When the terrorist organization known as Hezbollah found its pagers exploding in its members’ faces, presumably following Israeli manipulation of the group’s supply chain, many Americans struggled with how to react.
On the one hand, Israel (which officially said nothing) appeared to have come up with an audacious, gadget-driven trick straight out of a James Bond film. Aside from its innovative nature, at least at this level, last week’s action appeared to be a shrewd way of limiting collateral damage in that the explosions were small and only Hezbollah members had the booby-trapped devices in their charge. Add in the ancillary benefits of unmasking Hezbollah members (possibly surprising even their own family members) and disrupting terrorist communications and, for supporters of Israel weary of the bombs being lobbed at that state’s evacuated northern regions, there appeared to be things to cheer. What an operation!
“I love it,” said Pennsylvania’s famously unfiltered Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. Social media was filled with memes and jokes.
But it was not so simple, as Chicago Alderman Brendan Reilly found out when some of his anti-Israeli City Hall colleagues objected to a humorous posting he then took down. Even these confined explosions maimed and killed people, and there were children who should not have been near these pagers but, in some isolated cases, were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sheer number of explosions meant there was indeed collateral damage, and whether there was notably less than a typical missile or bomb was, like everything in the Middle East, open to debate. Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah members are so integrated into daily life in Lebanon that some call the situation a state within a state. By turning to individualized pagers, Israel was tacitly admitting that reality.
Is it not a pyrrhic victory to say that you developed a weapon perfect for war theaters where the combatants are so difficult to distinguish from ordinary people? Ideally, would you not have public sentiment on your side?