When the terrorist organization known as Hezbollah found its pagers exploding in its members’ faces, presumably following Israeli manipulation of the group’s supply chain, many Americans struggled with how to react.

On the one hand, Israel (which officially said nothing) appeared to have come up with an audacious, gadget-driven trick straight out of a James Bond film. Aside from its innovative nature, at least at this level, last week’s action appeared to be a shrewd way of limiting collateral damage in that the explosions were small and only Hezbollah members had the booby-trapped devices in their charge. Add in the ancillary benefits of unmasking Hezbollah members (possibly surprising even their own family members) and disrupting terrorist communications and, for supporters of Israel weary of the bombs being lobbed at that state’s evacuated northern regions, there appeared to be things to cheer. What an operation!

“I love it,” said Pennsylvania’s famously unfiltered Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. Social media was filled with memes and jokes.

But it was not so simple, as Chicago Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, found out when some of his anti-Israeli City Hall colleagues objected to a humorous posting he then took down. Even these confined explosions maimed and killed people, and there were children who should not have been near these pagers but, in some isolated cases, were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sheer number of explosions meant there was indeed collateral damage and whether there was notably less than a typical missile or bomb was, like everything in the Middle East, open to debate. Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah members are so integrated into daily life in Lebanon that some call the situation a state within a state. By turning to individualized pagers, Israel was tacitly admitting that reality.

Is it not a pyrrhic victory to say that you developed a weapon perfect for war theaters where the combatants are so difficult to distinguish from ordinary people? Ideally, would you not have public sentiment on your side?

Of course, that’s not a world within which Israelis live. The country now has conflicts on multiple fronts. But its citizens see them all as very much related and see fighting them as an existential imperative, whatever the views from outside. Americans have to understand that.

The exploding pagers are best described as a novel weapon in an ever-expanding war, one that threatens to engulf those far beyond the reach of Hezbollah’s now broken devices. There is also reason to worry that this kind of technical espionage is a potential new nightmare of modern life; if a pager can be manipulated to explode, so surely could an internet-connected car or refrigerator. Remarkably, Israel appeared to have created an entire European shell company for the pagers so as to obscure its doings. Others, surely, could do the same.

We should all feel anxious at the palpable lack of stability.

We had heard months ago from Israelis that the nation’s leaders saw this fight on the nation’s northern borders as yet more of a threat than the situation with Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah, which is supported operationally and financially by Iran and has tens of thousands of rockets in its arsenal, has greater capabilities than Hamas. Many Israelis understandably see its attacks on the portion of Israel near the border with Lebanon as a stealth shrinking of Israel’s borders. If those areas (from which Israelis mostly have been evacuated at the state’s request or their own volition) are uninhabitable as a result of the danger from missiles, Israeli thinking goes, it then has a right to defend them, even if that means going after Hezbollah at home.

We agree. The U.S. would never tolerate a foreign nation shooting rockets inside its borders. It would go after the perpetrators where they lived, even if they said what they were doing was linked to another cause. That’s the case with Hezbollah, which is supporting Hamas and attempting to put pressure on Israel over Gaza. So there is sound basis for the attack.

Still, it is sobering and worrying that the Biden administration appeared to know little or nothing in advance about the pager offensive, clearly a consequence of the rift that has grown between two long-standing allies. There are reasons for that rift, for sure, but anyone taking the long view, not just of this conflict but the broader issue of global peace and security, has to see that as a major problem needing rapid correction.

The U.S. and its allies have a vital role to play in maintaining Middle East peace, and total disassociation with a democratically elected Israeli government is simply not an option. There is more U.S. clout and more ability to maintain peace while sitting around the same table.

The dangers of escalation of this crisis in and around Israel have been much discussed over the last year or so. In recent days, it has become clear that the escalation is already here.

The first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel is not a day to anticipate with anything but foreboding.

This entire situation demands the Biden administration’s full attention, including the attention of the senior member out on the campaign trail.

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