Nearly two weeks ago, the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah’s pagers triggered an aggressive, Israeli campaign to degrade the Islamist militia’s military capabilities. The unprecedented attack has provoked varying strong responses. For Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement, the attack was “one of the coolest warfare things we’ve ever seen.” He revealed his secret inner thoughts on the matter on Friday. “For all of us who just, like, wanted to be the international man of mystery and do covert things to destroy the bad guys, we’re like, ‘This is the best thing we’ve ever seen in our lives.’”

Competing Views

Yet, “as is the nature of everything in this conflict,” the operation also “had its critics,” he allowed on “Washington Watch” last week. Some people have complained that Israel — no one has officially taken credit, but everyone believes Israel was behind the detonations — “shouldn’t have done that, that [it] was careless. It was reckless. It was done with disregard for the potential risk to the lives of innocents,” as Backholm characterized the responses.

Even Christians have come to different conclusions about whether the pager attack was justified. Some are strongly on Israel’s side in the current conflict. Others, due to the unprecedented nature of the attack, aren’t sure what to think about it. Meanwhile, those with an instinctive revulsion to violence, which can be a healthy response in many situations, are primed to view any attack negatively, particularly if it runs the risk of collateral damage.

To make matters more complicated, the pager attack cannot be taken in isolation but rather in the context of the larger, years-long conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, on which people also hold differing opinions. Palestinian leaders “are propaganda geniuses,” argued David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview. They have learned how to successfully appeal to “people that are sympathetic to the so-called Palestinian cause that are really interested in this so-called settler-colonial ideology … which is just a form of identity politics.”

“There are a lot of very serious people saying things like, ‘Israel is in the process of committing a genocide,’” Backholm granted. When he interviews college students, he said, “every single time, someone will say, ‘Israel is a genocidal state. … That’s why we need to free Palestine.’”

“There are people here in the West who have clearly internalized that,” he continued. “And there is this psychological impact of, when you hear something said over and over and over and over again, eventually you come to wonder, ‘Well, maybe it’s actually true.’”

A Christian Response

“As Christians, how are we to view claims like these that Israel is the genocidal state?” asked Backholm. “How do you think Christians should think through this war of words, which is not merely a war of words?”

“Christians are the people that are committed to truth,” Closson responded. “We don’t want to just take Israel’s side automatically. We don’t want to take anyone’s side automatically, even our own government’s. But we want to look at the facts, to see how this lines up to the moral tradition.”

Christians “have been thinking about these questions deeply for literally millennia,” Closson explained, with a “tradition of just war theory” dating all the way back to the fourth-century theologian Augustine.

In particular, Closson outlined “two sets of factors” that Christian thinkers have considered. First, “What are the situations or the circumstances that justify going into war?” Second, “Once you’re in war, what are the just ways to actually wage war?”

As to the first question, Christian theologians have argued that “there has to be just cause. There has to be right intention,” Closson said. One implication of this is that there is “really no way to justify an offensive war. It has to be defensive.” Christians have also made stipulations regarding a just war, Closson listed: “War has to be waged by a legitimate authority. It should be a last resort. There also needs to be a reasonable chance of success.”

As to the second question, “We do wage war with discrimination” between civilians and combatants, Closson said. “We don’t just go for anyone in a population center [but only target] those who are the combatants. And then also you want to use a proportionate force.”

Analyzing the Current Conflict

Regarding the recent conflict between Israel and its adversaries, “there are clear good guys and bad guys,” Closson argued. Even before open fighting breaks out, “Israeli people live in a constant state of just almost psychological terror, not knowing when one of these terrorist attacks is going to happen,” he said. Now, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year has described what Israel is facing really as a seven-front war.”

With regard to Hezbollah in particular, Hezbollah began attacking Israel on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s unprovoked invasion into Israeli territory, which resulted in 1,200 dead and over 200 kidnapped — mostly civilians. “Since October the 8th, there have been 8,000 missiles and rockets shot from Lebanon,” Closson said, causing “tens of thousands of Israelis … to evacuate their homes. Hezbollah [is] not abiding by any international agreements, not withdrawing from that border as the UN has told them to do countless times.”

“What happened a week ago is that … Hezbollah really ramped up these attacks,” and Israel responded with a sabotage operation that seems “right out of a James Bond movie,” Closson described. “They gave the order” — we assume — and “thousands of pagers [exploded]. 2,700 fighters were injured, 12 dead, many maimed.”

Israel’s goals in prosecuting the war are to allow its citizens to return home safely, and to render its enemies incapable of carrying out another of their many surprise attacks.

Meanwhile, Israel’s enemies show complete disregard for any doctrine of just war or even the internationally recognized laws of war. Like Hamas, Hezbollah militants “intentionally embed themselves into civilian populations. They launch rockets from the tops of hospitals, from schools, from a mosque because they know that when Israel responds — as they have to — there will be civilian casualties, and then the international media will have these pictures,” said Closson. “That’s a tragedy. It’s horrifying. But … we need to realize that that’s an intentional tactic.”

“A proper way to just determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys,” suggested Backholm, is to ask, “who is it that is trying to make those situations happen by embedding their rockets and their military headquarters inside of residential buildings? And who is trying to avoid those things by using very targeted attacks and by, for example, just putting the explosives inside the pagers that are going to go to the terrorists?”

In any analysis of the attack, it’s important to note that “the people carrying these pagers were card-carrying members of Hezbollah,” Closson insisted. “There were a couple of incidences where, unfortunately, innocent people were nearby who were hurt and injured. But the people that were primarily targeted were these people who were part of Hezbollah and had these pagers because they were awaiting commands from their senior military officers.”

“It’s actually hard to be more precise in your targeting because you allowed the leadership of Hezbollah to choose the targets for you,” Backholm agreed. “Presumably they were trying to communicate with members of the Hezbollah organization, so only they would have had those pagers.”

Backholm added that insisting upon zero civilian casualties in wartime is, unfortunately, unrealistic. “Is anything 100% accurate in that sense? Probably not. But it would be hard to find something more precise,” he said. “We know that sometimes war is justified. It’s always lamentable. It’s never something to be celebrated. But sometimes it’s necessary in order to stop a real evil.”