Opinion | Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War

The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the spot or reading about them from far away could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.

Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attacks but is widely believed to be behind them. If those allegations are true, it is important for friends of Israel to say: This was not right.

The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

No similar claim of minimizing risk to civilians can be made for the decision to explode the devices. They were not distributed by Hezbollah in order to put its people at risk. This was not a plot to force Israel to kill or injure civilians. The plot was Israel’s, and the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women and children.

Israel’s recent assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders requires a more complicated, but still critical, political and moral response. These were men actively supporting terrorist attacks on Israel, who certainly knew themselves to be targets — I would say legitimate targets — of assassins who could be operating from close up or far away. But when a government authorizes the killing of men it is directly or indirectly negotiating with, such as the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July, we have to conclude that the government isn’t committed to the negotiations’ success. That is politically and morally wrong, not only from the standpoint of the large number of Israeli citizens (including my friends in Israel) who are strongly, even desperately, committed to ending the war and bringing the hostages home, but also from the standpoint of all the victims of the Gaza war.

However, let me make a distinction here. Condemning an act of war is not the same as condemning the war itself. Hamas and Hezbollah are fighting against Israel for an immoral and unjust purpose: the elimination of the Jewish state. Long ago, Abba Eban called this the crime of policide. In his day, Israel’s enemies were motivated by a nationalist determination to reverse (literally) the nakba, the flight and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 from what became Israel. Today, the goal is religiously driven and zealously pursued. That this crime has found supporters and apologists in the United States and Europe, often among secular leftists, is even more amazing than the exploding pagers. So it is important to distinguish the judgments we make about the conduct of war from the judgments we make about the decision to go to war.

Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 was meant to start a war, and Israel’s response, though Hamas expected it and wanted it, was nonetheless justified. It is hard to imagine any country responding differently. Hezbollah in Lebanon joined Hamas almost immediately by lobbing rockets into northern Israel continually but also carefully, seemingly intending a limited engagement. In this way it has been supporting its Islamist ally, despite their Sunni-Shia differences, without committing itself to full-scale war.

Israel has helped maintain those limits with its own controlled responses, although it has not refrained from targeting Hezbollah commanders. The result has been the forced evacuation of destroyed towns and villages on each side of the Israel-Lebanon border, without significant damage to the rest of the countries. But the exchanges have become deadlier, and pressure has been building in Israel (which is, unlike Lebanon, a functioning democracy where political pressure is possible) to act in a stronger way to make the northern border communities safe. Perhaps the exploding electronic devices represented an attempt at strong action. I can’t believe it will make anyone safer. It invites retribution, and even if retribution is for the moment difficult, the desire for revenge won’t go away.

What the attacks demonstrate with blinding clarity is the importance of a political solution to the war in the north, which can only come along with some kind of cease-fire in the south. A catastrophic war with Lebanon is now the greater danger, but what began on Oct. 7 must be dealt with first to avoid it.

At this moment, any political proposal is bound to be called naïve. Leaders on both sides seem to believe that war is the only way forward. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said as much. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, are committed to a policy of doing whatever it takes to destroy Israel, even if what it takes is eternal war.

One war may be just and the other unjust, but today anyone who aims at continuing the fight must be condemned. The victims of the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, the general amazement at what is possible in war today, the fear of what will come tomorrow — all this proves the necessity of a political solution.

Michael Walzer is the author of “Just and Unjust Wars” and the co-editor of “The Jewish Political Tradition.”

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