It is the afternoon of Tuesday the 17th September 2024 and I am at my desk, taking a break from work and scrolling on my X.com feed. I stop on a video from Beirut, Lebanon, which appears to be security camera footage from a fruit and vegetable market. It is silent and it shows a man in a blue cap about to pay for some produce from the stall owner. Amidst the yellow, green, orange and purple of the produce, an explosion suddenly emanates from the midriff of the man in the cap. Smoke rises and people around him disperse as he falls to the ground in agony. In the chaotic few seconds following, his fellow market-goers seem unsure what to do: one calls for help, others keep their distance, wary perhaps of a sniper or some other lingering threat. The video ends on 19 seconds and loops back to the beginning. The man in the cap reaches to his pocket to pay the stall owner again as I half-catch a comment underneath from an account with an Israeli flag emoji expressing satisfaction at the event depicted.
I lock my phone screen and try to fight the rising feeling of nausea. It is a disturbing peculiarity of the contemporary information age that barely contextualised images and videos of death and mutilation, filmed by drone in the fields of war or on dashcam or CCTV, bursting unwelcome into scenes of daily life, have become commonplace in social and news media, along with the presence of anonymous commentary luxuriating in the suffering. If this horror has not yet become normal, it has certainly become familiar.
We now know that what was depicted in this video was part of a series of coordinated attacks causing personal electronic devices in Lebanon to explode, conducted by US-backed Israeli “security” forces, across the 17th and 18th September 2024, which at the time of writing have injured over 3,000 people, more than 200 critically, and killed 12, including two children, aged 9 and 11. The New York Times has described this as a “tactical success”1. This unspeakable barbarity arrives through some debauched process of formal, linguistic and ethical transfiguration as the stuff of blockbuster cinema, or serial drama: the difficult decisions taken by those with power, the thrill of righteous conquest. All this while Israel continues to escalate its genocidal war against the Palestinian people, principally in Gaza but also the West Bank2, whose death toll was estimated in The Lancet at approximately 186,000 in July of this year3 and has been noted recently as likely being over 335,000 as of September4. A ground war with Lebanon now seems increasingly possible.
In the face of such mounting, mutating horror, it is tempting to retreat to moral or metaphysical claims, to assert that Israel is plumbing hitherto unknown depths of depravity in the modern age. It is clearly true that the actions of the Zionist occupation are intended to be psychologically traumatising. In its twisted logic, its flagrant, shameless brutality appears to constitute the creation of a new category of human being: fundamentally expendable, whose life simply does not matter, and whose killing inspires no indignation, the very act of whose killing inscribes post-facto on their flesh their worthlessness and expendability, and the justification for their extermination. Hundreds of dead “Hezbollah fighters”: yes, even the nine-year-old girl. Thousands upon thousands of “Hamas terrorists”: yes, even the newborn babies. Western (including Irish5) media and political leaders, it must be noted, willingly propagate this mendacious distortion of language and reality on a daily basis to the point that it has almost ceased to be remarkable.
But of course, these premises prefigured Israel’s engagement of the latest phase of its genocidal madness; they are sewn into the very fabric of the imperialist, settler-colonial system the Zionist entity represents. To the machinery of imperialism, compelled under its own perverse energy to neverending expansion, human beings appear as instruments or obstacles, made of yielding flesh and bone. The enactment of this logic by the Zionist terror state in its purest form is genocide, accompanied by its profane invocation of the Nazi Holocaust to justify its crimes, the point at which the contradictions between empire and humanity, ethnic supremacy and democracy, become soluble only by mass violence.
In its own sick way, Israel has broken new ground, in its terror event of 17th and 18th September, in remotely detonating personal electronic devices – first pagers, then smartphones, keycard machines, intercoms, home appliances – in the depraved ingenuity of its planning and execution. Certainly, the “cleverness” of the attack, reportedly planned since April 2024 and from which the staff of the American University Hospital of Beirut were apparently, coincidentally spared6, has been roundly commended in imperialist media7. Despite its formal novelty, it is also more fundamentally a continuation of the debased, racist normality wrought most recently by western imperialist violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and others, capably led by the US, Britain and the EU, and indeed of the settler-colonial violence in Palestine of the late 19th and early 20th century, spearheaded by Britain after being honed against the population of Ireland, which preceded the establishment of the Israeli state as we know it8.
The reported use of the devices’ lithium batteries in the terror attacks in Lebanon too provides an interesting microcosm of imperialism today. Lithium, needed for batteries for smartphones but also the burgeoning market of electric vehicles, and extracted at great cost to the surrounding environment, has become a resource of immense value in intra-imperialist wrangling in the 21st century, from Bolivia to Serbia9. The object of the lithium battery itself embodies all the complexity of the conditions and contradictions of imperialism, ecological collapse, consumer society and, now, settler-colonial terrorism in 2024. But just as our modern consumer technologies are marked by the blood-stained handprint of imperialist resource extraction (from coltan10 to lithium and beyond), just as the decayed and putrid face beneath the mask of the liberal world order is displayed for all to see in its steadfast material and political support for Israeli genocide, up to and including the shameful operationalising of the “humanitarian aid pier” constructed by the Biden administration in Gaza and utilised by the IDF to perperate a massacre against a refugee camp11 – remember when such occurrences weren’t commonplace? – so too does this conflict continue to expose the lies and contradictions and bloody, grasping, demented violence at the heart of this imperialist order, in all its white, inhuman horror.
The genocidal machinery of Zionism may thus force us, tragically belatedly, to confront something deeply uncomfortable within ourselves, beneath the patina of our comparatively frictionless existence in the West, around our culpability in the same grotesque and on-going violence we reflexively condemn and distance ourselves from. At the time of writing, a company called BAC Consulting12 (whose CEO, in a dark but fitting irony, appears to be a graduate of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, or SOAS13), registered in Hungary, an EU member state, has been identified as procuring and delivering the pagers which detonated in Lebanon. The Hungarian government has been keen to stress that the company is not physically based in Hungary, nor did its pagers pass through Hungarian territory at any point, but that BAC Consulting is merely registered in Hungary14. It represents another twisted rhyme between contemporary imperialism’s financial system and settler-colonial violence, in the race to the bottom of nation states to prostrate themselves before capital with permissive tax laws and company registration loopholes, which sees countless such companies – without physical presence, employees, accountability to any one or any state in particular – persist in the ether, and by the recitation of which a mass terror attack can be effectively dropshipped onto an unsuspecting civilian population.
Though we can take heart in the comparatively recent example of the collapse of the nuclear-armed apartheid South African regime, it is a mistake to presume Israel’s eventual defeat as inevitable. Rather, it must be a call to action. To the extent that the influence of the Zionist project is woven through our contemporary existence, from technology, news media, pharmaceuticals and beyond, so too is the resistance to Zionism a global and multifaceted one. The survival of apartheid in South Africa, it should be remembered, was never an existential issue for the great imperialist powers. Alongside supporting the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) strategy, our immediate political focus here must be the severing of ties between Ireland and the Israeli military machine, from the cessation of Shannon Airport as a de facto US military base and prohibition of our airspace for ferrying weapons of war, to the enactment of our government of the Occupied Territories Bill and termination of all purchase contracts with Israel, as a starting point. The struggles of the Irish and Palestinian peoples remain connected: the struggle of the Palestinian people is that of all oppressed peoples.
19th September 2024. This video is one minute and ten seconds long and the caption tells me it is from Jenin. It appears to be shot from a nearby building or balcony, maybe 100m away, as we watch three IDF soldiers throw a blindfolded Palestinian man over the edge of a rooftop. He grabs the edge of the building to hold on, in desparation, but one of the soldiers, without hesitation, stamps on his hands and kicks him off, down, out of shot and presumably to his death. The caption informs me that they will do the same to two other men. I cannot watch any more. The increasingly erratic, flailing, rabid beast of Zionism continues to wreak senseless cruelty and destruction all along its path, aiming to break the spirit of its enemies along with their bodies. Thus the resistance must proceed, beyond despair, with unity of purpose.
- Kingsley, P. (2024) “Israel’s Pager Attack Was a Tactical Success Without a Strategic Goal” New York Times 18th September 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/gki7N
- Morning Star Staff (2024) “Settlers launch wave of attacks after UN’s highest court rules Israel must end colonisation of West Bank” Morning Star Online, 20th July 2024, accessed at: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/settlers-launch-wave-attacks-after-uns-highest-court-rules-israel-must-end-colonisation-west
- Khatib, R et al. (2024) “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, p.237-238, The Lancet 404:10449, accessed at: https://archive.ph/78BrC
- Sridhar, D. (2024) “Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza”, The Guardian website, 5th September 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/KAz5x
- Murray, Y. (2024) “UN says nine employees ‘may have been involved’ in Hamas attack” RTE News website, 6th August 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/P6B0X
- American University of Beirut Medical Centre (2024) post on X.com on 17th September 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/BFOEH
- Sabbagh, D. et al (2024) “Pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah were audacious and carefully planned”, Guardian website, 18th September 2024, accessed at:https://archive.ph/ssvQG
- Koutteneih, F and Pat Torley (2023) “Britain’s role in Palestine and Ireland”, Socialist Voice, January 2023 issue, accessed at: https://socialistvoice.ie/2023/01/britains-role-in-palestine-and-ireland/
- Mullen, R. (2024) “Serbia and Rio Tinto”, Socialist Voice, September 2024 issue, accessed at: https://socialistvoice.ie/2024/09/serbia-and-rio-tinto/
- Constantine, A and Ismail Wolff (2023) “The Dark Side of Technology: Coltan Mining in the DRC and its Human Rights and Environmental Impacts”, Global Forest Coalition website, accessed at: https://archive.ph/6jMci
- Staff article (2024) “Nuseirat, anatomy of Israel’s massacre in Gaza”, Al Jazeera, 11th June 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/RCr5P
- Staff article (2024) “Hungarian shell company behind exploding pagers used by Israel in Lebanon terror attack”, The Cradle website, 18th September 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/VYoQw
- Barsony-Arcidiacono, C. (2024) Academia.edu profile, accessed at: https://archive.ph/UhO8j
- Roussi, A. (2024) “Bulgaria says it didn’t make the exploding pagers”, Politico website, 20th September 2024, accessed at: https://archive.ph/1Ooa2
