In defense of the pager attack - comment

Michael Walzer is known among many other things to have revived the medieval distinction between jus ad bellum (the justice of starting a war) and jus in bello (justice in conducting the war). 

In his recent New York Times article, Walzer applies this distinction to the current Israel-Hezbollah war: He fully justifies Israel’s case in going to war by simply showing that it is a war of self-defense. (I should add, that, unlike the Palestinians, Hezbollah has no legitimate grievance against Israel and is not under Israeli occupation, but has nevertheless destroyed many of the towns and villages in Northern Israel). Yet, regarding the way Israel conducts the war, Walzer is highly critical, particularly of last month’s pager attack. His conclusion is quite harsh. He considers the attack as a “war crime.”

I wish to challenge Walzer’s unambiguous judgment. 

Beyond being a highly sophisticated and impressive technological feat, this “plot” was, in my opinion, a morally ingenious method of fighting Hezbollah. It was morally speaking more fine-tuned than most alternative strategies in conducting a war, since it precisely targeted the enemy that would be liable to be killed in the course of a just war.

In contrast to a bomb planted in the middle of a market or on a bus, in which only innocent people are targeted, the intention here was to harm only active Hezbollah members, for who gets a Hezbollah pager? Only those who are expected to be operative in a military enterprise. The cleaners of the Hezbollah offices surely did not get a pager; nor did the wives or children of the Hezbollah combatants. 

Furthermore, the technology of this new and unprecedented weapon had the moral advantage of being fine-tuned in the degree of damage caused both to the targeted person himself and to bystanders. The beepers had been implanted with mere 20-gram explosives – not more, not less. Had Israel intended to kill more Hezbollah terrorists or did not mind the collateral damage of innocent bystanders, it could have easily used 40 gr.

The results prove intention

Indeed, the result proved that the intention was not to cause superfluous damage: The number of Hezbollah members killed was relatively small in comparison to those who were wounded. The wounds were mostly minor (the wounded were released from hospital only hours after being hospitalized; including a few high-ranking commanders who were killed 24 hours later in the bombing of their clandestine meeting location). 

Many people were horrified by the aspects of the wounds caused by the exploding beepers: blindness and ugly face wounds. But we should remind ourselves that being killed is, in general, worse than being wounded. As for the innocent bystanders who were killed or wounded, we never received official numbers from the Lebanese or Hezbollah authorities. We do know that Hezbollah ordered 5,000 pagers and that thousands were distributed. Therefore if 2,700 people were wounded or killed in the explosions, there cannot have been a very large or disproportionate number of innocent victims.

Walzer adds in his critique that, unlike Hamas’s use of human shields, Hezbollah had no intention of risking the lives of “innocent” family members of fighters receiving the pagers. But I do not see why this absence of intention makes a moral difference: Walzer does not deny the legitimacy of causing collateral damage in the course of a just war, and usually this is regardless of the reasons for which innocent civilians to be at the site of the military act.

Walzer argues, correctly, that it would be wrong to assassinate an enemy commander or official while in negotiations concerning a peaceful settlement to the conflict. However, Israel has not been involved in any kind of negotiations with Hezbollah (since the 2006 ceasefire, broken by Hezbollah numerous times even before its renewed attacks began on October 8, 2023). All the attempts by the US intermediary Middle East envoy Amos Hochstein to broker a ceasefire over the past year have failed. Hezbollah has shown no sign of stopping the war, let alone complying with UN Resolution 1701. 

Therefore, Walzer cannot argue on that basis that Israel was wrong in killing Hezbollah leaders in Beirut. 

From the point of view of the morality of war (jus in bello), it is perfectly legitimate for Israel to use technologies such as the pager attack and to target Hezbollah commanders. 

It does not mean, however, that Israel had no better alternatives in conducting this war and that it could and should have tried first to reach a deal with Gaza that perhaps could have led to a ceasefire on the Lebanese border.

The writer is an expert in ethics, political philosophy, and bioethics in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.