Mick Hartley

Liel Leibowitz at the Free Press on a new film from director Justin Folk. As the headline says: Some Cultures Cling to Life and Others Sanctify Death,

Paging Hezbollah tells the story of how the Israeli military managed to trick the Lebanese terrorist organization into using beepers installed with plastic explosives, pressing the button one day in the fall of 2024 and watching the devices—and with them scores of hands, noses, eyes, and testicles—explode….

Rather than rush into his story, Folk takes his time explaining to his viewers what’s at stake. And at stake, he realizes, is the fate of our civilization, everywhere under attack by men hell-bent on death and destruction. Hezbollah, Folk reminds viewers who might’ve forgotten or have never really known, was founded in 1982 to murder not only Israelis but also Americans, a task at which the organization, sadly, once excelled: In 1983, the terrorist group bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. That same year, it bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut as well, claiming the lives of 17 more Americans, before kidnapping, torturing, and executing others in years to follow, including CIA station chief William Francis Buckley. Folk shows us archival footage of these horrors, doing everything he can to help a generation reared on social media and enamored with blowhard banshees like Tucker Carlson realize who are the real enemies of Israel and America, and everywhere in the still-free world.

That history lesson, brief but deeply moving, is worth the price of admission alone. Hollywood these days is hardly known for its excess of moral clarity, which is why its luminaries love wearing the red hand pin, which appears to symbolize the lynching of two Israelis by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in 2000. Folk delivers more candor and clarity in a few minutes than most of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters have in decades, giving us an unvarnished look at the merciless marauders at war with the West.

And the wonderful details of the Israeli scheme:

As they observed Hezbollah, the Israelis, we learn, noticed a troubling pattern: Increasingly terrified of being hacked, the jihadists were abandoning cell phones for more old-fashioned—and more secure—channels. This largely meant walkie-talkies, leading the Israelis to suggest that maybe those bulky devices could somehow be rigged with explosives. But Hezbollah members, we learn from the jaunty spymasters on film, used their walkie-talkies only in emergencies; for everyday chatter, they favored a more primitive, and resilient, form of staying in touch: beepers.

In one hilarious recreation, we see a Mossad division chief summoning one of his best operatives, a skinny and nerdy tech guy, and tasking him with finding a way to turn a beeper into a bomb in less than 24 hours. The engineer, of course, stays up all night, but the report he delivers come morning is mixed: There is a way to stuff the gadget full of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, he says, but hardly enough to inflict real damage. A standard pager is about two by two and a half inches, weighing less than two ounces. Any effective explosive device would have to be significantly larger. And who, in the 21st century, wants their electronics to be big and bulky?

Intelligence operations of lesser intelligence might’ve given up at that point, but it’s here that reality—and with it, Folk’s film—takes a turn to the fantastic. The solution, like something out of a particularly twisted episode of Mad Men, turns out to be not technology but advertising: What if, quips one female Mossad agent, a would-be Don Draper with a license to kill, what if we could make Hezbollah’s terrorists believe that only large devices could withstand the wear and tear afflicted by real, tough men? What if we could turn comically large beepers into status symbols for the terrorist on the make?

No sooner does the film pose the question than Folk cuts to an actual commercial, produced by Mossad, showing the supersize pager—think about three tins of Altoids stacked on top of each other and encased in black plastic—in a host of manly settings. You can get it wet! You can toss it on the sand! It’s indestructible, just like you! Another recreation of an absolutely true story shows us what happened next: The terrorists, enamored with the well-marketed gizmo, place their orders, giving Mossad a direct supply chain into Hezbollah HQ.

As we watch the story unfold, we root not only for the crafty spies but for something grander and quintessentially American, something that once gave Hollywood its superpower: the basic human understanding that the fight between good and evil is simple and simply exhilarating. Rather than peddle another batch of dubious and dysfunctional and all-too-dark portraits—like the kind we find everywhere, from Fauda to Slow Horses—Folk gives us those quintessentially American commodities, heroes and villains. The former are stylish—the silver-haired Barnea in particular looks like he just stepped out of a GQ shoot—and smart. The latter are bumbling and nefarious. And when the baddies have their balls blown off, the entire theater cheers.

Because some things in life, Paging Hezbollah reminds us, really are that uncomplicated. Some cultures cling to life and others sanctify death. Some create and others destroy. And when the two clash—onscreen and in real life alike—we have no other job than to watch with bated breath and applaud wildly when the good guys, against all odds, pull it off.

Creativity defeats the mindless Islamist hatred of Hezbollah. Quintessentially American maybe, but even more so, quintessentially Jewish.

As Jewish history shows, in Israel but also in the extraordinary contribution Jews have made to US culture (and, let’s not forget, to British and European culture), there’s something culturally and intellectually dynamic about the Jews – in sorry contrast, it has to be said, to the cultural and intellectual stagnation to be found in the current Muslim world.