuesday in what was the single deadliest day for Hezbollah in decades.
So, in short, I think there is a strategy to take this opportunity to significantly degrade Hezbollah’s capability to threaten Israel.
EA: OK, so you’re pretty much agreeing that the Israelis want a war. Or, at least, they want the ability to attack Hezbollah and degrade the group’s assets substantially. It sounds as if that would require at least some ground forces. So we’re talking about another Israeli invasion of Lebanon—something the Israelis are themselves now openly threatening—with all the risks and costs that entails.
It’s no wonder that apparently the White House is rapidly diverging from the Israeli view on this point. Israel has now torpedoed any prospect of a cease-fire—and thus the possibility of lowering the immediate threat from Hezbollah—and appears to be determined to engage in a broader war. The United States and France are now trying to broker a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hezbollah, but I can’t see why Israel would be more inclined to accept this than any of the previous cease-fire deals Washington has tried to negotiate on Gaza.
Certainly, policymakers should be trying to find a diplomatic off-ramp. For the United States, I think the risks here are very clear. We may be about to be dragged into that war and have done very little to disabuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government that we will defend them if it all goes badly.
MK: Yes. There is also open talk of a possible Israeli ground assault into southern Lebanon. And your point on the White House and Netanyahu reminds me of another factor that makes the timing propitious: Biden is a lame-duck president. It seems that Netanyahu has been less responsive to White House demands in recent weeks, and he will use the time between now and January to do what he thinks is best for Israel. Then he will deal with the new U.S. administration when it arrives. After all, Netanyahu has a freer hand as he has seen a polling boost in Israel in the wake of these attacks.
I must also say the White House’s knee-jerk response—almost always wanting to de-escalate regardless of the situation—is wrongheaded. Just this week at the U.N., Biden argued that a full-scale war is in no one’s interest and that a diplomatic resolution between Israel and Hezbollah is the only way forward.
But, as Henry Kissinger said, if the goal is always to avoid war, then you hand the initiative to the world’s most ruthless actors willing to use force to get their way. It shouldn’t be controversial to say, but sometimes U.S. interests are advanced when Washington supports its friends as they kill a bunch of terrorists.
EA: I don’t think your de-escalation point is accurate. This White House has bent over backward to let Israel do everything it wants to in Gaza—and now in Lebanon—even though many of Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. interests in the region. If this does devolve to full-scale war, there are U.S. forces on bases in Iraq and Syria who will be in the firing line. It’s hurting the U.S. relationship with pretty much every other Middle Eastern state. And the U.S. government is being perceived—rightly or wrongly—by much of the world as a participant in crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The thing about Kissinger is that although he certainly understood the utility of power, I think he also understood that you can’t just kill your way out of a problem. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia, for example, was part of a strategy to ultimately extricate the United States from Vietnam. In this case, Israel is escalating, but I see no plan at the end of it.
Israel’s primary strategic problem is that it cannot offer Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza political rights and has largely abandoned the notion of a two-state solution. It can kill most of the population in Gaza and invade Lebanon, and that will still not solve the underlying political problem. And without that, Israel is just breeding a new generation of attackers.
MK: Well, good strategy begins from correctly identifying the problem. The problem is not political rights for Palestinians. The problem is that Iran is supporting terrorist and proxy groups devoted to Israel’s destruction.
EA: The problem is that Arthur Balfour got carried away one day, but do continue.
MK: Well, if only Suleiman the Magnificent had done such and such. But anyway, back to the present. Israel’s desire to degrade the terrorists’ threats on its border is justified.
I think we agree that Israel’s bigger strategy is not clear—but for different reasons. You really think a two-state solution solves everything? I don’t. Not as long as Iran is sowing chaos, but maybe that is a debate for another time.
EA: A two-state solution remains the least bad option for resolving the crisis. I mean—what are the alternatives? A single Israeli state from river to sea that keeps Palestinians as second-class citizens? Or the Israeli fear of a single state in which Jews become a minority? Or perhaps the maintenance of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank where Palestinians cannot have basic political or economic freedoms? Expelling all Palestinians from those areas into other states?
Those are all terrible, immoral, and frankly unworkable options. All will breed future violence. What would you suggest?
MK: It depends on what problem you are solving for. I agree that it would be desirable for Palestinians to live in a functioning state that ensures their human dignity. But that does not bring peace and stability to the Middle East. Iran would still fund Hezbollah, the Houthis, and likely a new version of Hamas within a future Palestinian state.
So bringing stability to the region will require neutralizing Iran and its proxies—regardless of what happens with the Palestinian issue.
EA: What a strange thing to say! Hamas didn’t even get Iranian funding until the last decade or so. Hamas started out as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, getting funding from Arab states (including U.S. allies!). Indeed, there’s a reason why Hamas and Hezbollah are separate entities and often don’t play nicely together. They disagreed over support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria; Hamas backed the rebels trying to overthrow Assad by fighting Hezbollah! The two groups come from different places and have different goals.
But look, it’s undoubtedly true that a two-state solution will not resolve all regional tensions. But you have to ask yourself whether Hamas would have much traction among the population of a free, economically prosperous Palestinian state. Hezbollah wouldn’t be doing so well if Lebanon weren’t a basket case.
Take away the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you make it easier for Israel’s Arab neighbors to normalize relations and build economic ties and harder for the militants to build support and justify their violence. You can’t end the violence without resolving the underlying political problem.
MK: So I guess you agree with the George W. Bush freedom agenda, which proclaimed the “spread of freedom as the great alternative to the terrorists’ ideology of hatred, because expanding liberty and democracy will help defeat extremism.” You both might be right, but getting tough with Iran is easier to do in the short term than turning Palestine and Lebanon into “free, economically prosperous” states.
EA: I didn’t say it would be easy. But I’m not talking about spreading freedom by the sword as Bush was. I’m just talking about no longer being complicit in the suppression of the rights of millions of people who live under the rule of an ostensibly democratic U.S. ally.
No one who has viewed Western democracy up close could credibly claim that it solves every problem, but at least it pushes violence and extremism to the margins of politics. What was it Winston Churchill said? Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.
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