RICH LOWRY: Israel’s righteous war on Hezbollah

Israel is supposed to tolerate the intolerable. A terror group has launched thousands of missiles into the Jewish state over the past year — catalyzed by a hideous pogrom against Israel carried out by another terror group — and we are told that it is Israel, finally hitting back in earnest, that is dangerously escalating the situation.

Since the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, Lebanon-based Hezbollah has fired roughly 8,000 rockets into Israel. These indiscriminate attacks have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee the north of the country. In July, a missile killed 12 young adults and children who were playing soccer in the Golan Heights, a random massacre with no military purpose whatsoever.

Israel retaliated for the horror in the Golan Heights but has generally absorbed Hezbollah’s attacks because it’s been focused on the war against Hamas to its south while the Biden administration has been working to stay its hand in the north. The theme, as ever, is that the Jewish state is expected to accept as background noise unprovoked attacks on its sovereign territory that no other state would ever abide.

What other country is asked to bear the rocketing of its civilian population as the price for faux regional comity? Israel won’t abide by these rules, and nor should it.

It began turning up the heat against Hezbollah with its “Mission Impossible”-worthy attacks on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and other electronic devices. The pager attack was an experiment in whether Israel could carry out perhaps the most carefully calibrated counterterrorist operation in the modern age and still get accused of committing war crimes.

Sure enough, AOC and others have condemned the Jewish state. Israel hits terrorist targets from the air — and it’s accused of war crimes. Israel goes in on the ground — and it’s accused of war crimes. Israel does neither, opting instead to target terrorists by using their own devices against them — and it’s accused of war crimes. The assumption is that Israel’s role is to duck and cover and take whatever punishment its remorseless enemies dole out, lest things “escalate.”

The Israel Defense Forces could be fighting a delaying action as the Jewish state were being pushed into the sea by advancing forces committed to its destruction — and it would be still be accused of war crimes.

This entire way of thinking is a deep moral perversion masquerading as nuanced strategic thought. The idea that the pager attack is a violation of international law is preposterous. The philosopher Michael Walzer made the case against the operation in The New York Times, arguing that the operatives killed and wounded “had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged.” In the same breath, though, he conceded, “Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes.” This made them legitimate military targets.

As a practical matter, there is no other way that Israel could have hit so many terrorists with so little collateral damage. It could have droned or sent sniper teams after just a few of them and — tragically — ended up causing more collateral damage. The targeting of the pager attack was effectively done by Hezbollah itself by distributing the devices to its own operators.

Taking advantage of the resulting disruption in Hezbollah communications and the reduction in its effective ranks, Israel has followed up with a bombing strike against a meeting of high-level Hezbollah leadership and the destruction from the air of Hezbollah munitions and missile launchers. To the Biden administration, this looks like a mere escalation because it doesn’t understand the concept of deterrence — making an enemy fear what you might do to him, rather than allowing the enemy to set the pace for a conflict or to constrain your actions out of worry over what he might do next.

If Israel can successfully deter Hezbollah, it could mean — this obviously isn’t guaranteed — that the conflict de-escalates. Regardless, the Jewish state is under no obligation to tolerate the intolerable.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.