Israel Is Dangerously Dependent on Technology
Even before start-up nation entered the lexicon, the army’s embrace of technology alarmed some military experts.
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 of a small war between Israel and Hezbollah. Life at the outpost, with a few exceptions, wouldn’t have confused a soldier from World War I. Our weapons were mostly rifles and machine guns—Browning .50 calibers, a type first fired in 1918. At dawn each day, we woke up and peered out of our trench. We laid ambushes. We’d never heard of algorithms or drones. The most advanced technology at the outpost was probably the VCR that played Starship Troopers 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.
[Adrew Exum: The Israeli military wasn’t ready for this]
A decade later, in 2008, the army sent my reserve company for a stint along the border with Gaza. I visited a control room where young women in uniform moved joysticks and watched screens showing the entire border. There were remote-controlled machine guns along the fence, and unmanned aircraft whined overhead. It seemed like a different army.
By that time, Israel’s start-up scene was not just booming but becoming central to the country’s image, as celebrated in Start-Up Nation, the 2009 best seller by Saul Singer and Dan Senor, who coined the term. Israeli entrepreneurs, the book explained, made lemonade from the lemons of Mideastern enmity, building the ideal hothouse for innovation as veterans of tech units seeded civilian start-ups, creating a culture that was informal and undeterred by failure. The book opened with the story of the early electric-car venture Better Place and its charismatic CEO, Shai Agassi: “By isolating Israel, Agassi told us with an impish smile, Israel’s adversaries had actually created the perfect laboratory to test ideas.” To replace the batteries in electric cars, the start-up “employed the same hooks used to hold five-hundred-pound bombs in place on air force bombers.” (Better Place went bankrupt in 2013.)
Even before start-up nation entered the lexicon, the army’s embrace of technology alarmed some military experts. They traced Israel’s mixed performance in a 2006 war against Hezbollah to the way commanders had begun operating by remote control, abandoning the gritty Israeli tradition of leading from the front. If the old ethos was summed up by the Hebrew word aharai, “follow me,” the new ethos was mocked with the word plazmot, for the new plasma screens in the control rooms where commanders supposedly botched the war in air-conditioned comfort.
But the course had already been set, which is what I saw on the Gaza border. Israel is a small, tightly knit country that fears long wars and high casualties. “Tech seemed to offer an answer,” Amos Harel, a veteran military analyst for the daily newspaper Haaretz, told me. “We have this persistent idea that the Jewish brain will come up with some brilliant invention to solve our military problems.” I’d love to say that I was made uneasy by the new direction, but anything that kept soldiers safer sounded good to me.
Within the next few years, the tech array came to include Iron Dome, a remarkable system that has intercepted thousands of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon, and then an underground barrier meant to prevent Hamas from tunneling beneath the fence, which itself was now equipped with ever more sensors and cameras. One of the first principles I remember learning in the army, even as a simple soldier at the very bottom of the chain of command, was the adage “The line of contact will always be breached.” No defense line will hold forever, and you have to plan accordingly. But we decided that tech overruled what we knew to be true.
[Eliot A. Cohen: This debacle will transform Israel]
Israel was so confident about the Gaza fence and the scope of signals intelligence—which seemed to be capable of anything short of reading minds—that police felt fine issuing permits for a rave attended by thousands just three miles from the border on October 7. Security squads at border kibbutzim were told not to keep rifles at home but rather to lock them in an armory, because the army was more concerned about the theft of weapons than an attack from Gaza. (More than 350 people were murdered by Hamas terrorists at the rave, and many of the kibbutz security teams didn’t have time to reach their weapons.)
In Tel Aviv, between rounds of violence with Hamas over the past decade, the tech economy forged ahead. We looked up when the rockets came over, thanked God for the Iron Dome, and went back to coding. Every mother now wanted her high-school graduate in the elite intelligence-and-technology outfit known as Unit 8200, which was a sure ticket to a tech job. Combat soldiers had always enjoyed the status of lohem, “warrior,” a grand word that provided some compensation for the miseries of field service. But as prestige shifted from field units to tech, soldiers serving as programmers and computer technicians—the kind of people once scorned as desk jockeys—started to be known as lohamei cyber, or “cyber warriors.”
Israel sees itself as a country that is small and smart, and we liked the idea of a “small and smart” army, one with more tech and fewer grunts. Aviv Kohavi, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff from 2019 until early this year, was closely identified with that concept. In his last month on the job, he gave an unfortunate speech praising the army’s successes during his term, including in Gaza. The military had been so adept at countering the enemy, he said, that Hamas had instructed its strike force, the Nukhba, to “stay home.” (The Nukhba led the attack 10 months later.) The border was the quietest it had been in years, so quiet that real-estate prices in communities near Gaza were off the charts. “Don’t try to get an apartment there in the next three years,” Kohavi said, “because you won’t get one.” That prediction proved true, for unpredicted reasons: Those communities were abandoned after terrorists slaughtered and kidnapped hundreds of people who lived there.
The army’s “start-up nation” bravado didn’t escape Israeli satirists, including writers for the popular TV program Eretz Nehederet, or “A Wonderful Country.” In 2018, when arson squads in Gaza were igniting Israeli cropland with burning kites, the show ran a skit in which uniformed techies solved the problem by using nanotechnology to fireproof every single grain of wheat in the country. “It’s true that a bag of flour will now cost $4,000 and cause some cancer,” an officer announces, “but I’m proud to say we’ve defeated the threat from kites.”
Less humorous critiques came from inside the military. A 2017 article published in the journal Strategic Assessment, for example, argued that “maneuvering has dwindled and been replaced by fire and intelligence capabilities based on technology.”
Gabi Siboni, a reserve colonel who has served as a budget adviser to the Defense Ministry, and who was one of the authors of that paper, told me he saw military commanders adopt the idea that tech could replace the dirty and tragic work of infantry and tanks. “If you look at the general staff of the IDF,” Siboni said, “you’ll see that the whole level of strategy and planning has been replaced by a level of technology, and by subservience to a thought system that believes every operational problem has a technological solution.”
I asked Siboni if he thought there would now be a correction. “If there is, it will probably be brief,” he said. “We’re too Western. We want things to be quiet. We don’t think in a way that matches the neighborhood we live in.”
As Israel went high-tech, Hamas went low. Their commanders planned for October 7 with handwritten notes. Israeli intelligence actually obtained plans for the attack, but when one analyst tried to warn her superiors this past summer, they ruled the threat “imaginary.” On the morning of the attack, Hamas fighters shot out the border cameras with rifles and blew up remote-controlled machine-gun turrets with cheap drones. With the tech down, the army was helpless. It had no plan for a surprise attack of this size. The sophisticated underground barrier didn’t help, because the Hamas fighters just drove into Israel aboveground, breaking through the fence in dozens of places with bulldozers and wire cutters and massacring our people with bullets, knives, and shovels.
[Anne Applebaum: Netanyahu’s attack on democracy left Israel unprepared]
Israel’s fatal tech malfunction is worth attention as America and much of the world moves further into a haze of computer dependence, virtual reality, the metaverse, artificial intelligence, and a growing inability to discern what’s real. The same year my unit spent time on the Gaza border, 2008, this magazine published Nicholas Carr’s cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” he wrote. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” It was already becoming clear back then that tech wouldn’t just serve the human intellect but rewire it. That was making some people uncomfortable and others enthusiastic. To channel the optimists, Carr quoted Sergey Brin of Google: “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”
The tech vision is of a progression in which every software update is better than the last, ad infinitum, leaving us always “better off.” But October 7 demonstrates a more likely future. As rich Western cultures become disconnected from the basic facts of human survival, they’ll be threatened by people who are hungrier and tougher. These people will come into your living room when you have your VR headset on, kill you, and take everything you own.
In mid-November, the deputy head of IDF Southern Command, an old warhorse named Yossi Bachar, gave an interview about the events of October 7 to Israel’s public broadcaster. Bachar, 59, comes from a kibbutz called Be’eri, where Palestinians murdered more than 100 residents, including his mother. He spent most of that day battling terrorists from the porch of an elderly woman who’d been his kindergarten teacher. Since then, he’s been running the war inside Gaza—a war that includes air power and advanced technology, but in which infantry soldiers, tank crews, and simple bravery have proved once again to be indispensable. In recent years, “the tech units, the intelligence systems and other systems, felt that they were at the heart of the action, and this was connected to the reality that emerged,” he said, referring to the great failure. “I want to hope that now the ground combat army, the fighters, the special units will go back to being looked at the way they were when I was a boy.”
People who aren’t digital natives, like Bachar, and like me, may be naturally suspicious of tech because we don’t really understand it. When I told my 16-year-old son the subject of this essay, he said, “You just hate screens,” and he’s not wrong. We need screens, but we need them to not replace our eyes. The most technologically advanced military that Israel has ever fielded just suffered the worst defeat in the country’s history. An alert brigade of World War I infantry, transported from 1917 and deployed along the Gaza border in 2023, could well have averted the Hamas attack. It’s better to be terrified in a foxhole because you don’t know what’s out there than asleep because you think someone or something else knows on your behalf.