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Israel’s illusion of security Military technology has become a false idol

‘Machines don’t fight wars... Humans fight wars!’ Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times

‘Machines don’t fight wars... Humans fight wars!’ Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times


October 25, 2023   7 mins

Two weeks on, are we any closer to explaining the catastrophic failure of Israel’s extremely expensive, high-tech Gaza border defences to stop the Hamas attack? I’ve seen a surprising number of people, on both Right and Left, argue or imply that the swift collapse of these supposedly impenetrable defences, along with the very slow response by the Israeli military to the attack, 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 Hamas would have had no chance.

I find this idea ridiculous, but also 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. 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 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 defence system protected the skies. “The barrier is reality-changing. What happened in the past won’t happen again,” the then-IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi declared at a ceremony marking its construction in 2019.

Some former members of the IDF have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recalled. And the Israeli government and military certainly seem to have believed it was impenetrable, which partly explains why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.

But of course, on 7 October, this great wall of silicon proved almost totally useless, overcome in a matter of minutes by Hamas, which was then left to rampage across southern Israel almost unopposed. At least 1,400 Israelis lost their lives as a result. What happened? Let’s lay aside Israel’s broader strategic intelligence failure — having been falsely convinced that Hamas had been successfully pacified and was no longer interested in attempting attacks — which this certainly was. The border’s defences were expected to detect and repel even an unexpected assault — or at least were billed as such. How and why did they fail?

At the simplest level, we could say the IDF was overconfident in its defences and underestimated its enemy. “The thinning of the forces [stationed near the Gaza border] seemed reasonable because of the construction of the fence and the aura they created around it, as if it were invincible, that nothing would be able to pass it,” recounts Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv, a former head of the IDF’s Operations Division and ground forces commander in the south.

We could also say that the IDF had allowed itself to become strategically rigid and was ill-prepared to adapt flexibly when things went wrong. From the moment the fence was proposed, some military officers warned that pouring resources into it — along with the Iron Dome — was a mistake, because it would ultimately degrade the military’s ability to manoeuvre offensively and pre-emptively neutralise the enemy’s capacity to conduct attacks. Col. Yehuda Vach, commander of the IDF’s Officer Training School, warned in 2019 that “because we don’t cross the fence, the other side has become strategically stronger”, as they’d been handed operational initiative. “The enemy will seek in the next campaign to carry out an operation to kidnap soldiers and harm civilians in the towns near the fence, thus enjoying the first achievement of the campaign,” he ominously predicted. “The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security to both the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the residents near the fence,” he said.

These are both classic military mistakes, warned against repeatedly by strategists from Carl von Clausewitz to Sun Tzu. In this case, however, the even greater mistake may have been that the IDF came to rely far too heavily on technological solutions, methods, and ways of thinking.

One of the most famous sayings of the U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped to develop modern manoeuvre warfare, was: “People, ideas, machines — in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organising — as well as being far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”

Boyd had seen for himself the perils of overreliance on Big Brain tech wizardry in Vietnam. The latest generation of US aircraft, designed by geniuses who insisted that the age of aerial gunfights was long over, had been stripped of their guns and manoeuvrability — and built to be flying missile and bomb platforms. But in combat, the missiles proved horrifically unreliable — and the planes were no use at all in a dogfight. When they ran into lightweight North Vietnamese MIGs, they got destroyed: the US air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in the Korean War to 1:1 in 1967.

While technologies can certainly offer solutions to discrete problems, they are typically not flexible and adaptable enough to function as intended when things go sideways. Moreover, fragile technological solutions can produce entirely new liabilities that did not even exist before. In the current case, the widespread reliance of the IDF’s defences on wireless data transmission became a critical weakness that the enemy was able to exploit to great effect.

In fact, it seems likely that Israel was actually worse off with all its high-tech border gadgetry than it would have been without it. These over-engineered solutions to guarding the border were not cost-effective, instead representing an opportunity cost that could have been better spent elsewhere — such as on maintaining a far greater number of disciplined, sharp-eyed soldiers with guns. When the tech failed, it was only such men who were able, eventually, to adapt and respond. By reversing Boyd’s admonition and putting machines first and people last, the IDF actively degraded the capability of those people to respond to disaster when it most mattered.

But even this understates the bigger problem exposed by the folly of the “smart fence”. Israel’s smart border defences should be understood as the adoption of a needlessly complex system. “Complexity” here must not be mistaken to just mean “complicated”. Rather, a complex system is a technical term defining a system composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behaviour in response to entropy cannot be predictively modelled.

When things go wrong in a complex system it can’t be easily solved, because each sub-system relies on many other sub-systems, and pulling any one lever to try to solve one problem will produce entirely unexpected effects. This means complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures. Even if the original failure is fixed this cannot reverse the cascade, and the whole system may soon face catastrophic collapse.

This is essentially what happened to Israel’s border defence system. The replacement of low-tech solutions with high-tech ones needlessly added additional layers of complexity to the system, making it more, not less, fragile. Under pressure, the system then collapsed more completely and with more devastating consequences than if a simpler, more robust system had been used.

This doesn’t mean, to be clear, that I think technology can never be useful. Obviously, technological change has always played an important role in the realm of war — to my disappointment, no army would be able to win today with the cheerful simplicity of the good ole’ sword and shield. But on close inspection, those technologies that have the most transformative and lasting impact are almost always those that are the most simple, robust, adaptable, and scalable, and which generally work in accord with the human element, rather than attempt to totally replace him with a complex system. The cheap little drones that Hamas used so successfully, and which have already revolutionised warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere, are a perfect example of this.

This is true, too, beyond the world of warfare. In all aspects of life, we have come to worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that can solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often, it doesn’t — it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have diminished and our vulnerabilities to systematic collapse have increased. In this way, technology has become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.

Just as complex systems are vulnerable to collapse, so are empires and civilisations. And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight. They come to span the globe, and have too many alliances and commitments, too many “vital national interests”, too many IOUs, too many enemies, to ever handle at once. This is what “imperial overstretch” really means: not just that there is too much budgeted for the treasury to pay for, but that overall complexity has reached such a level that the empire has become impossible to manage. Trying to solve one problem only creates another. The empire may still appear strong, but it has become fragile. The potential for even a single point of failure to ignite a catastrophic failure cascade grows more and more acute.

Today, as the United States and its allies rush with increasingly visible panic to try to put out one fire after another around the world, I’m afraid that a global failure cascade may be exactly what we’re witnessing. The number of lights blinking red is growing faster and faster as more dominos fall. If this is the case, then just solving existing problems will never be enough: every effort to fight one fire may just set off new fires. Might America, by embroiling itself in two regional wars at once, prompt China to invade Taiwan when it otherwise wouldn’t have dared, for example? It seems like a possibility. But then we can’t know for sure: growing unpredictability is now the defining feature of the system.

There are many people who, witnessing this chaos play out, will predictably argue that the empire needs to redouble its efforts, to yield no ground anywhere, and to show everyone the power of its “global leadership”. The encroaching jungle must be forced back everywhere because to retreat would be to demonstrate weakness and invite calamity. Needless to say, doing more will only add more complexity to the system, and thus more vulnerabilities. It won’t do anything to prevent or stop a failure cascade — only increase its ultimate scope, momentum, and unpredictability.

Naturally, a wiser method would be to simplify: to deliberately pare back commitments and overextended positions, concentrating on conserving strength and defending only the most critical nodes of the system, until the balance of capabilities and commitments can reach a stable new equilibrium. But reform of this kind is extremely difficult, as untangling the imperial Gordian Knot one thread at a time often proves to be impossible. Historically, this type of impasse is typically only ever resolved, and simplicity restored, with one decisive stroke: by systemic collapse.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.


N.S. Lyons is the author of The Upheaval on Substack.


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David McKee
David McKee
11 months ago

This is two separate articles, uneasily joined in the middle. The basic problem is that the writer thinks tactics and strategy are one and the same.

Others can respond to the strategic, ‘imperial overstretch’ second half. I’ll comment on the first.

Essentially, the Israelis made the same mistake as the French, with the Maginot Line. Or, for that matter, as the Israelis with the Bar-Lev Line in the 1970s. If you hide behind fortifications, you cede the initiative to your enemy.

Worse, the Gaza defences were (apparently) unmanned and undefended. An undefended obstacle is no obstacle at all. Armies the world over have learned this repeatedly- and usually the hard way.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
11 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

Tactics and strategy and complexity (“Oh My!”). A simpler “strategy” (or tactic) was Trump’s approach – make them think you are crazy enough to engage them and wipe the ‘em out. Yes, he was and is a vulgar, self-defeating jerk, But Putin thought he was nuts, and Israel was doing an “end-around” (of “Palestine”) directly with Arab countries that feared Iran’s craziness.

The “complex” way (Obama writ large) is to give Iran free money, let them develop nuclear weapons freely (instead of covertly) after 10 years, snarl the Economy with green handouts and keep “plausible deniability “ in your back pocket. And here we are.

Yoram Mimoun
Yoram Mimoun
11 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

It seems to me quite grotesque to attribute the failure to the strategy or to the tactic when if the intelligence services would have not failed the terrorist attack plan would have been reduced to nothing and would not have even been treated in the media. Thus, there is no parallel with the Maginot Line, and the sole resemblance with an historic event is the intelligence failure during the Kippur War in 1973, during which the IDF was so deeply convinced that the Egypt would not attack that they have been blinded, at the point they didn’t see the preparations for the assault as such but as an exercise. The same overwhelming self confidence that skewed in 1973 the analysis of mere explicit facts caused now again the same dramatic consequences.

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
11 months ago

Perhaps the strongest argument over the last thirty years for Israel to seek peace (with more commitment than the Israeli political establishment proved able to muster) was the probability that its military superiority would end sooner or later. Israeli military superiority has been associated with tanks whose dominance of the battlefield appears – judging by events in the Ukraine – to be ending. A possible parallel is the last attempt to establish a western state in the area, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lost most of its territory seventy years after its establishment when the Muslims worked out how to defeat its armoured cavalry.

In the current crisis, as the Israelis move from the phase of pure outrage, hatred and a desire for revenge to thinking more cooly and strategically, it would be preferable if they consider designing their military operations with a view to creating the preconditions for a sustainable peace. They may not have many years left of being able to rely on military strength. Ejecting or eliminating Hamas from Gaza is a sensible and achievable aim but if it is achieved by means which alienate and embitter again the rest of the Muslim world it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War ended up having a positive result; optimists may hope the current conflict will have a similar long term outcome. Unfortunately, the PR electoral system in Israel gives one little confidence that it will ever again be able to pursue peace in a coherent fashion. Rabin and Barak tried sincerely but since then, amongst other factors, the settlers have gained a political veto on progress, political leaders have seen little profit in arguing for the necessary compromises and all parties have considered it prudent to allow Gaza to fester. The Israelis continue to rely disproportionately on military strength. They may win this war but perhaps not the next.

This prospect is especially disappointing because the last five years have seen more diplomatic movement than for thirty years. The possibility that the Saudis and Gulf States would come to see Israel as a potential ally in containing the threat from Iran and its Shiite allies in Iraq and Syria was tangible. It is this possible reordering of Sunni Arab priorities that one assumes the Hamas raid was designed to block. It is the hope of reviving this possibility before it is too late that should influence Israeli strategy.

The bottom line is that Israel should resist the temptation to flatten Gaza but instead use the threat of doing so to negotiate with the Saudis and Gulf States. The removal of Hamas and the relocation of perhaps two thirds of the current population of Gaza might be key features of the deal. Given the Muslim Brotherhood origins of Hamas, they are unlikely to be welcome in Egypt, Jordan or Syria but might find a home in Saudi Arabia. MBS is hoping to establish a new city of Neom opposite Sharm El Sheik. Perhaps the Gazans can provide the core population.

The Israelis need to recognise that in the long run the military balance will inexorably shift against them and work out how to get on with their neighbours … or face the the prospect of going the way of the Crusaders.

Last edited 11 months ago by Alex Carnegie
El Uro
El Uro
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

“The bottom line is that Israel should resist the temptation to flatten Gaza but instead use the threat of doing so to negotiate with the Saudis and Gulf States” – For the Saudis this is not a threat, it is a gift

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
11 months ago
Reply to  El Uro

Why do you think this? Expand?

El Uro
El Uro
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

Arab elites are more rational than you: a dead Palestinian in Gaza is more profitable than a living Palestinian in Saudi Arabia (martyrs are more convenient than troublemakers)

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
11 months ago
Reply to  El Uro

I see your logic but I think you are assuming that SA and the Gulf States are focussed exclusively on the Israel / Palestine issue. Prior to the Hamas raid, my impression was that they were far more worried about the threat from Iran and more intrigued by the opportunities presented by the US / China tensions. Framed either way, live Palestinians would have more attractions than martyrs. My hope is that the current crisis does not lead to a Saudi reversion to 1970s levels of hostility to Israel and its supporters – in which case your perspective will make sense. Regrettably.

El Uro
El Uro
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

Sorry

Last edited 11 months ago by El Uro
Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

Moving the Gazans to Neom is the best bit of lateral thinking I’ve seen in the last two weeks. Chapeau!
Do you have a blog or substack, Alex? You’ve made some interesting comments in the last few days.

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

I am afraid not. Maybe I should; it’s very fashionable. On current trends, however, there will soon be more Substack writers than readers – which might be rather demoralising.

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

Well, yes, there is that!

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
11 months ago
Reply to  Alex Carnegie

In 1990 Arafat came out in support of S Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait. Palestinians were then arrested in Gulf Cooperation Countries and expelled. In the 1950s the Palestinians tried to take over Kuwait. How much do the GCC countries trust the Palestinians let alone Iranian funded Muslim Bretheren ? I would suggest it is the lack of trust by Arab countries for the Palestinians which is a major obstacle to achieving a reasonable situation.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago

How can a people that was stripped of its arms and led to the gas chamber let itself be stripped of its arms again? Unlike the Swiss, who are all armed, Israelis, who must also serve in their military, apparently docilely turn in their weapons upon completion of their service. How many Jews would have been saved if the rampaging Hamas slaughterers faced a well-armed populace? Would they have even dared to attack if there was a chance the Jews would fire back?

JOHN KANEFSKY
JOHN KANEFSKY
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

“Would they have even dared to attack if there was a chance the Jews would fire back?”
I suspect they would. This is a classic example of the truism that you can repel terrorists 1,000 times but they only have to get through once.
On the wider point, recent events are yet more evidence of failure of imagination and greed for land. Both sides want all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. These desires are fundamentally incompatible, as neither side will give an inch, indeed Israeli settlers have been taking land steadily and piecemeal on the West Bank ever since the 1967 war.
The cliché that Israel can be a Zionist state or a democracy where all are treated equally, but it cannot be both, is becoming more and more a reality.
I despair.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

“I suspect they would”.

Well, maybe once.

JOHN KANEFSKY
JOHN KANEFSKY
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

That’s the point. They only have to succeed once. And there will be hundreds of volunteers to take their place.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

They may try once. But against an armed populace they’d be unlikely to succeed. Against an unarmed populace it was like shooting fish in a barrel. That’s the point. And if there’s “hundreds of volunteers to take their place” they would reach the same fate. Not one of the Hamas had any fear attacking civilians. It’s easy to be brave when no one fights back.

JOHN KANEFSKY
JOHN KANEFSKY
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

“But against an armed populace they’d be unlikely to succeed.”
I’d like to think that was the case, but the evidence tends to disagree with that. The more people are armed, the more they are killed. Arming civilians does not deter terrorists, especially those who are not afraid of death.
And you can’t realistically arm everyone or give everyone an armed guard.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

If only they had made Israel a gun-free zone.

JOHN KANEFSKY
JOHN KANEFSKY
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Getting off-topic, but
USA 20,958 homicides using firearms in 2021.
UK 28 homicides using firearms in 2022.
The evidence shows that restricting ownerships of firearms saves lives, as if you don’t have one you can’t kill your family or friends with it. And both sides are more likely to die in a shooting war.
The circumstances in Israel, Gaza and the West bank are different, of course, and I don’t want to argue over false equivalence, but the general point is true. You argued that if Israeli citizens had all been armed Hamas would not have attacked and I doubted if that was justified by reality. But we will have to agree to differ.
I expect this to be down-voted…

T Bone
T Bone
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

I think a great idea would be for all unelected Socialists to get together an organize a plan to eliminate risk from life. Maybe first you could start with defining and eliminating “hate speech.” Then you could move toward banning automobiles and fossil fuels. Then you could require everybody to maintain a digital passport before leaving their homes with a social credit/debt system then rewards people for helpful social behavior like mask wearing and punishes them for harmful behaviors like gun purchases. Then maybe you could join Canada in their plans for Humane Euthanasia while abolishing all forms of religion.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

“USA 20,958 homicides using firearms in 2021.”
Further off topic, take inner cities out of the United State’s homicide statistics and it’s homicide rate compares very favorably with those of Europe.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
11 months ago
Reply to  JOHN KANEFSKY

What about Switzerland, heavily armed often with military automatic weapons , even machine guns but little violence from guns? I suggest it is emotional maturity producing self- control.

Jacques Rossat
Jacques Rossat
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Alas, if the Swiss keep keeping their machine gun at home, they now have to surrender their ammunition to the military depots at the end of their annual 3-week training period….

Walter Schwager
Walter Schwager
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Gun sales have increased greatly in Israel

B Moore
B Moore
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I thought this immediately when this happened. If there is any country in the world where the whole country should be armed, it is Israel.

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago

Alongside the article by the Malmgrens, this is the second article to give a cogent account of the failure of the fence. We also know how forces normally in the area were deployed elsewhere.
The fence and the deployment are only two prongs of the conspiratorial account, though. The third is the repeated warnings from Egyptian intelligence. The fourth is that it was over 5 hours (allegedly) until al-Qassam was engaged, and it took 8-26 hours (allegedly) to rescue people from the attack (people were on social media asking for help within minutes). The fifth is claims from Israeli pilots that they were in the air in the affected areas within 45 minutes when people on the ground have said there was nothing in the air for hours.
Most of that could be decided with satellite data. But Israel and the US don’t want to reveal satellite data for some reason. Satellite data would put the disputed accounts of the truck bombing and the hospital bombing to bed, too.
As long as there is obfuscation, there will be conspiratorial accounts; the longer it takes to reveal data to prove otherwise, the greater the suspicion that the data has been fabricated.

El Uro
El Uro
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Business as usual, 9/11 was an inside job…

D Walsh
D Walsh
11 months ago
Reply to  El Uro

People sit up cameras in advance to record the planes hitting the buildings, this does suggest an inside job

Avro Lanc
Avro Lanc
11 months ago

Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man – General George S. Patton

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
11 months ago

An enjoyable piece. This reliance on tech for ‘easy’ solutions over work by humans is mirrored in health care where good diet, exercise, fresh air and relaxation are jetisoned for ‘miracle’ cures in the form of pills and injections to support the unatural modern life style.

Last edited 11 months ago by Martin Smith
Jacques Rossat
Jacques Rossat
11 months ago

“The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security (…)These are (…) classic military mistakes, warned against repeatedly by strategists from Carl von Clausewitz to Sun Tzu” and spectacularly examplified by the Chinese Great Wall, the Ligne Maginot, the Gustav Line and many other useless fortifications. But, as in finance, it seems more and more évident that one never learns from former mistakes….

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
11 months ago
Reply to  Jacques Rossat

A Spartan king was asked why no walls surrounded the city:he pointed to his warriors.

S Bursby
S Bursby
11 months ago

Technology IS the idol of this age!

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
11 months ago

Perhaps modern armies have forgotten the military skills taught by LT Col Peter Walter MC and Bar . He was hard man who taught hard men for war.
Lt Col Peter Walter, highly decorated soldier with the SAS, nicknamed ‘the Rat’ for his grit and resourcefulness – obituary (telegraph.co.uk)

Penny Rose
Penny Rose
11 months ago

Good article. Answers a lot of questions I’ve had since the awful events of 7/10.

D Walsh
D Walsh
11 months ago

The war with Hamas will be over by Christmas

Alan Gore
Alan Gore
11 months ago

Most fundamentally, Israel will never be safe so long as its bitterest enemy is right next door. May Natanyahu chuck the Palestinians out into the desert, so that their rich jihadist friends can buy them viable land somewhere in Central Asia, as far from everyone else as possible.

Betsy Warrior
Betsy Warrior
11 months ago

Why does no one ever mention the documentary crew of Dominick Suter, Paul Kurzberg, his brother and the others of the Urban Moving Systems who filmed 9/11/01 with great celebration? Their counterparts who most likely filmed the October 7th Hamas incursion could give us the real picture of what happened that day. Do we need to be reminded that Pegasus NSO could even track Khashoggi and his killer’s movements or that in Guatemala (or Azerbaijan) the ex- President had everyone they wanted covered? The Suter’s Urban Moving Systems was well covered in the press at the time (including their confirmation that they were documenting for Mossad) though most of that reporting has been scrubbed from the internet there are still some remnants extant. Such a film could clear up many questions about the Hamas attack on Israel. Eight thousand dead… (both sides)…and still counting….

Katalin Kish
Katalin Kish
11 months ago

Tech 101: the more complex the tech, the more delicate is the balance required for things to work as expected. If you have ever cared for toddlers, you know how easy it is to sabotage tech, how easily tech becomes a source of harm. Look up my name to see how tech is weaponised with devastating consequences, yet without any risk of punishment in a leafy suburb of million $ homes in Melbourne, Australia.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
11 months ago

The truth of Hamas’s attack would have been bad enough to have elicited a strong response. But not the response on which Benjamin Netanyahu was hellbent. Netanyahu did not get lucky. The bests spies in the world did not all miss this. And now, he has co-opted his opponents, he has marginalised and neutralised his rivals on the Right, he has silenced the judges, and he has usefully exposed the Western elites as cheerleaders for collective punishment and for genocide. At last, he will rank with his brother. A lot of the most effective politicians are psychopaths. They would get far less done if they were not.