This week’s attacks were not, as Israel’s defenders claimed, “surgical” or a “precisely targeted anti-terrorist operation”. Israel and Hezbollah are sworn enemies. The current round of fighting has seen tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Israel-Lebanon border because of the Shia militant group’s rocket and artillery attacks.
However, the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities. The plan appeared to produce what lawyers might call “excessive incidental civilian harm”. Both these arguments have been levelled at Russia to claim Moscow was committing war crimes in Ukraine. It’s hard to say why the same reasoning is not applied to Israel – apart from that it is a western ally. (...)
The worry is that Israel’s actions lead to a disastrous all-out conflict that would pull the US into a regional fight. The world stands on the edge of chaos because Mr Netanyahu’s continuing hold on power and consequent insulation from corruption charges depend largely on his nation being at war. None of this is possible without US complicity and assistance. Perhaps it is only after its presidential election that the US will be able to say that the price of saving Mr Netanyahu’s skin should not be paid in the streets of Lebanon or by Palestinians in the occupied territories.
by Editors, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA[ed. A new low for Netanyahu, and that's really saying something. It's entirely ridiculous to conflate anti-semitism with basic human empathy and revulsion at the misery and indiscriminate civilian killing Israel is responsible for. But that's part and parcel of the whole package, isn't it? In a just world we'd sever all military and economic aid immediately and see how much longer this lasts. But we won't will we? (and why is that? I have some pretty good guesses, all disgusting). See also: How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers (NYT):]
"Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets.
Mohammed Awada, 52, and his son were driving by one man whose pager exploded, he said. “My son went crazy and started to scream when he saw the man’s hand flying away from him,” he said.
By the end of the day, at least a dozen people were dead and more than 2,700 were wounded, many of them maimed. And the following day, 20 more people were killed and hundreds wounded when walkie-talkies in Lebanon also began mysteriously exploding. Some of the dead and wounded were Hezbollah members, but others were not; four of the dead were children.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as complex and long in the making. (...)
In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, in the village of Saraain, one young girl, Fatima Abdullah, had just come home from her first day of fourth grade when she heard her father’s pager begin to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to him and was holding it when it exploded, killing her. Fatima was 9.
On Wednesday, as thousands gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs to attend an outdoor funeral for four people killed in the blasts, chaos erupted anew: There was another explosion."
"I don’t think people have processed just what a shift in psychology happened with these rigged pager remote explosions, as well as ipones, and solar panels. We have entered a new phase of technological fascism that will take years to ripple through society.
Snowden’s warnings were theoretical, these bombings are real and people are dead. The phone I’m holding can be a time bomb, and yet, I’m still using my phone? We have all become naked to the face of evil."
[ed. See also: A new era in sabotage: Turning ordinary devices into grenades, on a mass scale (Seattle Times/NYT); and, Israel’s Beeper Attacks Are Terrorism (Jacobin). Finally, If Democrats Don’t Cut Israel Off, They’ll Lose in November (Jacobin):]
"Or, as one of Biden’s own Pentagon officials put it, “We have let Israel face zero consequences for crossing all of our red lines in Gaza so they are emboldened and know they will face no consequences for going into Lebanon, despite us saying, ‘Don’t go there.’”
Sure enough, Israeli officials have reacted to Biden’s latest caution as you’d expect: by politely telling him that they don’t care what he thinks and that they’ll do whatever they want.
The only thing that’s going to restrain Netanyahu — who even Biden himself has publicly acknowledged is dead set on keeping a state of war going so he can stay in power — is to stop giving him the weapons and other military support that he can’t keep waging war without. The Democrats have spent nearly a year trying to do everything they can to avoid making this decision, fearing the political backlash from the donor class (rather than ordinary voters, who actually back restricting aid). It is now coming to the point where it will be completely unavoidable, at least if they don’t want to be on the hook for another Middle East disaster and lose the election because of it."
