Pandora’s Box Opened: Netanyahu’s Double-Tap Fuck-You
[NB: Note the byline. Portions of this post may be speculative. / ~Rayne]
I wrote a while back about Israel, discussing Israel’s repeated intelligence “failures” as not mere fuck-ups but fuck-yous.
This week’s attacks by exploding electronic devices intended for Hezbollah — attributed to Israel without any denial so far — are yet more fuck-yous delivered using an indiscriminate approach and a double tap.
These fuck-yous blew open Pandora’s box — and then some.
~ ~ ~
On Tuesday nearly 3000 pagers blew up in Lebanon. These one-way pagers are believed to have been distributed to Hezbollah members as a means to bypass Israel’s surveillance of cell phone communications. More than 30 people were killed including children.
On Wednesday during funeral services for persons who died the previous day, walkie-talkies or handheld radios were detonated in Lebanon. 12 more people died and approximately 3000 were injured.
The exploding walkie-talkie attack was the double tap: when persons who escaped a targeted attack gather during a response afterward, a second attack is launched retargeting those same persons. We’ve seen this technique employed by Russia in Ukraine, using secondary attacks to take out first responders aiding the injured and dying in a first attack, or at funeral services for the dead.
It’s a questionable practice; former President Obama had been criticized for its use with drone attacks as double taps may violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996.
But both Tuesday and Wednesday’s attacks may have violated the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons regardless of the double tap on Wednesday, as the armed devices constituted booby traps which are prohibited.
These attacks are yet more proof that Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership has gone rogue having repeatedly refused to comply with multiple treaties including the Geneva Conventions.
~ ~ ~
This time, though, Israel doesn’t have the excuse that IDF may have made a mistake.
These attacks were premeditated, planned out and executed over months if not years. Front companies were used to obtain components and distribute assembled devices; in the case of the pagers, it’s believed a Hungarian registered firm BAC Consulting may have been a key intermediary between a Taiwanese manufacturer and the ultimate distribution of the devices.
Nonprofit OSINT investigator Bellingcat followed evidence between the pagers and Taiwan electronics firm Gold Apollo, noting that BAC Consulting listed as an employee a “ghost”; this person can’t be traced to any real human, suggesting strongly BAC is an intelligence front.
The operation’s timeline needs to be fleshed out more fully; it’s not clear whether some actions believed to be related to the operation behind this week’s attacks are intended solely for plausible deniability.
02-MAY-2020 — BAC Consulting appears in Hungarian business records but appears now to have been shuttered the same year.
21-MAY-2022 — BAC Consulting registered as a new company in Hungary, according to Hungarian Justice Ministry records. It was listed as a retailer of telecommunications products, management consulting, jewelry making, and fruit cultivator — a rather odd assortment of goods and services.
The business was not engaged in manufacturing according to a spokesperson for Hungary’s prime minister; they also said “the referenced devices have never been in Hungary,” suggesting BAC acted as a broker or trade intermediary.
XXX-2022 to AUG 2024 — Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Gold Apollo exported exported approximately 260,000 pagers over a two-year timeframe. The majority shipped to the EU and US with no records of pagers shipped to Lebanon during that same timeframe. The company received no reports of Gold Apollo pagers exploding.
SUMMER 2022 — Modified pagers containing PETN-adulterated batteries for which BAC was an intermediary began shipping into Lebanon.
APR-MAY 2024 — A Lebanese security source said the pagers had been imported to Lebanon five months ago.
The pagers may have been imported into Lebanon months ago, but they must have been planned out well before that given the prevailing description of the handheld improvised exploding devices (IEDs).
Acceptance of the pagers must have been worked out far earlier — which brand would the users be willing to use, how would they be distributed without raising questions, what could go wrong tipping off the plot between the time the first pagers were fitted up with explosive PETN and detonators, where could the IEDs be assembled without intelligence leaks, so on.
Which brings us to leaks by a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group Handala whose attacks on websites were first noted by computer security expert Kevin Beaumont back in May this year.
After the pager IED explosions on Tuesday, Handala published information about the pagers’ production claiming they had exfiltrated data from Israeli sources Vidisco and Israeli Industrial Batteries Ltd. (IIB).
Vidisco is an Israeli-based developer and manufacturer of X-ray inspection systems; IIB is a manufacturer of batteries which is 51% owned by Sunlight Group as of February 2023. Both appear to be contractors to Israel’s military. Breachsense indicates both firms were hacked and credentials of employees at both firms were leaked though no customer credentials have been.
Handala’s brief about the data it hacked published Wednesday explained the operation:
The operation of the last two days was a series of joint actions of the Mossad and Unit 8200 and a number of shell companies of the Zionist regime! Handala’s hackers, during extensive hacking in recent hours, were able to obtain very secret and confidential information from the operations of the past days, and all the documents will be published in the coming hours!
The summary of the operation is as follows:
* This supply chain attack has taken place by contaminating the batteries of Pagers devices with a special type of heat-sensitive explosive material in the country of origin of the producer!
* Batteries have been contaminated with these explosives by IIB (Israeli Industrial Batteries) company in Nahariya!
* Mossad was responsible for transporting contaminated batteries to the country of origin of the producer!
* Due to the sensitivity of explosives detection devices to these batteries and the need to move them in several countries, Mossad, in cooperation with vidisco shell company, has moved the mentioned shipments!
*Vidisco company is an affiliated company of 8200 unit and today more than 84% of airports and seaports in the world use X-rays produced by this company in their security unit, which actually has a dedicated backdoor of 8200 unit and the Zionist regime it can exclude any shipment it considers in the countries using these devices and prevent the detection of sabotage! ( The complete source code of this project will be published in the next few hours! )
* Contaminated shipments have reached Lebanon through the use of Vidisco backdoor and after traveling through several countries!
* All the factors involved in this operation have been identified by Handala and soon all the data will be published!
* Handala has succeeded in hacking Vidisco and IIB and their 14TB data will be leaked!
More details will be published in the coming hours
(Unit 8200: Israeli Intelligence Corps group)
Beaumont published a short write-up about Handala’s information dump to date, noting the likelihood that Handala is connected to Iran through IP addresses, their talking points, and the targets of their efforts.
Beaumont also asks:
Are the claims credible?
Handala has not yet provided proof of data exfiltration of these organisations. On reaching out, one company above said they are suffering from “IT issues”.
In prior claims by Handala, they have been credible around victim names.
If the battery claims are credible; it is not possible to assess as no evidence has been provided to date.
I’ll note that Handala’s English is very good, though in the age of ChatGPT it may be generated for clarity to English-speaking audiences.
There was no mention of specifics related to handheld radios by Handala in these early releases and if they were likewise products produced by the same after-market suppliers, specialized modifiers, and distribution network.
Reports indicate some of the radios were made by Japanese manufacturer ICOM though ICOM said the model IC-V82 identified was discontinued a decade ago. As damage to recovered radios displayed blast damage in the battery area, it’s possible the radios were retrofitted with explosives or replacement batteries were manufactured with explosives. Because radios and their batteries are larger than pagers, this would explain the larger blasts associated with the radios.
~ ~ ~
Do read the essay by American researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang at the link embedded at the phrase “Pandora’s box” above. Huang is deeply concerned about these attacks relying on handheld electronics:
Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics: the difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its re-deployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.
…
I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.
I share this concern, one I’ve had for over a decade beginning with reports in 2009-2010 of Chinese-made counterfeit electronics ending up in the U.S. military’s supply chain, compounded by reports in 2018 of unauthorized chips added to server motherboards.
Oversight and investigation into these problems were thwarted by geopolitical, intelligence, and corporate interests.
Huang included a nifty visual representation of an electronics supply chain with his essay:
Every point along the supply chain can be breached, whether the items are new or used or refurbished. Huang’s 2019 presentation at BlueHat in Israel on supply chain security looks in detail at the likely points in chip and board production for unauthorized modifications; he doesn’t look far outside manufacturing, though.
What terrifies me is that Israel’s operation revealed far more than supply chains are now threatened. They’ve shown every hostile entity in the world how to wreak massive chaos in ways we haven’t fully imagined.
~ ~ ~
The IEDs have and will continue to attract attention. This week’s double tap attacks made it clear that the proliferation of small electronic devices on which we rely so heavily are the means to destroy both individuals and groups of people.
The information leaked by Handala makes it easy for hostile entities to attempt the same for their own aims.
The attacks have already spurred renewed discussion about onshoring more of our supply chain.
But what concerns me the most is what we’ve learned about the application of X-ray devices in our supply chain and elsewhere.
If Handala could obtain information about this operation — assuming everything revealed so far is truthful and in no way distorted — what other entities may have preceded Handala in breaching Vidisco’s data? How much lead time do they already have toward something similar to this week’s double tap attacks?
If the public and leaked information about Vidisco is accurate, just how badly are U.S. scanning systems compromised? Have we already been allowing Israel (or other opportunists using Israel’s methods and means) to distribute IEDs inside the U.S.? Have our U.S. tax dollars doled out as aid to Israel paid for both the violation of Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and now the wholesale compromise of our own national security?
If hostile entities have obtained this same information about Vidisco’s X-ray systems, how badly have our import scanning capabilities been compromised?
If the public and leaked information about Vidisco is accurate and 84% of the world’s airports use its scanning equipment, how badly are our screening systems at U.S. airports compromised?
Imagine for a moment phones and radios on planes containing PETN-adulterated batteries triggered with a single call.
Imagine laptops and tablets triggered with a single remote prompt over onboard WiFi or wireless networks.
~ ~ ~
In June 2017 amid the WannaCry and modified Petya attacks, the Department of Homeland Security and the Travel Safety Administration rolled out heightened security measures including increased scanning of electronic devices.
By the end of July 2017, handling of smaller electronics changed:
… The TSA will now require “all electronics larger than a cell phone” to be removed from carry-on bags and placed in their own separate bin for X-ray screening with nothing on top or below, similar to how laptops have been screened for years. …
At the time the measures appeared to be related to potential threats related to cyber attacks.
Now one might wonder if the changes were intended to increase the use of X-ray screening related specifically to explosives and not just cyber attacks.
We aren’t likely to receive any answers to inquiries about the triggers for these changes.
What we should understand now, though, is that much of this could be performative. The X-ray scanning systems, if tampered with the way they were to admit pagers and radio IEDs into Lebanon, could be absolutely useless for detecting rigged devices.
~ ~ ~
It’s clear we are going to have to rethink our entire screening system at all ports after Netanyahu’s latest fuck-you.
He surely must have known he was opening Pandora’s box when he authorized the detonation of pagers and handheld radios.
I must admit the first thought I had after the initial shock upon hearing about the attacks was this: if Netanyahu had this capability to take out a group of targets this neatly, why didn’t he try this approach with Hamas?
If Netanyahu felt he could expend political capital on violations of international law, why instead is he systematically overseeing the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, humanitarian aid systems, women and children instead of having neatly excised Hamas in Gaza using these handheld IEDs?
Why? Because fuck you is a likely answer.
A reminder to all new and existing community members participating in comments:
— We’ve moved to a new minimum standard to support community security over the last year. Usernames should be unique and a minimum of 8 letters.
— We do not require a valid, working email, but you must use the same email address each time you publish a comment here. **Single use disposable email addresses do not meet this standard.**
— If you have been commenting here but have less than 1000 comments published and been participating less than 10 years as of October 2022, you must update your username to match the new standard.
Thank you.
My concern is that Israel has now invaded Gaza and the West Bank, fired ar Houthis in Yemen, Hizballah in Lebanon, at Syria and Iran. Israel Isa small country. Is Bibi attacking everyone to abuse the US to save Israel? It’s very dangerous.
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short and common it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. /~Rayne]
I am concerned for Madam Vice President now, in light of Trump promising (as though he were confident) a few months ago, about a terrorist attack occurring as an October surprise. Then he made company with Netanyahu before the October 7th attacks, and then again before the Lebanon terrorist offensive.
Clearly it’s time for the US to distance ourselves and our intelligence and technology away from Israel for the foreseeable future in order to lock down our own security apparatus.
To the “why he didn’t try this approach with Hamas?’ My understanding is Hamas uses notes carried by runners, not electronics. I understand your concerns and outrage. Israel is surrounded by terrorists, he targeted terrorists in my opinion. We are not battling a genocide over here on our continent, seeing the images of the injured makes me thankful for that.
Your comment is incredibly simplistic.
First, apparently you don’t understand that Hezbollah is a political entity in Lebanon, the origins of which were a direct response to Israel’s nonconsensual acquisition of Palestinian land and subsequent occupation. Let me guess you’re a descendent of colonial people since you don’t grasp that Hamas is a response to systemic human rights violations in Gaza due to Israel’s forcible occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid. The colonialism is obvious to colonized people.
Second, take a good look at recent U.S. history and the violations of human rights committed in the name of anti-terror/counterterrorism. We have lost considerable high ground to criticize Russia as it commits war crimes against Ukraine and we lose even further when we turn our back on Netanyahu’s war crimes.
Thirdly, you’re kidding me that all comms between Hamas members is only on paper via runners. Offer credible citations and don’t tell me Israel is the source of this intelligence because they’ve also repeatedly fucked up intelligence if they aren’t justifying fuck-yous.
Yep simple is my reply, Ukraine is fighting for it’s existence and their lives. They have expertly shown everyone how to weaponize drones, Drones that anyone can buy, ad a bomb from the internet and bingo. Is that different, showing the world how to convert a toy into a flying bomb? I can recognize terrorism like in the Nova Music Festival, I believe Hezbollah are terrorists and I agree with Noa Tishby when she says when Israel falls, the terrorists will then move on to attacking the other democracies. That is simple and I am not asking anyone to agree.
Challenger, 6:55 – Glad you’re not asking. Exploding toilet seats next, these inventive Israelis? Or just plain old U.S. made 2000 pounders, downtown Beirut, use ’em for democracy? Bibi and the hardliners, on a tear, not calling the occupied West Bank the occupied West Bank, using biblical words? Cute! With “friends” like that, we’re making enemies by the score. Arm those illegal settlers in occupied West Bank, cause somebody might throw a rock.
Simplistic, and then some. Imagine beehive soccer, the kind that schoolchildren play, where every player tries to get their boot onto the ball at the same time. Imagine booby trapping the ball, because you regard one player as a threat, or because their parent is and you want to send them a message. How targeted is your attack when you ping the ball and it explodes?
Israel has demonstrated the utmost disdain for proportionality: the legal and political requirement that an armed response be commensurate with the original attack. It has long held that only by inflicting damage that’s many times as great will it prevent future attacks.
As with the beehive soccer analogy, most of that damage is “collateral.” But Israel has defined that requirement out of existence, rather like the American military did during the Vietnam War, with its emphasis on raw body count. It deemed every peasant in black “pajamas” a terrorist, conveniently ignoring that nearly every Vietnamese peasant wore black pajamas. That mentality turned a targeted response into random murder.
As every news report repeats, for example, whenever an Israeli attack is suspected, that the IDF “targeted” a terrorist. Well and good. But those reports never seem to consider who the IDF actually hit or the cost to others. And who decides whether it’s worth it?
We don’t have to imagine soccer. !2 Israeli Kids were killed playing soccer in July by a Hezbollah rocket. That’s sorta like the reality there, but by all means continue to regale us with your imaginary world.
Your focusing on my hypothetical distracts from your non-response to my other points. It also distracts from your distraction: a missile attack is not the weaponization of everyday objects, such as consumer electronics carried by a majority of people, and the subject of this post.
Your practiced rhetoric and needless personal attacks aside, there’s nothing laughable about killing children. That goes for both sides in this conflict, even though, like much of the press, you only seem able to contemplate the costs to one side.
“Israel is surrounded by terrorists”
That may be an Israeli perception and talking point but for many elsewhere it appears that Israel is the terrorist.
No one, not even the most rabid Jew-hater, believes that if Hamas had not done Oct. 7 or that if Hezbollah had not started a rocket attack based on that attack, Israel would have attacked either Gaza or Lebanon.
One approach to curbing Israeli action would be to stop poking the bear. That would have the advantage of costing nothing.
(If anyone is interested in the origins of Hezbollah, I recommend Eugene Rogan’s ‘The Damascus Events.’ Rogan does not discuss Hezbollah, inasmuch as his history ends around 1920, but if ever two periods looked like Groundhog Day, it was the the Muslim attempt to exterminate the Christians in 1859.)
Knock off conflating Jewish religious identity with Israeli citizenship. Things are muddy enough already without lack of concision using inflammatory labels.
H.E. – 12:31 – Yes, and those mischievous terrorists are the sole cause of illegal settlement of over half a million people in the occupied West Bank. Not a provocation. Just folks wanting a home. On others’ land. And they’d not be doing that, but for the terror. Not that Israel wants River to the Sea, both sides of the River, in an ideal world. Just folks wanting a home.
The Eretz Israel crazies are a problem as intractable as the Hamas death cult. If you want my opinion about that (you probably don’t), I’ll be happy to oblige. but I thought this discussion was about Hezbollah.
Syria-Lebanon was a colony of the Ottomans for about 10 times longer than it was of the French. Whatever their other failings, the Ottomans were skilled at maintaining confessional peace in that part of the empire.
My religious instructor, a Maronite, used to talk about ‘the poor pipple who worship thee sneks.’ He originated from deep in the backwoods of the Mountain. At age 15, I thought he was making a joke. By age 35 I had learned he was just describing his neighborhood.
The extirpation of religious diversity in the province of Syria — once the most diverse cultic environment outside India — has been a 200-year project. What is going on in Lebanon-Syria right now is part of a centuries-old social displacement into which Israel’s interference adds to a mess that very few Americans have any inkling of.
Lebanon was the first — and so far the last — Arab democracy. The destruction of that democracy had nothing at all to do with Israel.
Theodor Herzl defined Israel as existing,”from the two rivers to the sea” and the rivers he’s referencing are the Tigris and Euphrates.
One way to understand the Israeli/Palestine conflict look at the kill ratio. The events of October 7 have lead to a kill rate of 1:34 (Israelis to Gazans). That number says a lot about how Israel the value of Palestinian lives. How many Palestinians have been murdered or displaced by the Israeli government since the founding of Israel? Why isn’t Israel working for a two state solution?
The disproportionality of response, not just in the kill ratio but the destruction of 60-70% of all buildings in Gaza, says on the face of it this is not about punitive response to Hamas. It is not a “just war” whether a single-state civil war or a two-state war.
But the persistent rejection of the two-state solution is part and parcel Netanyahu’s fuck-you to the U.S.; the two-state solution is and has been U.S. policy, and every time Netanyahu has been pressed on this the response is more Palestinian deaths.
This js a great and very thoughtful article. Thank you for writing it.
The x-ray scanning issue, & the ability to allow exceptions via a back door is HUGE!
I remember when the first “Nude scanning” system was pushed by Skelator ( Chernoff) and his company never proved it actually worked.
But they had the contract & the testing was Classified. We learned years later that the staff were sending nudes of the people scanned..
What I cared about was if it WORKED!
What if Chertoff’s POS scanning worked the way it was intended — as security theater.
You have no idea how often Marcus Aurelius’ remarks on first principles have rattled around in my head this week. What is the nature of the thing; what if it is right there in front of us, the device intended to make us believe we are safe while our tax dollars constructs something altogether different somewhere else.
Bless you, Rayne!
Tried to post this a short while ago–must have chosen the the wrong e-mail or some such (my eyes are going this late at night).Whenever I see a reference to Marcus Aurelias and First Principles, it makes me think of this scene from “SOTL”….
https://youtu.be/UhDZPYu8piQ
Amen. From a security perspective, our current system moves the threat from the airplane to the queue.
You also don’t want to know how many of the “awareness tests” are routinely failed.
Another thought to add to your questions about these horrible uses of devices. Russia certainly has the sophistication to design such things. Netanyahu has had a “friendly” relationship with Putin. Could their be Russian cooperation here?
I agree that our country is breaking humanitarian laws by supplying Israel with so many highly destructive weapons. I have written countless emails to the White House complaining about the loss of so many Palestinian lives. The rational of killing civilians as collateral damage to “freeing” the hostages (imagine that many were killed by the IDF in the process),
has never made sense to me. My feeling is that Netanyahu’s goal is to eliminate the Palestinian population so that Israel can take full possession of Gaza. The encroachment of Israeli settlers on the West Bank certainly supports that idea.
Netanyahu represents the danger that any future sympathy for Israel will be destroyed by his continuing evil policies. It is not only a “F-U” to Lebanon, it is a “F-U” to his own country.
Bibi is not alone. He has a coalition. Called Hardliners, as opposed to most in the nation wanting simply to live and prosper. And — He has the engineers who got the specs, and designed the exploding electronics, all in a day’s work. Next, testing. Yes, that should do it, a hand, half a head when it’s triggered, don’t need to overkill. Good job!
Perhaps so, but the use of exclamation points is a bit much. Either their keyboard is missing a period, or a voice-to-text app interpreted everything as a shout, so gave every sentence an exclamation point. (Or should I say “an exclamation point!”?)
LOL I’m still pondering what caused the exclamation points — was it upspeak in speech-to-text? Or was it a product of multiple layers of translation tools? Or was it an artifact from parsing between different keyboard sets?
The grammar is solid if the punctuation isn’t.
My guess would be translation tools through speech-to-text. To an English-speaker’s ear, some foreign languages might be taken as shouting, even when the speaker is offering a love-filled poem. Somehow, the software has to make a judgment – simple speech or a shout? – and if the software carries the assumptions of English rather than those of the speaker’s language, that assumption will plug in a lot of exclamation points for certain languages.
This kind of thorough discussion should be permeating media. Such would be the case if a terror group had carried out a cell-phone bomb attack on our country or an ally. Everyone would see there is a new vulnerability, and we’d be on our way to large investments in new security procedures. I imagine these involving supply chains, transportation, cell-phone restrictions on airplanes, etc. and we’d all accept the changes. However, it’s Israel. There’s nothing to do except cry some crocodile tears and sweep it under the rug. We have an election to win!
thank you, Rayne.
Israel’s skill in the pursuit of vile, not to say nefarious, aims and means should make us all tremble, while Israelis of good will are involuntarily hitched to this modus operandi and must tremble too.
Huang’s chart is interesting, but in this case, I think the IDF/Mossad effort to intercept and manipulate the pagers and walkie-talkies happened somewhere near the end of the chain, to make sure that the tampered equipment went to the desired end-users and not random folks around Europe and the Middle East.
I do question the relevance of the discussion of Mossad using a backdoor to bypass airport screeners to bring all this equipment into Lebanon. I don’t know how long the folks whose pagers and walkie-talkies blew up had that equipment, but if it was more than a few days, I’d think it is likely that someone would have taken one through a screener without having someone from Mossad opening the backdoor to let it through without a challenge.
Now obviously, importing the tampered equipment would have had to bypass *some* kind of security, but we’re likely talking about customs inspecting cases and crates of electronic equipment here, not individual people walking through your basic airport screening system under the eyes of TSA and their counterparts elsewhere. This kind of thing has been done for a long time with more ordinary means, such as forged documents/tampered computer records given at departure saying the crates will be inspected upon landing, and alternate documents/records given upon arrival saying the crates were already inspected before departure.
Which is not to say that a backdoor in airport screening systems *isn’t* there, only that IMHO it had little to nothing to do with this.
Re: Huang’s schematic — I’m sure the addition of the user returns was an early premise that materiel might re-enter the supply chain. Keep in mind he drafted this in 2019 after the Bloomberg report on the rice-grain-sized chip added to server motherboards. He wasn’t then thinking about reworked materials or OEM components modded by 3rd parties.
There’s source code which has not yet been leaked as far as I know, if software is the tool by which the X-ray scanning was evaded. It may explain what doesn’t currently make sense.
If a backdoor (hardware or software) was built into the core technology of scanning systems which have become nearly ubiquitous, how would it have been detected? Would anybody have bothered to look if there was never an event triggering concern? Why would they build dedicated scanners for use *only* at Lebanon’s borders — wouldn’t that have raised a flag? And if the backdoor/tool is software, why wouldn’t they have added use cases to the code, ex. detect in one case, don’t detect in another, or don’t detect unless certain dates.
And of course it’s possible that Handala is also a front created to sow disinfo about the operation. All the more reason we should pay more attention to our port security and work toward more domestic production of electronics.
Around the dawn of computing, the age of the PDP-11’s, one of the creators of the ‘C’ programming, Ken Thompson, announced that he had inserted a Trojan virus in the language compiler he wrote with Dennis Ritchie. This Trojan would allow him to log in as super user, aka. root, to any UNIX machine programmed in ‘C’ and compiled with any variant UNIX ‘C’ compiler that was compiled with the original K&R ‘C’ compiler. Or any other language, compiled or interpreted, that was built with the ‘C’ compiler. Hint: Basically all of them. This Trojan propagated through the compilation of the login routine. A SECOND Trojan was added to the ‘C’ compiler to propagate the first Trojan and the second when the compiler itself compiled behind the scenes. They were not included in any human readable ‘C’ source files. The ONLY way to excise these Trojans was to build a ‘C’ compiler from the first principles, from scratch, from the bare bones, without relying on the compromised Operating System.
He documents it in his 1984 Turing Award acceptance speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”
You appear to be new here — citations are expected practice here.
Because you didn’t bring one: https://web.archive.org/web/20050411113556/https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
Discussion of same via Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36389660
As for the underlying premise, yes — the US should design and build its own portable X-ray scanning devices from the ground up as this device has become critical infrastructure.
Re: Airport screening: I read someweb that Hezbolla had security-checked the devices upon receipt by running them through the x-ray machines at a local airport to check for explosives, so there’s likely something to this backdoor. (No source on this one unfortunately, but it passes the likeliness check)
Bunnie (in the article Rayne linked) has a passage that argues otherwise though:
Regardless, this attack has proven that the current airport protection scheme isn’t working from a security perspective; it may still work as intended though.
From the end of the post: “. . .if Netanyahu had this capability to take out a group of targets this neatly, why didn’t he try this approach with Hamas?”
I think Hamas has much better operational security than Hezbollah. Part of this is simply the different contexts in which both are operating. Hamas is operating *within* territory controlled by Israel, while Hezbollah operates outside Israel. Think of WWII, and the difference between folks in the French resistance on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Paris and others acting as part of the Free French movement on the outskirts of London. Folks operating within territory controlled by their enemy must have better operational security, or they are quickly rolled up and killed.
Yup, I understand that, and yet we’re supposed to believe IDF is targeting Hamas in hospitals, schools, humanitarian aid facilities based on SIGINT.
As for targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon: It’s an attack on a political party inside another sovereign country’s borders. There’s little effort to look at root causes to resolve conflict, just the ongoing volley of tit-for-tat constantly escalating under Netanyahu’s leadership.
In both Gaza and Lebanon, the IDF may be celebrating some tactical victories, but the strategic problems they are creating are enormous.
For every hospital hit in Gaza, every home destroyed, every apartment block leveled, and every baby killed in the rubble, the IDF is authoring stories that will be passed down for generations. Among the survivors in Gaza, Bibi and his government are lighting fires that will burn very hot in their hearts.
What should worry them is this strategic question: how many of these survivors will step up to take the place of the Hamas fighters that were killed, and how many of the next generation — raised on the stories of Gaza in 2024 — will join them?
From the Guardian, writing about the aftermath of the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/21/were-not-safe-any-more-lebanon-reels-from-week-of-attacks-that-have-intensified-war-with-israel
This kind of unity does not bode well for the question I posed above.
“The Israelis” are not creating any strategic problems for Israel. Bibi Netanyahu is creating strategic problems for Israel, much like Vladimir Putin is creating strategic problems for Russia. Bibi’s actions are all thoroughly rational insofar as Bibi’s own welfare is concerned. In some ways, Israel, too, is a victim of Bibi’s wants and needs.
“For every hospital hit in Gaza, every home destroyed, every apartment block leveled, and every baby killed in the rubble, the IDF is authoring stories that will be passed down for generations.”
and for young Israelis serving in the IDF —
This is authoring the many cases of PTSD/trauma that will keep on yielding more psychosis in the next Israeli generation, among the fires this is lighting.
didn’t anyone learn anything from Vietnam (US) and Afghanistan (USSR)?
Those hospitals and schools have extensive Hamas tunnel networks under them. The schools and hospitals were built on top of the tunnels, Israel is facing an enemy in Hamas who had extensive time to prepare. Hamas’ whole strategy is to force the IDF to kill as many Palestinians as possible. They sacrifice their own people carelessly, while Israel tries hard to minimize civilian casualties. Israel does all sorts of stuff, including things other militaries never tried before, to warn civilians away from the areas they’re going to attack. On trying to avoid civilian deaths, they hold themselves to a higher standard than any other military in any conflict zone ever has.
Hamas has been winning the propaganda war, but the world’s condemnation of Israel is misplaced. The party directly responsible for all of the civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas.
If you had posted those words at The Washington Post or New York Times, you’d have been blitzed with admonitions to remember Deir Yassin. But no one thinks that, absent the Oct. 7 attack, Israel would be in Gaza.
One way to interrupt a cycle of violence is to let sleeping dogs lie.
dopefish – despite what I wrote below (about the destruction of Gaza), I agree with your assessment of Hamas. I agree with what President Biden said on October 10 of last year. Israel did and does need to respond to their atrocities, their terror.
But Biden also pointed out – just about a week later – that we (at least some of us, anyway) have learned from our own, troubled response to terrorism.
Netanyahu’s leadership has been a failure. It has almost been a year, and with the support of the U.S., he has achieved no discernible objectives while bringing loss and destruction he pretty clearly cannot remediate.
Meanwhile, we’re supposed to continue to throw money at a guy who has systematically failed as a leader, including effective pre-emptive response to the October 7 attack and undermining hostage deal negotiations.
Washington Post, The case of al-Shifa: Investigating the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital, by Louisa Loveluck, Evan Hill, Jonathan Baran, Jarrett Ley and Ellen Nakashima, December 21, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EST
“Hamas has been winning the propaganda war” — that’s your opinion.
Mehdi Hasan, for starters, might disagree with you that Hamas is winning the propaganda war.
No party has had more time to prepare for a contemporary conflict than the state of Israel. Even assuming Hamas starting “this,” whatever this is, Israel has the same obligation as every other state: to respond proportionately.
An eye for an eye commemorates that obligation. It is a prohibition on escalation, not a license to escalate beyond all recognition or to dismiss ten or more times the dead and injured – and the attempted destruction of an entire society – as mere collateral damage.
I forgot to mention that I do agree that Netanyahu has been a disaster for Israel, and that for the U.S. he has been an unreliable and frustrating partner. And the humanitarian situation in Gaza has been and continues to be horrible, although I think the media does not give Hamas enough blame for their role in blocking aid distribution, and takes their constant claims about the number of civilian deaths and who actually killed them, a little too seriously.
Hamas may have kicked off the current phase of the conflict with their atrocities of Oct 7 (which they spent years diverting Gaza aid to their own ends, such as digging tunnel networks, in preparation for), but Israel has to take the blame for their settlement policies.
The overall situation in the Middle East is a complicated mess, but that has been true for my entire lifetime. For sure there is enough blame to go around.
Even when the current war in Gaza has ended, there will be hatred and animosity on both sides for a long time. Its very unfortunate, but to break the cycle of violence, both sides would have give up the use of violence to achieve their political aims, and its hard to see how that will happen.
And with Israel now opening this second front against Hezbollah, it may be a very long time before the region settles down.
Israel’s “fuck yous” — decades of ‘em — have been a feature, not a bug, of the relationship with its guarantor. Washington suits will murmur the usual “unhelpfuls” and “concerns” and, on occasion, even “deeply troublings”. In substance? They will shield Israel from meaningful legal accountability.
I’m not a techie, but his caught my eye (as apparently it did for others):
“has a dedicated backdoor of 8200 unit and the Zionist regime it can exclude any shipment it considers in the countries using these devices and prevent the detection of sabotage! ”
In order for a “backdoor” to open, it would need to be triggered. Since the scanner cannot know the origin of a particular package (it’s just a scanner), that raises the question – how are specific Unit 8200 packages recognized, such that the backdoor is triggered? I’m not doubting that it’s possible, but it seems like a kind of paranoid suspicion, more appropriate to a thriller novel/movie, than to actual technology.
But like I say, I’m not a technologist, and would be grateful if any who are can shed some light on possible triggering.
As to the exclamations points: mayber the writer was more familiar with comics than with other texts. In a comic, every word balloon ends with an exclamation point!!
We don’t yet have definitive answers about the methodology for detonation. What I’ve seen so far suggests that when the PETN was wrapped around the batteries, a small trigger/detonator was added at the end where the battery’s wires are attached.
That same trigger/detonator could be a small chip which indicates “this is not the device you are scanning for” to an X-ray scanner in which the backdoor has been used to activate code detecting PETN or other unusual substances in devices. Source code may likely tell us more.
A thought occurred to me from shipping / distribution work: the x-ray scanners could also have bar / QR code scanning built in as a feature. That could be leveraged to trigger bulk box, package, or even unit-level “ignore this” backdoor code. Even one extra sticker or an extra alphanumeric digit on an existing label could do this easily. So much supply chain logistics depends on the speed of automation and pass through, even for chain of custody, it is something to consider.
Yup. That. Or even the front company’s name, BAC by itself or as a company code could trigger an exception.
Definitely need to see the source code.
Building in a back door thinking no one else can discover it and potentially leverage it is utter hubris. If they’re right about that, and I really hope they aren’t, that’s going to really suck (on top of the exploding battery suckage).
Thank you for this reporting, Rayne, it’s going to take me a bit to get through all of it.
When I look into Sunlight Group, I find that some effort has, in theory, gone into the issue of domestic supply chains. They have a plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. If we had a functioning congress, we wouldn’t have to rely on hacktivists (and each of our abilities to understand the production details of everyday products) to get to the root of the problem.
I spent some of this past week refreshing my memory about the D.C. sniper attacks in the context of the would–be golf course assassin, which seems to have some of the same “why do we tolerate these risks for anyone?” moral.
With respect to Netanyahu/Putin/Trump in Gaza and Ukraine, I think Syria provides your answer – just pure destruction with no ability or means of restoration, and delusion that the human toll could be justified by what their leadership provides. The pager scheme took time and effort, while destruction just takes opportunity and means. It’s unfortunate that so many enablers and co-perpetrators have been/are ready to step up on their behalf. It’s unfortunate that we have to slog through so much propaganda to be able to call it what it is.
“When I look into Sunlight Group, I find that some effort has, in theory, gone into the issue of domestic supply chains. They have a plant in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
Has Sunlight Group moved production here? Has Sunlight Group hired only US citizens? Has Sunlight used only US-created designs for its scanning equipment?
There’s a LONG way to go before the risks are removed.
Oh, in case I wasn’t clear – I was picturing a functioning congress having hearings and questioning the U.S. head of Sunlight Group about batteries and electronics packaged as military/terrorist weapons.
Why would the US head have *any* knowledge of what’s being done in other countries, possibly in other *companies* in other countries?
Reply to PJ Evans – One of Rayne’s links says Sunlight is the 51% owner of IIB. Another, _Pandora’s Box_, links to a post “Turning Everyday Gadgets Into Bombs is a Bad Idea”, which forms part of Rayne’s thesis. She has a third link, to a NYTimes article calling for more onshoring of electronics production (which I did not click). Why wouldn’t a domestic battery manufacturer be able to (disavow and) speak to their role in preventing this type of attack?
Relations between companies and their contracts are more complicated, especially where they are related parties subject to a parent company’s control.
I do not recall where I read it, but Syria was not just pure destruction; it has created a diaspora of refugees that has create disruption and tension across the region and Europe, which is benefitting Putin’s attempts to create client/sympathetic authoritarian states.
One should remember that Hezbollah, in addition to having a military wing, operates charities, hospitals, schools, food distribution centers, etc. Israel can create one level of hatred by killing members of the military wing, but using pagers to kill other members of Hezbollah that are hospital administrators, school headmasters, food kitchen managers and the like creates a whole new level of hatred that will burn for generations.
I’m having a hard time determining airport scanner x-ray market share by company, but Vidisco doesn’t appear to be a >84% player. They do sell to several branches of the US military, though, and if a backdoor is proven they committed business suicide.
Unless the US has paid them to develop a backdoored system for them.
Would we outsource that sort of thing to a foreign power, esp one as problematic as Netanyahu’s Israel? But either way I can’t imagine airports and seaports wanting exploitable hardware.
You’re kidding me, right? Even while most electronics used in the US whether by private or public entities are made outside the US?
Have you looked at the phones out government employees use? Their laptops and desktops? Their network equipment?
Backdoors doesn’t have to be inserted by the company itself though, you only need to recruit the right employee(s). One of the things Snowden revealed was the extent to which the US was willing to do this to insert backdoors in commercial products.
Rayne, I don’t understand what you’re arguing. Yes, some companies allow exploitable devices, but it doesn’t follow they would continue to purchase once a back door is proven, especially something where the entire point is to detect explosives and the back door turns that off. Why would any procurement department choose the scanner that a foreign government decides when it works over a competitor with no known compromise?
Purchasing decisions about national security equipment tend to be above the pay grades of those using it.
Procurement people do make these decisions, though. The government has lists of standards products must meet, but doesn’t make vendor recommendations beyond listing who has met the standards. TSA specifically has lists of qualified or approved products in each category, x-ray equipment has several to choose from, explosives detection fewer but still more than one (FWIW, Vidisco isn’t on the TSA lists for any device type). So nobody is being forced to buy any specific product, in every product category there are other vendors to choose from. If Vidisco is found to be selling compromised hardware, why do you think anyone would choose them over another acceptable vendor not providing a back-door to a foreign government?
FWIW, Rueters reports, “The way the explosive material was integrated into the battery pack made it extremely difficult to detect, the source said.” and, “A Lebanese security source had earlier told Reuters that the pagers had been implanted with explosives that were difficult to detect.”
https://www.yahoo.***com/news/batteries-walkie-talkies-exploded-lebanon-104205874.html
(remove the *’s)
“Fuck-yous”? Israel, a democratic country, is doing what its elected leaders believe to be in its best interests (and politicians believe are in their best interest), just as the US and other Western countries (and politicians) do.
Also, the issue of whether the attack was a violation of the Laws of War may not be so simple. I’m not a diplomat or lawyer, but here is an article in Just Security which lists “a number of factual and legal questions related to the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law (IHL)”.
https://www.justsecurity.org/100193/law-war-exploding-pagers-lebanon/
Before I go further, is there agreement here that Israel has the right to exist and (within limits) defend itself and its citizens? I ask because I’m not certain that everyone understands that when Palestinians chant, “From the river to the see, Palestine must be free,” they mean the elimination of Israel and the ‘removal’ of Jews.
First, it’s obvious you didn’t bother to read the link to the section in my previous post about Israel’s Intelligence Failures. The absurd frequency of failures is a feature at this point, not a bug — and by feature I mean a massive ongoing fuck you. Don’t even start with “democratic country” bullshit because Netanyahu, who remains under indictment for corruption, has tried to screw with Israel’s democracy.
Second, don’t wave that Just Security link here as if it contains excuses. That essay is literally what it says on the headline, questions — (39) question marks worth to be exact. Don’t think Netanyahu’s relative silence with regard to Israel’s role and responsibility in the attacks has gone unnoticed; that silence is the thinnest veil of plausible deniability.
Third, just stop with the whataboutism. Israel’s right to exist and right to self defense does NOT confer a right to commit genocide nor the right to violate human rights or repeatedly commit grave breaches of other U.N. treaties. It does NOT confer entitlement to unquestioning support and financial aid from the U.S.
I am not now and have never been a fan of Netanyahu, and I think he has been a sometimes poor and sometimes bad PM of Israel. I’ve been of voting age for 50 years and I haven’t always been a fan of our American Presidents. Regardless, Israel and the US are democracies, so sometimes the people make a poor decision.
Intelligence failures happen. Israel had a major intelligence failure. But then America is not immune from intelligence failures.
But the use of the term “fuck yous” seems to imply that Israeli policy should be determined by the US and that any action taken by Israel that isn’t in America’s best interest is intended as an insult to America. I think that is wrong-thinking. It’s more accurate to think that Israel is acting in its own best interest which is sometimes in line with and sometimes counter to America’s best interest. (And ‘best interest’, whether America’s or Israel’s, is an opinion, not a fact, held by the current administration and can change with administrations.)
Netanyahu isn’t the only politician who “tried to screw” with democracy. (And he’s only under indictment, not a convicted felon.) As I wrote at the top, I don’t like Netanyahu and will be glad to see him go. But that doesn’t change the fact that Israel is a democracy and the only democracy in the region.
Regarding the Just Security article, I don’t have all the answers to the factual questions and I’m not qualified to answer the legal questions. It’s almost certainly true that Israel was behind the action. But in so far as the pagers and walkie-talkies were for Hezbollah fighters and the intention was to harm or kill enemy combatants and disrupt the enemies communications (all legitimate war objectives), this may not be war crime.
Finally, I explicitly wrote that Israel’s right to self-defense had limits. We agree on that point. And we agree that Israel should follow international laws and treaties. So should Hamas and Hezbollah (both groups are designated “foreign terrorists organizations by the US State Department, the EU, and many Arab countries), but one can’t expect them to. Israel is not perfect, is not better than other nations, but it is not committing genocide and suggesting that it is, is inflammatory.
If you’re not comfortable with the terms “fuck-you” and “fuck-up,” you’re at the wrong blog.
As for genocide:
As I’ve commented before, by June this year at least 60% of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged if not destroyed. The magnitude of destruction is visible from space, making wholly obvious the intent is to leave nothing in which Gazans can live and work untouched. As of May 20,
[[ Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, following the brutal terrorist attacks by Hamas on 7 October, 31 out of 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Among the destroyed is the Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza, which remains today completely out of service.
The remaining hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning, and operating under severe limitations. Due to the dire situation many of them are on the verge of collapse or had to be closed . Access to emergency medical care is even more crucial at a time when Palestinians in Gaza live under constant shelling and more than 9,000 severely injured people are at risk of dying due to the lack of adequate health care.]]
Source: https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/news-stories/news/palestine-statement-attacks-medical-and-civilian-infrastructure-gaza-and-west-bank-2024-05-20_en
Let me say that once again, more succinctly: THE GENOCIDE IS SO OBVIOUS THE WORLD CAN SEE IT FROM OUTER SPACE.
Your comment suggests a deep lack of familiarity with Netanyahu.
It’s funny, but not in a ha ha way, how people unversed in a subject are the first to give an opinion about it, and tend to lead with straw men arguments.
You missed my point. I’m not offended by “fuck you”, but, as I tried to explain, it confuses Israel’s actions taken in what it deems as in its best interests with a purposeful “fuck you” to America. It would be more productive to discuss whether Israel’s actions are in its best interests without adding the emotional notion that Israel is acting to disrespect America.
As for genocide, the report you quote states “there are reasonable grounds to believe,” but belief is an opinion, not a statement of fact. Too many innocent people have been killed, but 30,000 people (some number of which were terrorists) out of a population of over 2 million is not genocide.
And the destruction of buildings is not genocide. We can debate how accurate Israeli intelligence is, but it is not debatable that Hamas uses civilian structures, including hospitals, mosques, and schools for military purposes – making them targets.
So you can yell “GENOCIDE”, but that doesn’t make it true.
Grossman, you crossed a line. Fuck off with your rationalizing genocide as mere percentages. Fuck off hiding behind plausible deniability using legalese.
Quit this thread.
Rayne has correctly taken issue with the grotesque substantive point in
Grossmans paragraph:
“As for genocide, the report you quote states “there are reasonable grounds to believe,” but belief is an opinion, not a statement of fact. Too many innocent people have been killed, but 30,000 people (some number of which were terrorists) out of a population of over 2 million is not genocide”
Rayne has IMHO correctly called a halt to Grossman’s crap, and disparaged his tactics of indulging in “legalese”
I believe that latter criticism is worth expanding upon as it goes to defending institutional responses to genocide against being devalued by word play.
Grossman is wilfully misreading and misrepresenting the import of a LEGAL STANDARD set out in the relevant paragraph :
“By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are
•reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met• “
In English Law “reasonable grounds to believe” is a term of art establishing the quantum of evidence and information sufficient to justify investigatory steps in criminal proceedings ( thus corresponds to the US term “probable cause”), including arrest.
Indeed In international criminal law it is that standard for issuing arrest warrants by the ICC, as has been done in respect of Netanyahu and others on the application of the Chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan.
Khan had appointed a panel of appropriately qualified legal experts to support his investigation who concurred in his application:
Rt Hon Sir Adrian Fulford is a former judge of the ICC, a former lord justice of appeal in England and Wales and a former investigatory powers commissioner.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst CMG KC (hon), a distinguished fellow at Chatham House and deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office 1999-2003.
Theodor Meron CMG, now 94, is a former judge at a number of international tribunals. Before he immigrated to the United States in 1978, he was legal adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Amal Clooney is a junior member of the English bar who has appeared at the ICC and co-founded a campaigning organisation that provides free legal support to victims of human rights abuses around the world. Her family escaped from Lebanon when she was a two-year-old.
Danny Friedman KC is a barrister at Matrix Chambers.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws LT KC is also a barrister.
The panel was supported by two academic experts, Professor Marko Milanovic and Professor Sandesh Sivakumaran
So two separate international organisations have settled legal conclusions there are reasonable grounds to believe/probable cause for the institution of proceedings against Israel and Israeli officials for genocide offences.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party
First item of that founding Likud document, statement “a.”
…and read that whole document, just one page. It’s a detailed outline of just how and why Israel is doing what it’s doing today, 46 years after it was drafted.
Every time I hear the AIPAC-line dissing the Palestinians for their “river to the sea” theme, with that document in mind, I think there must be some truth in the remake of an old aphorism: “You are what you hate.”
I have long had a problem with the coziness of the US with Netanyahu. I understand that Israel provides eyes and ears in the Middle East via the various, and lethal, Israeli spy groups.But we are paying an awfully high price for that information.
I see our support of Israel the moral equivalent of the Governmental contracts we have with Elon Musk. We are now tethered to him with Starlink and with his stupid ‘dragon’ rockets. And as always, when you lie down with dogs you tend to get fleas; in this case our international reputation is less than shiney because of our dependence on vile, immoral, egocentric rectal orifices.
We are the Lady riding the Tiger in both cases.
Sadly, we are not the only ones paying an awfully high price for that information.
Local news has some more to the story. Apologies that the link is non-english, but automatic translation usually works pretty well.
They report that an un-named company in Bulgaria which is linked to the pagers is owned by a Norwegian national, and registered to a residential address with 196 other companies. The man’s (assumedly Norwegian) employer reports that he has become unreachable after a business trip. I remember reading (probably an earlier version of this story) where this was further expanded upon to say that they lost contact with him after he landed in the US.
This is likely linked to the front-persona that Bellingcat talks about, although those screenshots has the person listed as Danish. (Erik Hansen is pretty close to John Smith in Scandinavia)
Israel has been ahead of the curve in explosives detection/scanning for many years. Recently I spent a week (cycling through Bulgaria) with a retired PHD chemist who led the security/detection services at the US TSA/FAA and she described visits to Israel where systems were developed/tested pre 9/11 — and quickly implemented in the US afterwards. So I can appreciate how Israel might have figured a way to “fool” these systems selectively. However, it may be many years (perhaps forever) before we understand the full story and reason that the country decided to pull the plug on its audacious booby-trap strategy on Hezbollah operatives.
I won’t buy into the “Zionist colonialism” narrative — Hezbollah and Hamas want Israel totally eliminated without any “two-state solution” (as of course the Right/Settler-movement in Israel believe that Israel has the right to occupy the Palestinian territories forever).
Although parallel connections can be dubious, the strategy of blowing up individuals who explicitly joined the armed forces of the opposing side (and were using the communications devices to co-ordinate their operations) is of a different order of magnitude to plotting a massive surprise raid, attacking and taking civilian hostages. (I realize this was Hamas, not Hezbollah but they share common objectives.) Israel has much blood on its hands, but so do its opponents.
Anyone who tries to simplify this messy conflict into some sort of black-and-white, one side is right and the other is wrong, misses its extremely complex and nuanced history.
“I won’t buy into the “Zionist colonialism” narrative — Hezbollah and Hamas want Israel totally eliminated.”
Apples and oranges. For starters, “Zionist colonialism” is redundant. It’s the origin of the modern state of Israel and official Israeli government policy. That Palestinians might object to being dispossessed, as Israelis almost uniformly feel, might be a source for endless conflict, with deep rationales on both sides.
Of course. Right or wrong, the UN voted to partition the mandated Palestine in 1948 (with Jerusalem a ‘free city’.) The Jewish Agency accepted the deal; the Arabs said ‘no’ and so the State of Israel emerged from its first war.
The argument about Zionists as “colonialists” gets conflated into religious history going back more than 5,000 years and the rather theological question: “Do Jewish people have the right to their own nation in their ancestral homeland?” But I’ll leave that stuff aside and stick to modern international law. So, yeah, the Israeli “Right” and Settler movement (and Netanyahu) are over the line, as are Hamas and Hezbollah who want Israel gone completely.
You seem to be doing a bit of conflating, merging the modern Zionist movement of the last hundred and fifty years into the last 5000. When referring to modern Zionism, the scare quotes around “colonialsm” are inappropriate.
I am a fan of starting with Throughline. In my understanding of this history, the June 13, 2024 episode is the best 60 minute description for establishing a baseline for further discussion on this subject. A History of Zionism
“Zionism has been defined and redefined again and again, and the definitions are often built on competing historical interpretations. So unsurprisingly, we’ve received many requests from you, our audience, to explore the origins of Zionism. On today’s episode, we go back to the late 19th century to meet the people who organized the modern Zionist movement.”
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1198908908
With exploding devices, it has electronic triggering and “discretion” wiring to not blow up wrongly – all in an electronic device, where it is hidden. From reporting, it was not an exploited battery susceptibility, it was explosives and added triggering electronics within basic electronics. The best interdiction might be a trained sniffing dog. They get drugs, explosives, their sense of smell is beyond our ability to comprehend. Put Fido in the supply chain, and be better off.
Did you read Andrew Huang’s analysis? Two items. PETN is virtually insoluble in water, which means, in part, it doesn’t generate much for a dog to smell.
Pre-made batteries can be modified to sandwich PETN between two parts of it, which makes it hard for a dog to detect it. If you’re able to make your own batteries – simple for a state actor – you can also more securely seal the sandwich, making it virtually impossible for dogs to smell.
Latest – Israel, overnight, shut down Al Jazeera’s facility in Ramallah. Ordered closed 45 days, per a renewable military authority order. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/22/israel-closes-al-jazeera-bureau-in-ramallah-all-you-need-to-know
This is really shameful. The murders of so many journalists covering Gaza has been horrific but this closure is just plain shameful.
But you know, Israel is a democratic country…*eye roll*
Here’s some more shameful for you:
https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken
Contex, as the Israel apologists like to emphasize, is illustrative.
For a colonial power, no news is good news.
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Bertrand Russell
This quote rings true. Now that most of ISIS has been killed off or imprisoned, I think we are better off. Thanks to Seal Team 6 Osama Bin Laden isn’t adding his Terrorists to commercial jets and flying them into Towers filled with non combatants. Isn’t that like converting a pager, and aren’t we better off? Here is Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, from a speech a few years ago. “Lebanon was a Christian country, but we took it, and now it is ours. After we kill the Jews in Palestine, we will have just begun. We won’t stop until every country on earth is ruled by the law of Allah and the people of Islam like our prophet promised.” I support our allies Israel and Ukraine
If you have to ask, you’ll never know the difference. Odd for a writer so apparently well-versed in these things, it’s as if you do this for a living.
Sure, reducing the number of terrorists in the world would be a good thing. Depends on how you do it, because the ends never justify the means. The means are the ends.
The American colonists who threw tea in Boston Harbor were terrorists.
Native Americans who tried to throw colonists off their land were terrorists.
There’s a lot of judgment in the label terrorist; context is everything.
Thanks for this post, Rayne. Much needed.
I’ve been deliberating with myself if I want to respond to this post. But since I want to be able to continue writing comments for this blog, I think I won’t.
I doubt I will be able to change anyone’s opinions, and if anyone wants to fact-check, they can do it without my help.
Your fear is unfounded, in my experience here. I have had several strident arguments with the mods here, and I wasn’t banned. Just avoid ad hominems and sneering condescension, obviously.
From my POV, this war and its attendant horrors are the preferred MOs of the Israeli govt, their blatant disregard for the blaring pre-10/7 warning claxons being prima facie evidence of that — and their subsequent profligate war crimes, which provide further evidence, are destroying what’s left of international (including American) good will for Israel.
The cheerleaders for Rabin’s assassination are running the show now, and the biggest winners are Hamas’ recruitment program and Muslim extremism generally.
The head of state who has the most in common with Netanyahu? Putin.
I would agree with most criticism of Netanyahu. I would also agree with all the very justified concerns about the suffering of people in Gaza, Israel’s policy in the west bank etc. But there is a certain point where people cross the line between justified criticism of Netanyahu and straight anti-zionism. The simplistic worldview where everything Israel does is automatically bad, esp. without a deeper understanding of the conflict (or buying into one-sided narrative) is dangerous and sometimes even flirts with antisemitism.
In this case, according to the report of Amnesty International, there were 37 dead, 4 of them are civilians and the rest are Hezbollah people. This is, by definition, a targeted attack. There are very few times when attack of an enemy mixed with civilians results in so few civilian casualties. Attack of such precise operation seem hypocritical to me, unless you buy into the narrative that everything Israel does is automatically bad. I also have high doubts this is a Netanyahu initiative. It’s been years in the making, including periods when Netanyahu wasn’t a prime minister.
And finally, the Hezbollah is a terror organization. founded (and funded) by Iran as part of their middle-east political aspirations, and in charge of countless number of war crimes, including recently killing 12 Arab children in Majdal Shams , and indiscriminately shooting rockets at Israeli civilian population. It is true that they also have political and charity wings, but this is true for many terrorist and extrimist groups, including Hamas, Houthis, the Taliban and more. The political wing gives them political power, and their charity wing is used to increase credence and dependence with local population, gaining more local support.
Dead children are just collateral damage, whether dead from handling their father’s pager or dying because they’ve been denied food, water, and essential medical care. *eye roll*
And we’ll just ignore the fact the formation of Hezbollah was a response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon.
It’s as if we’re supposed to believe that fucking around never has a finding out phase, regardless of nationality, ideology, or religion.
I think it was 2005 when one of my coworkers added one more to the many conspiracy theories about Israel and the Jewish people I have heard in my life. He claimed to have seen an organizational chart of all of the SES (Senior Executive Service) members and whether they were Jewish.
Flash forward to today and as I have been more exposed to the history of the Jewish people and where they ended up post WWII; I would not be surprised, nor should anyone, if this list is real. Being more than friends with the most powerful country on the planet, the USA, has been necessary for Israel to survive.
I have just finished studying how the Lost Cause got incorporated into Southern history due to society’s collective blind spot concerning the power of a woman’s hate group known as the Ladies Memorial Auxiliary and I see a similar pattern with this issue. This post by Rayne and her moderation of the commenter’s have only furthered my belief.
Israel’s Lost Cause is the belief that their religious book gives them title to the original borders and nothing will stop those with that belief. Compounding this problem is the US media’s blind spot in not exposing those that really believe in this Lost Cause.
Greg Hunter: We’re going back to one of my earlier points. The lack of understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in most discussions.
It is true that a certain segment of the population in Israel believe Israel should be from the river to the sea, but this segment is just a minority of Israelies. This is not the main reason for the conflict, or the reason it is so hard to get to such a resolution. In fact, many of the first zionists, including Theodore Herzel who is considered “The forefather of zionism” were completely secular. What was driving them is the danger of antisemitism and the need to establish a homeland for the Jewish people. Early on, some people even suggested other places (e.g. the Uganda Plan), but it was the deep historical connection to Israel that made it the only possible place for a Jewish state. The size and borders are open questions. The one important thing is having a Jewish homeland.
Most Israelies were originally refugees: Refugees of the pogroms in eastern Europe, refugees of WWII, and refugees of Arab countries after 850 thousand jews were expelled from most Arab countries. They came to Israel when they had no other choice, when they were hit by antisemitism in Europe long before the Holocaust, and when the US close its gates to them (due to the quota laws in the 1920s).
The conflict started in the early 1900s, when jews started immigrating to Israel. The local Arab leadership refused any number of jewish immigrant, and wouldn’t accept establishing any Jewish homeland on any part of Israel. They refused the Peel commission, they refused the UN partition plan etc. Of course, it wasn’t just their fault. Israeli leadership made a lot of mistakes too, both regarding the Palestinian Arab refugees in 1948 and then 1967. But the bottom line is that most Israelies would accept a two-state solution, but wouldn’t accept the “right of return” to within Israel’s border. Palestinians won’t accept any final agreement that doesn’t include at least the “right of return”, and compound that with the lack of trust. That’s the real problem, and the root of the “Lost Cause”, if you will.
Rayne: The death of any child during war is terrible. Yet, you don’t go and write long posts because of any child that dies. The fact that you spent the time and energy because of the death of this one specific child reveals a strong bias.
And it is easy to start the chain of events in history at any point you want to promote your favorite narrative, but this is just playing a pointless blaming game. By the same Token, ISIS was created as a result of the US invading Iraq, but you won’t find lots of people who defend ISIS because of that.
Do NOT tell me what I wrote and why.
I am furious about U.S. national security being compromised by Israel AGAIN, and this time in a way that allows blowback on the U.S. for Israel’s inability to rein in its corrupt fascist leadership which has proven it doesn’t care about any collateral damage, whether innocent children in Gaza and Lebanon OR the U.S. national security.
Clearly you didn’t read my previous comments in my previous June post (linked at the top of this post) when I asked:
Now you’re expecting us to buy the justification for the launch of a war on neighboring Lebanon.
And I also wrote in my June post:
Perhaps you haven’t been here long enough at this site to recall the amount of criticism heaped on U.S. foreign policy and media for its gross failings with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan. We know fuck-ups when we see them because of our deep experience. The least Israel could do is learn from the trillions of wasted tax dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives lost to not replicate our failures.
But no. Apparently not.
To SelaSela:
The founding document of Likud begins with a river to the sea statement: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party
And that nebulous “some Israelis” who you claim “river to the sea” sovereignty must be a pretty large “some,” because the entire Jewish membership of the Knesset just a couple months ago issued a proclamation that a Palestinian state is not feasible.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-18/ty-article/knesset-passes-resolution-against-establishment-of-palestinian-state/00000190-c2c6-d13a-ad92-caffa4b90000
“a. The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
Only Arab members of the Knesset voted against it. That right there is the definitive Israeli government “river to the sea” proclamation.
Sorry, that second blockquote (item “a.”) was meant to go after the first link, not the second one.
“Theodore Herzel who is considered “The forefather of zionism” was completely secular.”
Ladies Memorial Auxiliaries (LMAs) were secular organizations that were told their idea was wrong but due to blind arrogance to their cause did it anyway resulting in a wrecked South that has helped usher in Christian Nationalism into our Republic.
Theodore Herzel was a secular man that was told his idea was wrong but due to blind arrogance to this cause did it anyway resulting in a wrecked Israel that has been corrupted by the religious zealots.
The LMAs could not have carried on their cause without those in the pews and Israel could not have become a nation without those in the synagogues.
Sela I had seen your comment earlier and I had already prepared a comment but was hesitant to post it due to people misunderstanding my analysis as being misogynist and or antisemitic and I wondered which way you would fall? Bruce drew you out and I finally took the opportunity to post my “insights”; however, I only posted half of my comment.
Blind arrogance to a bad idea is the root of the Lost Causes.
As I have come to this conclusion, I have begun asking a version of this question to my Jewish friends and acquaintances which so far the answer has been YES.
“Do you think you are smarter than gentiles?” As they say yes, I find it funny as I am a gentile smart enough to be in the same space as they are and smart enough to observe this obvious belief, but that never seems to dawn on them? I tell my friends that the great leveling factor in society is a fantastic K-12 public education and not your nature or nurture.
I will posit that this attitude is also prevalent in a great number of communities that were born lucky but fail to see that fact. If you were born with a stable family and a modicum of education in NYC post WWII, you could not help but hit a home run. I see the same attitudes from the Brahmin’s; Indians and Bostonians alike. Engineers think they are smarter than geologists….and so it goes.
BRUCE F COLE:
I don’t see how you can put “LOL” and the assassination of Rabin in the same paragraph, yet alone in the same sentence. I didn’t put a lot of events in my brief overview. There are too many relevant events, and if I wanted to write a comprehensive list, it would be a really long document. Yes, the assassination of Rabin was detrimental to the peace process, and so was the wave of suicide attacks during the tenure of Shimon Peres who replaced Rabin, when every week someone exploded in a bus. My own sister almost killed in one of those explosions. This wave of terror helped the election of Netanyahu in 1996. This goes to show you how extremists on both sides killed the prospect of Peace process.
And yes, I read your links, and I’ve been familiar with both before. Yet, when people believed that peace was within reach (even after the assassination or Rabin), poll after poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Israelis believed in a two state solution.
And finally, I’m not trying to convince you. My experience is that people rarely if ever change their minds following an online discussion. I just want you to understand my point of view (and the point of view of most pro-peace Israelis), even if you do not accept it.
SelaSela:
I didn’t notice your reply till just now, the thread-compression feature here being what it is.
Please forgive me the LOL I posted. It wasn’t appropriate, given the vast humanitarian quagmire that is the current state of the “Holy Land,” and especially given that particular juncture that your own family was deeply impacted by. I hope your sister was able to recover from that trauma.
I guess my main point is that when two adversaries stake out identically intransigent positions (“river to the sea”), the outcome of their conflict is predictably disastrous. That’s a nice way of saying “extremists on both sides” are to blame, as you put it; Israel’s 40/1 kill ratio in response to 10/7 gives Hamas and Hezbollah all the PR advantage they could possibly desire.
To wit: after the Rabin assassination, there was great hope — and then Shin Bet assassinated Palestinian bombmaker Ayyash, revenge for which led explicitly to his acolytes’ suicide bus bombings. To expect Israel’s security service to be surprised at that outcome is to be blindingly credulous imo, and my opinion is that they did it (instead of try to arrest the terrorist, say) in the immediate runup to the next election to give Netanyahu the boost he needed to win. And that assassination itself was the predecessor of the Lebanon pager assassinations, albeit much less messy in terms of collateral damage (your comment elsewhere relegating the fallout from those booby traps to only fatalities ignores that fact).
The acrimony caused by the displacement of millions of Palestinians by Jewish migration to modern day Israel is not something you can dismiss with the wave of a hand. The Holocaust and systemic antisemitism in the West and Russia, despite being the proximate cause of that displacement, counts for nothing in the lives of those who were displaced and are now themselves sorely oppressed.
BRUCE F COLE:
During the 90s and the early 2000s, about 70% of Jewish Israelis supported a two state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, as shown by a large number of polls from that period. This number fall following the collapse of the Camp David talks and the 2nd Intifada. By 2020, only 40-45 percent supported two state solution, and after October 7th the number became significantly lower.
If you ask those who oppose two state solution why they oppose it, you’ll find two main reasons:
1. Disillusionment of from the Oslo accords and belief that such agreement is not feasible since they believe that Palestinians don’t really want peace, or have requirements that Israelis would never agreed to, such as the “right of return”.
2. Belief that Palestinians did not come to term with the existence of Israel, and want to destroy it.
There are definitely those who object to two state solution for religious reasons, but these are not a majority. The main reason many Israelis currently object to two state solution is mistrust in the other side’s intents, and lack of belief in the feasibility of a two state solution.
I gotta drop an LOL in here now: the assassination of Rabin, one of the architects of Oslo, doesn’t get a mention in your overview of Isreali victimization by the Palestinians, and their distrust of Isreali intentions.
Check your lenses, they seem to be distorted.
And please do read that link above to the founding document of Likud, where a two state solution is expressly dismissed…in 1977.
No, today’s conditions are the direct results of Likud strategy over the long term. A two state solution died when Rabin was murdered, at the expressed urging of Bibi and his theocratic cohorts.
I remember 1983, when Hezbollah terrorists bombed the U.S. military barracks in Beirut, killing 241 members of the U.S. military. One of those terrorists involved, Ibrahim Aquil, now a top Hezbollah commander, was killed in a Israeli air strike on Friday. Thank You Israel
Yeah, they used PETN in that bombing, too. What goes around comes around.
To the people of Israel: please rid yourselves and the world of Netanyahu. To the people of Palestine: please rid yourselves and the world of Hamas.
I’m heartily sick of your conflict in the same way I’m heartily sick of mass shootings. No, don’t play the blame game, heartily sick of that too. You all bear responsibility, all play the game, all. Sorry, have watched this stupid game for too long, for too many years. You’ve all lost my support at this point, all. Yes, it’s horrible, but for too many either side, not horrible enough yet. I don’t expect remote detonation of hand held devices is the end of it. Surely the retaliation will be another horror story. And so it goes. I can only hope that someone has the courage to stop feeding it. It won’t be Iran.
Except for reports like these: https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-eu-top-diplomat-josep-borrell/ and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/europe/israel-hamas-money-finance-turkey-intelligence-attacks.html
Are they accurate? I don’t know. But things like this have happened before. Keep an enemy weak by keeping them divided.