Collateral

Moral confusion | Israel responds to Hezbollah

When news of Hezbollah pagers exploding all over Lebanon began appearing on my phone, I had a typically Jewish response.

“How are they—the big They—going to turn this into something Jews around the world must apologise for?”

Gone are the days since They was a word that might have represented a dignified and respectable political or philosophical adversary. Gone are the days when I might have asked myself whether or not They and I might be able to reach some kind of compromise on something or rather, as today’s They are not capable of compromise. They aren’t members of another political party, some other defined by an alternate conception of liberty or labour.

The They that concerns me most are the cohort of Australians who, like Adam Bandt and The Greens, refused to condemn Hamas in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

‘They’ are the terribly vocal hoard of agitators—who through misunderstanding, propaganda, ignorance, and colonial shame, all tied together with antisemitism—have united in order to insist upon Jewish statelessness.

The trouble, for me—someone who thrives in any given opportunity to debate—is that there is simply no reasoning with the unreasonable. They start the conversation from a place unfathomable to most Jews: that the Jews should not have their own state, and that the devastating effect that the creation of the state of Israel has had on the Palestinian people is grounds for the annulment of a Jewish state.

Antizionism—unlike criticism of Israel, which should be welcomed— is hard to reason with as it assumes that should there have been no creation of Israel, the world would be a better place.

And so this morning, They began the day by referring to an ‘Israeli terrorist attack’ as ‘marking a dangerous new chapter in global terrorism’. Some posts insisted that doctors and medical staff held these pagers and that Israel was committing war crimes by targeting hospitals, etc.

Their posts failed to mention that the attack solely targeted Hezbollah militants and that this was a response to 8000 rockets having been fired into Israel over the past 11 months.

They did, however, mention the killing of two Lebanese children, 9 and 11, in what would have otherwise been an unprecedentedly humanitarian military response.

I spent the day distracted by memes and the responses of some of the more comically insane people online. I found myself wrestling with the death of these children, only to be dismissed by some part of me more caught up in trawling through antisemitic shrieking on the internet.

Later in the day I posted the music video to ‘Blowin’ Up My Pager’ (1995) by Smooth, the lyrics played across the screen:

[Chorus]
It's gettin' kinda major, he's blowin' up my
He's blowin' up my pager, you know, you know, beep, beep
It's gettin' kinda major, he's blowin' up my
He's blowin' up my pager, you know, you know

[Verse 1]
You call me up, I know you would
Page me with your code when you're all alone, mmm, alone
Your essence got me runnin' to the phone, the phone
So when you're takin' care of business, one page will let me know

The track is as 90s as it gets. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think twice when posting it. But I felt no doubt in my mind that targeting terrorists using their pagers while having a civilian casualty rate closer to 0 than ever before was worth celebrating. It felt like this was the closest to a ‘win’ one might be able to get in the Middle East.

Having just lived through 11 months of people I’ve known for decades openly celebrating October 7, excusing Hamas, and calling for the retroactive annulment of Israel—the world’s first ever Indigenous land-back operation—I’ll admit that perhaps I’ve become a little desensitised to horror, and a little accustomed to the kind of amoral gaze so emboldened by a movement that refers to rape as ‘resistance’, or dead children under rubble as ‘collateral’.

I might have done what so many of my peers so disgracefully did on October 7 and consigned the death of an innocent child to ‘collateral’. Be it 1200 dead or 2 dead, there’s nothing to laugh at.

And so while the death of 2 children looms over the Mossad operation against Hezbollah, it’s not just insensitive to make light of the attack right now, but it’s bad for the soul. It’s bad for my soul. I am grateful for the two friends of mine who compelled me to think more deeply about the implications of turning an operation against thousands of terrorists—an operation that also killed a child—into something that might also be rendered comical.

Like I said, when news of Hezbollah pagers exploding all over Lebanon began appearing on my phone, I had a typically Jewish response.

“How are They going to turn this into something Jews around the world must apologise for?”

All they had to do was show me who I don’t want to be, and all I had to do was forget.

Jews around the world have nothing to apologise for. But today, I do. I shared music in celebration of the Mossad’s targeting of Hezbollah terrorists, as though somehow the success or the justifiability of this operation could overshadow the deaths of children.

Today I am feeling particularly repulsed by the word collateral. While collateral might technically be the correct word for those killed, the truth is that we are talking about dead children.