In my last post, I quoted Hillel Halkin suggesting that if Israel's current options fail, it will be time for Option 6. I believe Option 6 is closer than people suspect.
Many agree that for the near term Israel is facing the most dangerous time in its history. The next few years are likely to include an ongoing evolving existential threat from Iranian nuclear weapons coupled with emboldened and enhanced terror attacks from the North and South. Israel has developed a successful approach to minimizing suicide bombers but has not yet perfected a tactical or strategic approach to the rockets, and eventuallythe missiles sure to be launched against its citizens from close to its borders. Israel cannot win an extended war of attrition in the short run. Its primary responses have been defensive (building a fence) with carefully directed offensive attacks targeting the leadership of the various terrorist groups aligned against it. As discussed yesterday, widening the war, as much as it might be desired, with the goal of definitively ending the conflict, is an impossibility and unworkable, in any event. Israel will retain the option of destroying their enemies in a nuclear holocaust, but would only use it in extremis, and even then, there are reasons to believe that no Israeli government would ever use the Sampson Option until too late to save the Jewish state, which means that, since the only possible rationale for the Samson Option would be a nuclear weapon exploding in Israel, MAD would out. This would be small consolation for Israel and those who care about her.
The fence has worked quite well to separate the Israelis from the Palestinians, who are only very slowly beginning to show some self-reflection and take some minimal responsibility for their plight. Ray Hanania is an Arab journalist who describes the crippling tendency of his countrymen to nurture their shame and hatred:
Imprisoned by a wall of ignorance constructed by their own foolish failure to see through the rhetoric and the hatred of the past to the reality of today, Palestinians have only one option: They can either start living in reality or they can disappear in the past.
Such articles are a start but he fact that it appears in the Jerusalem Post and will never be read by most Palestinians suggest that waiting for the Palestinians to become "peace partners" is a fool's errand.
At the same time, the wall can only be a partial approach to separation since the Palestinians have been nothing if not inventive in their approach to killing Jews.
The second leg of Israeli defense is described well in this morning's Jerusalem Post where Yaakov Katz lays out the rationale for targeted assassinations:
In March 2004, an IAF-fired missile hit the wheelchair Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was sitting on as he left a mosque in Gaza City following early morning prayers. Three weeks later, his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was killed in similar fashion. Israel went into a defensive mode, preparing for a Kassam rocket and suicide-bomb onslaught, which never came. Instead, Hamas asked for a cease-fire.
The sharp escalation in targeted killings and Gaza air strikes since Monday night is an attempt by the defense establishment to try and copy the success from 2004. While the hudna (cease-fire) then did not last for long, it did create a lull in attempts by Hamas to infiltrate suicide bombers into Israeli cities.
The IDF and Shin Bet have been extraordinarily successful in their recent actions. Elder of Ziyon quotes from a Haaretz summary and offers some commentary:
A very good followup to my last Nice Shooting post....
A Hamas operative was killed Tuesday when an IAF aircraft fired a missile at a Hamas post in southern Gaza, officials from the group said....
The latest airstrike came after ten Islamic Jihad operatives were killed overnight Monday and early Tuesday as the IDF stepped up its operations against terrorists in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
...Palestinians also reported that the brigades' Jenin commander, Tarik Abu-Ra'ali, was killed during an exchange of fire with troops in Kabatiya.
Ha'aretz counts 13 terrorists, zero civilians. This is a record that is enviable for any moral army on the planet (excluding, of course, Arab armies whose goal is to kill civilians.) [Emphasis mine-SW]
Debka wonders if the IDF can follow the Iraq Coin rule book:
Keeping the lid on the West Bank continues to be solely up to Israel’s military and security forces, which have performed excellently until now in keeping terror at bay. The tactics employed by the Americans in Iraq would be useful both on the West Bank and eventually in Gaza after its pacification: Ignoring the Palestinian Authority, Israel should engage local powerhouses for long-term ceasefire arrangements - if necessary, by forking out large sums of money to purchase calm.
Subduing the enemy and negotiating long-term ceasefire accords from a position of strength appear to this analyst as the only feasible option left to Israel at this time. It is not ideal and the cost will be high, but seven years of Israeli government mistakes carry a price.
The culture of hatred and anti-Semitism on the West Bank and Gaza suggests that the Debka approach has little potential for long term stability; in Iraq real world contact with American troops led the Iraqis to recognize that the Americans were much preferable to the terrorists; this is not a possibility for the Israelis and that suggests that the only realistic long term approach to the problems facing Israel are to continue and carefully enhance their policy of targeted assassination and increase their ability to detect and destroy incoming attacks.
Technology holds out hope that the Israelis will be able to achieve significant enhancements in their security as time goes on; the pace of change in high tech favors the developers of high tech. This is a significant change from the recent past in which more nimble, small groups have had the advantage over larger more static armies. The entire premise of 4GW has been that small groups can, like microbes (viruses and bacteria), subvert the machinery of the modern society to damage that society. I use the biological metaphor purposely. Viruses are tiny and escape detection via deception. Once inside a cell they take over the genetic machinery for their own ends. In medicine techniques are being developed to enhance our surveillance and identify viruses earlier in the process of infection, before any damage can be done. Bacteria destroy by finding areas where immunity is weak or nonexistent and growing apace until the body can mount an immune response. Techniques are being developed to use smaller particles (nanotechnology) to reverse the process and invade the microbes, destroying them from the inside. Further, various approaches are in development to immobilize and destroy viruses in novel ways. Many of these approaches are biologically based and many are technology based; in either case our technology will leverage our knowledge to render many diseases historical artifacts.
Now, extend the metaphor to the terrorists. Consider fine grained surveillance using robot birds, bats, and snakes moving down in scale to robotic mosquitoes and centipedes and finally down to the level of "smart dust." Once such robots are available (along with other enhanced surveillance techniques, some of which are starting to come on line already and others which are approaching proof of concept) it is a trivial problem to weaponize them. The era of 24/7 surveillance over the West bank and Gaza Strip will be the era when rocket attacks are stopped before launch and turned into suicide attacks for the attackers. Further, the Israelis famously missed taking out the entire leadership of Hamas several years back because of concerns of collateral damage; consider the effect of microscopic assassins on the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.
In reality, one or two assassinations which are attributable to such techniques will be all that is required to assure the good behavior of the leadership of terror organizations; such leadership has never shown itself to be particularly eager for their own martyrdom.
Part of the dynamic of anti-Semitism is the unconscious belief that Jews are supermen. The Arabs who form the bulk of the fighters in terror groups tend to be poorly educated thugs. (This is in marked contrast to their leaders, who are often sophisticated, well educated, and intelligent thugs.) They can be easily convinced that the Jews has magic weapons; they already believe in death rays. Our experiences in Iraq suggest their core irrationality can be used against them.
The argument that the terrorists will be able to use such technology against us has some truth to it but misses the bigger picture. A culture that cannot build and develop its own high tech will always be two or three generations behind in its ability to acquire and use such technology. With the increasing pace of development, two or three generations of technology is the difference between the crossbow and the JDAM; it is no contest.
The strategic conundrum for Israel is surviving the next few dangerous years until Option 6 becomes a reality. This is a manageable and realistic problem and there is good reason to expect a good outcome.
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