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Notes -
Israeli Terrorism?
It dovetails with our recent discussion of how Israel has normalized the practice of assassination as a core strategy of warfare. And now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around. We will get more details about the deaths/injuries, but there are rumors of an Iranian ambassador being injured and there will most likely be injuries among women and children across Lebanon and Syria.
I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack. Is the US going to publicly disavow this, or is rote terrorism now going to be normalized by Israeli operation in the region?
That's the similarity.
The difference is these are micro-target explosions in the pockets of the targets rather than the entire market blowing up. So really quite different in the important metrics by my estimation.
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One is an explosion coming from a suicide belt or backpack which is designed to harm and kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, particularly those women and children.
The other is sabotaging a pager handed out by a terrorist organization to its members with a small enough amount of explosives that even the person wearing the pager or keeping it in their pocket isn't reliably killed.
These are not the same.
Are you sure? Knocking out a major communication system sure seems disruptive to me, to say nothing of putting a couple thousand officers, cell leaders, logistics people, etc. in the hospital all at the same time.
I know words are just vibes now, man, but come on. This is an attack on the participating personnel of a combatant organization during ongoing hostilities. That's not terrorism.
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I see this attitude - you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.
What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?
How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?
Why should they not fight back when getting occupied? Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world? The neo con/globalists wars have caused massive waves of refugees to Europe. There is no critical race theory and gender studies in Iraq. They fought back and kicked the globalists out.
These wars have given us nothing but a surveillance state, migrants, and debt. It is a good thing that the locals manage to resist.
The bombing went fine. It was the pretending that building schools for girls in a muslim nation was a good idea that went poorly.
I have no qualms with Palestinians trying to reconquer everything from the river to the sea. I have a problem with them expecting any sympathy from me when they do it. No other historical border in world history is talked about in the way the "1967" borders are. That sort of thing is tiresome. If they want that land they can get good and win. Or else they can accept a peaceful 3 state solution with something similar to current borders.
This using your own women and children as human shields because you know antisemites and progressives will cry foul is totally lame.
“Skill Issue.”
I agree.
At this point enough precedent has been set to paint the Arab / “Palestinian” / Islamist resistance to Israel as what they are; sore losers and pathetic failures who start fights and continually get their asses handed to them, no matter the price to their people.
Any dialogue about this issue that conveniently skips over this very obvious point I just automatically flag in my mind as fundamentally dishonest. It’s incredibly tiresome.
Stop starting wars with Israel and losing. Or don’t, I really don’t care.
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This makes me far less anti-anti_dan. What a well reasoned comment. The quadruple think required for all of this can be reduced down and you have done so. Please continue.
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If the battle is to stop the occupation of Lebanese land, then Hezbollah can make some ploughshares now.
I obviously get that it's a GWOT hangup, it's the first response you get. I was being polite: I don't "get" it in the sense that I think there are significant disanalogies I often see the sorts of people making the above argument or your comparison simply ignore for unclear reeasons. If OP gave an alternative to violence, it'd explain why he thinks those don't apply.
Also, you switched the question. Nobody is really asking why Hezbollah is doing this.
The question was why Americans seem to behave with not only with absolute fatalism but also with condemnation that others don't take them at their word that, because they lost, nothing can be done. And why they think that's an option for a nation that can't just fly away and let any Afghans dumb enough to believe that they were now global citizens fall to their deaths or be beaten back into niqabs.
Also not the question. These people, like OP, don't say they don't support it. They actively condemn. "Their bed to lie in" is totally different. Because that goes both ways.
What does "actively condemn" mean? Few people are going as far as saying that the US should bomb Israel. The condemnation is only relative to a baseline of close to unconditional material and political support. Not that I'm American (though I'm a citizen of another major IL supporter), but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself, or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.
Declaring the government structures of your enemy terrorists and therefore outside of normal conventions of acceptable wartime conduct is all fun and games until it is done to you and yours. Israel has performed targeted assassinations of scientists involved with the Iranian nuclear programme; I would like to see the reaction if Islamists killed some US academic involved in DARPA, or any Israeli scientist involved in defense projects. Ukraine has killed journalists and lobbed basically unguided ordnance at Russian cities; I doubt it would be framed as an acceptable wartime move if Russia pulled something like the pager trick on Ukraine's leadership or even merely on GRU/whoever is behind the assassinations on the Ukrainian side by any of its cheerleaders.
This would be "their bed to lie in" I think.
The cynical answer to perceived hypocrisy (often on the left anyway) is that it's all power all the way down. If America's enemies aren't terrorists because that is a cynical judgment on the US' part, it doesn't necessarily follow that the US are terrorists. They may all be hypocrites.
Then it's just a pragmatic judgment what you prefer.
But it often doesn't go like this. America's judgments of its opponents are false, but their judgments are correct.
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No just Xinjiang is enough
Israel doesn’t have the resources or political cover to go full Xinjiang in Gaza.
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The point of operation seems to be extremely clear. As a first-order effect, they just took out at least hundreds of enemy combatants at no personnel costs of their own, which is what any military would consider a good result. As a second-order effect, Hezbollah and other Israeli enemies will now have to exert a certain amount of care and nervousness over a lot of other foreign-imported gear, which will presumably have compounding hampering effects down the line.
Obviously if they want a full-scale war it makes sense to do this. I said it doesn't make sense unless they want a full-scale war.
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Attacking enemy combatants while in conflict with the organisation they fight for isn't terrorism, attacking civilians to create spectacle and fear is.
I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.
Ok, what's the real equivalence? Is this attack closer to a terrorist attack, or is it closer to something the US has done in decades of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can you point to any conduct in the US in engaging in those wars that compares to this? It's unprecedented, and the closest base of comparison are terrorist attacks. If you don't agree, you can just point me to where the US has engaged in this in its own "War on Terrorism".
Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.
What exactly is the basis for objection here?
The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.
The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.
The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.
My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.
US drone strikes are a lot worse than is widely reported. Any male from 12 up in the combat zone was classified as a military target.
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You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?
My objection is that IEDs in marketplaces are a terrorist tactic, and that we are probably closer to this becoming normalized.
"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."
Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.
You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.
You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.
A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
Depends how they inserted the pagers. Did they rig a specific batch bought by the Hezbollah office supplies department? Or did they send them to a reseller "known to supply to Hezbollah"?
If it was done the second way a lot of these could have been sold to totally random people.
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That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.
That is absurd, obviously a bomb in a crowded place is a danger to people standing near the person with the hidden bomb. We don't have any numbers on civilian casualties yet, the ideas that these bombs didn't harm anybody standing near them strikes me as extremely improbable.
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An "IED" is merely an "improvised explosive device"; whether something fits that description says nothing about whether the use of it is according to the laws of war.
Ok? It's obviously an IED. Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives. Now Israel is using IEDs for the same purpose against Hezbollah. So why object to my statement that Israel is embracing/normalizing tactics using by terrorists? Just admit they are and argue it's a good thing if you're inclined.
If it is an actual explosive, and they deliberately manufactured the devices they are no more improvised than a tank shell.
They are bombs of a sort, and bombs can be more or less targeted. It can be put on a street, it can be put under a soldiers car, or fired into an army barracks from a mortar.
Tactics used by terrorists are the same tactics used by states. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians with the intent to intimidate Japan into surrender. But that isn't regarded as a terrorist attack, even though it fits most of the criteria to a tee. States plant mines and other explosive devices that are hidden, and if they can will drone strike someone, killing them and people around them. But none of that is terrorism. So it can't be that hidden bombs or collateral damage or targeting civilians that mean it's terrorism.
Taboo the term terrorism and IED for the moment. They don't add anything concrete to the discussion.
What specifically is the issue? Risk of collateral damage/deaths? Being sneaky and underhanded? Being unfair? Lack of targeting? Something else?
All IEDs are "deliberately manufactured".
The term came into existence to describe IRA's boobytrapped explosives, like suitcases that would explode when you opened them. This operation is obviously on the level of "send a boobytrapped explosive suitcase" to someone, which is unambiguously an IED.
Boobytrapping goods which are shipped internationally with explosives is a terrible precedent. Explosives which can detonate anywhere, anytime, regardless of the target in the area.
What if peace had been brokered in the months since the distribution of those explosives? Then you are just left with a bunch of untracked explosives in civilian areas? It beggars belief that you struggle to find the issues with this practice.
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If they made them in a munitions factory, they're not "improvised". My point is your use of the term "IED" adds no light, it's nothing but heat.
Insurgents in a US-occupied country using IEDs to attack American military targets are fully within the laws of war in doing so.
So a boobytrapped suitcase is an IED, but a boobytrapped pager is a grenade or a drone strike?
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Do I have news for you. The region is in conflict. Hezbollah and Israel have been in a hotter-than-usual shooting war for nearly a year.
The point to me looks like it is to damage and degrade Hezbollah operations by attacking their communications network. Fear is an element and tool in all conflicts. If you can scare your enemy into using messenger boys on bikes instead of instantaneous, encrypted communications you've made their decision making process much slower. Presumably, the reason Hezbollah has so many pagers is that they moved away from cell phones due to Israeli capabilities and actions.
If you only accept unequivocal victory as a meaningful action in conflict, then there's no point to much of war. Maybe it's true and a sad reality that much of conflict is pointless. Rocket Attack #3019 seems pretty pointless, yet everyone seems pretty dedicated to continue without points.
Terrorist attacks typically target civilians. If reports are true, then this attack targeted Hezbollah operatives embedded in the the Hezbollah supply chain. That would explain why an Iranian ambassador was hurt.
Most civilians don't use pagers anymore. Even civilians in the African bush have fancy cell phones with big screens. I'd wager in a place like Lebanon that possession of a pager is so highly correlated to being involved in Hezbollah operations that saying "everyone that has a pager in Lebanon helps Hezbollah" is largely a fact.* Downstream of the pager supply probably includes some doctors, logisticians, and other adjacent support personnel, but it probably it includes a lot of invested decision makers and operatives as well.
Real life imitates The Wire.
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Yeah, Israel should have been good boys and waited around for Hezbollah to attack them as they promised to.
As others have pointed out, this is about the least collateral damage that could be imagined. But no matter what it does, Israel can't win with its critics. What the critics really seem to want is for Israel to stop defending itself. As if Hezbollah would deliver one final punch and then both sides are even and the boys won't fight anymore.
Israel can defend itself and stop trying to use terrorist tactics to draw the United States into another ME war.
I am very curious to know what you and @functor would consider to be the ethical options available to Israel when it comes to defending themselves.
Fundamentally the solution to this war can't be from an Israeli perspective. We have hundreds of millions of middle easterners and then we have Europe close by. The solution needs to be one that benefits arabs and Europeans.
They have been kicked out of countries 109 times and seem to be a fairly nomadic people. If they want to settle somewhere it has to be on land that is available and doesn't cause a constant headache for the rest of us. The jewish autonomous oblast is bigger than Israel and available to jews.
That seems like a terrible deal in every way for the Israelis. Why would they agree to it?
"They're just Jews, they don't really mind wandering around, and we can stick them in a bumfuck corner of unproductive land under the control of a country that historically pogromed Jews often and is currently their enemy" is a proposal only someone who deeply hates Jews would think serious and reasonable.
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You act like it's a hard question, but the United States has managed regime change and military occupations, Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war. Calling this "self defense" is not even a stretch, that's obviously untrue, it's a major act of provocation.
Israel should negotiate a settlement, but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.
How? With who? Why would they think the other side would abide by said agreement? Why would YOU?
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The last 80 years of history would suggest it is.
I find it difficult to believe that if Israel went all-in with the regime-change-and-occupation playbook, you would be less critical of their actions.
What settlement should they negotiate with an adversary whose only win condition is "You stop existing"?
I am actually not all that sympathetic to Israel, except in comparison to their enemies. But their enemies have made it clear that there is no permanent negotiated settlement that leaves Israel extant. Israel's options are to do what you suggest, and just put a boot on half the Middle East, or keep playing a tower defense game while hoping the Arab world eventually has a generational change of heart.
I think if we were fighting a war against an asymmetrical adversary who uses terrorist tactics, setting off bombs in enemy combatants' electronic devices (and accepting a small amount of civilian collateral damage) would be within our standards. It has certainly done less collateral damage than we did with drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives. If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.
Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.
We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.
This is not clear to me. You might disagree with our geopolitical objectives, but Israel and the US seem to be pretty much on the same page about them, even if we don't always agree on strategy and tactics.
When you said:
I claimed that you would not, in fact, consider that to be more ethical than what they are doing now. So you have now admitted that that's correct. My original question was "What can Israel do in its own defense that you would consider ethically defensible?" So the answer from you is clearly "Nothing" and the answer from @functor is "They can cease to exist, or they can fuck off to a backwater of Russia (and cease to exist)."
So now that we've gotten that out of the way:
"Insolence" implies they owe us fealty, which is ironic when you then claim we are an "occupied government." How can ZOG both be insolent and secretly ruling us?
That's not remotely close to what the IRA or the Iraqis insurgents did. I notice how very carefully you phrased this: "boobytrap civilian office supplies." It must have taken you some small amount of time to figure out the best way to describe "boobytrapped communications equipment used by the Hezballah" in a way that sounds like they were doing something like planting bombs in copy machines. Golf clap for the clever wording. But we've all seen the news and the videos. They targeted Hezballah pagers and walkie talkies, and almost nobody but Hezballah were injured. Yes, I'm sorry for that 10-year-old girl who was killed (I am certain, in fact, that I feel more genuine regret for this than you do), but no war in history has avoided civilian casualties.
Now let's be real here: you aren't morally offended by Israel's tactics. If they sent snipers to take out Hezballah leaders, you'd be accusing them of escalation. If they dropped bombs and rockets, you'd be accusing them of war crimes. If they sent troops, you'd be accusing them of unprovoked aggression and imperialism. If they used Jewish space lasers to target Hezballah leaders from orbit, you'd accuse them of space terrorism. If they had Harry Potter wands and could Avada Kedavra Hezballah soldiers with zero collateral damage, you'd accuse them of black magic. You don't actually care how Israel responds to its enemies. You object to the fact that they exist.
Which brings me to my other question which I'm sure it just slipped your mind to answer, as you so often forget to answer inconvenient points when pressed:
With who? What settlement? What is your brilliant plan for peace in the Middle East? @functor's idea is at least rather straightforward about acknowledging that he doesn't think Israel should exist. But you speak of a "settlement" as if you think there is some meaningful and workable deal the Israelis could actually make that allows them to continue to exist but isn't "insolent" or doesn't cause you to shed crocodile tears over dead Arab children. I remain fascinated to hear what it is.
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This is Israel defending itself against a group which has, over the past 11 months, fired tens of thousands of explosive rockets (you know, explosive devices) at random into civilian areas (i.e. your definition of "terrorism"), forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from hundreds of square miles of territory.
We have ZERO evidence that the U.S. was involved in any way in this, and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required, I place a low likelihood on the U.S. being significantly involved.
Does it? I know nothing about this area, but I'd have assumed the US would have the resources to become top performers in any field related to national security.
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What Israeli tactics are not "terrorism" in your book?
The chances of the U.S. getting drawn in are very low now. Israel is winning militarily and Iran has been absolutely humbled. It's not that they don't want to do something, it's just that they can't because they are weak.
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