Terrorism, according to some of America’s esteemed defense officials and intellectuals, is when you jump out from behind a bush and yell “BOO!” at an unsuspecting passerby. Campfire ghost stories, snake-in-a-can, rollercoasters—terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.
All these things make people afraid, maybe even momentarily terrified, and are therefore terrorism—it’s right there in the word!
“This is going right into the supply chain,” former CIA chief and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said about Israel’s targeted pager plot against Hezbollah soldiers in Lebanon. “And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, What the hell is next?”
Philosopher Michael Walzer has a slightly different, but equally ridiculous, objections: “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.”
The first sentence in that quote establishes that the operatives were, by definition, operating. So when Walzer then states two sentences later that the operatives were not operating, one wonders why an editor at the New York Times would not have saved Walzer from himself at his moment of greatest need.
Since such objections to the pager plot are no longer merely coming from figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we must ask: Why are folks making imbecilic, self-refuting arguments in public, where people can see them?
The answer is that we are witnessing the latest chapter in a long-running attempt to delegitimize any offensive military act carried out by Israel. And as absurd as these recent arguments may seem, they are quite dangerous if they catch on. They are being deployed for the express purpose of disqualifying Israel’s policy of targeted attacks, very much including targeted assassinations.
Put simply: They are defending a random Hezbollah operative today to prevent the death of Hassan Nasrallah tomorrow.
There’s a long history of forcing Israel to be a sitting duck, pressuring it to not defend itself unless there are enemy forces on Israeli territory.
Over time, Israel’s enemies and critics have tried to delegitimize its victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, despite there being no basis on which to do so. Egypt had ordered the UN to remove its peacekeeping force standing between Egypt and Israel, mobilized its troops into formation, and closed the shipping lanes to Israeli vessels to choke off access. Israel launched what was the dictionary definition of just preemptive warfare—and won. So the international community decided Israel shouldn’t be allowed to launch preemptive military action, because it might win.
In the 1980s, tensions with the PLO statelet in South Lebanon reached a boiling point. After enough PLO attacks on Israeli civilians to warrant what was, at this point, not preemptive war but a textbook response to a war begun by the enemy, Israel went into South Lebanon and removed the PLO. Because of Israel’s success, some new “rules” were introduced into the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, Israel would be considered the aggressor for removing a threat across its borders.
In 2006, Hezbollah unambiguously touched off a war with armed attacks by its soldiers on Israeli territory. Israel sent its army into South Lebanon to pacify the front without occupying territory or removing Hezbollah from Lebanon. The world’s reaction surprised nobody: Now Israeli counteroffensives of any kind were deemed criminal.
All these capricious rules changes left Israel very few options to prevent its own destruction. Recently, Israel has relied more and more on intelligence that enables the targeted assassinations of terrorists. This reduces if not altogether removes collateral damage, while having the advantage of de-escalating, even if temporarily, the conflict by hamstringing a terrorist army planning to attack. At times, Israeli attacks have been so precise as to be targeted maiming of terrorists, as were many cases in the pager plot.
Now Walzer, Panetta, and the empty crayon box known as The Squad (plus foreign governments and the United Nations) have come out against targeted maiming. Why? Because it’s the last plausible way for Israel to defend itself before the Jewish state becomes a sitting duck, patiently awaiting its own destruction.
Luckily, Israel has shown no signs of swearing off targeted assassinations, each and every one a boon to the free world and wholly legal. Which is a reminder of just how much danger the rest of the world would be in if Israel did what its critics wanted it to do and disappeared.