It has not been difficult to work my head around this week’s pager bomb attacks. Israeli agents compromised the supply chain of the Gold Apollo pagers used by Hezbollah, planting small quantities of PETN explosive in about 4,000 units. When the detonation signal was sent on Tuesday and Thursday, many of the pagers exploded (not all were in use or turned on at the time), killing 37 people and maiming almost 3,000.

It was an indiscriminate attack. Although the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service) had been planning the operation for more than a decade it was, by definition, arbitrary and un-aimed. There was no way that the Mossad could have known in whose hands the pagers would have been; although they were ordered by and supplied to Hezbollah, it would have been nigh impossible to account exactly for the location of each one.

Hezbollah had been distributing the devices to its cadres for almost two years, and a lot can happen in that time. Who sold a pager on eBay? Who lent it to a spouse, friend, or a child? Who was standing at a Beirut street corner when it detonated? Who was riding a bus or a taxi? This kind of attack is indiscriminate by definition. The weapons are not aimed, and they arrive in the street by any number of circumstances beyond the control of attacker. It is for this reason that the US Central Intelligence Agency (itself hardly a paragon of virtue) has been loath to employ such tactics.

And it is what makes the attacks this week acts of terrorism.

It is difficult to understand what the State of Israel’s strategic, or even tactical aims were. Even four thousand pagers loaded with a few grams of explosive all going off at once – or twice as it turned out – could hardly have stopped Hezbollah in its tracks, nor could it have targeted senior commanders and officials since the attack was not actually targeted in any way. Indeed, the dead and injured included children, healthcare workers, shopkeepers, and teachers. It is difficult to imagine how maiming and killing them makes the State of Israel any safer.

The attack only makes sense as an act of “counting coup” meant to demonstrate the State of Israel’s power to strike at any time and place and to sow fear in Hezbollah’s ranks, and among Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. It had no military value; at best, it was “propaganda by deed” and rhetoric by violence. In short, it was a terrorist attack.

The State of Israel and its proxies and apologists around the world claim that the attack, however strategically gratuitous, was made in the context of the ongoing, mostly low-intensity conflict between Hezbollah and the State of Israel across its northern border, and that made it a an “act of war” rather than garden variety terrorism. But if it was an act of war, then it was certainly a war crime.

It boggles the mind that something as savage and barbaric as war is governed by rules, but it is. Ideas of what constitutes a “Just War” – a conflict fought for legitimate and justifiable reasons – have a history going back millennia and were explicitly embodied, by the 18th century, in the principle of Jus ad bellum.[i] In the last two centuries, the Laws of War have been elaborated in a series of international treaties, the best-known of which are the Genevan Conventions.

These Laws of War set specific limits on what a belligerent power is allowed to do without facing sanction and prosecution for war crimes, and even if these prosecutions are rare, they do establish the standards that “civilized nations” are expected to meet. The Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949 and signed by 196 countries, including the State of Israel, prohibits the intentional targeting of civilians, the use of enemy civilians in slave labor, and the settlement of occupied territories by an occupying power.

Since 1949, the Fourth Geneva Convention has been amended with a number of protocols. Part of Protocol I is worth quoting in full:

Article 57 — Precautions in attack

1. In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects.

2. With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:

a) those who plan or decide upon an attack shall:

(i) do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection but are military objectives within the meaning of paragraph 2 of Article 52 and that it is not prohibited by the provisions of this Protocol to attack them;

ii) take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects;

iii) refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

b) an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one or is subject to special protection or that the attack may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

c) effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.

To be fair, the State of Israel has never signed or ratified Protocol I, but Lebanon, Palestine, and the Islamic Republic of Iran have. And the State of Israel’s failure to sign – in the company of the United States and North Korea – only demonstrates its well-known disinclination to be held to the standards of “civilized nations.”

Israelis collectively have nothing but contempt for international law, and their government’s policies have embodied that attitude again and again since 1948.[ii] In a 2018 submission to its own Supreme Court, the Israeli government explicitly stated that “the Knesset [the Israeli parliament] may ignore directives of international law in any area it pleases,” and this is an attitude widely shared by almost every Israeli with whom I have been acquainted.

Israeli apologists, the Zionist movement, and its proxies worldwide invariably declare that the State of Israel has been engaged in a decades-long war with Palestinian terrorists who do not follow the rules, so why should they? Benjamin Netanyahu famously claimed that Palestinians collectively, and Palestinian militias like Hamas in particular, were “wild beasts” so, the reasoning goes, that entitles Israelis to behave like wild beasts themselves; “dog bites man so man bites dog,” as it were.

However, Israelis are highly selective about the international laws that it is willing to disregard; when the State of Israel perceives itself as being victimized it is always willing – nay, eager – to appeal to “international norms.” And it seems (in fact is) deeply hypocritical for a state whose legal legitimacy, indeed its whole existence, rests on a positive act of international law.

A generous reading would say that Israelis have been brutalized through years of terrorist attacks, so they and their Zionist proxies’ willingness to excuse the State of Israel’s criminal behavior is a product of trauma. But that is patently false, both morally and legally. Besides, the State of Israel, with Israelis’ and Zionists’ full endorsement, has been employing terrorism since before it even existed. It is a state whose values are deeply rooted in terrorism and the celebration of terrorists as national role models.

Pre-independence Zionist paramilitaries like the Irgun and Lehi proudly assumed the label of terrorist, and they were arrested, imprisoned, and often executed under British laws as terrorists alongside Palestinian Arab terrorists in Mandatory Palestine. They are such heroes in the State of Israel today that there are towns and boulevards named after the assassins of the UN official Count Folke Bernadotte and the bombers of the King David Hotel throughout the country. A vast monument to these terrorists in Ramat Gan is a pilgrimage site on national holidays.

Even after the 1948 war and the massacres at Deir Yassin and elsewhere, the State of Israel made frequent raids across its borders with its neighbors and across the “Green Line” into the West bank. The bombings of Jewish properties in Baghdad in 1951 was a Mossad-sponsored false-flag operation intended to make Iraqi Jews feel insecure in order to encourage them to emigrate to the State of Israel. A similar operation in Egypt in 1954 led by the Mossad operative Eli Cohen (the most celebrated spy in Israeli history) almost brought down the Israeli government in the Lavon Affair.

And what else can one call Operation Wrath of God, in which Mossad death squads secretly hunted down the PLO terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich Massacre, violating the sovereignty of countries around the world but terrorism? One might have no sympathy for the Munich murderers, but can anyone really call the murder of four bystanders, including a German nun in a Mossad car bombing anything other than terrorism? Those murders were also committed on the streets of Beirut.

Terrorism is the State of Israel’s business; it is founded upon terrorism and has been governed by former terrorists and their ideological heirs for most of its history. Menachem Begin, who planned the King David Hotel Bombing, was a terrorist who somehow dodged a British noose, and so was Yitzhak Shamir who ordered the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte; Netanyahu’s Likud party is the direct descendant of the Irgun.

The State of Israel’s whole existence is based on terrorism and a craven contempt for the rule of law. The indiscriminate killing and maiming of thousands for no strategic or tactical gain is nothing more than business-as-usual.

It is not difficult to call it for what it most manifestly is: Terrorism.

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[i] The State of Israel’s war on Hezbollah (not to mention the rape of Gaza) does not even meet the standard of Jus ad Bellum, which requires, among other things, that the war be a last resort, proportional, and formally declared.

[ii] It is unfair to characterize Israelis as a whole in this way, as there is a small minority of dissenting political leaders, journalists, and private citizens who appeal to international law and treaty obligations in their criticism of their government. But, in a hegemonic sense, it is fair to say that Israelis, collectively, are contemptuous of both international law and global opinion.

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