The Ethics of the Pager Attacks

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Israel’s remarkable attack on Hezbollah terrorists with exploding pagers has predictably been assailed by Israel’s critics as violating the ethics of war and, ironically, even as an act of terrorism itself. Of course we should be accustomed to such charges against Israel no matter what Israel does to defend itself against the most barbaric enemies, and perhaps we should not stoop to respond to such calumnies. However, in this case Dr. Michael Walzer, among the leading “just war” theorists, and in general a supporter of Israel, has made such criticisms in no less a venue than the New York Times, in an op-ed entitled, “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War,” (Sept 24, 2024), so I feel that a response is called for.

Dr. Walzer wrote the classic study Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (1977) that in many ways created the modern field of just war ethics and set the agenda for decades to come. Many of the essays in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (2015) directly engage Walzer’s arguments, or take Walzer’s positions as their point of departure, almost 40 years after Walzer’s foundational book was published.

Walzer calls the pager attacks “very like war crimes—terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.” His argument is primarily based on two distinctions. First, just war theory distinguishes combatants from citizens: a military “has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties,” even when, Walzer claims, the opposing forces deliberately mix with the civilian population. Second, the Hezbollah fighters were “attacked” by the pagers when “they 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.” Here Walzer draws on the principle that generally protects soldiers who are “off duty” or not involved in current fighting. If an American soldier, for example, goes home on leave for two weeks and is relaxing with his family in his backyard, he essentially has civilian status for that time. An enemy may not kill him claiming that they were attacking an American soldier, a combatant, because he was not functioning as a soldier there and then.

Neither of these distinctions is convincing. First, the pager attacks were among the most effective ways to pinpoint harming Hezbollah terrorists while minimizing civilian casualties, as the pagers were issued exclusively to Hezbollah. Inevitably, some citizens were hurt—there was some limited collateral damage. But there is almost always collateral damage, even among the most targeted military operations, and especially when terrorists hide among the population. Walzer’s ethic works best when there is a professional army clearly identifiable by their uniforms, fatigues and gear, that can be distinguished by the enemy, also a professional army, in their own uniforms, so that civilians can always be easily identified. But Hezbollah is not a professional army—they are a terrorist militia that integrates itself with the population, and often go about in civilian dress. As noted by one foreign policy columnist: “it is hard to identify Hezbollah fighters, Israel wouldn’t know how to distinguish them from civilians even if it invaded…Hezbollah is not a group of people wearing uniforms.” What is a more ethical way to target the terrorists in such circumstances than to sabotage pagers specifically issued to them and not to civilians?

Consider a hypothetical (or not so hypothetical) alternative: that Israel sends in ground forces to shoot Hezbollah terrorists. In this case the Israeli soldiers would only target Hezbollah combatants, but inevitably civilians would be confused with terrorists, or killed in the crossfire, and in much greater numbers than were killed or injured by the pagers, where there seem to have been minimal civilian injuries and few deaths. The pager attack should be recognized as a brilliant way to measure up to the highest ethical standards given the reality of Hezbollah tactics, not condemned as a violation.

Walzer’s second distinction—that of “on duty” vs “off duty” soldiers—is even less persuasive. Again, this war ethic developed in the days of professional armies fighting on battlefields against each other, or in areas devoid of civilians. And it assumed a kind of reciprocity: each army wanted the same protections for their soldiers and would therefore treat the opposing forces in a similar way. Alas, Hezbollah terrorists do not fight from military bases or battlefields but from towns and villages, storing rockets and equipment in houses and garages, and they have no ethic of reciprocity. They are always involved in military activity, always “on duty,” whether they are among a family in a house where weapons are stored, or sleeping beside their rocket launchers, or shopping in markets. At these times they are not on leave like soldiers from a professional army, but rather purchasing provisions and preparing for the next attack. That is why they had their pagers on them—to be able to engage immediately in hostilities when called upon. There is nothing unethical about surprising enemy soldiers while they sleep in their bunks or eat in the mess hall while they are on active duty. That is essentially what happened to the Hezbollah terrorists whose pagers exploded while essentially on active duty, even if they were not firing a rifle at that very moment. According to Walzer’s logic, a Hezbollah terrorist could sit down at a coffee shop or go buy vegetables when the Israeli forces approach and be immune from assault like the surrounding civilians.

Other condemnations against the pager attacks are even less convincing. Former CIA director Leon Panetta ranted: “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism….This is going right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question: ‘What the hell is next?’”

I am not clear on the logic of Panetta’s argument, but whatever he means, it is far short of a coherent accusation that the pager attack amounts to a form of terrorism. For people to ask “What the hell is next?” is not—to the best of my knowledge—a violation of any just war ethic. Nor is “going into the supply chain” a form of terrorism—conventional armies always try to cut the supply lines of the enemy. In any case, Israel hardly attacked any supply chain, except perhaps the supply chain of pagers, which were hardly a civilian necessity, and were issued exclusively to Hezbollah terrorists.

The LA Times published a column by Willem Marx, “Did Exploding Pagers Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon Violate International Law” (Sept 20) that points to potential violations of a provision of international humanitarian law that prohibits the use of booby traps, “which Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, defines as ‘objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use.’”

But these pagers were ordered specifically by Hezbollah and were distributed exclusively to Hezbollah fighters. They were by no means associated with “normal civilian use.” Indeed, the pagers were used to avoid “normal civilian” communication devices, namely cell phones, which Hezbollah leader Nasrallah had become suspicious of.

There are additional accusations made in this LA Times article, but all of them share the common—and by now familiar—strategy of holding Israel to an impossibly high standard such that any military response becomes a violation of some international law. At the same time, Hezbollah’s (and Hamas’s) violations of the Geneva Convention by using human shields, attacking from civilian residences, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, and other crimes, go unmentioned.

Fortunately, the pager attacks have found some defenders too. What this confusion shows is that much of the “just war theory” of the past, and even some of the provisions of the Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law, are outdated, anachronistic and inappropriate for terrorist militias and their campaigns and tactics. We need a thorough revision of war ethics in light of current strategies of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah who themselves violate all provisions of law and ethics.