Israel’s attack on Lebanon using exploding electronics is part of a long history and strategy of targeting civilians

The massive unfolding attack in Lebanon targeting personal electronics belonging to members of Hezbollah, which has so far killed at least 20 people and wounded roughly 3,000, is already beyond doubt Israel’s work. The attack that began on Tuesday has continued into a second day, with more reports of other personal communication devices exploding, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens of others at a funeral on Wednesday for people who had been killed in the first attack the day prior. 

The ongoing attack, which can only be described as terrorist in nature, is unprecedented in its scope and method, but the nature of its indiscriminate attack is far from unique for Israel. In fact, Israel’s doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians is named after the area of Beirut, Dahiya, where this very attack was centered. The most recent development marks a shocking advancement in Israel’s wholesale disregard for human life but it is not new, even if you would never learn that from reading the Western press.

Western media spin

The New York Times team of Patrick Kingsley, Euan Ward, Ronen Bergman, and Michael Levenson covered the attack, and while they did name Israel as the culprit, it worked to include Israel’s blatantly false p.r. angle that it was a targeted attack.

The Times reported: 

“According to American and other officials briefed on the attack, Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon. The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. According to one official, Israel calculated that the risk of harming people not affiliated with Hezbollah was low, given the size of the explosive”.

The Times also wrote that “the blasts appeared to be the latest salvo in a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7,” giving this an aura of mere military activity, rather than a blatantly imprecise and deadly attack on a civilian population. American whistleblower Edward Snowden, cited on this site yesterday, correctly summarized the focus and impact of the attack: 

“What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.”

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara provided a reality check, perhaps most pertinent for Western audiences:

“For our viewers around the world, it is probably helpful to do some ‘role-play’ here. Imagine if 1,200 people, active in the Pentagon, State Dept. and CIA, had pagers explode in their faces, arms and abdominals. How would you think the U.S. would feel about that?”

The Times notes Israel’s “long history of using technology to carry out covert operations against Iran and Iranian-backed groups” as if it were some impressive technological achievement. But really, in order to understand what Israel is doing here, we must look at its track record of indiscriminate attacks. And this is, in fact, not only historically relevant but strategically and geographically relevant as well. 

The path from indiscriminate attacks to genocide

The name of the Dahiya Doctrine stems from the Dahiya quarter of Beirut that Israel targeted and leveled during the 2006 war, a quarter where many families affiliated with Hezbollah lived. In 2008, then military Chief of Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot (later chief of staff and centrist minister), coined the doctrine and  outlined “what will happen” to any enemy that dares attack Israel:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”

Israel applied this method already in its 2008-9 Gaza onslaught. The UN ‘Goldstone Report’ of 2009 concluded that Israel had conducted a “deliberately disproportionate attack, designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population”, and noted that the Dahiya Doctrine “appears to have been precisely what was put into practice”. Just to reiterate: “Punish, humiliate and terrorize.” That last word, “terrorize”, should give us all pause, especially in this particular context.

The recent Gaza onslaught has in its way been the implementation of this doctrine into full-blown genocide. This is not surprising, since the vein of deliberate harm to civilians as a logic of “warfare” has been in the DNA of this doctrine to begin with. 

So now, Israel is blowing up pagers. The prospect of this being called an act of terror by Western media appears to be very low. That is still considered a radical notion, when it comes to Israel because terror is a political term that is only reserved for enemies of the West. For the readers of the New York Times, it is just a “latest salvo” and not a reflection on the nature of Israel itself.