‘Dinah’s Revenge’: Israelis Interpret Unconventional Strike on Hezbollah in Explicitly Biblical Terms

The terrorists are now terrified. A day after pagers used by the Iran-backed Lebanese terror group Hezbollah exploded, Hezbollah’s handheld radios exploded, too, killing at least 25 and wounding 450 (the first wave of blasts killed 12 and injured nearly 2,800). Some reports indicate that other electronics used by Hezbollah, such as solar energy systems and computers, also exploded, leaving the terrorists to wonder if any electronic device is now safe. Israel followed up with airstrikes on Hezbollah positions on Friday.

The pinprick attack seems to be the result of a years-long Mossad infiltration campaign, whereby Israel actually manufactured the bomb-laden handheld devices purchased by Hezbollah. The pagers bore the logo of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, which sub-contracted the manufacturing to Hungarian company B.A.C. Consulting, which in turn appeared to be a shell company created by Israeli intelligence, according to The New York Times. All of this was in response to Hezbollah’s decision to invest in low-tech pagers to evade Israel’s high-tech communications surveillance.

Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, refuted the claim, made by Israel’s enemies and parroted by Western media, that Israel’s actions risk escalating the current conflict. “It’s been a regional war. It’s been a seven-front war that Iran has been waging against Israel through all of its proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and from Iran itself,” she said. “The question just becomes, how are the different fronts going to develop?”

“In Lebanon, we’ve seen a massive escalation in the missile attacks on Israel by Hezbollah over the past couple of weeks, where we’ve been seeing over 100 missiles shot into Israel a day,” Glick explained on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “The landscape has changed over the past year in northern Israel because they’ve destroyed large swaths of our forests. … The people have been refugees. They’ve been out of their homes since mid-October. And when they get back, you’re going to have dozens and dozens of homes in their communities … That just no longer exist.”

The most significant phrase there is, “when they get back.” Israel’s seven-front war against Iran and its proxies will not be over until its citizens can return to their homes in peace, and that hasn’t happened yet. But Israel is contemplating what it would take to implement that vision.

“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told soldiers on Wednesday — apparently a new phase that will involve more aggressive operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“We’re not finished with Gaza,” but “we’re in a multi-front war. There’s nothing we can do about it,” Glick noted. “As a maneuver force, the Israel Defense Forces is quite small. So it means that you have to scale back your operations in Gaza in order to have the forces that you need in order to carry out a conventional battle in South Lebanon. … It’s a lot of juggling of the forces and trying to prevent exhaustion of the forces as well, and of our reservists.”

However, she added that “Israel’s economy is much stronger now than it was in previous wars, so that we’re able to withstand prolonged battles. But it’s very difficult and it demands a massive sacrifice from the people.”

“We have to win,” Glick insisted.

On this point, Israel’s critics disagree. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted that the pager attack “clearly and unequivocally violates international law.” This is a telling response to a targeted strike against only members of a terrorist group. “What could be more discriminating than the equivalent of an M80 going off in the pockets of terrorist operatives who were hand-selected by their own leadership? Footage of these devices going off indicates that even bystanders who were mere feet away from these explosions experienced little more than shock,” wrote National Review’s Noah Rothman.

“Of course, Israel’s detractors would object as vociferously to an incursion into Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River [out of what should be a demilitarized zone] as they have to Israel’s use of subterfuge to disable as many individual Hezbollah fighters as possible,” Rothman added. “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the problem Israel’s critics hope to remedy is Israel’s petulant insistence upon its own existence.”

Glick argued that Vice President Kamala Harris shares this view. “Kamala Harris has made very clear that, when she says she supports Israel’s right to defend itself, what she means is that she supports our ability to intercept missiles en route to Israel,” she said. “And, if we miss from time to time, well, you know, tough luck. But she does not support Israel defending itself by defeating its enemies.”

For Israel’s part, public resolve for victory and exhaustion with international criticism seem to have resulted in both a revival of gallows humor and “an extraordinary religious awakening,” as Glick described it. “Even in pop music, the songs that everybody’s singing, they all have biblical allusions. Many of them sound more like prayers than rock songs.”

“There was a lot of intolerance on the Left in the 10 months that preceded the invasion, where they were trying to banish Judaism from the public squares,” she said. “I don’t think that that could happen anymore. … People are realizing that what happened on October 7th happened because we’re Jewish. And, if we want to withstand this challenge to our survival, then we do it as Jews.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted “a stream of people … after these explosions took place, making references to biblical occurrences,” particularly to Genesis 34.

“It was very funny,” responded Glick. “You wouldn’t have seen this in the past, but I started getting on all these WhatsApp groups and seeing on Twitter everybody writing ‘Genesis 34’ and calling this campaign ‘Dinah’s Revenge.’”

In Genesis 34, a Canaanite prince named Shechem raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah (Genesis 34:2), an action the biblical account clearly condemns (Genesis 34:7). Jacob’s sons tricked the entire city into being circumcised (Genesis 34:13-17). “On the third day, when they were sore,” Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, slaughtered every male in the city (Genesis 34:25). Jacob prophetically condemned their disproportionate vengeance both then and later (Genesis 34:30, 49:5-7), but it did frighten the idolatrous Canaanites (Genesis 35:6) and foreshadow the future conquest of the land.

The episode bears a number of parallels to the recent Hezbollah explosions. On one level, an isolated Israel struck at thousands of national and religious enemies through an elaborate ruse. On a more subtle level, many of the exploding pagers, often kept in pants’ pockets or waistbands, resulted in leg injuries, suggesting that a substantial number of Hezbollah militants may been involuntarily circumcised or worse in the blasts.

Israel’s renewed interest in religion parallels that seen in the U.S. after 9/11. However, while vengeance is sometimes appropriate for a nation, the gleeful celebration of it is at odds with the spirit of the Torah, which commands that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

Israel’s spiritual restoration will not be complete until they recognize Jesus as their Messiah and experience true repentance and circumcision of the heart (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6). Through the prophet Zechariah, Yahweh foretold a time when “I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn” (Zechariah 12:10).

As spiritual descendants of Abraham, let us pray for God to fulfill this promise, that “the natural branches” may “be grafted back into their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24).