If you’re anything like me, your first reaction to the news that Israel had exploded hundreds of Hezbollah pagers was to ask, “Wait, who still use pagers?”
The second reaction was sheer awe at the brilliance of the plan.
On Tuesday last week, news spread that hundreds of pagers – believed to be in the hands (and pockets) of Hezbollah agents – had exploded across Lebanon, killing about a dozen and injuring 2,000 more. A couple days later, walkie talkies likewise exploded, including some at funerals for Hezbollah agents, adding another 20 dead and 450 wounded to the casualty list. The plan has been nicknamed Operation: Grim Beeper.
The Mossad and Israeli Defense Force of course haven’t taken credit, but everyone knows that both no one else would or could carry out such a plan.
As this video by AiTelly lays out, the devices were built in Taiwan, then sold in Lebanon through a Hungarian company. At some point in the supply chain, the electronics had “bombs” installed that could be triggered just by sending a page.
In answer to my question about “Who still uses pagers?”, apparently terrorists and other nefarious actors do, because simpler communication is much harder to intercept than a cell phone transmission or email. (On the HBO crime drama The Wire, the drug dealers use pagers as well.) While of course media unfavorable to Israel will cite all the poor! innocent! civilians!, because only bad guys use pagers and walkie talkies the amount of collateral damage was the absolute minimum.
Moreover, the same way terrorists might plant a bomb in a bus to scare everyone from using buses, this now makes every member of Hezbollah scared to touch their mobile devices. Grim Beeper will disrupt their violent operations for years. Israeli spycraft is second to none.
Now of course, Hezbollah is crying foul, just as Israel’s enemies always do when they start to lose. World affairs guru Peter Zaihan summed it up pretty well when he said that exploding mobile devices without direct evidence of terrorist activity isn’t legal, but Hezbollah isn’t taking anyone to court after shooting so many rockets at Israel across the Lebanese border.
Hezbollah is a 40-year-old non-state actor with both military capabilities and a political presence in Lebanon. As a sign of how scary these guys are, their name – an adaption of “Hisbu Allah” – quite literally means “The Party of God” in Arabic. The closest comparison in modern Western history would be the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein during The Troubles, but only if the IRA had enjoyed billions of dollars of sophisticated military equipment.
The question is of course how can Hezbollah afford its armaments. Hezbollah is more powerful than the official Lebanese Armed Forces. That’s thanks to funding from the oil-rich jihadist Iranian government, which also funds Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group. Given how many Islamic fundamentalist groups there are, it’s kind of hard to keep track of them all! (Hamas and Hezbollah are both worse than Al Qaeda.)
Hamas began a new intifada with a wave of highly publicized mass murders and atrocities against Israel last October, and Grim Beeper is (allegedly) a response to this wave of Iranian aggression. Some in Western countries speculate that this could escalate to full-blown war in the region, but Israelis probably don’t take criticism seriously from people not surrounded on all sides by maniacs who want to finish what Adolf Hitler started.
As a point of historical irony, it’s mutual distrust of Iranian aggression that four years ago gave birth to the Abraham Accords. His signature foreign achievement, President Donald Trump negotiated the historic normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and the UAE (the Arab country where I used to live). Even the strongest of Trump’s critics have to acknowledge that he pulled off the unthinkable by bringing peace to the Middle East.
And since Israel’s counterattacks against Iranian actors, none of those four have withdrawn from the accords.
Israel is far more polarizing in American politics than it ever has been. Whereas majorities in both parties have historically always supported Israel, Democrats no longer do. Whereas 78% of Republicans sided with Israel following Hamas’s massacres last October, only 38% of Democrats said the same – a historic low – with huge chunks of younger Democrats siding with Hamas.
Notably members of the Democrats “Squad” like Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib are so violently anti-Israel that they were forbidden speaking slots at the recent DNC. So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when Iran hacked the Trump campaign last week to help VP Kamala Harris’s campaign. One imagines that’s an endorsement Harris won’t tout as much as she did Taylor Swift’s.
Everyone in the Middle East is going to be watching the election returns with rapt attention … though many of the more violent ones probably won’t be checking them on their pagers.
Jared Whitley has worked in the US Senate and White House. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. For his musings in Utah Policy, the Top of the Rockies competition this year named him the best columnist in the Intermountain West for small publications.
