“I don’t know what weapons might be used in World War III,” Albert Einstein has often been quoted as saying, along with a warning that any war after that would be fought with sticks and stones. He didn’t say paging devices, but here they are. It may be hard to say just when World War III might occur. It’s not hard to marvel at the weaponization apparently by Israel of mobile devices used by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. 

The thing to bear in mind as this chapter of the war against the Jews unfolds, though, is that neither Lebanon nor Hezbollah are innocent parties. Hezbollah is a recognized terrorist organization and for years has been courting — and stoking — disaster. It is a proxy of Iran. It has been attacking Israel — men, women, and children — relentlessly since October 7, driving some 80,000 denizens of the northern part of the country out of their homes.

Israel’s coup de foudre, our Benny Avni reports, relied on exploding pagers that killed at least eight members of the Iranian-backed terrorist group and wounded some 2,800. The mobile devices were supplied to operatives, Mr. Avni reports, because the group’s chief feared cellular phones were subject to Israeli surveillance. At some point in the supply chain, the devices were armed. So far, Israel has given no indication of any involvement, despite accusations.

The operation, though, has sparked wonderment across the world, while offering a morale boost for Israelis. As Mr. Avni puts it, many in the Jewish state “seem encouraged by what is believed to be one of the country’s most daring operations in decades.” The pager attack, Mr. Avni explains, is a response to “Hezbollah’s endless harassment, which has forced thousands out of their homes in the north,” and had “been met with tit-for-tat responses.”

With the one-year anniversary of October 7 near, and Jerusalem embroiled in a war with Hamas, few can relish the prospect of a further conflict with Hezbollah. “Some wondered if Israel has lost its ability to initiate,” Mr. Avni observes, “and thus is allowing the Iranian proxy to dictate the war’s pace.” Is Tuesday’s attack, though, “another round in the ping-pong game with Hezbollah,” one former Mossad official asks, or the “first act of the main event”?

Can such a feat be repeated, or expanded? The circumstances — Hezbollah’s embrace of outmoded mobile technology — are unique. Yet the innovative nature of the operation at least gives one pause. Here in America, after all, something like all of Apple’s iPhones — and 70 percent of all mobile phones overall — are made in Communist China, which is at least a strategic rival. How can one not eye such devices a little warily after today?

Wars, moreover, drive technology and are driven by it. Nineteenth century conflicts spurred advances in chemistry and metallurgy, seen in ever-more-lethal rifles and cannons. A few years after the Wright brothers took to the air, armed aircraft plied the Western Front in World War I. The internal combustion engine helped end that war when it was used in the first tanks. The nuclear bomb whose use Einstein feared was a byproduct of World War II.

Today, though, the nuclear threat looming over Israel and the Middle East is from Iran, whose cat’s-paw in Lebanon was the apparent target of the pager attack. The Islamic Republic itself is getting ever-closer to becoming a nuclear state. Just Saturday, Tehran launched a space satellite that showcased the regime’s growing capabilities in missile technology. Meanwhile the European powers and the Biden-Harris administration dither.

At a fraught time Einstein himself emerges as an ambivalent figure. Though uninvolved in the Manhattan Project, he urged FDR to build an A-bomb to counter the Nazis’ effort. “I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong,” he said after the war. Yet he declined the presidency of the Jewish state — itself now under the shadow of the A-bomb. What will war come up with next?