The Israeli operation that led to the detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies in September 2024 shocked the world, eliciting admiration and condemnation alike. Yet, daring and creative tactics such as the pager operation are not an unusual phenomenon; in fact, they are a mainstay of Israeli strategic thought. It was the ultimate combination of “Jewish Chutzpah”, the Zionist pioneering (Haluziut) ethos, and the long-standing belief in self-reliance (as Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion put it: “What matters is not what the nations say, but what the Jews do,”), combined with creative, sometimes criminal, Jewish wit.
The result is decades of Israeli cunning: the obtaining of a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Communist Party Congress by the Mossad (1956); the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and his trial in Israel (1961); “Operation Diamond,” orchestrated by the Mossad, in which an Iraqi MiG-21 pilot defected to Israel with his plane (1966); the espionage saga of Eli Cohen in Syria (1960-1965); and Operation Entebbe, where an Israeli commando force rescued hostages from a terrorist-hijacked Air France flight in Uganda (1976). These are just particularly well-known examples of “out of this world” special operations. And they’re not just relics of the past: more recently, events like the Stuxnet Computer Worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, attributed to Israeli involvement; the operation to bring and expose the “Iranian Archive” that revealed Iran’s nuclear weapons program to the world (2018); and, lately, the “Pager Operation” and the subsequent killing of Hezbollah’s entire high command.
And yet, despite the advantages that come with Israel’s ability to carry out such deft tactical feats, there are also downsides to a strategic overreliance on special operations. First, daring is “cool” only as long as it succeeds. When things go off the rails, the stakes are high. This is true for specific operations gone wrong, like the failed assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Jordan (1997), which led to a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Jordan, as well as a rift with the Clinton administration. But more broadly, since the image of cunning is now so strongly tied to the overall perception of Israeli strength, it takes a hard hit when there’s a perception of weakness, such as after the Yom Kippur War (1973) or, more recently, after the events of October 7, 2023. This points to an inherent disadvantage—the perception of Israeli cunning is, after all, a form of soft power, besides the hard power that comes with such capacity for tactical planning. This perception does indeed have genuinely positive effects on Israel’s maneuverability and is an important pillar of Israel’s geopolitical standing in the region. But at the end of the day, it is still soft power, with all its limitations and shortcomings.
Moreover, Israeli daring has clear boundaries. The “superhero” aura surrounding Israel is bound to the moral framework of “purity of arms” and the proper use of power. The KGB also carried out daring intelligence operations, but in Western eyes, these were perceived as cruel and brutal. The use of cunning is, by its nature, limited to operations that can be framed—at least in the eyes of a neutral third party (as much as any such parties exist)—as actions conducted with moral restraint intended for a “greater good.”
The need to limit special operations to “good causes” creates high expectations of what Israeli daring can achieve and what its side effects will be. For instance, the Hollywood-style daring operations of Israeli cunning set an almost impossible standard for “minimal collateral damage.” What’s astonishing about the pager operation, of course, is its surgical precision. Killing dozens of Hezbollah operatives and injuring thousands could have been achieved through the carpet bombing of Beirut. But the achievement was made in an unprecedented, targeted manner, with minimal harm to non-combatants. The downside is that this sets an unrealistic standard when the “cool operation” can’t deliver the same effect—either because it’s not feasible in the first place or because it is feasible but with much higher collateral damage. The very existence of the “cool operation” creates a strong illusion about how wars work and sets an impossible bar. This mistaken belief that the fantastic successes of Israeli special operations won’t be balanced out by its extremely damaging failures is the Sterility Fallacy.
Furthermore, there are few cases where a “cool operation” can, by itself, create the necessary strategic effect and truly achieve political objectives, as 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz would put it. More often, a “cool operation” can complement a broader campaign which, in a holistic way, can achieve the strategic effect. However, viewing everything through the lens of the “cool operation” limits and restricts, ultimately playing into the enemy’s hands.
In the long run, this creates Western standards of force application that are not only very high, but also do not necessarily achieve the intended goal. It’s the story of precision munitions in miniature. A technological development rooted in science fiction—GPS, for example, could not have been imagined just a couple of generations ago—and was designed to solve real operational problems the U.S. military faced in Vietnam. Thus, technological developments arose that enabled precise targeting to achieve operational objectives. The aim wasn’t to reduce collateral damage or avoid harming non-combatants—the goal was to achieve the ability to strike military targets accurately as part of a broader strategic context. However, 40 years after the development of precision-guided munitions (PGM), the standard created by the ability to hit a coin-sized target anywhere on the globe has spawned a series of operational constraints that tie the hands of Western armies. The idea that the level of precision of the pager operation and similar acts can scale to the level necessary to have a lasting strategic impact is the Elegance Fallacy.
Similarly, precise operations create unrealistic expectations. For instance, why is the casualty rate for non-combatants high in Gaza if Israel has the ability to target terrorists with such precision? The anti-Israel campaign to halt the supply of precision bombs to the Israeli Air Force is partially fueled by this perception. In reality, the ability to kill a terrorist without any collateral damage is a boutique capability; it cannot be demonstrated in the thousands.
Israel itself suffers from these fallacies as well. Israel is a country with a technological and special-operations orientation in its approach to all policy issues: While the senior positions in the U.S. government are often filled by political science and humanities graduates, their Israeli counterparts tend to have risen through Israel’s special operations units or are engineers and programmers. This naturally makes the Israeli mindset a problem-solving one, focused on solutions that conflate the messy, chaotic world of international relations with the precise, mechanical process of designing machines and planning military operations. And when tools as magical as “a terrorist organization’s dedicated communications devices that only terrorists use, which will explode exactly when and where we want” exist, there’s a strong tendency to believe that every problem can be solved through the framework of Israeli cunning.
The problem is precisely that—when Israel is successful, its successes are so elegant that they create the illusion of a panacea. This often leads to them being carried out in isolation, or at least not tightly connected enough to a broader, holistic political framework. And, in international security, there aren’t only “cool operations”; there’s also a lot of grunt work, less “cool” actions, and certainly less elegant ones.
In the summer of 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and murdered them following a failed rescue attempt. Israel’s then-Prime Minister, Golda Meir, vowed to avenge their deaths and ordered the assassination of all the organization’s leaders and members involved in the Munich massacre. The assassination campaign was successful, and within a few years, most of Black September’s members were eliminated. And yet, Golda ultimately won the battle but lost the war by not considering the broader political context in which Black September carried out its attacks. Within two years of the massacre, the PLO—under which Black September operated—was recognized by the Arab League as the sole representative of the Palestinian people (at the Rabat Summit in 1974), which, within a few years, paved the way for growing international recognition of the PLO and, ultimately, for a situation in which Israel was compelled to negotiate with the organization in the Madrid Conference and later in the Oslo Accords. Israel viewed the entire operation through the lens of the “cool operation,” rather than the strategic lens utilized by Arafat.
In conclusion, Israeli cunning is a genuine asset that has made a notable comeback in after the blow it took on October 7th. But at the same time, Israel’s overreliance on its own cleverness enhances fallacies and misunderstandings of the reality of modern warfare, thus unintentionally exacerbating the pushback against Israeli action in battle and making it more difficult to carry out operations sequentially and simultaneously, be they elegant or not. We must keep our eyes on the ball—the strategic context is what truly matters here. If Israel can retain both its amazing capacity for tactical innovation while also recognizing that such abilities alone are not enough, it will be able to maximize its force on the battlefield and beyond.