The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Israel's pager attacks have changed the rules of war

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. Today's show is all about Israel's pager and walkie talkie attacks on Hezbollah members in Lebanon. Rudyard argues that you can't continuously fire rockets at civilian neighbourhoods in northern Israel without expecting a response. But Hezboallah is not Hamas: its army has a vast and sophisticated weapons arsenal that has the potential to overwhelm Israel's defense capabilities. Janice and Rudyard disagree over Iran's level of influence over Hamas and Hezbollah. Are they puppets of Tehran, or partners with similar objectives? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice discuss the long term global ramifications of using this type of advanced technology in warfare. How does international law apply? Both worry that in the age of AI, civilian infrastructure has become part of the battlefield and anybody with access to code can weaponise everything from our phones to our fridges. To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few. simple clicks, triple W the monk debates.com. Look for the Friday focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the monk

debates. I'm joined by Janice Gross Stein today on the 20th of of September, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Well, Janice, it was another one of those weeks, wasn't it? Oh. Where months, I don't know, years of history, kind of compress and snap like tectonic plates, and boom, we find ourselves in a new reality. So I think we gotta spend today's show

talking about what's happening in Israel, in Lebanon, It looks, Janice, like we are in the opening phases of what would this be, the third Lebanon war that we've seen in our lifetimes. It certainly does look like that. Roger, there's one signal that I would have expected to see by now, and I have not. Let me tell you quickly what that is. Usually when you knock out communications networks, which is, sanitized way of describing what happened in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday. If Israel were going to launch a war, it would have done so by Thursday morning. You go in under, you seize the advantage that that tactical surprise creates. They haven't done it.

So I'm holding back. Are we on the verge of the long. weird escalation. Certainly, if you listened to Galant, the Minister of Defense, he said, we are moving forces north. We are changing this situation. Nostrella gave a speech in which he said, what Israel did amounts to all that war, but did not say we are now ready for war. So it is Friday morning as we do this. The escalation I thought would have happened by now has actually not happened. So just to put some pieces together, some clues here.

We have the 98th Division, which is the elite paratrooper and command of division now moved from Gaza to the northern border. Right. They've been followed by the Galani Battalion, which is, sorry, division. I mean, we're talking 10 to 20,000 troops in each division. This is another kind of crack combat division. So that has been redeployed to the north and is on the border. Israeli tanks have been cited on the border. Netanyahu has provided a briefing to President Herzog,

which normally only happens in the context of a major security development, i.e. something of the scale or significance of a war. And unfortunately, in the last 24 hours, we've continued to see large-scale strikes by either side last night a significant Israeli aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon and various other points. In Lebanon, destroying upwards allegedly 100 different rocket launchers, over 1,000 rockets potentially destroyed.

in the reply this morning, at least overnight here in Canada time, has been approaching now 200 rockets fired from Lebanon into northern Israel. So I don't know, Janice, I guess you put this all together. And if it's not war in terms of a formal declaration, it certainly has, you know, the features of something that's very close to what you might normally describe as all out conflict. You're certainly right, Roger, and looking at those two key things you identified are really important here. That's what I was looking at, too, the movement of the 98th Division to the North and the Golani Brigade, which is forward-leaning combat-ready forces. And they're deployed along the border. And, you know, in Israel's case, because it has a small draft army, it can't really deploy forces and leave them there for a very long time. So you look at that, I would have expected, frankly, they would have gone by now.

And so they have not. How much of this then is signaling we are on the verge of war? because the goal here is to get the crack Hispola forces to pull back from the border. This is fundamentally about those 90,000 civilians that have been displaced now for 11 months. And that was added officially by the cabinet as a war objective. They went out of their way to signal that as well. So you're seeing everything in place for ground invasion, which is really what this will be about if it escalates and yet it hasn't happened. Is this the last chance at the very last moment to allow for that withdrawal of Hezbollah forces so that they no longer threaten the border town?

That's the critical issue. And it has been, by the way, we should say, rather that has been an issue since I've been. October the 8th, Galant was ready to order a ground invasion on October the 8th. Right after Hamas attacked, President Biden and U.S. officials really went all out to restrain Israel and succeeded in doing that. They did not want a regional war. They did not want a two-front war. and if you speak to senior military analysts today, they think they made a mistake because that population has not been able to go back to the northern borders.

And as one quite astute journalist, to put it, Israel has frankly shrunk insights as a result. So this is clearly the most unstable status quo you could imagine. Yeah, and I guess trying to understand the position that Hezbollah is in, and we'll talk about it in the back half of the show, this remarkable pager and walkie-talkie attacks. I want to get into the kind of ethics of war with you and what these types of attacks do, but we'll do that with our donors after our midbreak. But to wrap up this section, I guess it seems, Janice, both parties are in impossible positions here. I mean, if Hezbollah was to withdraw to the Latani River, I mean, it would be a massive humiliation and capitulation on their part. It would be, in a sense, to acknowledge that their entire supposed threat, deterrence, everything that Iran has invested now decades in to build in Beirut and southern Lebanon is really a paper tiger.

and this would fall right on the backs, again, of these, you know, disastrous and humiliating pager and walkie-talkie kind of battery attack. So it doesn't surprise me that, you know, Hezbo overnight and into today is now continuing to rocket up over 200 missiles into northern Israel. And Janice, I think as Secretary Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, other top American officials have pointed out, This is simply unacceptable. I mean, you cannot expect a country like Israel that has a civilian population to defend with 100,000 people displaced from these communities permanently, seemingly now, for over a year with no hope of return. And a designated international terrorist group, heavily armed, belligerent, continuing to attack and rocket your

northern communities. I mean, what options does Israel have other than to cross the border, to have a war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, force them back to the, I assume, the Latani River, which is the internationally agreed UN-sanctioned demarcation line for military forces in Lebanon, which has been serially violated for years by Hezbollah with the tacit permission of the Lebanese state. So again, I just, no one wants a war. No one would want to see this conflict widen outside of Gaza, but it just seems as if A, Israel is in an absolutely impossible position, and Hezbollah is unebable, unim willing to. contemplate the rational thing to do, which would be to withdraw, to acknowledge the United Nations

resolutions on the Latani River as the demarcation line, and to stop shelling, you know, and rocketing civilian cities in northern Israel because they want to kill Jews. Well, as well as objective here has been to do everything it can to distract the the Israeli army, to divert the Israeli army from fighting in Gaza without escalating to a full-scale war. That's what this has been about rendered for 11 months, literally short of a year. The way out for them, and they made it very, very clear, was a ceasefire in Gaza. They effectively were a silent partner to a ceasefire in Gaza, and they said so repeatedly. They would ceasefire as soon as there was a ceasefire in Gaza.

it is clear that those ceasefire talks are so badly bogged down that frankly they may never happen at all. And the key driver here in the United States, particularly in Biden administration, is losing heart. Not only are they losing heart, they're being damaged by their leadership in these talks because they appear weak and effectual, unable to get it done. And I think, frankly, that effort has just. run its course. They're going through the motions, but there's no real momentum or dynamism. That's what puts Hispola now in the jam that it is in, that it does not want to be in. Because Nostrala understands very well what will happen to civilian infrastructure inside southern Lebanon if this war escalates. The other side of this is what will happen to the civilian infrastructure inside northern Israel, if this war escalates.

Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles. If this war does escalate, it's very likely it will overwhelm Israel's wanted air defense, and there will be civilian casualties. That's why both sides have been playing this cat and mouse game, moving literally up to the edge, but not going over. I think we're in the final minutes of this, frankly, but I am surprised that that ground division, I thought once I saw what happened on Tuesday, that this was, if what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Patriot attacks, if that had been part of a strategy rather than just a tactical win, there would have been a ground invasion immediately falling. It's really surprising that it's not happened to that. Yeah, I mean, it could be, there are reports that there were Hesbala operatives who were cluing.

into the fact that these devices were at risk and therefore maybe the timing of the explosion of the devices to when troops and others were, you know, ready to deploy, did not exactly sink up. I just want to make just a final observation because I think we need to be careful when we talk about Hezbollah in as in the first person. I mean, should we not, Janice just acknowledge that Hezbollah takes orders from Tehran. Hezbollah has been created. by Tehran. It is a basically it's an insurance policy against Israeli and other strikes on Iran's nuclear program. All those thousands of missiles are basically there to stop in Israeli attack on a tance and other key facilities, nuclear facilities in Iran. It's a deterrent. It's a deterrent capacity

that Iran has deployed into Lebanon holding the Lebanese people and the Lebanese state hostage to the Iranian Empire. It is the worst example of how Iran as a malignant actor in the region has basically taken over another sovereign state, Lebanon, and turned it into a forward operating base for its proxy army to torment, attack and undermine the state of Israel. So I'm just not so sure that, you know, we can constantly talk about, you know, Israel this and Hezbollah this and Hamas that and Israel this, without acknowledging that what this really is Iran is maybe the second phase of an Israel-Iran war that began last October 7th. See, I don't agree with that.

And this is chapter two. This is chapter two of that war. The invasion by Hamas into southern. Israel was facilitated and enabled solely because Iran had backed Hamas for over a decade and had weaponized them and weaponized Gaza purposely. Second, they followed exactly the same strategy in Lebanon but on a larger scale. And understandably, Israelis are not going to move back into these communities in the north after October 7th with Hezbollah fighters, you know, one mile from their border committed to their destruction, murder, and death of the type that was perpetuated on the residents of southern Israel by Hamas. I mean, again, we're asking Israel for unacceptable things that no other state, especially

the United States, would ever accept in terms of the undermining of the security, the threatening of their civilian centers, all by designated international terrorist. terrorist groups. Let's remember that. That's what Hezbollah is. That's what Hamas is. These are not legitimate state actors by any shape, form, or definition that we can possibly come up with. So much in there, Roger, that I, at least three things to unblock. And we don't have time for that. But let me just say unequivocally, I think it is a mistake to see Hamas and Hezbollah as puppets of Iran with Iran pulling the strings and giving the orders and saying yes or no.

Let's just remember, Hamas attacked and did not tell Iran in advance that it was doing so, right? Iran was surprised. Iran funds these organizations, but they have a lot of autonomy in the decisions that they make. There is one key demand in exchange for the funding that Iran gives Lebanon. If there were to be an attack on Iran by Israel against Iran's nuclear installation, that's when you get involved. That's the deal. Short of that,

Nisrella has autonomy. And we've seen it over and over that they have that autonomy and that they exercise it. And we get it fundamentally wrong if we see this as a puppet show with Iran pulling all the strings. It's a network.

It's not, generally speaking, I don't know, I know. And it's a really important. kind of a lied Iran's moral culpability in this. I mean, why are all these Iranian generals getting killed in Lebanon? What are they doing there? Are they there for tea and cookies?

No, they're planning and enabling Hezbollah to smuggle weapons into the West Bank to kill Jews. I mean, this is- Roger, we are not talking about moral culpability right this moment. We are talking about whether Nostrallah decides to launch thousands of rockets over the border into Israel. He's not able to do that without the permission of Iran. No, I don't agree with that. And I also don't.

He cannot go to war with Israel on a large scale and degrade that deterrent for Israel to attack Iran's nuclear program without Iran's permission. Iran will never let them do that. They own them, lock, stock and barrel. So there's a profound. disagreement here and how do we know how could we resolve this disagreement the only way we can't by the way is to get the best possible intercepted communications that we can in the discussions between the Iranians and Haswell you're quite right there are Iranian and it's which generals is it it's not Iranian generals it's the Al Quds expeditionary force that forward leaning element of the Republican guards that travels between between, you know, Iraq, where it's very, very active, Hezbollah and also Hamas, coordinates, development of weapons, finance, all of this. But they all have, the Iraqis the least, the other two have real autonomy in making decisions

about when and if they go to war. You could have said that about Hamas. Look, my fundamental point is that Hamas and Hasbalah and the Houthis and the militia groups in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere would not be the threat that they are today to the state of Israel if it wasn't for Iran. That's different. We agree on that point, though. We agree on that point. Yes, we do because they get money and they're and they get assistance with weapons development.

But to see them as deprived of any autonomy on making decisions about whether they've gone to war. On the big decisions of going to war, that is when Hezbollah has a short leash and it's yanked from. yanked by the mullahs in Tehran? Well, there's two ways of looking at that short leash. First of all, that argument does not apply to Hamas. We have proof because Sin War went to war without asking Iran's permission. And Iran was surprised as anybody else. So we know that.

Secondly, on a decision to go to war or not, Nostrala doesn't want to go to war because he's lived it, he's seen it, and he knows the consequences. And he knows that it could destroy Hisbalah, not only because of what Israel would do, but because in Lebanon there's zero tolerance for another war that Hisbalah will start with Israel. The bigger question is, how far, how close to the line does Estrella go? How big a risk does he run before this thing goes over the edge? And again and again, he's back on.

200 more missiles over the border. That's small. Believe it or not. Small, there's thousands of missiles. There's two dozen Israelis who've been killed in the north, civilians and soldiers that have been murdered by this terrorist group. If you have an arsenal of 150,000 missiles, 200, the Israelis read the signals very clearly.

200 is not the beginning of a war. But it's not putting your arms down. It's not backing off. after the pager attack. No, of course they're not going to back off. So Israel should just accept this indefinitely, a completely destabilized northern border, tens of thousands of citizens never ever able to return to their homes.

They should just assume that this is the new fate of complete, that they've effectively lost sovereignty over large sections of the north of the country. I think whether Israel should accept this or not, that's a different argument than these regimes being puppets, of Iran. Israel, that's what I said, has been struggling this since October the 8th. Since October the 8th, they wanted to go in and push Hezbollah rocket launchers

and the forces that run those rocket launchers back and the key expeditionary force that Isbala has. And the pressure's been building fundamentally relative, you know, the offensive operations and offensive forces have been pulled out of Gaza. They are in a hold and raid operation there. This has been coming for a year almost, and I frankly would expect it, after what I saw on Tuesday, that the Israeli forces would go on the ground

to do exactly what you just described. They haven't. And I think the reason for the hold, it's not a deployment issue. They're all deployed. The cabinet authorized this. The reason they don't is like Hezbollah, they recognize this is a war that nobody wins if it starts. No winners here, just losers.

Well, my bet is that Hezbollah, like Hamas, is going to be turned out to be a paper tiger. And that these organizations are incompetent, poorly manned, have abysmal technology, as we saw in this devastating pager attack. And it seems like on these sorties of the IDF over southern Lebanon, they're taking out thousands of rocket launcher tubes in a single night. So again, there may be a big difference between the rhetoric of people like Nessarala and Sinwar and the reality of what these, these quote, fighting forces, close quote, actually are. Unfortunately, we may find out in the coming weeks.

We're going to take a quick break, come back fast on the other side and just talk a little bit about this pager attack because I want to put a kind of ethical, moral question to you and get your response. And we'll have that exclusively for our paid donors right after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com. click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents an episode, and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content.

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