Israel’s ‘pager attacks’ contradicts claim it wants to avert wider war

This burying of actuality has long been a speciality of Lebanon’s volatile political landscape and remains so in the ongoing war between Israel and the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group – Hezbollah.

Anyone who doubts this need only look at the initial reaction to the incredible events of the past few days, following the explosions of pagers in the pockets of hundreds of Hezbollah fighters across the country that killed more than a dozen people and injured thousands of others. And even as I write, reports are surfacing that handheld radios used by Hezbollah fighters are now taking more of a toll.

As it stands, it’s not as if Israel has even proffered a version of the truth as to what has been happening across Lebanon and beyond as these devices exploded simultaneously. It simply doesn’t need to.

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For, as any Middle East observer knows, such an operation of this level of sophistication and audacity could only have been carried out by Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad.

Certainly that’s how Hezbollah sees it, and on the most basic of levels that’s all that matters here both in terms of Israel’s messaging to its deadly foe, but also in terms of any hope for a ceasefire in Gaza and the wider region.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Mossad has form when it comes to this type of operation.

Anyone who has seen the movie Munich, about the revenge wreaked on the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) by Israel for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, will recall the film’s reenactment of the real-life moment when Mossad operatives planted explosives in the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO’s representative in Paris, before detonating them when he answered the call they made to him.

Then in 1996 it was the turn of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, to kill Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, known as “The Engineer ”, after tricking him into taking a call on his father’s mobile phone that had been brought into Gaza by a Palestinian collaborator.

Right now questions continue to swirl around the ingenuity and logistics of this week’s attacks with two main theories as to how the explosions could have been accomplished. Current thinking is that those behind the attack infiltrated the supply chain of the company that provided Hezbollah with the pagers and planted small explosive devices in thousands of units or, alternatively, a cyberattack caused the devices’ batteries to overheat and explode.

But putting these technical questions aside for a moment, equally important are the political consequences and what it means for an already tinderbox situation in the region.

To begin with, why would Israel choose precisely this moment to carry out such an attack just when there were signs of a slight tailing off in tensions?

If some reports are to be believed then the decision was taken on a “use it or lose it” basis according to US and Israeli sources cited by the Reuters news agency.

In other words, the Mossad originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah but chose to act early when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors.

Having learned of the suspicions, Israeli leaders reportedly considered launching an immediate full-scale war in order to retain the pager attack as an opening blow. They also considered leaving things as they were, even at the risk of the operation being compromised, according to the Al-Monitor Arab news website.

But go ahead Israel did, scuttling any notion of a dialling down of hostilities with Hezbollah and its Iranian backers, and precisely at the moment too when US secretary of state Antony Blinken arrived in Egypt in the early hours of yesterday, in the latest push for a Gaza ceasefire.

Call me cynical but Israel’s timing of the pager attack does make you wonder if it was aimed at deliberately sabotaging such talks given that regional tensions will now inevitably ratchet up with an expected Hezbollah retaliation almost a given.

Equally cynical would be the scenario that Israel having gone to all the effort of setting up the booby-trapped pagers did indeed see it as a “use it or lose it” moment and thought that killing off a few Hezbollah members and injuring thousands of others was more important than keeping any ceasefire talks on track.

Whoeever made the final decision for the pager attack there’s little doubt that it would have come from the very top. Likely from Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who to date has thrown obstacles in the way of peace at every turn and in whose political interests a wider war in the region arguably benefits.

In other words, things simmer down for a while then Netanyahu turns up the gas, keeping things on the boil all in the name of personal political survival. That some innocent Lebanese civilians were killed and maimed alongside Hezbollah members would matter little in the big scheme of things for an Israeli leader who has the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians already on his hands.

If Israel’s decision to go ahead with the pager attack was the precursor to much wider military action against Hezbollah then there is little sign of that as I write. If it was a deliberate message of deterrence designed to shock Hezbollah into realising how vulnerable its security is then it might have achieved a degree of psychological impact, but almost certainly will not stop the Lebanese group from responding.

To date, Hezbollah has carefully calibrated any retaliation to the killing of its leaders such as its commander Fuad Shukr a month or so ago. But that calibration it seems has only emboldened Israel, meaning that Hezbollah will now almost certainly be compelled to respond more forcefully.

Again call me cynical, but could it be that this is perhaps precisely what Netanyahu and those hawkish ultra-nationalist right-wingers in his coalition have wanted all along?

For the moment, as so often in the past, only versions of the truth have so far surfaced in Beirut and Lebanon these past days. Israel might claim that it wants to avert a wider war, but if that is indeed the truth then it’s going about it in a very strange way.