New Thinking in Israel

Israel is starting to think in terms of systems disruption (which reflects the shift in warfare I have been writing about):

On Friday, The Jerusalem Post quoted senior security and government officials who warned that this country must gird itself for "a large-scale disaster," should the Kassam rockets fired from the northern Gaza Strip hit one of the super-sensitive targets in Ashkelon's industrial zone. These include the Rutenberg Power Station - which supplies electricity to nearly half of Israel (as well as to Gaza) - huge depots of fuel and potentially deadly chemicals, the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, a desalination plant and many more.

The idea that the Kassam (homebuilt) rockets (which under normal circumstances are more of a pest than a real threat) could be turned into an effective operational weapon didn't escaped me. I am glad to see the Israeli's finally understand this too.

Ashkelon is not only a large and very soft civilian target; it is of vital strategic importance. In this setting, even unsophisticated weaponry can cause environmental and economic catastrophes, to say nothing of the taking of innumerable lives.

Using Kassam rockets for systems disruption are but one of many potential innovations. This puts the security the wall provides into an entirely different light.

Comments

[phishing]

Fish the spot and nothing bites...

[Larry]

It looks to me that someone in the military got rather annoyed with the latest attack which landed near a sensitive installation, and decided the time has come to go on the offensive.

I would assume that the Friday story also appeared in the Hebrew papers. Remember that the Friday edition is like the American Sunday papers, only more so: There are no Saturday papers.

I'm also inclined to assume that the latest attack on Ashkelon crossed a red line that was hinted at to Abbas. The threat to turn off electricity to the Palestinians was probably not thought up at the JPost editorial offices.

Since the first intifada, constraints on Israel have included:

* world opinion

* an internal sense of the inherent immorality of the occupation

* concern for regional stability

As European embassied burn in Syria, as Hamas rejects the two-state solution for jihad, and as the Bush experiment disrupts Jorand and Syria, the constraints slip away.

The fact that the The Onion, which is hardly a neo-con rag, can make fun of the western media for finding moderation among Hammas, and compare the Palestinians to Nazis, indicates that we're not in 1988 or 1990 any more.