RUTHFULLY YOURS

Getting your balls blown off by a primed pager has got to be the most ‘f**k around, find out’ thing that has ever happened. It took place in Lebanon yesterday. To the approval of both supporters of Israel and meme-makers everywhere, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives suddenly exploded. The footage coming out of Lebanon is extraordinary. A man’s trouser pocket erupting in a supermarket, a man writhing in agony in the middle of the road after his trusted comms device turned on him. The battle of the pagers will surely be recorded as one of the most unusual and audacious acts in the entire history of human warfare.

All eyes are on Israel, naturally. Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind – no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled ‘army of god’ that has sworn itself to excising the ‘cancerous growth’ of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)

Much remains unclear about the operation. Israel has not claimed responsibility. It is reported that 12 people were killed. Tragically, two of them were children. The others included Hezbollah fighters. Around 3,000 were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Of course, the West’s leftists are too busy slamming evil Israel to ask why an Iranian official was in such close proximity to a Hezbollah pager. But then, we all know why. Yet for all the questions that still hang over this techno-assault on medieval militants, some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is.

Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail. Even a presenter on Sky News looked shook, describing the operation as ‘scary’. I suppose it is scary, if you’re a member of an anti-Semitic army with a pager in your pocket. The double standards are shameless at this point. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. These missiles have destroyed homes, scorched earth, caused 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel to flee, and butchered 12 Druze kids. It is a strange ‘anti-fascist’ who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli children.

Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is ‘indiscriminate slaughter’. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is ‘barbarism’.

The list of things that become ‘crimes’ when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of 7 October, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too – it was the crime of ‘forced displacement’, apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too.

That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked.

Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of anti-Semitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word ‘anti-fascist’ from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself ‘anti-racist’, and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’.

Through those weaponised pagers, Israel sent an important message not only to Hezbollah but also to the world. It let the world know that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Those days are gone. Kill Jews now – as Hamas and Hezbollah have both done, as part of their fascistic war on the Jewish State – and there will be consequences. You might lose a bollock, you might lose your life. That the racist militants of Iranian-sponsored Islamism are peeved that Jew-killing is no longer acceptable makes sense. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West also seem put out by the fact that killing Jews is a riskier business today than it was in earlier centuries is more disturbing. Paging the Western left: racist terrorism must always be resisted.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy