Comment by zug_zug
4 days ago
I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror).
I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition.
If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
Two things
Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
Secondly, even if you only kill generals, that doesn't mean you didn't cause terror for everybody else. Imagine for example that Hezbollah found a way to poison the food for Israel's top X military personnel. It would cause a state of emotional terror for many people in Israel about their food safety for decades most likely, even if they weren't in the military themselves.
When Ukraine assassinates a Russian general with a car bomb, is that "terrorism" or is that just a targeted killing of a military leader during a war? Do you think this is somehow morally problematic beyond the typical standards of war?
Do you think that "normal" means of military action, like dropping a 500lb bomb, is less "terroristic" than essentially setting off a firecracker in their face/hands/pocket? Because, like, that's the alternative. If your position is that all forms of war are illegal, then you have the right to that opinion, but it's not a realistic position.
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No, generals in an operational military force are definitionally combatants, and cannot in fact be "terrorized".
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No. Generals are always legitimate military targets.
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Terrorism doesn't mean "anything that makes someone scared," or else all wars would be acts of terrorism.
There isn't a universally agreed upon definition, but generally it refers to targeting non-combatants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
For example, when the Allies tried to assassinate Hitler with a smuggled briefcase bomb during WW2, that wasn't terrorism: that was just regular warfare. Hitler was the leader of Germany and directed its military.
Similarly, smuggling pager bombs to members of Hezbollah generally wouldn't qualify as terrorism, since Hezbollah a) is a militia (famously it's the largest non-state militia in the world), and b) was actively fighting a war against Israel — a war that Hezbollah themselves initiated.
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Hezbollah is an organization that tries to destroy Israel. If any law doesn't have an answer to that problem, it isn't worth to discuss legality.
But that isn't the problem here, luckily. It was an extremely targeted operation, generals are military target and know the risks of war. A war that they started in this case.
> Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
This isn't part of any modern definition of terrorism, otherwise war is terrorism, stalking is terrorism, bullying is terrorism &c.
> Firstly, generals, like anybody else can be terrorized.
You know terrorism doesn't mean people were terrorized, right? Surely you understand that.
The issue is that Israel has no idea where those pagers were at the time of the attack, civilians were directly hurt by the explosions: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/survivors-of-israels-page...
Israel had in fact very clear intelligence that the specific pagers they were detonating were overwhelmingly going to be in the custody of combatants. This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years. That's not a value judgement; it's a descriptive claim.
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You think you are not allowed to do a military strike if civilians may be hurt?
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Zionists don't care about civilian casualties. It's extremely well documented. They even defend the explicit rape of their "prisoners". They will just explain them away as Hamas sympathizers and people will shrug their shoulders and move on.
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Not only military leadership was killed, there was a significant amount of civilians being harmed.
Even if you drop a bomb to target a military personnel, but you drop it in the middle of busy city, this will be a war crime, as you didn’t do anything to avoid civilian casualties, and disregarded them.
The Irish terrorists that were mostly the responsible to put word "terrorism" into political discourse targeted almost exclusively politicians and military. And targeted way better than that Israel attack.
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How is communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members not a directed attack?
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> Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition.
I mean, you're not wrong: the State seeks monopoly on violence; the kind of damages it can inflict, where, when and however it wants. Everyone else is ... a terrorist, and whatever they do is ... terrorism.
> communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah
Replace "Hezbollah" with "the US Govt" and you'll arrive at some answer.
Btw, off-duty / non-combat personnel aren't deemed to be "at war".
The reason foreign military organizations don't routinely target active duty US military generals isn't that they're worried about being dragged into some mostly-fictitious courtroom to answer for their misdeeds. It's that the United States armed forces will very quickly reduce their entire organization, and much of the surrounding area, to its combustion products.
There aren't a lot of opportunities in life you get to use the word "annihilatory"; this is one of them. And in the immortal words of William Munny out of Missouri: "deserve's" got nothing to do with it.
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> i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror
That's not really a good description of terrorism. Terrorism is going after non-military targets, or at least indiscriminate targeting, for the express purpose of causing terror.
If an enemy tank platoon is rolling down the street, the operator of an antitank missile certainly knows that blowing up the lead tank and killing the crew in front of their compatriots is going to instill terror in the rest of the tank platoon. Taking that action anyway is correctly described as an act that intentionally instills terror, but that's not an act of terrorism. War, regardless of if it's waged lawfully, is often terrifying.
The way to successfully argue that Israel's pager attack was an act of terror is to show indiscriminate targeting - not merely highlight how terrifying it is to have a bunch of high level officers killed at once. However, investing a lot in the latest information gathering technology sound like the opposite of indiscriminate targeting.
I obviously can't speak for how the public writ large would react to our hypothetical. But I can at least speak for myself that if Hezbollah somehow, say, flew a bunch of drones onto IDF bases and killed officers, then that would be an act of war but not an act of terrorism no matter how terrified it might make Israelis feel.
I don't whether something is terrorism as something that's relevant for whether it's allowed by the laws of war.
Instead what we have is IHL, i.e. the Geneva and Hague conventions etc., and if you are targeting military personnel or other targets of military importance, without any extra cruelty or attacks on civilians, what does it matter if it looks like terror-bombing?
If it's allowed by IHL but is terrorism by British or French of German law or whatever, it's allowed. IHL is the actual binding thing.
>IHL is the actual binding thing.
And who enforces that?
When Netanyahu or Putin break that and bomb children and civilian hospitals, can you stop them by waving the IHL in their face?
Its a war between two organized armies, however lopsided, with one army recieving support openly to defend against a larger state. Isreal is not only a belligerent state, it openly commits war crimes from every single human war convention in existence, if not outright genocide, what is it?
I think this was a brilliant operation and perfectly lawful. I also think that if Lebanon (not Hezbollah) were in a state of war with Israel, yes, that would (depending on proportionality and target discrimination) be perfectly legal, too.
> perfectly lawful
Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.
No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike? Anyway it seems to me that it was:
Passes the smell test to me.
Would you still have a bone to pick with my credentials if I said that I thought the Dresden firebombings were not brilliant and not perfectly legal? Or the same about US military strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels?
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The most brilliant part about the civilian casualties from this operation is how many fewer of them there were than there would have been with any alternative means available to Israel.
Both of these sound like non-terror, internationally legal methods. Commanders are military.
Terrorism targets civilians. So no, this isn't terrorism.
> Terrorism targets civilians.
This can be true, but terrorist acts can also be indifferent to the target, which is where the debate here comes from.
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That's very true, when Israel consistently bombed and destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza. The media tried very hard to narrowly frame it this as legitimate.
Unfortunately for people, Israel will further be tightening its grip on the world (and has already) by buying and censoring platforms such as TikTok.
So there goes one of the main ways news was being shared defying the main stream narrative.
These are the facts and you will be labelled for stating them.
I don't see how. It was intended to paralyze and undermine a militia which it did. A lot of war actions create terror that doesn't make most war terrorism
How are all acts of war not “intentionally creating a state of terror?”
i think there are internationally recognized lawful terminology that several institutions and countries recognize that permit the use of "act of war" and "terrorism". but at any given time a country _does_ act of war/terrorism, they likely would deny claims of terrorism if it was recognized as terrorism by said institutions.