On June 15, the U.S.-based far-left New Israel Fund (NIF) distributed a press release decrying a proposal before Israel’s legislature to outlaw the filming of Israeli soldiers. Left-wing activists and journalists quickly joined in denouncing an authoritarian assault on freedom of speech by preventing news coverage of allegedly misbehaving troops; a major television channel aired a heated debate over the bill between an activist and a right-wing politician. Two days later NIF claimed that the bill had made it through the committee—the first of four votes required for such a bill to become law—and was on its way to making it through the Knesset. But, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, the entire episode was a sham:

[The parliamentarian] Robert Ilatov did, in fact, pen [such] a bill. . . . But he didn’t do so because he thought it might pass, or even because he wanted it to pass. As anyone with more than a [little] familiarity with Israeli politics . . . can attest, right-wing lawmakers use such bills to get their names in the newspaper in a nation where news events come at a fevered pace and no mere press release from a junior politician has much hope of getting noticed. The most effective way to get noticed, right-wing lawmakers have discovered, is to trigger the left into a public-relations campaign against them. . . .

The fact that his bill forbidding all filming of IDF soldiers had no hope of becoming the law of the land was the only reason Ilatov allowed himself to propose it in the first place. . . .

As for the bill that made it through the June 17 committee meeting, it no longer forbids filming IDF soldiers. Any filming, for it to become illegal under the stipulations of the new bill, would have to be part of an activist’s already-illegal efforts to obstruct the soldiers’ work. . . . Even now, with the bill so thoroughly gutted as to be unrecognizable, it is not at all clear it can pass in the Knesset. Even the Jewish Home party, the farthest right one gets in the current Knesset, isn’t eager to support it. . . .

[Yet] just about everyone got what they wanted [from the exercise]: the bill’s supporters got to pretend they were defending Israel’s soldiers, and in the bargain that they’re just illiberal enough to satisfy a right-wing base that dislikes liberal pearl-clutching. The NIF and [the Israeli human-rights group] B’Tselem dutifully supplied the pearl-clutching about “tyrants” and got to pretend in their turn that they alone stood athwart history, holding aloft the torch of transparency and liberty in a slowly darkening world. For organizations that fundraise among low-information foreign donors, it’s hard to imagine a better narrative. . . .

But there were losers, too, in this exercise. Israel as a whole, of course, was depicted by its own lawmakers as a nation that could seek to prevent citizens from filming misbehaving troops. [And] IDF soldiers [were] besmirched by the claim that their “morale” is so fragile and their behavior so troubling that photographing them should carry a ten-year prison term.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.