Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology
Not long after the first rocket siren went off on the morning of October 7, my brother-in-law Ben was outside his house in central Israel. At the time, several thousand Hamas fighters were pouring through the Gaza border fence about an hour’s drive to the south, overrunning our military defenses and butchering hundreds of civilians. But no one knew the details yet, just that something very bad was happening and that the army had been caught off guard. Ben ran into a neighbor with two children serving in the army. The neighbor’s immediate response stayed with him, and then with me when I heard the story. “We have cameras instead of eyes,” he said.
Months or years will pass before Israeli society fully comprehends what caused the October 7 debacle. We misunderstood Hamas’s intentions and limitations. We told ourselves that each round of violence might well be the last, so we could safely raise families or dance at a rave within eyesight of the border with a fanatical enemy. Alongside these failures of imagination, any honest accounting will need to consider a point of Israeli pride: our love affair with technology.
In 1998, when I was 20, I was part of an infantry platoon at an outpost in southern Lebanon, one corner until the tape wore out. Our lookouts actually looked, with their eyes, through an open slit in the concrete. I don’t remember seeing a computer.
