One of the few universal rules with no known exceptions is that the surefire way to get wall-to-wall coverage of your conflict is to have the Jews as your enemy. A real genocide in western China or in Ethiopia can never compete with an imaginary one invented by Westerners to tarnish Israel’s reputation.
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE -- But there’s another reason to prefer Israel as your enemy in battle, as the current war demonstrates.
Over the weekend, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a feature on Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in September, in which thousands of Israeli-detonated beepers held by Hezbollah operatives exploded simultaneously.
“Using dummies, Mossad conducted tests with the pager in a padded glove to calibrate the grams of explosive needed to be just enough to hurt the fighter, but not the person next to him,” Lesley Stahl says as viewers see a demonstration of such a test on the screen.
It’s no surprise that the plot, which unfolded over a number of years and required creating and marketing a new product and then enticing Hezbollah to buy it, was precise in every detail. “Mossad also tested these ringtones to find a sound urgent enough to compel someone to take it out of their pocket,” Stahl reports, as a medley of beeper tunes plays. “And they tested how long it takes a person to answer a pager—on average, seven seconds.”
But the fact that that precision included shielding civilians from thousands of blasts miles away is remarkable. As security-camera footage of some of the pager explosions shows on the screen, Stahl says: “Watch the man on the left. Those standing next to him were unscathed.”
This level of care and precision was on display in late July as well. When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by an explosive device planted in his room in Tehran, his next-door neighbor—the head of fellow Gazan terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad—was unharmed.
The salient point is that this care is standard practice for Israel. On the same day that CBS ran its feature on the pager plot, Jewish News Syndicate published a story by Yaakov Lappin on how Israeli military planners have rearranged aid routes into Gaza to help the convoys avoid looters.