The 60 years war between Israel and the Arabs will not end when a Gaza cease fire is arranged sometime in the next few days to weeks. The best that can be hoped for from the current Israeli incursion into Gaza will be a respite fromthe violence and a chastening of Hamas adequate to minimize the chances that they will resume firing rockets into Israel for the near future. The sad fact is that wars are only ended when one side loses and the other wins, or when both parties become exhausted and tired of the blood letting. It is possible that the Gaza Palestinians will become so dispirited by the current fighting that once a cease fire has been achieved, or imposed, they will turn their attention inward and focus on rebuilding some semblanceof reasonable lives. The West Bank would be the model for this. Although the Palestinians on the WestBank still dream of destroying Israel and killing the Jews (and continue to teach their children that murdering Jews and martyrdom are the highest ideals to which a Palestinian child can aspire) they have realized that the main victims of their blood lust is themselvesand have set aside their dreams for some indeterminate future date. In the meantime, they are now slowly starting to build an economy and some of the accoutrementsof a state. If the Gazans follow the same path, in 10 or 20 or 50 years, there will be a lasting peace in the Middle East.
The International Community will never allow Israel to actually "win" a war with its neighbors. That is a fact, lamentable perhaps, but a truism which constrains the Israelis almost as much as their own disinclination to operate via Hama rules with its neighbors.
The Peace Process so beloved of the diplomatic corps and the International Community is a non-sequitor.
However, even if the Gaza Palestinians never agree to stop trying to actively murder Israeli citizens and even if the West Bank Palestinians decide once again to rejoin the active struggle to destroy Israel, and even if Hezbollah rejoins the active fight for genocide, Israel will eventually win this war. We are already seeing the shape of the ultimate Israeli victory and some signs of factors which will lead to the ultimate victory. Consider this technological advance from the Israelis:
Electro-optic technology has been used by researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology for an urgent purpose - locating tunnels through which arms and other goods are smuggled by terrorists.
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"Smuggling tunnels enable uncontrolled movement of people, drugs and weapons and are a security threat to Israel," they said on Tuesday. "Recent advances in distributed strain [an indicator of distortion] measurements using fiber optics enable the development of smart, underground security fences capable of identifying and locating tunnel excavations. Tunnel excavation is accompanied by the release of stresses that cause permanent displacements and strains - although very tiny - in the ground. By measuring the developed strains in the soil with sensitive equipment, one can find the tunnel's location."
The idea is wide spread among those who support the "Peace Process" that peace can never be achieved by force of arms but only through diplomacy and through gratifying "reasonable" demands of the dispossessed Palestinians, ie, they should be given their own state. Lip service is given to the idea that smuggling arms into Gaza must be controlled but, just as the International Community has done nothing to curtail smuggling of weapons into Southern Lebanon where Hezbollah has been resupplied with a multiple of their per-existing number of missiles, the idea that the UN or some iteration of it will do anything to discourage violent Arabs from killing Jews is a fiction.
However, if the tunnels could be controlled and Israel could be satisfied that weapons smuggling into Gaza could be controlled, they would be much more comfortable tolerating a hate filled terror quasi-state on their border.
Beyond that, the current war, with the extraordinary specificity of the Israeli attacks, suggests that the idea of a war being fought on an individualized basis is drawing much closer to reality. In 2006, in Moore's Law & Counter-Insurgency, I pointed out that future Israeli incursions into Gaza would not resemble the extremely high risk and high casualty assaults that have historically been the norm in urban warfare:
It is clear that this is very dangerous work [Urban assaults circa 2006-SW] for the Israelis; the Palestinians can easily set up ambushes, IEDs, and other nasty surprises. Now, picture the scene 5-10 years down the road.
During the day, a flock of Smart Sparrows networked together offer daylight coverage of areas of concern; at night, they are replaced by a flock of smart bats equipped with night vision and all part of a meshed network. These flying birds and bats provide 24 hour real time coverage of whatever parts of an enemy territory you desire. They can fly high enough to be invisible from the ground and are nearly impossible to shoot down even when spotted. The Palestinians can kill all the birds they see in Gaza, but when Smart Sparrows cost a few dollars and the next generation of surveillance includes Smart Mosquitoes, their problems become exponentially greater. If they spend all their time hidden indoors, they can't fire Qassam rockets at Israel, which is one of the goals of the current Israeli incursion. Furthermore, Smart Snakes can slither into buildings, and even if they can be defended against, Smart Cockroaches and Centipedes, once cheap enough, will be ubiquitous. If necessary, it would be simple to equip such robots with reservoirs of Cyanide or some other such poison (spider venom?), at which point targeted killings and Smart bullets would take on a whole new meaning.
We lost too many soldiers and Marines re-taking Falluja; imagine a future Falluja, or Mogadishu, (or Tehran?) where we fight machine guns and IEDs with Smart Birds, Bats, Insects, Snakes, and Spiders. Our military could see the theater and manage the entire operation from safe bunkers connected by networks to the battle field, which could be an underground bunker, or an isolated field.
We are clearly not there yet, and technology is never going to be a perfect answer to warfare, but the point that future warfare will increase in specificity of targeting is proven valid on an almost daily basis. Furthermore, the nature of information technology is that as it increases exponentially, those who start behind the curve can only fall increasingly behind the curve, with the disparity growing exponentially. The Arab world has been, and Islamic fundamentalism remains fundamentally, parasitic on the productive developed world. The disparity will increase, with the Israelis using their technological prowess to remain at the cutting edge while the Palestinians beg, borrow, buy, and steal the crumbs of technology the rest of the world provides. As long as the Palestinians remain fixed on destroying Israel and killing Jews they will remain crippled in a world in which warfare is increasingly becoming an information technology.
The leaders of Palestinian hate groups, with rare exceptions, believe in martyrdom for their followers but tend to prefer to avoid it for themselves. Once the Palestinians realize that in a future war they will be less and less able to hide from the Israeli weapons, when bullets and cyanide laden mosquitoes have their names written on them, the Palestinian leadership will come to realize that their core ideology, of killing Jews and destroying Israel, may need to be amended, in practice, even if not in theory.
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