Some thirty dead, perhaps forty, including two or three children, and several thousand wounded. A very normal, almost peaceful day on the Gaza front. Nothing to report. Ah, but it’s not Gaza. It’s Lebanon. Now it’s a bombshell headline, which even provokes heated ethical debates: blowing up hundreds of pagers and radio transmitters simultaneously in the hands of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, causing death and destruction in markets, businesses and hospitals, isn’t that terrorism?
Terrorism. This refers to acts of indiscriminate aggression against civilians with the aim of instilling terror in the population and thus forcing political change. “It is not so much a question of eliminating a specific person, but of forcing, through a spectacular act of violence, a media reaction that can be instrumentalised for the desired ends,” says a German expert. Who dies does not matter. What matters is that everyone sees the death. A common tactic among groups of all kinds – from the Zionist militias that founded Israel to the fascist ones in Italy, the Algerian nationalists, ETA and IRA to the Palestinian militias, both secular and, later, Islamist – since the term was invented in 19th-century Russia.
At the same time, the word terrorism has been devalued. Today, in the discourse of politicians, on social media and even in the serious press, any movement considered to be the incarnation of evil is considered a terrorist group. Even the European Union designated Hezbollah as a “terrorist group”, one of the few militias in the region that has never committed terrorist acts, except for the massacre in Buenos Aires in 1994, which was attributed to it by the Argentine justice system, but which the organization has always denied and which is outside its sphere of operations (we also except the stupidity of attributing to it the terrorist attacks committed in Beirut in 1983, two years before Hezbollah was founded).
Is Hezbollah now the victim of a terrorist attack committed by Israel ? No one doubts that the Israeli secret services, the Mossad, are behind the pager explosions, but can it be called “terrorism”? Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, did so in his speech on Thursday, but at the same time he confirmed that all those carrying pagers and transmitters were members of the organisation. Not necessarily combatants, we understand, but militiamen, people affiliated with a movement whose declared aim is to fight against Israel. This is no longer completely “indiscriminate” violence. On the other hand, it is not considered legitimate to attack a soldier who is on leave and is not carrying a weapon. The European Union must see it this way: its high representative, Josep Borrell, has condemned the act, because its objective, he said, would be to “sow terror” in Lebanon.
The war in Lebanon is different
But this debate reminds me of a joke that circulated in 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney announces: ” We’re going to bomb Baghdad. We estimate that about 120,000 Arabs will die and 50 dentists.” “Why 50 dentists?” asks an adviser. Cheney turns triumphantly to Bush: “See, George? I told you. Nobody’s going to ask about the Arabs.”
The Arabs, in today’s context, are the Palestinians of Gaza (the dentists are the Lebanese). Spreading terror in Gaza, with indiscriminate bombings in which many civilians die, seems inevitable, part of the life cycle of the State of Israel, as natural as rain, even when it is obvious that the attacks serve no concrete military purpose, except to frighten the population. And they cannot serve any concrete military purpose, because Israel has not defined any, apart from a high-sounding “
“, nor has it made clear what it intends to do with the territory if its enemy surrenders. Annex it? Declare it independent? Recolonize it with an apartheid system ?
It is pointless to speculate, because Gaza is only one part of the Palestinian conflict, and in this conflict the only goal of war is to prevent a peace agreement. Because Israel’s aspiration to be a Jewish-only state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River requires the total physical disappearance – through death or exodus – of three million Palestinians from the West Bank. Since no peace agreement can include the annihilation of one of its signatories, war is necessary.
The war in Lebanon is different. It is a choice. It is up to the prime minister to decide whether he wants to provoke it or not, based on his domestic political calculations. Because there is no foreign policy reason. Lebanon and Israel have not had any disputes since 2000, the year in which Israel withdrew from the southern strip occupied in 1985. could have made peace long ago. They did not want to; on the contrary, they kept a reason for conflict: the hills known as the Shebaa Farms (22 square kilometers) north of the Golan Heights, of which no one knows very well whether it is Syrian or Lebanese territory. They have no economic or strategic value, but they are very valuable as a bone of contention. As long as Israel keeps these camps occupied, Hezbollah can claim that the withdrawal is not complete and therefore it must continue to fight, and as long as it continues to fight, Israel can proclaim that it is the only bulwark of Western civilization standing against an Iranian-Lebanese axis of evil whose aim is to exterminate the Jews.
To its supporters, Hezbollah tells them it will fight until Israel makes peace in Gaza, but the Shebaa Farms give it a glimmer of legitimacy in the Beirut parliament: the 1989 Taif Accords, which ended 15 years of bloody civil war, provided for the disarmament of all militias except those “resisting” Israel’s occupation of the south. Since the war ended in 2000, Hezbollah, the only party that can put a gun next to its briefcase, has become an illegitimate force – save for the Shebaa Farms.
A part of Lebanese society that is not in the Hezbollah camp supports the armed organisation, despite everything, because after all, it is said, they are our sons of bitches. Better with them than with Israel, no doubt about it. And another part, especially the resolutely Christian one with Phalangist roots, does not publicly air its deep hatred of Hezbollah or its desire to ally itself with Israel again, as it did in the eighties, because as long as Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, how can it propose anything like that?
They could have signed peace long ago. They did not want to; on the contrary, they kept the hills known as Shebaa Farms.
Israel’s sporadic and indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon are Hezbollah’s life insurance policy, which is why it regularly provokes them. For Israel, Hezbollah’s attacks are an accident insurance policy: if by chance, unexpectedly, a period of calm were to be established on the Palestinian front, there is always the option of an exchange of rockets on the Lebanese border, or even an incursion, to remind the citizens that Israel is a country under permanent attack by “the Arabs” and therefore must vote for a strong leader, a man capable of facing the entire world without any qualms about respecting international law and human rights, a man worth his weight in uranium.
It is possible that the attack on the pagers and radio transmitters has been triggered now precisely for this reason. To open a large-scale war front that is necessary if the southern one is to be shut down. We do not know what is being said in the secret channels between Washington and Jerusalem, but if we are to speculate, could it be that old Joe Biden, who now has nothing left to lose, has given his friend Benjamin Netanyahu an ultimatum? Since Jimmy Carter, it is not unusual for former American presidents to publicly regret the Israeli maneuvers against peace in which they were complicit ; Biden is practically already ex, but with the power to sign until January 20. Dangerous. What would happen if he seriously demands that the ceasefire be established on the terms that Netanyahu himself proposed last May, obviously with no intention of complying with it?
The price of uncovering the truth
In that case, Netanyahu has a way forward. Sign, let Hamas, Egypt, Jordan, the United States and whoever wants to take part in the mess of a multinational force sort it out in Gaza, and then quickly continue the war on the northern front. With a similar display of destruction, at least in terms of the media, and with an incursion into Lebanese territory that keeps the Israeli citizenry occupied and away from the irresolvable conflict between secularists and religious people, which threatens to break up the country. Because war, as Clausewitz did not say, is the continuation of domestic politics by other means.
It is possible, then, that the attack on Hezbollah heralds an imminent end to the bombing of Gaza. But not necessarily. The version leaked to the press may also be true. That Israel launched the operation because it knew that someone in Hezbollah was about to blow the whistle. A blow that had been prepared and cooked for many months. We can assume that Mossad agents intervened in the chain of manufacture and import of the devices, placing explosives in the devices or the batteries. There is talk of a shipment of pagers purchased five months ago, and it is read that in the case of the radio transmitters, the batteries were tampered with and purchased only two weeks ago. In any case, it is plausible that an operation of this magnitude would be discovered at some point and that, tipped off by a mole, Israel chose to press the button without delay.
If this is the case, it does not allow us to draw geopolitical conclusions or speculate on Netanyahu’s machinations. The date would be a coincidence.
And the consequences? Hezbollah will respond, as Nasrallah announced on Thursday, deciding “the time, place and type of response” – a ready-made phrase. Hezbollah is in no hurry. However, to show that nothing essential has changed, the militia immediately launched a few rockets, even with better aim than usual: two Israeli soldiers were killed.
That will probably be the end of it for Hezbollah. As an extremely professional organization, it knows when to take a blow from the enemy. Right now it has almost four thousand wounded mid-level commanders, recovering in hospitals and, what is worse, therefore publicly exposed as members of the movement. With the task of reorganizing internal communication and finding out who in the logistics department could have been the mole, this is not the time to launch into large-scale revenge attacks. If Netanyahu wants all-out war, he will have to take the first step.
Perhaps some might think that Hezbollah’s momentary weakness is the time to go in and try to destroy the militia. But that is an illusion. What the Israeli military failed to achieve in 2006, it will not achieve today. There may be a shortage of pagers; there is no shortage of rifles and trained guerrillas for fierce resistance in its hills.
If the timing was indeed fortuitous, Netanyahu will probably also leave it at that. It will be enough for him to score a huge moral victory in the opinion of all of Israel, especially in the camp that hates him. Because that other Israel, the secular Zionist establishment – and Zionist in its origin means opposed to religiosity, to orthodoxy – that old guard that considers itself the heir of the founders of the nation as opposed to the upstarts of Netanyahu’s fascist-religious front, which it almost managed to overthrow with the huge protests of the summer of 2023 before being saved by the Hamas attack, that other Israel is also celebrating after the blow inflicted on Hezbollah. And, although it will not be credited to Netanyahu’s personal account, but to that of the Mossad, which does not get on particularly well with the prime minister, the operation has boosted the morale of the entire country. We are not doing so badly, they will say, despite Bibi. We are great.
Because the old Zionist guard, who consider themselves liberal and part of European civilization, have always found it a bit primitive, a bit barbaric, a bit unworthy of an enlightened country like Israel to raze entire neighborhoods and kill tens of thousands of civilians. Not exactly for the civilians, who are Palestinians, but for the soldiers, who are Jews. Deep down, it disgusts them to see their noble army turned into a brutal soldiery dedicated to killing without rhyme or reason. This is not how they want to see themselves in the mirror. They preferred to imagine Israel as the world’s luminary of intelligence in the civil and military sense, full of Nobel Prize winners, engineers who invented booby traps, agents capable of infiltrating any gang of criminals, brains dedicated to planning precise and deadly strikes. Instilling in the entire world not only fear of Israel’s strength, but above all, respect for its intellectual capacity.
Precise hits, it was said. The fact that almost all the victims were actually members of Hezbollah allows for a celebration not marred by the blood of innocents. Or almost. Two children out of a total of 32 dead, 6%. Minimal collateral damage. In comparison. And not only in comparison with Gaza, where the rate of children killed in the bombings is close to 40% — 16,000 out of 40,000, it is estimated — but also minimal compared with the West Bank, that territory under full Israeli control, where since October 7, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed some 680 Palestinians, including 150 children: yes, 20%.
But that is not terrorism, of course, because they are not dentists, they are just Palestinians. And this old guard that wants to see a noble army killing without bloodshed has never had the courage to imagine a future for their country in which there will be no more killing.
