On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon. Their purported target? Hezbollah operatives. Forty-two people, including children, were killed by the indiscriminating devices. More than 3,500 were injured in an instant, the booby-trap blast blowing open abdomens and claiming fingers and eyes.

Although purchased from a Taiwan company, the pagers were produced by a shell company that was part of a Mossad operation, packed with powerful plastic explosives and a detonator that would be triggered at will by Israeli intelligence.

The next day, walkie-talkies similarly rigged with explosives were detonated as well, killing at least twenty-five and injuring over six hundred.

The exploding pagers Trojan horse attack was just one more tactic from an old and well-used Israeli playbook. Thirty years ago Israel targeted and killed a Hamas bombmaker with an booby-trapped phone.

Other pages of the Israeli playbook include brazen denials, false flags, assassinations, phony ceasefires, surprise attacks, and industrial sabotage.

Of course other countries employ the same tactics, including the United States, but they appear to have a privileged position in the Israeli playbook. This we may presume from its oft-cited intelligence motto "By way of deception, thou shalt do war." As if to underscore this propensity, one of the pager-plotters told CBS 60 Minutes that the people walking around Lebanon with scarred faces, missing eyes, and fingers "are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East."

The problem for Americans is that in the same way that he is infatuated with the pro wrestling circus, President Donald Trump is mightily impressed with the tactics of deception and seeks to ape them. That goes a long way to explain his infatuation with the Israeli prime minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu knows it. He proudly presented Trump with a gold-plated commemorative model of the deadly pagers. "That was a great operation," said the appreciative president.

Trump is uniquely susceptible to Netanyahu's entreaties. We learn from The New York Times account "How Trump Took the US to War With Iran," that in the White House Situation Room in February, Netanyahu laid out a case for "near certain victory" in the latest war:

"Iran's ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad's intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime."

That was a stretch. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, called Netanyahu's assumptions "farcical." Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an inveterate warmonger, said, "It's bullshit." Yet the president bought it.

It was to be yet another surprise attack on Iran, Israel's third in just a year and a half. Trump, ever under the spell of Netanyahu's tactics, gave the go-ahead. Americans didn't merely participate in Israel's plan. It became a U.S.-led operation.