Photo Credit: Freepik

A Response to Michael Walzer’s “Immoral Israel’s Pagers’ Attack” Argument  

By Luis Fleischman

Michael Walzer, a respected Princeton scholar and author of the book Just and Unjust Wars, has called Israel’s recent pagers’ attacks on Hezbollah fighters  “war crimes” in a recent article published by The New York Times. 

Walzer, a committed Zionist who believes that Israel’s current war in Gaza against Hamas is justified, believes that the operation that caused the explosion of Hezbollah’s operatives’ pager devices was an act of terrorism.. 

Israel, which has not acknowledged involvement in the operation, apparently managed to manufacture and sell pagers with explosives to Hezbollah members. The purpose was to cause chaos within the organization and eliminate those in charge of committing hostile acts of terrorism against Israel and its population.  

 Such acts indeed run the risk of harming innocent civilians, as was the case of a girl who died because her father left his unsupervised pager at home. Other innocents may have been hurt or could have potentially been harmed.  

However, the reality is that the attacks overwhelmingly affected Hezbollah members. It was a very targeted attack aimed with precision and intended to minimize civilian casualties.  

When discussing civilians in war zones, Walzer argues in his aforementioned book that “simply not to intend the death of civilians is too easy; most in battle, the intentions of soldiers are focused narrowly on the enemy. What we look for in such cases is some sign of positive commitment to civilians.” Walzer continues, “[i]f saving civilian lives means risking soldier lives, the risk must be accepted. But there is a limit to the risks that we require. There are, after all, unintended deaths and legitimate military operations, and the absolute rule against attacking civilians does not apply… [Therefore] we can only ask soldiers to minimize the dangers they impose.”

Suppose Walzer accepts the premise that removing Hezbollah’s threat to Israeli northern communities and returning the 80,000 displaced Israelis to their homes is a legitimate and vital goal. In that case, he may reasonably also believe that eliminating the group’s main fighters and their communications helps achieve such an objective. A Hezbollah official reported that more than 1,500 Hezbollah fighters are out of commission after the pagers attack. The official does not mention civilian casualties. It is reasonable to assume that those who received communication devices were people with essential positions or positions of command. 

 Therefore, Israel acted in accord with Walzer’s imperative to minimize civilian casualties.

But Walzer makes another surprising comment. He claims the pagers attacks came when the “operatives were not operating.” The devices’ carriers did not engage in direct battle. However, inevitably, Hezbollah would have mobilized these individuals.

If we are to take Walzer’s argument seriously, we could say that Israel’s preventive strike in 1967 against the Egyptian air force at a time when Egypt’s leader was preparing for war was an illegitimate act. However, Walzer himself justifies Israel’s preventive strike against Egypt with great clarity. As Egyptian leader Jamal Abdel Nasser not only repeated his intention to destroy Israel but also “his military moves served no other, more limited goals….” The preemptive Israeli military strike is, I think, a clear case of legitimate anticipation. To say that is to suggest a major revision of the legalist paradigm. 

Walzer refers to the legalist paradigm as something that protects the states’ territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Hence, Walzer seems to believe that Hezbollah does not challenge the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of  Israel as Egypt did in 1967. Therefore, he considers the pagers attack an illegitimate act of war. 

According to Walzer’s deontological approach, Israel’s behavior is wrong because its intentions and actions are morally risky.  The Princeton professor does not consider the ultimate moral goal of impairing an organization that endangers the State of Israel and its citizens.     

 Hezbollah’s bombings of northern Israel displaced dozens of thousands of residents, and in the words of Anthony Blinken, Israel de facto lost sovereignty over parts of its territory.   Hezbollah’s intention to destroy Israel suggests a permanent war with no end on the horizon. Hezbollah’s continuous violation of the 2006 UN Security Council  Resolution 1701—which calls for a complete cessation of hostilities between the parties and the absence of any armed force South of the Litani River except UNIFIL—and its constant rearmament confirms this intention.

That is precisely why an immediate cease-fire may lead to another confrontation sooner or later. Resolution 1701 has failed and UNIFIL forces have been as useless as the UN. It requires a great deal of creativity to find a lasting solution, but militarily subduing Hezbollah is essential. 

Such a state of affairs is no different in Gaza. In the same article, the author of Just and Unjust Wars  argues that the elimination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July suggests that the Israeli government  “is not committed to the negotiations’ success.” 

The question is whether such negotiation could lead to the same situation that existed on the eve of the October 7 attacks. Hamas demands a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to retain sovereignty over the Strip to make Israel vulnerable again.  One does not need to be a Netanyahu supporter to understand such a multifaceted picture. 

I agree with the need to find realistic solutions to the crisis in Lebanon and Gaza, which may well exist, but this topic requires a different discussion.  

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, the Western mainstream media and a significant part of the academic community have directed their attacks against Israel. Unfortunately, Walzer’s piece—which was published in The New York Times, a media outlet at the forefront of Israel’s indictment—added another unnecessary insult to injury.

Luis Fleischman, Ph.D., is a professor of Sociology at Palm Beach State College, co-presdient of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research and the author of the book “The Middle East Riddle: The Peace Process and Israeli-Arab Relations in a Changing Times.”