The pre-eminent contemporary thinker on Just War Theory,* Michael Walzer, takes to the NYT op-ed pages to argue “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War.”
To set the stage, I should note that his classic 1977 volume Just and Unjust Wars was required reading at West Point 40 years ago and his work is still assigned throughout the U.S. professional military education continuum. While he decidedly comes from a leftist perspective, he’s taken quite seriously by the American military. Further, while he’s an ardent critic of the Netanyahu government, he’s steadfastly defended Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the spot or reading about them from far away could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.
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; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.
While I have studied the laws of armed conflict, I’m not a lawyer. And, certainly, Walzer has thought more deeply on this subject than I have. That said, while I share his discomfort with the timing of the attacks and the likelihood that innocents would be killed, I strongly disagree that terrorists are only legitimate military targets when they are actively engaged. That’s an absurdly high bar not required by either law or morality.
The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No similar claim of minimizing risk to civilians can be made for the decision to explode the devices. They were not distributed by Hezbollah in order to put its people at risk. This was not a plot to force Israel to kill or injure civilians. The plot was Israel’s, and the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women and children.
Walzer has done more than any thinker before or sense to establish that the questions of the justice of the war (jus ad bellum) and the just conduct of war (jus in bello) must be considered separately. While I agree that these are both separate moral and legal matters, I do believe they are intertwined. Israelis responding the October 7 attacks and Ukranians responding to their Russian attackers ought to be given more latitude than their foes because of the injustice of those attacks and the resultant righteousness of their retaliation.
We’re in agreement that the perfidy committed by Hamas in Gaza has intentionally given Israel no way to fight without killing noncombatants and that must factor into how we judge the IDF’s actions. But it seems obvious to me that the same applies to Hezbollah fighters who commit violence and then fade back into the civilian population. While I think exploding the pagers at 3:30 in the afternoon was problematic precisely because it maximized the likelihood of noncombatant harm, I don’t think Israel had a duty to avoid any possibility of noncombatant harm. That’s next to impossible given the circumstances.
Israel’s recent assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders requires a more complicated, but still critical, political and moral response. These were men actively supporting terrorist attacks on Israel, who certainly knew themselves to be targets — I would say legitimate targets — of assassins who could be operating from close up or far away. But when a government authorizes the killing of men it is directly or indirectly negotiating with, such as the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July, we have to conclude that the government isn’t committed to the negotiations’ success. That is politically and morally wrong, not only from the standpoint of the large number of Israeli citizens (including my friends in Israel) who are strongly, even desperately, committed to ending the war and bringing the hostages home, but also from the standpoint of all the victims of the Gaza war.
This strikes me as not a just war question at all but rather one of policy disagreement. Does killing the leadership of the two terrorist groups make it harder to reach a peace? Maybe. It might also radically enhance reaching peace on Israel’s terms. That’s the whole premise of war, after all.
However, let me make a distinction here. Condemning an act of war is not the same as condemning the war itself. Hamas and Hezbollah are fighting against Israel for an immoral and unjust purpose: the elimination of the Jewish state. Long ago, Abba Eban called this the crime of policide. In his day, Israel’s enemies were motivated by a nationalist determination to reverse (literally) the nakba, the flight and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 from what became Israel. Today, the goal is religiously driven and zealously pursued. That this crime has found supporters and apologists in the United States and Europe, often among secular leftists, is even more amazing than the exploding pagers. So it is important to distinguish the judgments we make about the conduct of war from the judgments we make about the decision to go to war.
One can fight an unjust war justly and vice-versa. But, to the extent Israeli leaders believe they’re fighting foes that wish to wipe the country off the map, it’s hard to blame them for erring on the side of military advantage when assessing the proportionality of their means.
Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 was meant to start a war, and Israel’s response, though Hamas expected it and wanted it, was nonetheless justified. It is hard to imagine any country responding differently. Hezbollah in Lebanon joined Hamas almost immediately by lobbing rockets into northern Israel continually but also carefully, seemingly intending a limited engagement. In this way it has been supporting its Islamist ally, despite their Sunni-Shia differences, without committing itself to full-scale war.
Israel has helped maintain those limits with its own controlled responses, although it has not refrained from targeting Hezbollah commanders. The result has been the forced evacuation of destroyed towns and villages on each side of the Israel-Lebanon border, without significant damage to the rest of the countries. But the exchanges have become deadlier, and pressure has been building in Israel (which is, unlike Lebanon, a functioning democracy where political pressure is possible) to act in a stronger way to make the northern border communities safe. Perhaps the exploding electronic devices represented an attempt at strong action. I can’t believe it will make anyone safer. It invites retribution, and even if retribution is for the moment difficult, the desire for revenge won’t go away.
But, again, this is a disagreement over policy, not law or morality. I suppose, if the Netanyahu government authorized the operation—which was initiated well ahead of the October 7 attack—to increase the likelihood of a wider war, that would be worthy of condemnation. But it seems far more likely that they thought it would help them disrupt enemy command and control and lessen their support from the local population in a war they see as inevitable, if not already underway.
At this moment, any political proposal is bound to be called naïve. Leaders on both sides seem to believe that war is the only way forward. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said as much. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, are committed to a policy of doing whatever it takes to destroy Israel, even if what it takes is eternal war.
One war may be just and the other unjust, but today anyone who aims at continuing the fight must be condemned. The victims of the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, the general amazement at what is possible in war today, the fear of what will come tomorrow — all this proves the necessity of a political solution.
By definition, all wars end with a political solution. All sides here are trying to achieve one that is maximally favorable to them. I don’t believe the use of exploding pagers, per se, is an illegitimate means to that end.
