By Marc Champion /
Bloomberg Opinion
In what must count as one of the more extraordinary acts of sabotage of all time, as many as 2,800 people, including hundreds of Hezbollah officials, were injured and several killed across Lebanon on Tuesday, the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said, when the pagers they use to communicate exploded. Somebody transformed the devices into bombs before their distribution, and the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was among those wounded.
It is not as if another smoking gun was needed to establish Iran’s deep integration with members of the so-called arc of resistance it has built around Israel — from Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis of Yemen and the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Even so, assuming that Iran’s state-run Mehr news agency is properly informed, there it was: a smoking pager, given to the ambassador as well as to Hezbollah.
It looks very much like a decapitation strike, putting Hezbollah’s top command out of action at a moment when speculation is rife that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might be planning to expand the war into Lebanon.
Details remain hazy, and Israel — accused by Hezbollah — has not yet claimed responsibility. Yet this was a highly sophisticated operation that required a substantial intelligence penetration somewhere in the supply chain to insert explosive material into thousands of devices, as well as arranging for remote detonation.
All of this had to be carried out without detection, even as the pagers were carried around and used. It is highly unlikely that causing the batteries to overheat by hacking into the electronics, as some have suggested, could create this kind of effect.
An invasion into Israel’s northern neighbor is by no means inevitable. Late on Monday night, the government laid some political ground work for a larger military operation, adding the return of displaced Israelis to their homes along the Lebanese border to its official Gaza war aims.
However, it is also possible the pager hit was designed as a final warning for Hezbollah to halt its rocket strikes, and to therefore avoid the need for Israel to send in tanks to secure the border.
Only those who ordered the attack can know their full intention, but here is why we should hope this was a warning shot that Hezbollah heeds: There is a huge disconnect between the brutal operational efficiency of Tuesday’s attack on Hezbollah’s command and control functions, and the dismal performance of Israel’s government at the higher, strategic level.
If this was a decapitation strike to precede an Israeli move into Lebanon, there are at least two separate questions for Israel to answer. The first is whether such an invasion would be an act of aggression or of self-defense. In other words, would it be legitimate? The second is whether it would be smart, a strategy that can succeed in bringing security to Israel and stability to the region.
There is a strong case to make that Israel has a right to claim self-defense. That is not just because Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel the moment the Israel Defense Forces began to respond to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 last year. It is also because Iran is using proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, in a much wider attempt to target and eliminate the state of Israel.
Yet, because of the way Netanyahu chose to conduct the war in Gaza to date, any argument for the legitimacy of its expansion would be lost before it begins. The civilian death toll has simply been too high, and the government has no apparent strategy for Palestinians other than their collective suppression. Lebanon, because of its greater size, could prove still more bloody.
So would expanding the war be wise? History says no. Israel has invaded Lebanon in search of security and a buffer zone several times before, without success. There is no reason to believe the outcome would be different now, when Hezbollah is stronger and better armed than it has ever been — even after the pager strike.
The logic among many Israelis is that a full-scale war with Iran and its proxies is inevitable, and that Israel will never be in a better position to win it than now. Hamas has been all but destroyed as a military threat, Hezbollah is beset by political problems at home in Lebanon and Iran still is not quite ready to break out as a nuclear power. To do nothing is to die by a thousand cuts.
That might stack up — if Israel had strong international backing for going into Lebanon and a plan for the future. It cannot afford to end up in a direct war with Iran alone. That is especially true with regard to the US, on which it would have to rely for the arms and ammunition required for potentially three long-term occupations (of Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon). Meanwhile, the military and reputational cost of backing Israel’s wars can only grow.
Worse, Netanyahu has chosen this juncture to begin negotiations to replace his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and perhaps also the chief of staff of the armed forces, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi.
If you want to know how bad an idea this would be, look at how the Israel Business Forum, which groups 200 of the country’s major companies, broke political cover to warn against it.
“The last thing Israel needs at this time is the firing of a defense minister,” the group said, adding that it was a move made for petty political reasons that would weaken the country, encourage its enemies and hammer an economy already teetering on the “abyss.”
Gallant is a former admiral. He is also popular and has crossed swords with Netanyahu over the prime minister’s resistance to cutting a ceasefire deal with Hamas, as well as over his plan to introduce legislation to slow-walk the removal of the exemption that ultra-orthodox Yeshiva students enjoy from military service. Gallant is right and has the backing of Israel’s security establishment on both counts.
The man under consideration to replace him as defense minister is Gideon Saar, a lawyer by training who broke away from the Likud party, of which both Netanyahu and Gallant belong. I do not know a lot about Saar, but he has no military experience other than his compulsory military service decades ago. His sole qualification for the job appears to be the four seats he controls in the Knesset, an addition that would help secure Netanyahu’s fragile hold on power.
It is hard to imagine a worse reason for switching top security personnel during a war — all the more so if it is about to be expanded to take on far more challenging opponents than Hamas.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Hezbollah pager attack looks like a decapitation strike
