If your pocket starts to feel warm in the coming days, here’s a few questions you should ask yourself. #1 – Are you trapped in the 80s? #2 – Are you affiliated with any terrorist organizations? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should probably throw your pager away…but hopefully all of my readers ditched their pagers before Bush Senior left office.
If you haven’t heard by now, a sophisticated Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon was carried out on September 17. While Israel has not officially claimed this attack, it appears to be the next chapter in the rising tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.
Israel’s operation involved intercepting pagers somewhere along Hezbollah’s supply chain, implanting explosives, and then returning those devices to the supply chain to eventually end up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives. Those devices were then detonated earlier this week. Hezbollah has evolved into a political and militant power within Lebanon, so they’ve somewhat limited conflict with Israel to help maintain their political footholds.
This attack resulted in a number of casualties among Hezbollah and also provided the Israeli’s with a strategic understanding of who is involved with the organization. As of now, I don’t expect this to escalate into a broader conflict.
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Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, I’m recording this on the 18th. Yesterday, the 17th of September, we had several thousand pagers explode in Lebanon, injuring at least 2,800 people and killing at least 12. This was undoubtedly an Israeli operation. The Israelis aren’t saying anything about it, but no one else would, and no one else has a vested interest in doing this.
The target was Hezbollah, which is a militant/political organization in Lebanon that the Israelis have been dealing with over the last several months, and vice versa.
Okay, so what’s going on?
Number one, Hezbollah is not new. It’s been around for decades. Israel is not new. It’s been around for decades. Basically, since Hezbollah’s formation—it’s been around for 40, 50, 60 years—they’ve always been involved in conflict with Israel. However, things have evolved over the last 15 years in a more peaceful direction. The two haven’t come to direct blows since a brief air war in the early 2000s. The reason is very simple: Hezbollah is not a typical terrorist organization. They also have a political wing that is part of the government in Lebanon.
There’s a whole class of people in Hezbollah who don’t see a vested interest in firing rockets into northern Israel because they are now part of the power structure. If you challenge Israel in a way that makes them feel the tanks need to move, there’s nobody in the neighborhood who can stand up to them. So, you get this hybridized organization where there’s a militant wing and a political wing.
I’m not suggesting any of them are nice people, but not everyone wants to have a war. In fact, even on the militant side, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks last year, Hezbollah knows they are fortunate that Israel has its hands full with a suppression operation in Gaza. The danger, of course, is that everyone in the Middle East always wants the last word.
Both sides—Israel and Hezbollah—have been doing attacks on each other, just like the Iranians, in order to get the last word. But since no one will let anyone else have the last word, we keep having these layered attacks that escalate, settle down, escalate again, and so on.
I have no reason to believe that this is any different. I don’t think it’s going to lead to a general war, but Hezbollah will feel like it has to respond, and then Israel will feel like it has to respond, which will make Hezbollah feel like it has to respond. Welcome to the Middle East. This is just what the place looks like on a good day.
This does not change my assessment that the Middle East is still the most volatile part of the world and has been for a little over two years now.
Now, what about this attack specifically?
Well, a few things. First of all, this is clearly against international law—using a civilian network, the telephone network, to trigger civilian devices (pagers) in civilian areas of Lebanon is clearly not legal. But because Hezbollah has a militant wing and has been launching missiles and rockets into Israel, I really don’t see anyone who matters bringing a court case against the Israelis for this one. So that’s kind of a minor sideshow issue.
Far more important: this was a pretty sophisticated attack. The Israelis have had a lot of intelligence failures over the last few years. They completely missed the Gaza operation, and they’re botching their counterattacks into Gaza now. This should have been done months ago, and they’re making no appreciable progress. They’ve had to go back over areas they’ve already cleared, over and over again. This has the makings of a quagmire operation for them.
Now, let me explain how this attack likely happened. The pagers were manufactured in Taiwan. They were shipped to Hungary, where a Hungarian company’s distribution system took over. Somewhere between Taiwan and Hungary—and these things being delivered to Hezbollah—the Israelis got a hold of the shipments and implanted explosives in them. Probably what they did was swap out the batteries and replace them with a hybrid battery-explosive system.
There’s no way to remotely hack a pager and turn it into a bomb. Sorry. The most a pager would do is get really hot if tampered with. So, the sophistication to do that without anyone noticing, and getting it into thousands of people’s hands, is kind of impressive.
There’s also the operational aspect. Hezbollah uses pagers because cell phones can be easily tracked if you know what you’re doing. Pagers only send a signal when they’re on, so they’re a much simpler technology but safer if you’re trying to avoid having the Israelis drop a bomb on your head. Well, the Israelis have now hit a couple thousand people who were part of the Hezbollah supply chain and distribution system.
It’s not like everyone who has a pager in Lebanon got hit—just the people who had gotten pagers from Hezbollah. The vast majority, if not all, of them were affiliated with the organization in an operative way. So, the next step here is that the Israelis undoubtedly had observers in hospitals across Lebanon. They’ve either confirmed or identified hundreds, if not thousands, of Hezbollah agents and operatives. That’s a rich intelligence trove. It doesn’t get much better than that. Not to mention, a lot of these guys are going to have holes in their thighs and will be easy to identify after they heal because they’ll be limping for the rest of their lives.
You’ve got to give credit where it’s due—that was a brilliant operation.
Finally, it raises the question of what else the Israeli intelligence services have been up to. After those recent intelligence failures, there was an open question as to whether or not Israel had lost its mojo. Clearly, at least some people in their intelligence services have not. If they can interrupt a supply chain of pagers, what else can they do?
Manufactured goods in Lebanon—everything is imported. So, that’s an opportunity for the Israelis to reach out and tackle anything that Hezbollah might have an independent supply system for.
Today, on the 18th, we found a second wave—walkie-talkies, something else that is hard to hack—that exploded and probably injured another 300 people. Now you’ve got a bunch of Hezbollah folks walking around missing fingers. The Israelis are not done here, and Hezbollah will react, but we have seen a level of sophistication in Israel today and yesterday that we just haven’t seen in the last few years.
Whether they’re doing this because they have some broader plans or whether this is just the most recent tit-for-tat, I don’t have an answer for you. But what I can tell you is that operationally, Hezbollah has now been marked, and a more traditional assassination campaign would be so much easier than it was just three days ago.
