Paul Breen: Israel's new warfare raises global concern

What Lebanon is now experiencing is literally a meeting of the Old Testament and new technologies.

This began with what was undoubtedly a smart move in military terms. Out of the blue, Israeli secret services orchestrated the detonation of a series of handheld pagers that were in the possession of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia Islamist political group.

This wasn’t just a huge physical blow to a movement that fancies itself as capable of fighting Israel on the ground. It was also a major psychological blow, further reinforced by the killing of several military commanders in a targeted drone strike a few days later.

Probably, a great many people would accept the mantra that ‘if you live by the sword, you can expect to die by the sword.’

In war, including those that are unjust, the killing of combatants is par for the course. But in these battles, in the pictures we’ve seen in the past week or so, very often it’s civilians bearing the brunt of the high-tech terror.

Worst of all, children are suffering punishment for acts they had no part in. In Gaza, approximately 14,000 children have died so far. An estimated 33 children died in Israel during the October 7 massacre.

Under the mathematics of an eye for an eye, that’s a ratio of around 424 Arab eyes for every Israeli eye.

Strangely though it’s not the Arabs who have been the ones left blind. Instead, it’s western politicians and media outlets who see no evil or hear no evil, whilst speaking straight off a script that might as well have been written by the Israeli government.

Those who are acting this way are completely betraying the idea of western values about rule of law and the sanctity of the nation-state. The West now publicly and unashamedly applies one rule for its friends and another for its enemies. Maybe it always did this but now it is making absolutely no secret about it.

One rule for Putin and Xi, but another for Netanyahu. It’s that simple but sadly there’s probably going to be a price to pay for this further down the line.

Israel is opening a can of worms not just in the traditional sense of the expression. What it is also doing is creating circumstances for high-tech malware to become a part of warfare.

To begin with, it looked as if the Israeli Secret Services had actually been sophisticated enough to hack into Hezbollah’s pagers and cause batteries to overheat, overriding safety mechanisms.

Later it emerged that the devices were compromised.

But in targeting everyday gadgets in this way, the rules of war have been compromised too. More and more, it seems that civilians are now fair game in warfare for nation-states, where once these actions were the terrain of those we call terrorists.

Worst of all, by shifting the boundaries of what’s acceptable, nation-states risk losing the legitimacy to call out terror. Recently, on X, I saw someone challenge a famous TV broadcaster who had praised the Israeli forces for their cunning and their ingenuity.

A simple question was posed. What happens if someone on the ‘other’ side at some point decides to remotely hack and detonate a series of devices packed into suitcases on an aeroplane in midair?

And what if that becomes so easy to do in a high-tech future that every time we get into a plane, we’re really gambling with our lives.

Last weekend when at a soccer match in London, I was thinking about the horrors of this. Imagine a world where, for example, somebody could hack into people’s phones as they’re using a popular website such as BBC Sports Results on a Saturday. Imagine the absolute carnage if they were able to detonate our devices out of the blue in the way Israel blew up the ‘Hezbollah’ pagers. We would call it what it is – terrorism.

Even if this had purely been fighters in a paramilitary group, it still wouldn’t have been ethical because it happened in someone else’s territory.

It’s as bad as Putin attacking Kiev in the name of tough love to protect the Russian speakers in the Donbas.

And by allowing Israel’s attacks to continue in the name of self-defence, we’re hardly showing much of a moral example for states such as Russia to follow. I say ‘we’ here because I imagine that when someone in Palestine or Lebanon sees western bombs raining down on them, they see all of ‘us’ as being equally culpable.

Sure why wouldn’t they? Isn’t that the logic Israel has also used to collectively punish hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas attack? It’s the same bloody-minded logic as that of the terrorists who blew up their rucksacks on the London Underground in 2005 or at the Manchester Arena in 2017.

Kids at an Ariana Grande concert should not have been military targets. Nor should innocent passengers on their way to work on a summer’s day. We shouldn’t live in a society where ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ slip so easily off the lips of those who would defend bombing civilians in the name of political causes.

Right now, the world seems to be in a very dangerous place and it’s going to get even more dangerous if the remote hacking of smart devices ever comes to pass. Imagine what the world would be like if we reached a stage where unannounced blasts could come from the everyday devices we use – televisions, fridges, baby monitors, and the smartphones we carry around in our pockets or hold so close to our faces.

Having studied my PhD in Educational Technology, I’d rather that today’s technologies were put to better purposes than that. They should be used as tools for advancing the development of our species, not for creating such high-tech weapons that one day soon, the human race is going to blast itself back to the Stone Age.

For all of Israel’s military brilliance, the present tactics of scorching the grounds of their enemies by any means possible might not turn out so smart in the long run.