High-tech gadgets adorn an IDF observation tower.
Over the last two weeks I have, like everyone else, been closely following Hamas' horrific attack on Israel and the resulting war. So many others have already done an eloquent job covering it at a general level that I'm not going to try to do the same, however. There is one specific aspect to the whole (ongoing) story, though, that I am keen to return to and focus on in brief here, in part because I see it as directly relevant to some of the core themes I've been trying to think through for some time now. That is the total failure of Israel's extremely expensive, high-tech Gaza border defenses to stop the initial surprise attack by Hamas.
I've seen a surprising number of people, on both Right and Left, argue or imply that the swift collapse of these supposedly impenetrable defenses, along with the subsequent very slow response by the Israeli military to the attack, in itself justifies a conspiratorial explanation - e.g. that Netanyahu, or Washington, or whomever on the inside must have wanted the attack to get through, as otherwise it couldn't have gotten through. I find this idea ridiculous, and telling.
Telling in that many apparently find the notion that Israeli Jews were deliberately betrayed and allowed to be murdered by their own fiercely nationalist government to be a more readily believable theory than that complex technological systems could possibly fail. I think this fact speaks to something important about how we moderns have come to misperceive how things work, misplace our faith in systems, and often accidentally make ourselves more rather than less vulnerable to chaos.
Over the last few years, Israel spent more than $1.1 billion USD to construct a sprawling security barrier along the entirety of its nearly 40-mile border with Gaza. This was, allegedly, to be the fence to end all fences. In addition to 20-foot high multi-layered wire, steel, and concrete barriers, the "smart fence" integrated a vast network of cameras, motion and other sensors, radars, and remote-controlled weapon systems, all monitored by dozens of towers that served as data hubs and high-tech observation- and listening-posts. An underground wall and sensor system, designed to stop infiltration by tunnels, was extended far below the earth along the whole border, at great expense. Meanwhile Israel's advanced, exceptionally costly "Iron Dome" missile defense system protected the skies.
Comment: The New York Post writes: