From Israel's perspective, this supply chain attack was undoubtedly a clever move, but I can't help but wonder about its long-term consequences.
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
I think the point is that if you're not Hezbollah or any kind of political actor, but just a customer for Israeli technology (public or private), would you really want to keep buying it? Leave aside boycotts over Israeli policy, you might be opening yourself to becoming an Israeli attack vector and either find your own interests compromised or become a target of Israel's enemies if they thought you were complicit.
I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens them to actual armed conflict.
This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.
All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is weird.
China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US companies can be forced to comply with the government in secret- much in the same way we consider that China does it to even part-owned China based companies.
The concern over tiktok is not that Xi’s autocratic regime is surveilling you, but manipulating the algorithms in its large social media market share to foment anti-American (& anti-Israeli) sentiment.
What is the real risk here? The only thing they can really do is make the case that if China invades Taiwan then the US shouldn't get involved. There problem is they might well be right; if I compare Hong Kong and Ukraine, I'd expect Taiwan would be better off going with the HK model of an "invasion" rather than fighting an actual war with the world's #2 or arguably #1 economy. So I'm not sure what the case is for quelling the message; there are some important issues there to debate.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.
I’m exaggerating a little (but not much): the risk with tiktok is that it is brainwashing Americans—particularly young ones—with anti-American sentiment. Not only does that suck for the individual, but diminishes the civil-service talent pool and weakens US institutions.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
They may well be right that the people of Taiwan, a country with a democratically elected government, should just lie down and accept a complete and undemocratic Chinese takeover of their country?
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
The good alternative is China not wanting to take over a sovereign country, and for the world to gradually normalise Taiwan as a legitimate country.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Sure, there are many avenues to spread this sort of propaganda, but a state-run social media platform can certainly be a lot more effective than someone flooding someone else's social media platform with propaganda.
Assuming the Chinese government is using TikTok for influence campaigns (they'd be foolish not to), they only way to stop it is to outright ban it in your country (which the US seems to be trying to do, with possibly-disastrous effects), or find a way to get your citizens to dislike it (good luck with that).
While Russia is doing pretty well at their influence campaigns on other platforms, those platforms can choose, if they so desire, to step up their detection and banning efforts. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game, of course, but it's at least possible to stamp out most of that crap if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
Over the years I have personally found multiple accounts on Twitter/X that appeared to be Russian propaganda trolls (or someone with resources looking to appear that way).
They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.
I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.
Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases.
From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.
I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]
This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.
After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.
My goodness, there are so many examples of more or less direct Russian influence operations. Here's a recent one where a bunch of political influencers were being paid ~$100,000 per single podcast episode by a company in Tennessee, whose founders were fully aware that their super-generous investor was located in Moscow.
the USA tried to invade Cuba when the soviets put missiles there, and somehow people are surprised that Russia would do the same thing in the same situation.
It feels like they're spending more on pro-israel sentiments, and have for decades. A biblical quote about a beam in one's eye comes to mind whenever people go "but china!".
My concern with tiktok is that it rots your brain like television, but far more effectively because it's rapid fire content constantly tuned to the individual user to keep them hooked on it. It's an instant gratification machine, effectively a drug, that fries people's attention spans. It has people spending hours a day consuming vapid short-form nonsense, and alters their psyche to make them less effective in other endeavors even when they aren't distracted by the app (particularly school, since it hits children particularly hard.)
I'm not sure why influence should be illegal. What about books and movies? Or even schools and universities? American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXm-NYyWEAA1jNs?format=jpg&name=...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
But dynamic algorithms, targeting exactly you, knowing what mood you have in that moment (by analyzing what you have looked at, liked, disliked), what opinions you have etc. opens up a whole different world of influence possibilities amd I think those possibilities are just starting to get explored with AI. The data is already there.
> American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
Damn the education system, and it's penchant for teaching the history of colonialism instead of a revisionist policy. What's next, after Mandatory Palestine we'll teach our children about the Civil War and slavery too? What an anti-America sentiment, clearly we need our conservative lawmakers to... I dunno, rewrite history for both countries? Teach feel-good cookie recipes instead of international politics?
As long as America has anti-BDS laws there won't be any freedom of speech in the first place. Our first amendment rights are currently being suspended by international lobbyists that can't handle their share of due criticism. A shame, considering the US does so well to educate others on it's own embarrassing history, but is threatened with a lawsuit when anyone tries to meaningfully criticize Israel.
I'm not sure the American pov is really the topic here. This story can have consequences for everyone. The USian government is not the center of the world
> Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution
Say what? Ok, there is no explicit "right to privacy" anywhere in the US Constitution, but that applies equally to citizens and non-citizens. Whatever is in the Constitution applies to everyone regardless of citizenship, with only a few exceptions. And those exceptions don't have much to do with anything you might refer to as privacy. (They're about whether state governments can mess with you. And were I a non-citizen, it's the states that I would be worried about, given that many of them are actively trying to make things harder for non-citizens.)
Unreasonable search and seizure, in particular, applies to everyone. The courts have repeatedly affirmed this.
Unless you're talking about non-citizens outside US borders, or crossing them? That's much murkier.
The constitution does not exclusively apply to US citizens is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no explicit and broad right to privacy in the constitution. You are protected by the fourth amendment requiring a warrant for searches and seizures, but the court has ruled that, citizen or not, if a third party like Meta willingly hands over your info, it’s fair game. L
JFK asks to take a photo of you when leaving US. Only US citizens can object that based on privacy. Thats the moment you know, as a foreigner, you have no privacy in this country. And honestly, I would not expect America to care for that.
> my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
Why do people engage in this sort of larping, like they're secret agents or intellectuals that may be hunted at any moment by the grey suits in western governments?
We know it's not true for this person in particular because one click on their HN profile tells you their real name. I stopped there, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional info available with 3-4 more clicks. If they were really so afraid of government reprisal like this larping suggests, maybe they'd attempt to be at least a little pseudo-anonymous.
The actual fact is that 99.9999999999% of us are boring and will remain boring no matter what kind of comments we write on HN. It wouldn't hurt to touch grass once in a while.
You shouldn't be downvoted, the whole industry ought to know by now that Palantir aggregates multiple international sources of data for sale to American defense agencies. If you're legitimately afraid of America, the internet has few places of refuge.
> China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
If you have something of interest to Beijing and you’re doing something shameful or illegal in America, and they have evidence, they have leverage. This is human asset development 101.
Most people don’t have skills or information relevant to a foreign state. But some do, and for them being mindful about not giving a foreign adversary blackmail leverage is prudent.
Anybody that has lots of videos from you could train a deep fake realistic model and create a fake video depicting you committing a major crime. Sadly blackmail is the easier part.
The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.
This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.
Exactly. Our concept of sovereign states has become outdated by advances in technology. Up until maybe 1990 even second-tier countries could make just about anything indigenously. It might be a little worse and a little more expensive, but still good enough. Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment. (We might outsource some of that to save money but the latent capability and capital reserves are there.) Even with nuclear weapons, India, Russia, UK, and France are only partially sovereign. Other countries can barely even pretend anymore, and their freedom of action will continue to evaporate barring some drastic realignment of the geopolitical order.
> Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment.
Not arguing, but I think China still relies on Russia for jet engines - though it’s making great efforts to become self-sufficient there.
(Edit: high performance / high technology jet engines)
Russia is no longer a reliable supplier. They need all the engines they can make for domestic use, including replacing war losses and building airliners to service domestic routes. Production is down because all the foreign technical experts left.
Are those jet engines the only option for China or are they just the best option. Because if you require state of the art tech then everyone still relies on Taiwan (TSMC).
>> Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.
I am not aware of chinese or iranian devices exploding and killing people. Spying is not worse than spying and killing. I do not get how do you get the conclusion that US/EU/Israel is as good as it gets if you are a random citizen not from any of these mentioned countries.
Yeah but if you’re dealing with hardware with any kind of Israeli involvement, do you really want to open every single customer unit to make sure one of the capacitors hasn’t been swapped for C4? I think that’s what the poster was indicating. At first I thought yesterday’s action was deviously impressive. Now I’m starting to think it’s actually shortsighted and bizarre. It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon, and obviously a declaration of a war they think they can win, but no good can come of this action.
If you want to run with this argument, they have been at war since 1948, when all of Israel's neighbors including Lebanon invaded Israel following the UN vote to grant Israel statehood and Israel's declaration of independence.
There has been a UN-brokered ceasefire since the later 2006 war. Minor issues have occurred since then, but October 8 was the first major escalation between the two in almost twenty years.
1. This is an attack against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. The two entities are tightly coupled, but they are not the same.
2. Israel and Hezbollah are already at war. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced because of Hezbollah ongoing rocket and missile attacks. Israel has retaliated in various ways.
TLDR: you can argue that this is an act of war against Hezbollah. But it is not a declaration of war, and it is not against Lebanon.
In Britain, if the mobile phones of 3000 members of the non-governing Conservative Party exploded in their pockets caused by the armed forces of a different state, one could be reasonably assured you just declared open war on Britain.
For a more accurate analogy, imagine if Conservative Party were a terrorist organization with its own military, took direct orders from Iran, had claimed for itself all of Wales, and had been firing thousands of missiles into France without cooperating in any way with either the British government or army.
Then imagine that France predictably shoots back, and takes great care to specifically target members of that terrorist group.
In this more accurate analogy, would you still say that France declared open war on Britain? I would say no - that the terrorist group is the one that declared war; and that France is clearly engaging in acts of war against that terrorist group, which happens to be embedded in a host country, like a parasite.
For a more accurate anology involving Britain, imagine that British secret services decided to detonate pagers belonging to Sinn Fein party members in the territory of the Republic of Ireland.
Yeah I agree with you. It’s also that the situation in the region around Israel is so complex and long-running that there aren’t really appropriate analogies. The two countries are at a state of war that’s fairly obvious regardless of the parties involved. I’m fairly confident Israel given its history in these matters knows what it’s doing and takes actions that will move it toward security and victory, and any potential responses from Hezbolah have been considered and accounted for. One thing that came up for me was if Hezbolah had de-escalated, what would Israel have done with the pagers? It’s clearly a kind of “sleeper” munition, I wonder what the circumstances would have been for them to never use it.
What if the pockets of IRA members had exploded (yes, I know. Say 40 years ago when they were doing their share of bombing)? Does anyone seriously dispute that Hezbollah is a proxy army for Iran?
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
To clarify, obviously I rather live in the EU than in china, but if this system is as good as it gets, then I am quite sceptical for humanities long term survival.
How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
Additionally, iPhones were never assembled in America. Enough manufacturing had been offshored to the PRC it just wasn’t even a consideration of any sort until late last decade, and the response from Apple has been to reshore some assembly elsewhere, not bring it into the States.
"over time" is right - if TSMC's roadmap isn't getting the US onto 3nm before 2026, then Apple could buy cheaper/denser silicon from fucking Samsung if they wanted. You know, the fab Apple has avoided for density issues and concerns that they aren't competitive. Taiwan still has the golden goose, and unless Apple's products stop relying on node upgrades (they won't) then we're not going to manufacture the majority of Apple chips in America. We'll be lucky if American fabs yield high enough to make memory controllers, let alone entire SOCs.
It's very easy to say that during peacetime. But you can't depend on adversaries for cheap labor, period. The US federal government, communist or not, just spent billions ensuring that those manufacturing jobs aren't forfeited by our multi-trillion multinationals. Our strict adherence to capitalism is just about pushing us to USSR-collapse levels of market abuse. Our consumers are completely braindead; our manufacturers aren't being given reason to stay by the government; even US agencies like NASA and DARPA are getting outdone by Chinese state-run agencies.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
This doesn't really mean much when those laws include "you're not allowed to expose crimes by government" not to mention drug laws and copyright. At the end it's not any less arbitrary than whatever excuses the chinese government uses to intern those they don't like.
There are also no laws against exposing crimes by the government. You’re just not allowed to break other laws just because you’re doing so.
People very frequently successfully expose corruption and abuse by governments in the US. It just doesn’t make significant news unless it’s a major national politician, and that happens multiple times a year.
It is known a priori that the laws are so vague that everyone is breaking several. If the government chooses to find out which one you are breaking, you go to prison. If you expose crimes by the government, you may find yourself suddenly being investigated for something unrelated.
That's just the government interring whoever it doesn't like, with extra steps. Or making a law that says "we have to like you" with extra steps.
Sure they are. E.g. hate speech, antisemitism, threat to public order, threat to the integrity of the state. You know that Russian woman with the blank paper was also a threat to the integrity of the state.
No. While there were criminals also in gulags, most of people were there only because someone didn't like them or they happened to be wrong time in wrong place. That's it.
One is a failure of social order, product of greed, evil and stupidity. The other is the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
No. But does China have a horrible record on human rights and abuses? Yes. Have they been ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population for years now? Yes. Not to mention bullying and threatening all neighbors across the region. Just read about the recent worries over ZMPC cranes. The CCP will and has infiltrated private companies as a vector to spy on other countries. Maybe they haven't blown up pagers like this, but they've done other things that should make anyone skeptical of buying sensitive equipment from them.
Oh wow, a country BULLYING its neighbors. Imagine a country doing that. Luckily, the US never does something like that. Or imposes sanctions on a country half a world away, sanctions which the entire world has to adhere to unless they want to lose US trading all together.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
China is the one major power that doesn't seem to engage in extraterritorial assassinations, so by default I'm more inclined to at least trust that the Chinese state won't ever decide to activate a kill switch against me.
Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world? Aren't there numerous Canadians of chinese origin that China has abducted? I see news articles of Canadians being arrested for assisting China in these abductions fairly often lately.
> Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world?
The US does the same thing and worse, just look for the very long arm of their FBI and Secret Service when it comes to what they allege to be “cyber-crime”. A decade or so ago I was visiting my company’s ISP one morning when I manage to stumble just as some US federal agents were doing their thing among the server racks. I live in Bucharest, Romania.
Of course FVEY/CSIS would push anti PRC narrative. PRC's espionage behavior basically translates to "using words", it's so mild vs what others majors are doing that it needs to be characterized as "over seas police stations" to make it seem extra threatening, when it's bottom barrel espionage activity. MSS handlers using words to leverages / intimidate, to convince people to return to PRC on their own accord, i.e they're not abducting anyone let alone extrajudicial assassinate. Like the solution to countering these activities is to say... naw I'm good.
AFAICT, that's mostly propaganda. What makes them "police" centers exactly? They do not have police men in them, don't have jails, no one has been convicted of a crime in relation to them, etc. Not sure what you mean by "abductions" but if you are referring to the Canadians who was arrested on Chinese soil, one of them admitted to espionage and is even suing the Canadian government for involving him against his will.
They are called secret police centres in Canada because of the actions they pose, and the threats they make. They'll threaten to kidnap you and extrajudicially extradite you to China, they'll threaten your relatives in China, they'll force you to stop behaviours considered inappropriate by the CCP, they'll try to recruit you as a spy.
To the Chinese Communist Party, the Han ethnic group belongs to the Chinese State, and everything anyone of this ethnic background does is their business.
Some of the actions you mention would definitely be illegal and yet, no one has been prosecuted nor found guilty. In fact, the concerned centers in Canada are suing the RCMP for defamation. So you are either speculating or spreading propaganda.
But people have been charged by the Canadian government over people that have been taken to China. Referring to actual Canadian court cases that are in regards to actual people taken to China is propaganda because?
Edit: Why am I blocked from replying to the below comment?
I previously asked what you were referring to because I genuinely don't know what you are talking about. Of course I don't believe actual criminal convictions are propaganda, but there have been none in relation to the so-called "police centers".
That article pretty clearly says they were assassinations within China of people who no one disputes were actual CIA spies or handlers. So at bare minimum it wasn't extraterritorial, which I understand to be the key differentiation made by GP.
Could you clarify? I see some reports of extraterritorial assaults, as well as harassment (particularly including threats against relatives within Chinese territory), but couldn't find examples of extraterritorial killings, at least with my best attempt at ctrl-f.
I have. I just haven't heard of them resorting to assassinations. Happy to be proven wrong, but I'll need to see at least one actual example assassination.
Right afterwards, you can learn about the place called Haiti. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or heck, Mexico. Oh, Vietnam. North-Korea. China. Japan. Wait until you learn about Chile. And do not forget to look up the meaning of 'Jakarta is coming'
BTW, before someone screams whataboutism: adjusting your worldview according to facts and applying your moral standards to all countries is not whataboutism. Its a prerequisite to being able to morally condemn any action.
Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.
> > Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
>
> Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…
If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
>The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.
The US has a very large voting bloc composed of people who want their state and municipality to be free from restrictions imposed by the federal government. In practice, this leads to many places with a significantly larger amount of actually-experienced tyranny than you get in more uniformly governed countries. Ideally, this is coupled with freedom of movement, so that it's easy to get a job and housing in a state or city with more liberal governance.
They actually have. The Supreme Court had a recent ruling, congress has passed laws to try and restrict it (to the best that federal rules can affect local state ones). The distinction definitely is important, but if you have an ideological bone to pick, it’s better to ignore it.
If you actually believe that then you are amazingly ignorant about the legal structure of the USA and its dual sovereignty system. You should ask your civics teacher for a refund.
You think China and Russia don't do a hundred times worse to their citizens? The US is far from perfect, but it is drastically better than China and Russia.
Whataboutism. I never claimed they were better (and you're right, they're much worse). But the US is the one that claims to be the world leader in defending freedom and individual liberty. China never made any such claim that I know of.
> If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.
The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.
The US is a two party system with many hereditary politicians. How free do you think your elections really are?
> They have no free press unlike US.
How did the US news report on Snownden, Assange and others the US government does not like? The US press is an oligopoly that does barely any real reporting. Theoretical freeness does little here.
> They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
Which is more than happy to shield the executive from any consequences. Qualified immunity makes this separation meaningless.
> They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
According to western definitions of corruption that conveniently do not include corporate lobbying, revolving door relationsships between politics and industry, backdoor laws via trade deals and all the other shadyness that has effectively taken over so-called democracies. But sure, pat yourself on the back for being less likely to get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the officer some cash.
Hey I used to believe this myself. But then just realized that this too is propaganda. Insider trading by congress? Lobbying? Judges accepting gifts from billionaires? Abortion? At least in China/Russia women that need urgent reproductive care can get it without risking death.
Because they are just as bad as the US but don't pretend otherwise. Also because the US has gone into aggressive conflicts a lot more than those 2 countries put together.
Thy was what, 40 years ago? China has their great firewall set up today, never mind their social credit systems, automated CCTV citizen tracking systems, etc. Russia has people accidentally falling out of hospital windows or drinking polonium tea. I don't think this is at all comparable.
I checked Wikipedia to learn about the Social Credit System, and according to the article, no such system exists as described. Most assumptions about it seem to be based on misinformation from Western media. Could you clarify what you mean?
Do you think Hezbollah was buying stuff from Israel, or otherwise using Israeli supply chains?
The modern supply chain is vastly deep. Iran can buy something from (IDK) India which might use software or hardware from Israel. As a further example, unless there's viable phone OS I don't know about, even Hezbollah will be using Android or iOS (and so buying from the US). etc.
I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli)
Maybe that is more likely. But I don't think my or your guesses matter so much as public perception. IE, it would change the situation that a given customer may look skeptically at an Israeli software or hardware product. Or they may not given that price and features trumps security and quality for nearly everything these days.
It was pointed out to me that you shouldn't overthink it: the most likely thing which happened is Israel had someone inside Hezbollah procurement and used them to take delivery (I'd put much lower odds on this guy being in on the plan, it's doubtful he even knew he was working for Israel directly).
You've got to remember that as internet people, we want everything to have a clever storyline to it. Intelligence services exploit that exact expectation though: the first thing you attack is trust within the organization itself, since it gives you more access, more easily and once people have talked themselves into "supply chain threat" there's a real danger they've ignored "actually the guy signing off on the paperwork is taking a payoff to ignore some delivery irregularities".
> I think it's far more likely that Mossad has infiltrated whatever foreign (non-Israeli) supply chain they were using.
Yeah. Wasn't there something in the Snowden leaks about the CIA intercepting servers in-transit to install implants on them? I'm sure Israel is doing something similar.
The correct analogy for espionage isn't crime. But even taking that framing, if everyone actually does steal, it doesn't do you any good to be naive and deny reality.
meh, the most probable explanation is that israel infiltrated hezbollah and whoever was in charge of ordering and distributing those devices knowingly distributed the tampered devices.
That guy got a deal and was evacuated with his family before events unfolded. Seems way easier than alternative plans.
I don't see this as a smart move (let alone strategy) in any time frame. As a third-party observer greatly removed from the conflict I used to view Israel as an island under attack from terrorists. Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals. You can say I'm naive, and why would Israel care about how I feel, but as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor, and I don't think I'm alone in how I feel.
> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.
Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.
Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.
Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.
Many people fail to see this. You can't compare a terrorist attack that intentionally targets civilians with no apparent military target to a legitimate attack on a defined military target that unfortunately results in some collateral damage.
Many people fail to see this because they have an intact moral core. Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].
> Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)
It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.
You are simply incorrect. “Rate” is a ratio, not an absolute number.
But to your point, Israel’s ratio in Gaza was as high as 100 civilians to 1 soldier in the shopping mall (or more accurately, refugee family shelters).
No, you've cut off the crucial second half of the sentence, which says a military operation with known risks of civilian deaths "is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians."
The phrase "those civilians" refers to a countable quantity of them.
Perhaps you meant to write "morally equivalent to targeting that proportion of civilians"?
Assuming that's a plural "you", I would paraphrase the subthread like this:
_________
(1) zer0x4d: "Many people fail to see that morality depends on intent, there is a qualitative difference between deliberate and incidental collateral damage."
(2) abalone: "No, only people suffering from broken moral cores think there's a difference. An attack when they knew a predictable rate of collateral damage is morally the same as deliberately targeting those civilians who died."
(3) Terr_: "It's based on the number of civilians who die? That doesn't make sense. Consider these scenarios, where even though fewer civilians die, the intent/planning of the act makes us judge it as morally worse."
(4) abalone: "Incorrect, I said it was about comparing the two rates of death."
(5) Terr_: "Well, that's not quite what you wrote earlier, is this other version closer to what you meant to convey?"
Hi Terr, the "you" was singular (and in reference to you, in particular). You paraphrase the subthread well enough, but your first comment within it misinterpreted what Abalone said.
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
I think the argument boils down to "what does it mean to target civilians?"
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.
Lavender specifically calls out NCVs as high as 100 for high level commanders not soldiers, and NCVS aren't minimums they are maximums. Where is the actual case where 100 died for one soldier?
There are many points on this grey line, and we often fail to recognise those in the middle. For example, between your two points is a very significant type of action that this one may well fall under: an attack on a military target that you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.
The act of modifying and/or deploying the devices was targeted. That’s it.
Carrying out an explosives attack across a large geographic area that includes public spaces, with no specific intelligence on the location of the devices, or who is within the blast range, is the exact opposite of targeted.
What on earth would be more targeted than compromising pagers that only Hezbollah military is using?
At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.
Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.
> Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed.
This is anecdotal and misleading. There are reports of civilians maimed including the murder of a child. This is entirely plausible due to the indiscriminate nature of these bombs with respect to immediate bystanders.
If an enemy had set off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming thousands of whoever was nearby and killing children, we would undoubtedly call it a mass terrorist attack.
2000+ bombs hurting 2000 fighters and one child? I'd argue that almost no war is without collateral damage, but this one action might be uniquely low in the amount of collateral damage done.
> This is anecdotal and misleading
I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".
You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.
Sure, there has been at least one civilian death, and others might be reported later. While we don't have numbers yet, the evidence so far suggests a low ratio of civilian casualties, probably much lower than what's possible using convention warfare against an enemy embedded in a civilian population.
Israel also do bad things. Maybe it flies under the radar of being called terrorism by the west - but look at west banks settlements, jailing kids forever for throwing stones, turning Gaza into something that makes Mad Max look like a dream in the name of self-defence, appartheid conditions in Israel and the occupied territories. Offensives on Gaza before Oct 7 - 2023 was particularly bad, and the general embargo aroudn Gaza that made life pretty rotten before the current war - etc.
Israel do enough operations that ticks the "look we killed soldiers guys!" box and they really like to get media attention on that. Otherwise it is "Hamas was hiding there". Hard to verify - they may be right sometimes, but I bet not all the time based on the the number of deaths and the amount of destruction in Gaza.
This isn't happening. Kids are being jailed for throwing stones, yes. Just like you or I would be jailed if we threw a rock at a cop. But it is not "forever".
I know there is a documented case of a non-involved person getting injured, but do you have evidence that this attack was not 99% effective? The attack vector was the device specifically used only by involved people.
A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.
Any child death is tragic, but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare. It is safe to believe that everyone that was given a pager for secret communication by a terrorist group, is associated with such group, probably in a military capacity. Furthermore, videos show that extremely close bystanders are left unhurt.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
Yes. If China detonated several thousand bombs in Idaho civilian locations on the premise they were targeting militias, some of whom fought in Syria and/or against Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs, this would absolutely be an act of mass terrorism.
> but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
Thousands were injured, yes. How many of the thousands injured belonged to Hezbollah? It’s a safe bet that the majority of injuries were sustained by owners of these Hezbollah-supplied pagers.
International law allows, to some extent, collateral damage during war (and Israel and Hezbollah are certainly at war). What percentage of collateral damage would you say is acceptable here? 50%? 20%? None?
Hezbollah are also terrorists. You might think it is ok to fight terror with terror, all I am trying to point out is that this is indeed a response in kind.
Hamas may be the “legitimate” government of Gaza (or at least the most recently elected one), but Hezbollah is not the legitimate government of Lebanon; it’s a minority party with outsized influence in parts of Lebanon due to its militia and intelligence services.
Almost 3000 wounded are not a problem if they're Hezbollah, no? The child is tragic of course, but one dead child when targeting enemy soldiers is more ethical than the dead children in deliberate attacks on civilians, which is what Hezbollah is doing.
Why are you pretending otherwise? Is it the bigotry of low expectations? Arabs/Muslims can act very reasonable and humane too, so there's no reason to measure them with a different yard stick
Anyone who got resold / loaned those devices, those who were next to blast radius of those devices while going with their lives, any relatives who were unfortunate enough of having an hezbollah member in their family.
This is basically just one step above a chemical attack, and can only be excused as "the end justifies the means" by the interested parties.
Why would you use 80s technology that allows you to circumvent Israeli tracking, and get that from Hezbollah if you're not in cahoots with them? People in Lebanon can afford smart phones.
With the people next to the blast radius you have a point, but when targeting guerilla fighters that blend in with civillian populace it's hard to not inadvertantly target innocents too. But a small explosive device that is used by enemy soldiers and kept close to their bodies is the best way to avoid innocent casualties.
Also, Hezbollah hiding between innocents doesn't mean Israel shouldn't defend themselves. If you hide behind civillians you're the one to blame for casualties, not the party that defends against you
I guess you've never been in most of middle east. Pagers, shortwave radios and "80s technology" are still widely deployed among the general population.
This isn't about pagers generally, this is about a particular batch of 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah. They weren't distributed to random Lebanese citizens.
Hezbollah employs doctors (heck, it runs hospitals) and Hezbollah personnel (in any of the political, armed, or social services parts of the organization) presumably fairly often live in households with children.
"Doctors and children are among the dead" isn't inconsistent with "this came from an order of devices specifically for Hezbollah" (it does cast doubt on "this was a precisely-targeted attack on Hezbollah combatants", but that's a very different claim.)
We'll need to await more info about the second wave of explosions from other devices, but the first wave was widely reported to be from a specific order of 5,000 pagers for Hezbollah, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-exp...
Again, these guys don't go to distributors saying "Hello, we're evil Inc, we want your devices for our nefarious plans!" - they were coming from a batch imported trough local resellers like...basically every other consumer retail channel.
Without taking in consideration that "Hezbollah" as a loosely defined group ranges from conservative politicians and institutions to bona fine terrorists.
These devices were being shipped in equal measure from the guys sending rockets to Israel to the local equivalent of those preppers who like to spend their weekend eavesdropping the police radio waiting for WWIII.
Unfortunately real life is a bit messier than a Tony Scott movie, and we didn't harm 5000 evil terrorists ready to destroy America and Israel from their Cobra underground lair, just a bunch of random people - a few of them genuinely bad guys (how many? thousands? hundreds? less than ten?), and everyone else who may or may have not sympathized with a group that may or may be not considered a terrorist organization, depending on who you ask.
Mainstream sources are saying it was a specific shipment of 5,000 pagers, which Hezbollah ordered from Gold Apollo (a manufacturer, not a local reseller), that was tampered with.
Are you claiming that these sources are wrong, and Hezbollah actually bought them from some retailer who happened to have 5,000 units of tampered inventory?
Per Reuters, "The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country in the spring."
I suppose the source could be lying, but what is your alternate theory exactly? Militaries don't tend to procure their communications equipment from the shelves of Radio Shack. Lebanon doesn't have a booming pager market, so it's unlikely that some local distributor just happened to have 5,000+ pagers sitting around.
This was clearly a special order (which doesn't mean no distributor was involved), and Occam's razor suggests that Mossad tampered with that particular order, rather than tampering with random pagers and just hoping that some of them might end up being purchased by Hezbollah later.
"Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the group’s leadership was mostly spared during Tuesday’s attack targeting pagers that killed several members in Lebanon as they were using older devices while “new ones were sent elsewhere.”
Beacuse it's a pager, and they're rather common in most of Egypt, Turkey and middle east countries for medical support and first-time responders.
I mean, the reason Hezbollah switched to those devices was also because they're readily available in the country.
I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
> I'd be extremely, extremely surprised if this was a "targeted" shipment rather than a generic batch that was expected to a certain degree to be bought by hezbollah members.
Because they're not S.P.E.C.T.R.E. It's a separatist group whose more extreme members resort to terrorism, not much differently than IRA, Basque Nationalists or Bosnian Indipendentists.
Their supply channel is the same as the civilian population, they're not shopping for vibranium from Hydra.
It would be interesting if we could trace the local distributor for those devices and see where they were available at retail, it would probably match the areas in Lebanon where members of hezbollah are commonly located.
I'm confused, how do you know the 99% of those wounded aren't Hezbollah operatives?
How many innocents would get harmed during a more conventional military strike against the same group of operatives?
I would be fairly surprised if Hezbollah opsec guidelines didn't say that you must have the pager at you at all times, and make sure it can't be accessed by others.
This is likely the most precise large scale military strike of all time. You can't control for everything - some pagers might have been in the hands of innocent people - but it sure seems like an ideal attack vector.
> blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population
Which is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades by
and on and on and on since a time when none of us was even born. Let's not pretend Israel is the good guy here. There are no good guys, and while I don't accept the acts of Hezbollah, what is a colonized people being genocided to do when the world doesn't care about them being denied human rights ?
I wonder if it would endanger the plane. A 20g explosive sitting in the pocket of a person will clearly cause serious injury, but I am unsure if it has penetration power to actually go through the plane body. I am reminded of mythbusters experiments with small amount of explosives to block up doors, but I don't recall how much they needed in the end.
Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of a turbine fan blade taking out a window, the case where the MAX door panel blew off, the cases where the cargo door came off, and the 737 "convertible" case. You'd have to take out a large part of the structure to bring it down.
Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.
However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.
In some of the cases you mentioned, there were passenger deaths due to being ejected from the aircraft. I'm on mobile or I'd link exactly which incidents but I remember at least two cases from when I was bored in a lecture and read through most of Wikipedia's "list of deaths in aircraft incidents" list or whatever it's called
>Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of
These are all fake news. According to Hollywood, a single bullet from a gun will cause an airplane to break apart in mid-air. You can't honestly expect me to believe Hollywood movies get physics wrong.
Similarly, as soon as a car's wheels leave the ground, it bursts into a fireball according to many TV shows I've seen.
Naturally the close quarters will results in multiple people being harmed. The question is more about the physics and if the explosives has enough penetrating power to go through the walls of the plane.
The bigger risk to the plane (and passengers) would likely be if the person carrying the explosive was working in the airport and the explosion occurred during a critical moment, like when a pilot is taxiing.
Most of the flight would be out of range and I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane. Plus it would probably be powered off because Hezbollah is serious about flight safety.
Do we know whether or not they embedded gps tracking into the bombs?
I would think they would have that ability, not just to avoid a horrible accident like blowing up a plane, but also to gather valuable tracking intel on a terrorist organization.
My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
The AR924's in question are POCSAG pagers; broadcast from base stations and receive only at the pager end. Two way pagers are a thing but use an entirely different protocol for communications.
I was thinking about this, but then it probably wouldn't even get past a security xray scan. Which makes me think, in the 5 or so months these were reported to being in the wild, one never boarded a plane?
From what I can find, the targeted pager-model can receive UHF messages in the 450~470MHz range. That could reach passenger jet cruise altitudes if the transmitter is strong enough.
I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.
On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.
Penetration of 450-480MHz through the shell of an airplane would, on the ground,require a transmission strength of approximately .4dB/m at a distance of 1 kilometer, which is doable by most measures, but would quickly become unrealistic as the plane gained altitude.
What do they do, then? Are you implying that connections can only exist as a two way relationship? Are rivers not connected to streams, tributaries, etc?
Receiving data from a network is a connection, no matter how you want to define it.
The towers resend the message for a while so that they get through - some guy might be in a plane on approach to Beirut right now his pager coming into range as they land ....
We can nuke a dictator. It's going to blow up everything within miles, evaporating millions of people, but it can't get any more targeted than that. Deal with it.
Seriously, tho, it's infuriating that a government literally triggered explosion among general public, right in front of innocent eyes. This is an act of terrorism, harming the lives of innocent people who've been largely unrelated to the conflict.
They may have discriminated carefully on which devices were modified, but any care or intelligence ends there.
When they triggered the bombs, they can’t have known who or what was in the blast radius. Video shows one going off in a produce market. The fact that those variables are uncontrolled make it indiscriminate, by definition.
> This is false. Many innocents are killed including children
That article - just like all other sources - mentions one 8-year-old girl, not "many innocents" and not several children either. Hence, this is deliberate misinformation.
> You can't determine where the device is when the bomb is activated.
You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket. Where else would it be?
After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?
> This is an indiscriminate attack.
Launching rockets at civilians is. Blowing up pagers explicitly used for terrorist activities isn't.
>After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes
And even compared to a phone, the limited functionality of a pager means the owner isn't going to hand it to a friend to show them a funny video or sports highlight, or to a kid to let them play games on it.
TBH, toddlers and younger kids would find pagers extremely fun: if you are at home, I wouldn't think that too far fetched.
However, since children causalties are "good anti-propaganda", any more would have certainly been reported, so I doubt there are more. Still, how successful targeting was is anyone's guess.
> You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket.
This seems intentionally avoiding the point. Duh, it's a pager. The real question is can the person donating the explosive tell if the pocket is completely isolated from innocents or if it's standing in a crowded line sitting very near to a childs head.
I do believe that Israel _tried_ to discriminate but its an explosive, you can only aim those to a point. Israel wasn't deliberately trying to kill children/harm innocents, Isreal did knowingly engage in a set of actions where it was possible outcome.
I want to be clear i am not trying to choose a side. These are actions of war in the 21st century.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?
I leave my phone all the time, my kids are actually playing games on it. Also, I can be on public transportation, I can be driving, near a flammable object, or boarding a plane. As demonstrated an 8-year-old girl died, it's enough proof that an innocent died.
I think the part you are missing is that this was not an ordinary cellphone. These were pagers handed out by Hezbollah to the militants in their organization so they could communicate, specifically because they did not want to use ordinary cellphones out of fear of being tracked.
The only person who would be likely to have such a pager is a Hezbollah militant who is deemed responsible for secret Hezbollah information (i.e. mid-to-high ranking members). While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.
> While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.
What the hell? Why isn't it the fault of the one who detonates the bomb? This sets a dangerous precedent for attacking unsuspecting army personnel, even when they're off-duty. I don't think people's stance would be the same if this were done to off-duty IDF or US Army personnel and when they just doing ordinary things in public, for example. Moreover, Hezbollah is also a political party, and it's not just their military wing that's being targeted.
>This sets a dangerous precedent for attacking unsuspecting army personnel
Israel and Hezbollah are at a state of war. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organisation that does not meaningfully distinguish between military and civilian staff. There is already a very clear legal precedent - being an unsuspecting or off-duty combatant offers you no protection under international humanitarian law. Unless you're hors de combat, you're a legitimate target at all times. Sabotage of this type is an entirely legitimate ruse of war.
"While in some countries, entire segments of the population between certain ages may be drafted into the armed forces in the event of armed conflict, only those persons who are actually drafted, i.e., who are actually incorporated into the armed forces, can be considered combatants. Potential mobilization does not render the person concerned a combatant liable to attack."
Given that the pagers are for secret messages to be sent between militants, it would be highly unlikely for them to end up in the wrong hands unless the militant is being irresponsible.
Certainly you would not expect somebody in the military to leave a loaded gun around the house. But, also it should be obvious that they would not leave their radio device for transmitting top-secret information either due to the implications of having such information and how that would affect the safety of family members.
It is likely that nobody could have expected their pager to literally explode. But, military or merely involved in the "political" side, anybody who lets their family play with such a radio/pager is putting their family at risk.
I think the struggle here is that the combatants aren't on a battlefield in these modern wars. They're walking around a city full of civilians. Observing this it's hard not to feel like it wasn't a military target, however it clearly was.
Not only that, but from reports, it sounds like they deliberately sent an alert several seconds before detonation to ensure that the user of the pager would be the direct target. Or perhaps that was just the time it took for the fuse to detonate the explosive? Either way, some of the videos out there show the incredible precision that the owner of the pager was taken down and people in the vicinity were unscathed.
There are 100,000+ northern Israeli's who are refugees inside Israel because Hezbollah is firing hundred of rockets indiscriminately daily at civilian targets, but Israel doing something specifically targeted at higher level Hezbollah operatives makes you feel like Israel is doing exactly the same thing? All while you don't even yet know the reason for the Israeli op (was it to stop an imminent Hezbollah action? Seems odd that this also impacted so many operative in Syria, doesn't it? Why aren't people mentioning that this was larger than Lebanon?)
> The 1982 Lebanon War began on 6 June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon. The invasion followed a series of attacks and counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operating in southern Lebanon and the Israeli military that had caused civilian casualties on both sides of the border.
You asked "but what pissed them off so much". Maybe it was the PLO operating in Lebanon, not sure.
>As the Americans discovered, this level of radicalization doesn't come naturally to people.
It doesn't? Theocratic governments have been around for millennia. They're not some kind of modern invention; they're really just a reversion to how most societies worked in the past.
I never understood this logic. We made peace with the Japanese and Germans after the horrors of WWII. There will probably be peace between Russia and Ukraine at some point. Only Arabs attacking a specific country seem to be infantilized to the point where every retaliation is destined to perpetuate the conflict.
Nice, using Islam as a scapegoat. Lebanon is a democratic republic that has 43.4% Christian population. If that is their intention, why not focus on their country first rather than attacking Israel?
Lebanon had a civil war along religious lines. There are many Lebanese Christians in the USA that could help you with what seems to be a misunderstanding about the country.
Hezbollah's founders writings at the time are available online, and that they are clear about their goal being the rule of Islam. Their slogan was 'The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon'. They were founded as an Islamic revolutionary group, that is very core to who they are. Highlighting that is hardly 'using Islam as a scapegoat' whatever that means.
You are mentioning a civil war that happened a decade ago that is by no means exclusive to Hezbollah. I couldn't care less what their founders wrote, but, strangely, they care about the rule of Islam in Israel when their president is a Maronite Christian and their party is one of the parliament members. I can agree that they are Iranian proxies for war against Israel, but it's far from installing Islamic rule. I mean they are also responsible for the secular movement that comprised many religious factions [1]
I'm referring to a time when Hezbollah was founded. Kind of important to an organization, it's founding, and it's reason for being founded, don't you think?
You are trying to obfuscate Hezbollah's public statements calling for Islamic rule. Hezbollah wants Islamic rule and Sharia law for Lebanon, they are very clear about this. Currently realities that they have to put up with do not change that. They are also clear all of their actions and philosophy is consistent with and based on Islamic teaching. Again it is not deceptive to point out they are an Islamic organization.
Hezbollah is firing rockets to conduct terrorism on the civilian population living in the area. Are you are OK with terrorism if you feel it's justified?
Had Israel killed 15000 people when Hezbollah launched, I think it was 3000 rockets at civilians in an attempt to overwhelm Israel's iron dome defenses for civilians, during and immediately after Oct 7th, partnering with Hamas in ending the semi-peace that had been in place in order to kill the maximal amount if Israeli civilians/instill maximal fear? We are talking about those attacks on this thread about Lebanon.
> order to kill the maximal amount if Israeli civilians
This is hasbara. Both are part of the same wider conflict in which Israel is aiming to eliminate Palestine from the map. There was never peace to begin with, including before October 7. Israeli gradual decade-long land grabs are an act of war in themselves.
I think the desire to throw grenades over the fence comes more from the neighbor coming over the fence once in a while and murdering anything he finds.
You forgot to mention your neighbor razed the yard and killed some relatives too. Throwing some Molotovs, while it may not justified, is still an expected reaction.
Well, yesterday’s actions aren’t really gonna fix that situation for those 100,000 Israelis now though are they? It wasn’t designed to make that border region safer overnight because those rockets are going to keep coming even more often now. Hezbolah might even get so pissed off they go all out and rush the border.
It absolutely alleviates the situation. The rockets were going to be fired either way. Now with a few dead, a bunch of wounded, and a communication channel disabled, it's going to be harder to coordinate future rocket attacks.
It looks like Israel wants to be secure. It was attacked in October and since then retaliated to attacks.
It is not a terrorist attack, it was an reaction of Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel. That are terror attacks. Something UN troops are supposed to stop, but that is another topic.
You can look up what Hezbollah wants and that is nothing else than the elimination of Israel. The terror is almost exclusively one sided here and it is sourced from radical fundamentalism.
And no, Israel doesn't not murder, rape and torture, that is purely projection.
Personally I’m all for Israel’s security. I find it devastating how hard long term peace in the region seems to be, and how it keeps getting further and further away.
> It is not a terrorist attack, it was an reaction of Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel
It was literally a terrorist attack - it was designed to cause terror. If Hezbollah had done this to the Israeli government or even IDF reservists, I've no doubt that you would call it a terror attack.
And why might Hezbollah be firing rockets onto Lebanese land illegally occupied by militant Israeli settlers, I wonder? Could it also have something to do with Israel launching unprovoked airstrikes in Lebanon?[0] Israel is the occupier, Israel is the aggressor - Israel needs to stop.
> Something UN troops are supposed to stop
That's ironic, given how many UN staff Israel has murdered since last October.
> And no, Israel doesn't not murder, rape and torture, that is purely projection.
I'm sorry, but you're either incredibly misinformed, or an that's an outright lie - even the UN says Israel has institutionalised the use of abuse, torture, sexual abuse and rape[1][2]. Even B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, agrees with this![3]
I've read countless reports of Israel torturing Palestinian hostages - they are doing it on a huge scale, and in mind-bendingly evil ways.
Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
Sure, except Moses and the Jewish people were on the land around 1500 BC, and the Islamic religion didn't start until after 500 CE. So the Jewish people got there at least 2000 years earlier, so if we are doing the "who ethnically cleansed who" game, I think the Jewish people appear to be at most, reversing the previous ethnic cleansing? Or is there some kind of moral "expiry date" on ethnic cleansing?
This is a pretty heated thread, and I’m not trying to fan any flames: the Assyrians and Sumerians were there before that. It always seemed a bit arbitrary to me to claim land based on whose religion started first — although not quite as arbitrary as “my God said it’s mine, so there.” Plus I believe they claimed that Ashur promised the land to them.
I think we can all agree that the ancient Roman and Byzantine empires were not exactly gold standards in protecting human rights. However, the fact that something was done to the Jews thousands of years ago does not make it acceptable to do the same to another population today.
The birth of Islam did not cause a whole new race of people to spring from the ground, some of their ancestors lived in the region as well. And according to the Torah the Jewish people who came to that region with Moses during the exodus had to fight off the caananites and philistines before they could settle, so apparently itd been occupied for a while- not that I'd put too much stock in the ancient history thats come down to us, certainly not enough to enforce modern territorial claims
Israel left Gaza. It gave the Palestinians what they wanted. Their own area with no settlers. Israel forcefully removed all of its people from all of Gaza.
In exchange they immediately voted in a terrorist organization as their government and began to attack Israel over and over again.
Of course the guy's a lunatic. He also happens to have a lot of support within certain very powerful circles, not in spite of but because of what he's proposing to do in Gaza, and for his lunatic, outright fascistic worldview generally. That's why they made him National Security Minister, after all.
There was nothing remotely racist in my post, and I don't appreciate the smear.
There are like 20% Arabs among Israel citizens. The are about 20 (not %, just 20) Jews in Lebanon. Who's ethnically cleansing whom again?
Both Jews and Palestinian Arabs have legitimate claims against each other. The levels of barbarity in pursuing these claims is not even remotely comparable.
By native i assume you mean arab. Not to mention that the infant mortality rate dropped something like 90% after the state was founded and the arab population is still growing at a huge rate.
Not necessarily, this can happen with immigration alone. For example, French and English descendants used to form a much greater percentage of the Canadian population, yet they were not "ethnically cleansed".
If we are talking about pre-globalization many countries are no longer have a majority “native” population. (US, Japan, Taiwan, parts of Europe) and that is just the reality of human history.
I think we have to decide on a time when the back and fourth geocoding between groups is no longer acceptable. Most of the world thinks it’s around the end of ww2 and the start of globalization, but are you contending that it should be later, and the Arabs should take back Israel?
There are old stories of the Russians planting mines inside children's toys during some of the later cold war conflicts. This is starting to feel a bit like that. Nobody had any way of knowing who was holding those pagers when they sent that packet but they still distributed thousands of munitions throughout the populace and pressed the red button. Now there are probably at least a hundred or so still out there that haven't exploded and are just live UXO sitting in people's desk drawers.
Yes. Except there are credible reports of Israel also doing this in the past.
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others."
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/227779/Mariam%252C_res...
So you can guarantee every single pager went to a solider of war? By that logic, soldiers in the Ukraine war also use cellphones and drones so it's A-OKAY to implant bombs in those products too?
Ok so the US DEA detonates explosives on cartel members.
Your daughter is enjoying a cappuccino at a bistro when a cartel member walks by, the device detonates burning and scarring her face. You’re good with it.
Your oldest son has ordered a deli sandwich and is waiting for his order. He kneels down to tie his shoes. Next to him is a cartel member. The device detonates, destroying his ear drum. You’re good with it.
Your sister is shopping for produce at the market, as she walks past a cartel member to choose an avocado, the device detonates, maiming her left hand. She loses her fingers and is let go from her job as a software engineer. You’re good with it.
Your mom sits down in an empty seat on public transportation. The man next to her is cartel. The device detonates and shrapnel pierces an artery in her leg. She dies. You’re good with it.
Your brother, nephew, and youngest son are walking down the street. You were supposed to pick the kids up at 3pm but had to work late. You asked your brother to walk them home instead. A cartel member is driving a vehicle down the same road. Suddenly the device detonates and they lose control, the vehicle swerves up on the sidewalk striking all three. Your brothers leg is maimed and mangled, before he passes out from pain he watches his son die, trapped beneath the vehicle. Your son is flung into a wall and suffers a severe brain injury, he survives but never walks or talks again. You change his diapers for the next 40 years. You’re good with it.
Your dad is an ER doctor, a man comes in complaining of trouble breathing. As your dad is listening to his lungs, the device detonates, ejecting shrapnel into your father’s face. The man was part of the cartel, if he doesn’t work for them, they will kill his sister. Your father is blinded and can no longer practice medicine. You’re good with it.
Two things:
1) This is war. It's not pretty and it's never not messy.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
Becouse christianity formed our societes like this. With help of Romans...
Becouse we learned about separating religion from power, law, medicine, science, etc. Some tries to get rid of religion completly but that another subject.
And it is absolutely sure US agency would not do such thing on "USA soil".
But down there is a open battle in WW3 - Israel delivered something to Ukraine and next day rockets started falling on them, fired by suicidal ponies.
You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).
They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.
And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.
You've been victim of what's called manufactured consent.
Why hasn't Israel allowed any investigations in Gaza, not showing evidence they're using to obliterate practically all of Palestine now, not allowing foreign journalists in either to document things?
No, we sure can go all the way back to 1948 and talk about how Israel gained territory in a series of defensive wars, Palestinians and their Arab allies getting their asses handed back to them every single time.
We'll sure find some occurrences of Israel chasing away Arab civilians early on, but that's beside the point. This attack, and the absolute majority of Israel attacks of the last decades, target enemy combatants, and civilians only ever suffer collaterally. Israel never mounted an attack on civilians, and went very far in reducing civilian casualties when attacking combatants - roof knocking and all that.
How 'bout 0%? I have zero compassion with displaced Palestinians - they were wronged, but what they did after was so much wronger.
We both know how Palestinians repaid those who was kind to them- by Lebanon Civil War and Black September. Israel was ready to cede what it won in defensive wars, they got out of Gaza, built infrastructure and invested in businesses to provide jobs.
Palestinians had countless opportunities to make peace and live a better life. They choose war every single time, made Dalal Mughrabi their hero, dug up water pipes and made missiles out of them.
Even if up to 30% of casualties were civilian this would still be quite a surgical strike in my opinion. At 50% I would not say so anymore. Nobody knows yet anyways.
If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.
"Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others."
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180386/
It's a bit silly to think the Ukrainians would do something like this, because any such thing would instantly lose them the war as all western support is withdrawn.
Russia meanwhile... they just seem like they want to see the world burn. Given the fact they're fighting using convicted criminals, it doesn't seem all that far fetched.
Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know.
There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.
There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all).
And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.
Why would that specific video be up-voted into the skies? It's just another piece of misery porn and we had at least 2 years of that on almost daily basis at that point.
The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.
Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it.
Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently.
People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they understand the far bigger point, which is that at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway.
But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any.
And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.
> Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know
I'm not inclined to believe that, but even so Russia would scream it off the rooftops if there were the slightest chance that it would affect anything. Unfortunately it'd be lost in the flood of lies that they spout daily. At least western media seems to be mostly silent on things they can't be at least marginally truthful on (presumably because they have no need to be, I guess media in Ukraine is a bit more biased).
I think the one thing that I think completely turns me off this logic is that it’s only proponents seem to be the ones that feel like it’s fine for Russia to keep what it’s unlawfully taken.
Sure, there’s a bunch of drone footage of Ukraine dropping shit on barely moving Russian soldiers, but I’m not sure if that’s an indictment of Russia or Ukraine.
which has now escalated into 1 million dead in Ukraine
So mere hours after appearing in the WSJ, "1M are now dead or injured (but actually about 80k Ukrainian, 200k Russian dead)"[0] is being misquoted as simply "1M dead", and not so coincidentally in tandem with another misconception (that gets repeated on HN almost daily it seems):
when it could have been resolved w Minsk Accords or anything negotiated in Normandy or Turkey since then.
"Could have been resolved", that is, by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time, if not then some, and other non-viable concessions (with no guarantees that they would even work to stop him from simply grabbing more land and/or just keep bombing Ukrainian cities whenever it might suit his fancy):
Fair enough, I was inaccurate in saying 1M dead, should have said “dead or injured”.
However, you are WILDLY inaccurate suggesting that the Minsk agreements would have ”granted to Putin permanent sovereingty over” Donbas. He was not “sitting over it”. The entire Donbas would have been an autonomous part of Ukraine. Kyiv officials didnt want to grant this autonomy, but more importantly, Angela Merkel admitted the West cynically “used the peace agreemnys to buy time and arm Ukraine!”
Now you may say that “Russia would have kept Crimea and that is why Ukraine must fight to the last Ukrainian to return it” but you don’t know the history of Crimea.
The vast majority (94%) voted to be independent of Ukraine every chance they got, starting in 1991, 1992, etc
and they only agreed to be part of Ukraine if guaranteed autonomy (and Russia agreed to recognize it on that basis). After that, though, Ukraine broke the agreement, invaded Crimea with 4000 troops in the 90s, arrested their leaders, forced them to change their constitution, etc. But they got to keep Crimea anyway with not a peep from the “democratic West” (cause the West is biased):
Crimea has been an unwilling hostage to Ukraine but if Ukraine is doing it then it’s OK because the West never reports on it…
I mean heck, NATO integration was wildly unpopular among the Ukrainian public, it was only happening because Yuschenko was an unpopular stooge who was ramming it through anyway, since Bush vowed that Ukraine and Georgia would be in NATO:
This came to a head in 2008 with Georgia when Medvedev - not Putin - was president. The war had the same EXACT elements: two breakaway Georgian republics (Abhazia and Ossetia) being shelled by Mikhail Saaakashvili hoping to be in NATO. They asked Russia for help. Russia invaded with tanks going to the capitol.
The difference is that it was over in a week because Nikolas Sarkozy (the French President at the time) negotiated a peace agreement. Georgia is fine now, I’ve been there. (Saakashvili is in Georgian jail now btw.) Abhazia and Ossetia are not just fine, they’re happy to not be under Georgian hegemony. Imagine that. The matreshka doll of self determination can go more than 1 level deep, which the West and NATO knows really well in the case of Kosovo. (But it’s an “exception” of course, cause it’s them doing it.)
Anyway, that is the outcome you are told to “fear”. Russia didn’t go on to annex Georgia, or further, emboldened. They reacted to stated NATO expansion, and shelling of people on their border who asked them for help. They asked the government to cut it out, then intimidated them with tanks. If they backed down and stopped oppressing the two breakaway republics (same as Serbia and Kosovar Albanians) then they stopped also. It’s a valid approach and results in more peace for everyone.
And in fact, in the 2022 invasion, the role of Nikolas Sarkozy was played to the T by Israeli PM Naftali Bennett. He says in a tell-all interview that he was negotiating with Putin and Zelensky directly and could have had the war halted a mere 1-2 weeks in. But he was specifically told by the Western leaders to stand down and let it play out. That “Putin was not to be negotiated with, he was to be defeated.”
So much for “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Actually, the war must go on, so we can weaken Russia. Ukraine is the new Afghanistan (mujahideen, stinger missiles, a decade leaving 2 million dead civilians).
====
Speaking of the casualties:
If you want to go by official UN casualty numbers, this war has the SMALLEST civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios I have ever seen (something like 20 militants to 1 civilian!). Both sides want to avoid killing civilians, likely because 11 million Russians have relatives in Ukraine and vice versa.
By contrast, the urban warfare in Gaza has (in my estimation) a 4 civilians to 1 militant ratio, while the worldwide historica average is 9 civilians to 1 militant.
But militants are people too, especially if they are regular men being grabbed off the street and conscripted against their will. As a man, I understand that men are expendable in war, but as a libertarian, I have to count those deaths as involuntary in most cases.
The longer this goes on, the longer the Ukrainian nation is decimated. The women are abroad, the men can’t leave. The young women end up marrying successful foreigners. I know, I see them all over the place in USA, Canada etc. The children are half-Ukrainian. It’s not only that the men are being killed, but Zelensky’s war and policies of forcing the men to fight are reducing the Ukrainian nation as a while. If he allowed the men of Ukraine a choice, most would opt out of this war, even preferring to leave Ukraine than be drafted.
That’s why I am against wars as a libertarian. It’s politicians deliberately failing to avert a conflict, and the plebs have to pay the price while the politicians get rich and give speeches about how “we must all sacrifice”. Somehow the talking heads on TV never get drafted either!
However, you are WILDLY inaccurate suggesting that the Minsk agreements would have ”granted to Putin permanent sovereignty over” Donbas.
You are WILDLY misquoting me already in the very first sentence of your riposte. I never said that that's what the Minks Protocols said. I can understand how it might sort of seem like I said that -- that is, if you're hastily skimming, but not actually reading. Just read my words again, carefully this time please.
He was not “sitting over it”.
"Sitting on it" I said. Either way, it's just another way of saying "occupying" it, which of course he was and still is.
As to the other stuff you're saying -- look, you're going off on way too many tangents here (many not even about Ukraine), and presenting way too many twisted mischaracterizations of the historical record along the way (including even more WILDLY inflated body counts, this time in Afghanistan). Like any other contorted, vituperative, ideology-driven libertarian rant.
Not something I have time for, or see any purpose in. You're free to make of the world what you want, though.
So if the WP article for the Soviet Afghan war quotes a broad range of estimates, ranging from 562k to 3M, with most in the range of 800k-1.2M -- how is it that you came to believe 2M is the "right" number?
Without going back to check the article -- I just want to know what's in your head right now -- can you actually tell me which estimate it was that gave you the 2M figure, and why you decided to go with that estimate and not the others? Did you ever get to the section in the article where it lays out all the conflicting estimates, in that big huge sprawling pile of footnotes?
Or was it more like -- you scanned the little Infobox at the top, saw 3 estimates in the range 1M-3M (including 2 conflicting estimates from the same author) and thought to yourself "Hmm, I know, I'll just average them!"
Something like that?
No judgements here. I just want to understand your thought process.
> by granting to Putin permanent sovereignty over whatever territories he happened to be sitting on at the time
I think the one thing I can agree with is that it’s debatable whether it’s ultimately worth it. Is Putin’s Russia so much worse that it’s worth 80k deaths to prevent it becoming reality in those regions currently occupied?
I guess it depends on whether you think it's OK to be forced at gunpoint to abandon your culture and language and adopt your invader's, and to live in a totalitarian autocracy rather than a very imperfect democracy.
I don't think anyone would enjoy that, but they'd probably enjoy the war even less. I'm inclined to believe that for most people not all that much would change. You still go to work every day, you still go to school, you still get paid.
Like, I feel like the war has value for not allowing Putin (or any other leader) to just walk all over another country, but whether a specific place is called Russia or Ukraine, Germany or France? Maybe not so much. It just feels weird we're essentially fighting a war more for an ideology than a physical location/group of people. I guess that's always been the case though.
I mean, that’s literally what has happeneed throughout history everywhere?
Lots of groups currently live as part of a larger country - Basques, Catalonians, Kurds, Tibetans etc. does this mean they have to lose millions of people fighting for total independence and sovereignty?
In Ukraine, for instance, Crimea was an unwilling particpant, ever since 1991 we know 94% voted to break away from Ukraine. Ukraine invaded them in the 90s, arrested their leaders and changed their constitution.
Going further back, Galicia was part of Poland, but then Ukrainian communists took it. And Poland used to rule Ukraine, which Ukrainians chafed under (Bogdan Khmelnitsky revolt).
Ukraine has been a tinderbox of many cultures, incouding Kossacks, Orthodox Christians, Greeks, Russians, Catholic Poles, religious and secular Jews, Red athiest Communists, and more.
In 1919 it was briefly a Cossack Hetmanate, if you can believe that!
Actually, communist Bolsheviks (except for Stalin) are the ones responsible for reviving Ukrainian language and culture, as part of their program of “korenizatziya” throughout the USSR. The opposite of what you’d expect:
The culture of “hating Russians” was there among some nationalists, such as Petliura, Bandera and Schuhevych, who took the opportunities around world wars to try to fight for independence. But they were also deeply wrapped up with hatred of Jews, Poles etc. The two guys I mentioned are responsible for killing many Jews, Poles, etc.
After WW2, the Soviet Union had lost 30 million people but emerged a victor over nazis. The USA in a few scant years had made NATO with formerly-nazi Germany as a founding member, against USSR. In 1954 USSR formally asked to join, before starting the Warsaw Pact. Incidentally that same year Khrustchev’s Presidium unilaterally gifted Crimea from Russian SSR to Ukrainian SSR “in a spirit of deep friendship”.
USA and CIA preferreed to work with literal nazis against the eastern bloc. (Operation paperclip, Pinochet in Chile, etc etc.) Radio Liberty was a CIA-funded program to keep the opposition to USSR alive in Ukraine, usually among the far-right elements who sympathized more with the nazis who had lost, and whose grandfathers fought on that side. It didn’t matter to USA, because USSR was their geopolitical rival now.
Same as it didn’t matter about sponsoring jihadists (which is what “mujahideen” means in Arabic) in Afghanistan and getting 2 million civilians killed in a needless civil war, spending billions radicalizing and arming people together with Saudis and leading to the explosion of Wahhabist Islam around the world, ending up later ravaging Iraq, Syria, Nigeria etc.
It’s not about “preserving culture”. That’s the cynical explanation. It’s about proxy wars and weakening the rivals throuh endless quagmires. USA and its architects of proxy wars do not actually care about the people on the ground:
I guess wikipedia and all mainstream news are Kremlin propagandists?
What did I say that was a lie? I try to be as accurate as possible.
You think US doesn’t have propaganda? “They hate us for our freedoms”… “weapons of mass destruction”… “unprovoked and unjustified”… whenever you hear the same line repeated over and over verbatim, it is propaganda
Who is doing the debating? The Ukrainians will have to decide for themselves how many deaths they're willing to accept for national survival.
But as long as they're willing to fight we should give them everything they ask for. The Russian empire is bleeding to death in Donetsk. That suits our interests regardless of the ultimate outcome.
>as a country and a people they only exist as long as we're their benefactor
Why do so many people think this? If the US stopped "giving" them "military aid" which is actually just disney dollars to spend in the US military industrial complex they would be out a small percentage of their defense budget.
This is probably the biggest impact tbh. I wonder if the US public would support these actions if it knew it was going to come back on them with longer TSA lines.
To a point, but it's spot checks at best; a state actor has full access to the wide range of explosive compounds, surely there's some that wouldn't be detected (or that can be handled and packaged in such a way that it doesn't get detected)?
The explosive scanning is the thing where they pull some people out of line and run a wand over you and your gear, then put it into a machine and wait a few seconds for the analysis.
Just like everything else 90s the transparent iMac G3 look is going to be coming back only in the non-ironic prison use for having everything in a clear case (to check for contraband).
When you don't treat people who are brutally uncivilized with civility, it isn't long before people forget who the bad guy is and where it all started. If you are a civilized society, you have to treat the uncivil with civility. You have to set an example.
I was trying to bridge a communication gap by offering an interpretion. In truth I don't understand your comment at all, but I never go to stack overflow empty handed for example.
"Israel orchestrating an attack against the terrorists they're at war with makes me think less of them" is certainly an opinion. A batshit fucking stupid opinion, but you're entitled to it nonetheless.
you should really take a rigorous look into the history of early Israel and the ideologies of its founding members like Hertzl and Jabotinsky. They have always been terrorists.
Right now one of the fastest growing companies is the Israel cybersecurity company Wiz, founded by founders and investors from Israel's Unit 8200, their secretive cyber hacking group. Seems to me a massive security risk for any US company to be relying on critical security to a non American founded companies.
I actually hired, and we later fired, a couple of 'engineers' from Unit 8200. They were technically quite weak, and when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn't surprised at all. If this was the cream of the crop, the defense community should seriously re-evaluate the efficacy of the IDF.
Wiz is the WeWork of cybersecurity. The Israeli tech sector is not that powerful but has lots of investments from the West (US mainly). My experience relates to yours. I think most people have high and unrealistic expectations of people coming from Israel but this usually comes out short.
Israel has a mandatory military service, and they have been cultivating technical talent development in their armed forces for a long time. So I would think that the arrow of causality runs the opposite way.
In other words: virtually every Israeli has been in the military, and for the technically competent ones, were likely to be recruited into their offensive intelligence unit. Coupled with a government whose industrial strategy has been to promote business development in this sector, we are in a situation where practically every single founder of an Israeli tech company has a military service background.
Those with (offensive) infosec mindset end up founding infosec focused businesses, knowing that there is readily available investment available for them. As a result, the Venn diagram between the unit members and infosec business founders is likely to show a pretty big overlap.
And if you look at it more broadly, most Israelis served in the army which maintains an occupation which is illegal under international law, that is most countries on the planet deem it illegal. So, when I meet an Israeli, the instant thought that runs through my head would be: did this person participate in the human rights abuses? They might very well not have, but the possibility is there. This is a scary situation for me as well, because I do not want to be discriminating and prejudiced against anyone, but the facts are straight.
It looks like a trigger that can only be pulled once.
Thus, choice of the optimal time could be influenced by a lot of things:
- knowledge of other Hezbollah imminent action making comms disruption right now of great importance
- recognition that the vulnerability had been discovered and was about to be remediated
- via other "eyes on" prime targets, knowledge that just one or two top leaders were briefly in especially-vulnerable positions (like sleeping alongside their pagers)
- etc
And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers. Some marginal recruits may even be deterred from joining a battle against an opponent which can carry out this sort of attack – though of course, others may be emboldened.
> And, there will be a "long tail" of damage to Hezbollah's usual communications practices & trust in devices/suppliers.
It appears pager use was a solid choice. Even on full supply chain compromise the amount of explosives fitted couldn't kill even 1% of targets. A cellphone would be packed with much larger payloads able to kill much more people. Their failure was the lack of proper inspection before distribution.
I’d be surprised if the amount of explosives was influenced by physical constraints. The aim wasn’t (and never is) to kill. It was to disrupt command and control. If even half the leadership lost hands, eyes, ears or mouths, there literally is no other option of similar effectiveness available.
But on the other hand. They needed the pagers to work for half a year or more (and still only about 3k/5k seem to have been active). Think about tech-support-but-evil trying to fix one that a boss dropped and discovering the explosives inside
I think the purpose is to terrorize your opponents. Sometimes getting seriously wounded is even worse than getting killed, from the perspective of Hez. Now they need to handle thousands of wounded members, which is much more expensive than dead ones.
if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive like the video shows, do you think perplexed and completely unharmed would be a good description for your experience? Maybe we saw different videos, but it's pretty hard to make such a generalized statement from a few seconds of video.
Yes? Clearly the people directly beside the target were physically unharmed and confused about what happened. For all they knew the guy had an e-vape explode or something.
Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage or something, but living in a country de facto in a state of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while governed by a terrorist organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such an operation was a surprise to anyone.
> if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
And how did watching videos of Hamas beheading people on October 7th affect you? And how did watching videos from the Hezbollah attack on the children's football field, that killed a dozen children, affect you?
It's a damn shame that Israel funded Hamas in their goal of supplanting more leftist groups gaining ground in Palestine, and it's a damn shame that Israel has spent something like 70 years now assassinating various Palestinian political leaders, including vocal pacifist advocates.
Just like the Americans decreased the safety of Americans abroad by spending two decades radicalizing the middle east, Israel has decreased the safety of its citizens by always choosing to escalate the violence.
If the same people here are the ones killing people there, then surely you see the connection. I don't need to be the victim of a serial killer to not want to dine with one.
> The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.
Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them, so they couldn't possibly account for collateral damage when firing them all at once, and a conscious decision was made that any unlucky civilians are fair game. Indiscriminate in the same sense as dropping a bunker buster on a residential block because you believe there's a handful of terrorists inside, or nuking two cities to "encourage" a military surrender.
If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if Mossad obliterated your child in the process of assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget, since it was for the greater good and they tried their best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it sometimes goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring 16 others.
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law;
and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
The fact that the pagers were obtained by Hezbollah to be used for their communications, and consequently could be expected to be exclusively in the possession of combatants means the attack was not indiscriminate.
Causing collateral damage does not make an attack indiscriminate. The standard for permissible collateral damage is that an attack must not cause loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian property, etc. that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage [1].
The fact that it was so specifically targeted, combined with the small size of the explosive charges means collateral damage could be expected to be minor. And the evidence so far suggests that to have been accurate. The death of a single child is tragic, but negligible in comparison to the military advantage gained by thousands of combatants dead or wounded.
Where in aforementioned international humanitarian law, step (c), is it preordained that one child's collateral death is negligible? See, therein lies the crux of the issue. The definition itself is wise enough that you can't just lawyerese your way through the issue.
In your scientistic rationalization using weaselwords like "expected to be exclusive", "the [subjective] standard for permissible..", "a death is [objectively] negligible", and so on, it is rather the case that your explanation is so laden with prejudiced pseudoreasoning that you are blind to it and unwittingly helping to spread ideological misinformation.
It's funny, everyone on Hacker News at least completed high school in principle. But there's so much brave conservatism that high school education should have infused students with enough critical thinking to make them think about what they're really saying, regardless of how complex or simple their version of words is.
"unlucky civilians are fair game" that's been an unfortunate fact of war since, well, war was invented. maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war and put people in harms way, instead of complaining that one of the most precise operations still had unintended civilian consequences.
taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
> Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them
AFAICT the stock pager models are ~95 grams, and people are suggesting 3-5g of added explosives. If they used RDX, then 3g would be ~5.5 cubic centimeters, which seems like rather a lot to try to squish into a small pager unless the design also replaced the standard battery with a smaller one to make room.
In contrast, a M67 fragmentation grenade uses ~156 grams of explosives.
Basically I'm saying it sounds like the bombs are small enough that it's not quite fair to call them "indiscriminate", especially if the trigger logic involves a Hezbollah radio network that nobody else would be using.
A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and ISIS for terroristic attacks.
Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes people easy to manipulate.
I think you are mistaking your emotional reflexes for objective truth. Weapons on flags historically connote a message of 'don't mess with us'. The IDF's logo is a sword and an olive branch, and is more or less the same as the logo of the Haganah...a pre-independence paramilitary organization that was considered terroristic at the time when Palestine was still a British possession, and which killed hundreds of people.
The issue is not that weapons are shown. The issue is that it’s a fist holding an assault
rifle. It’s very plainly a call for violent action. And frankly I think it’s kind of stupid to argue otherwise.
Regardless of your opinion of the IDF, their flag is clearly a very different vibe
2 American state flags depict people holding guns as well. I won't mention which two lest it lead to an outbreak of hostilities. And wait until you hear about the symbology of the US flag, or listen to the US national anthem!
More seriously, quite a few other countries have guns on the flag, reflecting a turbulent recent history. As I mentioned, Hezbollah was formed in response to the invasion and occupation of Lebanon just over 40 years ago, which was not a violence-free event. Let's not even get into swords on flags.
There's a tendency among some people to draw their conclusion first and then summon reasons for it afterwards, reasons which often lack consistency. Our violent history is glorious; theirs is deplorable. Consider, for example, the Irish Republican Army; like Hezbollah, it's considered a terrorist organization by US, UK, and many other jurisdictions. But due to the huge number of Irish American people and the subsidence of that political conflict in the last few decades, lots of Americans think the IRA is cool, while reflexively lumping Hezbollah in with other Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, I think things like 'their flag has a gun on it' are the opposite of helpful or insightful.
Americans generally don’t know what the IRA is. Hezbollah is actively involved in anti western terrorism. That is perhaps why Americans think they’re terrorists.
Even if Hezbollah made the order, it would be difficult to be confident all would be distributed to operatives as opposed to sold to other civilian users.
Optimist in me thinks that outside solution is still possible either through revolutionary tech or fundamental discovery like total disproof of religion.
A lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese are irreligious. Yet, a lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese know people who have been affected by the conflict first hand (either refugees, civilian casualties, or combatant casualties), which makes it difficult to negotiate.
The 1990s-2000s was the last period where some sort of negotiation could succeed, because there was still a large 1st and 1.5 gen Mizrahi and Sephardic community that had some residual feeling for Muslim states, and vice versa. That's how Israel and Morocco, Azerbaijan, and Turkey pre-2012 were able to get their relationship back on track.
At this point, the peace process is dead. Even the secular opposition to Likud and the Kahanists in Israel supports a harsh military response, casualties be damned. Similar story in West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon.
Any sort of peace process will have to be backed by internal repression for a generation by all participants.
Also, being a martyr on a poster with everyone celebrating you can be an attractive recruitment tool to young men. But seeing the broken beggar without eyes that people pity isn't going to be quite the same enticement to recruit for your terrorism org.
I actually think that an unintended consequence is that Mossad has permanently flagged the vast majority of Hizbullah's followers, an entire generation, on Lebanese soil.
The wound patterns will emerge for the vast majority of victims: arms, hands, eyes and hips ? Time will tell.
The Lebanese army, and the IDF, now suddenly can tell between civilian vs combatant.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you are implying membership of Hezbollah is deep dark shameful secret in Lebanon. The designation of Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" is great for outside political propaganda, but the actual reality is they are a major and open faction in political life in Lebanon as both paramilitary group and political party - as is my understanding. Basically Sinn Fein/IRA.
Lebanon is very generous. They have their zones, mostly in the South, Bekaa, and a specific part of Beyrouth. It is also true they have a political wing. But they also have covert enforcers outside those zones and that is what everyone else is most fearful of. They have been involved in sectarian killings tit-for-tats, for many years. Most famously, the murder of PM rafik hariri.
So, otside of those Hizbullah zones, its actually not common to see the Hizbullah yellow flags openly displayed. Or a car bumper sticker. It is for good reason. There was a civil war before, and memories run deep.
If I was wounded (or even witnessed this in real life), I would go from civilian to combatant instantly. Israel just attacked a bunch of civilian population centers. This will be seen as a huge strategic mistake, both in terms of new combatants created on the ground and continued loss of good will for Israel abroad.
I think you are missing context. 10 years of civil war and many more decades of animositiy and of strife, are not reversed overnight , even due to an event like this. For example, Israël has lobbed missiles before, and that had its collateral damage, but also didnt change a thing or win new allies to Hizbullah.
Even some druze (historically neutral sectl were kidnapped and killed in the Oct 7th events.
Now, for the 1st time in 100 years, every single rival of hizbullah is able to instantly recognize enemies, in the open.
Obe thing im certain of, Israel has managed to reset the board in its conflict with Hezbollah.
Israel has no support outside of hardcore Zionists. I don't know if you've checked out the global reaction to this terrorist act that Israel just pulled, but they just multiplied the intensity of their enemies (i.e. the rest of humanity) 10X.
Even if all that is true, for all intents and purposes, it's a moot point.
The only people that share borders with Israel matter. That is Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. 2 of those 4 have firm peace agreements in place, and have converging interests to control their extremist interests. Syria has its own issues and a defacto govt ban on extremists. Lebanon just had its entire terror contingent permanently labeled.
If you notice my statement, 3 of the 4 of israel's borders were more or less under acceptable control. Now, Israel has likely managed to reset the board for the 4th and final border.
Again, time will tell if the long term consequences you envision matter in any way. I contend they dont, in comparison to the gains they just made.
I think the simplest explanation here is that pagers are small and light and don't have that much free space inside them, and it's hard to fit enough explosive into them to reliably kill people. The figures I saw was only a few grams of explosive could be fit in them. If you look at the photos and videos that have been coming out today you'll see what the injuries look like; they're not as catastrophic as getting shot with a bullet, or anything close to a real explosive with orders of magnitude more explosive in it like an artillery shell, rocket, aerial bomb, etc.
I would guess Israel would have preferred more lethal pagers, but the required amount of explosive simply didn't fit. So the resulting deaths are from the people who got really unlucky, whereas getting wounded was the modal result.
you're looking at the wrong videos. I saw videos with people's hands blown off, massive holes in their bodies, etc. reportedly something like 15-20gr of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Massive wounds.
I suspect it's going to matter a lot where the pager was relative to the person at time of explosion. Someone holding it in a closed fist vs reading it vs in a backpack vs in a pocket could all have very different wound patterns.
there's also going to be a bunch of plastic shrapnel either way. reports were saying that people's eyes were being hit, I think most likely by plastic shrapnel.
The death toll isn't the goal. They're after the 2nd order effects, now there are ~3,000 operatives that are marked by a scar that is relatively distinctive. They also have substantially disrupted their communication protocols and caused psychological damage.
Hezbollah members in Lebanon are not necessarily perceived as bad people - why would the scar be a problem ? Hezbollah claims it’s a resistance movement to Israel, they’re now wearing a scar caused by Israel in a mass coordinated attack, which will further legitimize Hezbollah.
I agree with the disruption of communication protocols and psychological damage though.
I don't get it. Why does Lebanon need to resist Israel? When in recent history has Israel attacked Lebanon or threatened it in any way, except in retaliation or defense against Hezbollah acts?
In the first Lebanon war, Israel invaded Lebanon to strike against PLO. At this time, Hezbollah did not really exist, or was at least small and insignificant. It grew as a force in opposition of Israel's occupation.
This was in the middle of the Lebanese civil war in 1982 , the Lebanese government had no control over anything.
Furthermore, after the Israeli entered Lebanon in 1982, they didn’t fully leave the country until 2000, which is what caused the founding of hezbollah in 1982, and the perception of hezbollah as a resistance movement since then.
Basically the Lebanese see Israel has having attacked then occupied a part of Lebanon for about 20 years, between 1982 and 2000 - this is recent enough for most people to relate to it.
The Lebanese should then have a good answer to what they expected Israel to do with attacks being launched from Lebanese soil without the Lebanese doing anything about it. I understand, they were in the middle of a civil war, but that doesn't mean Israel has to be OK with attacks happening.
The occupation came as a result of continued attacks. And after Israel left in 2000, more and more attacks happened, culminating in the 2006 war.
The fact remains that if no there were no threats against Israel from Lebanon, there would be nothing for Lebanon to fear from Israel. It's repeatedly sought and made peace with every sovereign country with which is has no ongoing disputes.
(There are, as I understand it, some minor territorial disputes along the border. I'm sure these can be quickly resolved through negotiation, if all parties are serious about it.)
Lebanon has a weak government. I think you could compare it with a house owner who does not have the means to evict uninvited guests, where the guests are much stronger and more powerful than the owner. This is both because the country consists of many ethnic groups and religions, and because it came to host a lot of Palestinian refugees and became base for the HQ of Palestinian resistance. Add on top of this widespread corruption. The situation is pretty dire.
'Allah's Messenger said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."'
(94)Chapter: Fighting against the Jews
Sahih al-Bukhari 2926
Book 56, Hadith 139
Hezbollah considers that they must fight Israel following the Gaza war. They’ve stated they won’t stop until the Israelis leave Gaza.
The average Sunni Muslim in Beirut either remembers, or has family who remembers what happened during the (unprovoked by the Lebanese) Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation. Today, most of the Arab world supports Hamas in the Gaza war, considering that the large number of civilians being killed is essentially mass murder. Mix these two informations, and you will find very little trust towards Israelis. Add today’s attacks and things get even worse.
It’s very easy to destroy trust, and very hard to build it. None of this has to be perfectly logical - it’s not how people work.
I didn't say that the invasion didn't affect many Lebanese. Only that the Lebanese don't need to "resist" Israel, because it is not a threat to them, so long as they're not attacking it (or are in close proximity to those who are).
This is on target. Tagging collaborators certainly has advantages, not so much for invoking a social glare at home but helping to identify them to intelligence sources, certainly.
I doubt those 2,750 all have minor injuries. That's 2,750 targets, a lot of whom probably now now have missing fingers/hands, a chunk missing from their leg, face injuries.... Aka major injuries from having a small explosion on their belt or int their pocket. It's going to be 2,750 probably major injuries that will take a long time to recover from.
And then they will be 10x more dedicated to revenge. Where they may have sworn to destory Israel before, they weren't yet personally injured. It'a the same cycle of violence.
you can't fill a full bag, there is no "more" to conceive of. They are fully convinced already that all Israelis should simply be killed or worse than killed.
It surely is because you corrode your target’s trust in technology. They moved from smartphones to pagers, now they’ll have to find even cruder types of communications.
If you lost half your gut or a kidney or had your stomach punctured you may be alive, but you’re definitely not battle ready. And you may never be again. A device that explodes in such close proximity to a body is more than certain that it will damage some internal organ. All these thousands of Hezbollah militia are forever incapacitated. You didn't kill them, but they can't hurt you in the future if let's say you decide to mount a full scale invasion on Lebanon.
It's not clear whether you're asserting Israel does or doesn't care whether it kills civilians, though I think you're saying it doesn't in general try to accomplish this.
Israel's history is decidedly chequered in this regard, and there have been killings, including quite recently of demonstrators / protestors, and within recent years of journalists, by Israeli forces.
But there are also practices such as "roof knocking" in which an initial nonlethal warning is exploded above a building several minutes prior to a much more destructive strike:
And to be clear, much of Israel's subsequent air and artillery assault on the Gaza strip has been far less surgical, with vast numbers of structures destroyed.
By contrast, both Hamas and Hezbollah make extensive use of highly inaccurate missiles (totally unguided in the case of Hamas, guided though low-ish precision generally for Hezbollah) which are effectively aerial mines, striking randomly largely within civilian areas. This reflects both tactics and available means, so again the picture is complex. As I've written in an earlier comment on this thread, most hats are at best grey in these conflicts, rather than clearly white.
Not to get into it here, but i believe the fancy non-lethal warnings is done for the TV audience. There are so many incidents of bombings civilian areas stretching back for decades. And the statistics for the IDF killings of children alone are off the scale.
You have misread the room if you think you can boast "impressive partial destruction" of buildings when the ENTIRETY of Gaza has just been made unlivable in front of your eyes.
They are not only not caring about minimizing harm, they are getting away with 11 months of wanton destruction on a daily basis. Just this month, they have dropped mk84 bombs on civilian tents. What are you babbling about?
Wounded soldiers are often a bigger burden than killed ones. You neee to retrieve them, take care of them, and they may never be fight capable again. They are also a breathing reminder of the costs of war, and at the same time less likely to make others vow revenge.
Or the sabotage was on the verge of being discovered and their options were either to use it at an inopportune time or lose the ability to use it at all.
How do we know this didn't do this but in reverse, being used to disrupt an attack Hezbollah had planned? Edit: People seem to be ignoring the large amount of Syrian operatives this hit as well.
And how many of those wounded are totally unconnected bystanders, who just happened to be standing next to the individual in the grocery store or wherever?
exactly. The most charitable way to look at this is Israel targeted a handful fewer bystanders than a terrorist attack. I can't imagine anyone thinking longer-term strategy thought thought this was a good idea.
Really isn't though. We don't know if there was an imminent action that Israel prevented by doing this? Did Israel do this instead of blowing up apartment blocks to target individuals, in which case this might be a much more limited collateral damage action than other methods might have caused. Without knowing Israel's motives one can't make any sort of judgement not sure why you are leaping to conclusions minus any actual information.
The point was probably to reduce accidental casualties.
Also, the wounds can be quite severe.
Finally, a device like a pager cannot hold a lot of explosive substance in its spare space anyway.
I'm guessing it was to stop some tentative action on Hezbollahs and the huge number of Syrians that this attack got as wells parts that was about to occur.
Nearly every single one injured was a Hezbollah militant. Regarding militant:civilian rates, this has one of the lowest civilian impacts of any option.
Most modern wars see MORE than 1 civilian death per militant death. This pager bomb was nearly entirely militants.
That seems like an awful lot of explosive power for something that needs to be secretly added to a functional pocket pager without affecting external dimensions or adding perceptible weight.
Cautious skepticism is warranted, given how profitable some parties would find it to make such claims regardless of whether they are true or not.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Is the short term here a few days or maybe just hours? For the reasons you pointed out and more this is likely a strategic failure for a very short term military gain. The economics you pointed out. Politically this will not help them with any but their most extreme allies while enraging their enemies and giving them the moral high-ground with their peoples and the international community. Militarily this likely did little to actual readiness since the people wearing the pagers were probably mid to upper level people so they will heal and go back to desk jobs they were doing before. So an economic, political and military strategic fail. It would have been far better for Israel had this fizzled out or been found out before it triggered. Plausible deniability would have been easier and international outrage would have been minimal all while the C&C of their enemies would have gotten the intended message that they had deep capabilities that could cause disruption. Instead they actually pulled it off and now they get all the bad consequences with very few good ones. This was a bad idea executed, unfortunately, well.
This is a one shot attack. They will never be able to do it again. And I don't think most of the world has pissed off Mossad quite as much as Hezbollah. Assuming they even did it!
Only if Hezbollah take steps to avoid it. Presumably they will, but presumably there is a cost, and so Israel will continue to benefit from them having to divert resources to doing that.
I'm not at all convinced that's the case, unless it comes out that the targeting was extremely broad (like if Israel was just putting bombs in every pager going into Lebanon rather than targeting a specific shipment going to Hezbollah) I don't think there's really any new risk for other countries.
I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.
The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.
these weren't random pagers. They intercepted a shipment of thousands of pagers for hezbollah and rigged them with explosives, and set them off likely using hezbollah's own command and control network.
> Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.
To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.
They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.
There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.
Everyone should be keeping an eye on all their supply chains all the time, Israel-connected or not. Especially for military (or paramilitary) applications.
It reminds me a bit of when after 9/11, some of the reaction in Israel (as well as shock and sympathy) was "Of course we have locked cockpit doors, marshals on planes and other security features on ElAl. We're not barbarians!"
Also, (Hagelin) Crypto AG. Just because it's in Switzerland doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid.
> In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.
Did they? Supply chain attacks, intercepted parcels, none of this is new - the US, going by the Snowden leaks, has a long history of tampering with parcels in transit, which is why a few of the "libre phone" vendors offer to seal the parcel, the device and all screws in random glitter glue and take photos prior to shipping so that any attempt at tampering in transit is not hideable (there is no known way to recreate a glitter pattern).
For me this whole things, including the previous use of AI backed social graph modelling build from digital surveillance of Palestinians, being use for as targeting intelligence, for drone strikes on people homes and families.. this whole thing chills me to the bone about ever wanting to use a social network, or a always connected mobile device ever again. Israel has taken the Dark Mirror SF speculations about the shifts in power and capability as the instruction manual and we're mostly ignoring the warnings. There nothing stopping this happening to any of us.
The combatant to civilian casulties in this paper explosion is probably unparalleled in the warfare history. I wish all conflicts would strive to have such a great record.
The fact that they attacked them via their communication network that was intended to avoid Israeli surveillance, is irregular warfare at its finest.
The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological - we got into your supply chain this far. Also, your attempts to avoid us failed.
But at an org level? They just disabled the entire comms system, whether through explosions, or by making people scared of explosions.
What's the contingency plan for this in Hezbollah? And will it have credence, given their last grand idea of "let's use pagers to avoid the Israelis" ended with a large number of simultaneous explosions?
It's a very clever attack from a psychological POV.
> The main injury inflicted on individuals was psychological
Have you seen the footage(0) from hospitals? It's likely that hundreds of Hezbollah members lost hands, eyes, etc. That will degrade their military effectiveness significantly, especially the people who were blinded. And remember that Hezbollah is trying(1) to prevent more footage of the attack from getting out, so what we've seen publicly quite likely underplays the full extent of it.
Sure, maybe you could argue that the "main" effect in terms of total numbers was psychological. But we shouldn't understate how many Hezbollah members were directly given life-long injuries that will make them ineffective forever. That's a huge win for Israel.
This is not the first time Israel has pulled stuff like this. It blew back for a while in their face, but eventually people move on. If Israel recognize this event as existential for them, then anything is allowed including nuclear weapons.
IMO, this gives IL's enemies more excuses to execute more horrible attacks. Considering pagers are civilian products and some of them might actually be delivered to non-Hez civilians, the consequence is pretty dire.
it basically says: we can do whatever we want because we can. Now imagine what the other side is going to reply.
I don't know if you've been following this conflict, but Israel's enemies don't need excuses to attack Israel. They think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and thus see the very existence of the state of Israel as a provocation that justifies violence against Jews.
Definitely not. Hez has showed footages of UAVs inside of IL so potentially they could do some damage. They can also up their missile attacks. And there are other players such as the Houthis. Maybe they just don't want to do it because they figured it's of no good to them at the moment, but maybe the climate changes in the future and they decide to do it anyway.
Also important to remember is that Israel evacuated the civilian population in the north of the country due to Hezbollah currently indiscriminately shelling/bombing that area for the past months.
There's also the hit to the reputation of the manufacturers of these devices to consider (even though they were almost certainly intercepted some time after manufacture and modified in transit, or replaced with a different batch that had been ordered by the perpetrator and modified ahead of time for a quick swap). The perpetrator may have been spying on the pager network for some time, and if so then their cover is blown and their information source is gone.
The larger issue is that if shipments of pagers can be intercepted and modified in this manner, then any electronic device can be subjected to other hardware-based attacks - eavesdropping devices, keystroke loggers, etc. What if large numbers of countries with developing tech markets start looking at the suppliers involved the way the USA looks at China's Huawei?
In general this boosts the open-soure model for both software and hardware, so the expected hardware configuration that can be checked visually and with other user-available tools. If any phone, pager, tablet or laptop can be physically hijacked and modified, the user should be allowed access to all the information and tools needed to detect it. This assumes the factory itself is not the bad actor.
Hardware security consultant firms probably have a bright future. Also robots for assistance with inspection.
My concern now is another nation-state actor who manages certain large international supply chains doing this on a broader scale against widespread western targets. Your comment on it being a pandoras box is quite profound.
Everytime you say Israel you must insert US, just as you must insert Iran every time you mention Palestine. These are who the war is between. Hamas or Hezbollah by itself is nothing and so is a <10 million population fighting several adversaries. And the US will always win in escalation which is exactly what they have aimed to achieve and why Iran never gave a 'proper' response to the assassination of Haniyeh.
it makes me think the Israeli decision-makers are trying to leave Hezbollah no choice but to escalate into a larger war. I think Hezbollah has been trying to avoid escalation into all out war, responding in limited proportionate ways despite Israel continuing to escalate. (Can you imagine if Hezbollah had detonated thousands of such devices in Israel? I'd be scared of a nuclear response).
But Israeli leaders maybe decided Hezbollah's hesitation to escalate into all out war must mean that such a war must be good for us and bad for them? Let's try to really make em do it, so we can invade Lebanon again? Why Israeli government thinks it wants an invasion of Lebanon right now, I don't know, but it looks like that's where this goes to me and they must know it?
He’s not referring to the Gazan attacks of October 7, but the Hezbollah rocket attacks that started on October 8 and continue to this day, flouting the 18-year ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah and causing the evacuation of over 95,000 Israelis from northern Israel.
Israel leadership is probably prepping for some big October surprise timed perfectly just before the US election. Everyone is predicting it so much these days that its not really a surprise but a eventuality at this point.
Or you know, 100,000+ Israelis had to leave their homes in north Israel for nearly 1 year. You also had Druze Arab children slaughtered by Hezbollah. So what options would Israel have here?
Although it was aimed at harming Israel's adversaries, third-party countries may now hesitate to involve Israel in their supply chains. There's also the risk that other major producers could replicate this tactic, potentially leading to further escalation in the region or beyond.
In the short term, it's a smart strategy for Israel, but they've likely opened Pandora's box in the process.