Smoke Signals

On September 17 and 18, a wave of explosions swept across Lebanon, killing dozens of people, injuring thousands, and precipitating what we now understand to be the sixth Israeli invasion of that country. Unlike the previous five, however, this invasion did not begin with fire raining down from the sky. Instead, death came from the implements of daily life: pagers, walkie-talkies, and solar panel systems, which exploded simultaneously. Much has been made by Israeli and Western media over the supposed “decapitation” of Hezbollah, ignoring that the vast majority of those killed and injured were civilians. But this attack has also made something clear to the rest of the world: Zionism will sacrifice or destroy anything to impose its will in the Middle East, up to and including the liberal values of dialogue that it claims to profess. In so doing, it has demonstrated that it never truly believed in dialogue in the first place.

The fact that the pager attacks mostly killed civilians has been ignored in the media using circular logic: The attack was targeted since the IOF says only Hezbollah was killed, and we know only Hezbollah was killed because the IOF says the attack was targeted. Thus, the pagers represent to supporters of Israel proof that the IOF and Mossad are the “most moral army in the world.” Through sheer technical ingenuity, they devised an attack that was surgical and purely in response to Hezbollah’s rockets. However, these bombs in plain sight demonstrate Israel’s permanent commitment to war against not just Hamas or Hezbollah, but against all Palestinian and Lebanese people.

This attack was clearly a long time in the making: Israel planted the first explosive-laden walkie-talkies in Lebanon almost a decade ago in 2015, well before the current stage of the genocide began; Israeli officials began planning the pager plot in 2022, a year before October 7th. These booby-trapped devices lay in wait for years among the Lebanese population, circulating through the economy and eventually exploding in the hands of medical workers, children, and thousands of others who had the temerity to exist near a pager or radio.

Despite what Israeli and American politicians like Netanyahu, Biden, and Harris say about “working tirelessly towards a ceasefire,” massacres like the pager attack reveal their true intentions. There can be no ceasefire when Israel’s genocidal campaign extends beyond the military realm to the very technologies that form the basis of modern society. Israel is not just waging war from its military bases across the border; it is doing so — or could be — from every Lebanese person’s pocket, every Lebanese home, and every Lebanese hospital. The means of communication have quite literally gone up in smoke, taking lives with them, and Israel has a history of murdering the people it’s supposed to be negotiating with: it killed Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas official in charge of negotiations with Israel over the war in Gaza, in July and soon after the pager attacks, the Zionist entity assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, killing and injuring hundreds along with him. This time, Israel abandoned the falsehood that their strike was surgical.

Harvard and other Western supporters of Israel employ the language of “civil discourse” to solve the “crisis in the Middle East,” or, more accurately, to wash their hands of it. As the University never fails to remind us, we are part of an institution that values “discourse” and “open inquiry.” But what discourse or dialogue is open to Palestinians, Lebanese, and all others who are oppressed by colonial and imperial regimes? On whose terms, with whom, and how?

“Discourse” and “dialogue” are empty terms when Israel has weaponized the tools meant to enable them. At the beginning of the 21st century, telecommunications were supposed to set us free, but Israel has put the final nail in the coffin of that idea. By hijacking the modern supply chains that all nations depend on, Israel has transformed methods of communication into means of control. And it has turned Lebanon into a society fearful of communication: a land where any device that connects to the outside world could bring death at any time for no reason at all. Israel has proven that it does not simply seek to defeat Hezbollah but to destroy Lebanon. Zionism has chosen the outcome: eternal war in the north until its collapse.