On the corruption: For half a generation, Israelis have participated in a celebration of corruption and intellectual decay, and as they stand above all the rotting institutions of the land - they have only begun to pay the prices. The article will present an updated security concept for Israel, which no one will adopt, read or understand, and the historical process of the country's degeneration will continue on its way to its final purpose. The officers of Sodom have failed and the democracy of the people of Gomorrah
In an article published in "Haaretz" exactly five years ago today, on October 9, 2018, a black circle presented an innovative security doctrine that could defeat Hamas (link
here). Today, the amused reading of the article is shocking, because it turns out that the one who read and implemented it - and through its ideas inflicted a crushing defeat on Israel - is actually Hamas. We will not repeat here the in-depth analysis - more penetrating than any "professional" product of a research institute - of Israel's past wars, but we will note that the current war also obeys the exact same pattern. The victory of surprise.
What does corruption look like? Not a black monster - but chocolate. Corruption is the preference of the immediate reward mechanism over the learning mechanism: preferring the short term over the long term, external appearance over internal content, the shortcut over the path, effortless laziness over effort, and smooth words over straightforward ones. And what is the most extreme and blatant form of corruption? Deception, because in it the tension drop is the steepest: easy and quick tactical gain and strategic loss in an irreversible crisis of trust, to the point of value reversal. Deception becomes the supreme value, and the phenomenon of admiring fraud is born, and who is the king of the state of fraudsters? The king of fraudsters. Isn't this the image of Israeli society? What is anti-freierism [Translator's note: "freier" is Hebrew slang for "sucker"]? This is the society that is not willing to pay prices, that wants to get everything without paying anything - and therefore will pay the highest prices.
Even at this hour, Israelis are busy telling themselves stories - what will happen at six in the evening (when they still don't internalize what happened at six in the morning). After all, one minute after six after the war, an internal war awaits them - the war of sixty-one - when each side is sure (!) that now the other side has certainly (sure!) sobered up, and violence is at the doorstep, in a tsunami of rage. Very few of them know the mood of the other side, for their punishment in hell is that they are trapped outside reality - in self-deception.
The self-licking singing groups, the "show me" weddings at the expense of the guests, the broad public support for the Shalit deal, the denial reports and insider information on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange that drove away every "reasonable investor", the criminal standing by in the face of crimes against humanity in Syria and by Russia, the people's tale about the money tree growing in the Ministry of Finance that should benefit the public and distribute gifts at the expense of the baron, the drying up of basic scientific research and the exploitation of the best minds for "selling" (a product that doesn't really work to investors whose money will produce parties for employees who will be fired tomorrow), the wonderful legend as if it's even written in the Bible that we are a wonderful people (when in fact it is told that it is an evil and short-sighted and ungrateful people punished by God and never learns. This is the point of truth in the rise of Christianity!), the long-term underinvestments that have accumulated into an infrastructure crisis in every possible field (from transportation and housing to communications and mail), the saga of the reform whose entire meaning is "Mom! It's him!" (about which we wrote in the link
here), the recycled prose that doesn't know what intellectual and formal effort is, the infantile education from parents to teachers (to lack of (self (chocolate!)) discipline), the unconditional surrender to every possible pressure group, the worship of self-confidence and external impression, it all boils down in the end to one question: how many Israelis know that Bibi is bald?
Everything is covered by the loan and savings method at the expense of the future. Therefore, there is probably no future, but for the blood of those killed in Your holy name, let us briefly dream of what the future should have been, and how it should have sobered up. Zvi Lanir caused Israel strategic damage, by conceptualizing the problem of surprise as a problem of conceptualization (i.e., as an intellectual matter!), and Jabotinsky caused enormous damage to security with the passive image of the wall. Instead, we will offer a new image: the iron snake. The strategic mistake of the current generation was not the disengagement itself, to reduce friction - in Gaza and Lebanon (and it's a pity not in the territories) - but the very desire to disengage. Not mental fixation versus constant paradigmatic change - but a much more prosaic fixation: passivity.
We must flush down the toilet the holy trinity of Israel's strategic (orthodox?) security doctrine (dogma?) - deterrence, warning and decision - because it is a chain passive by nature, which should be replaced with a snake. Such a chain whose head and beginning is in the head of the opponent is disastrous in a rapidly changing world, because one needs to learn quickly, and one doesn't learn much through passive intellectual means, of absorbing knowledge about reality (for example: intelligence), but through active means, of dreaming about a new reality. Any friction with the enemy (the ambiguous space beloved by the Shiites) allows him to gradually learn and adapt to us, and also bothers us and does not allow us a dreamy learning leap - which will not allow the enemy to adapt. Hamas secluded itself for two years for learning within the system, during which it gave us quiet - and then struck at once, not allowing the rival system time to learn, and fulfilled its dream, which is our nightmare. We must dream the nightmare of the opponent - and pounce on him like a snake at intervals that will not allow him recovery. All three principles of the -ah should be replaced with one snake leg: surprise.
In the snake concept, surprise is not an option, or a means to achieve a goal, but it is the goal itself - there is no option to act except through surprise. In the current situation, we should have agreed to a comprehensive and humiliating prisoner exchange deal down to the last prisoner, and then wait for the right moment and strike the enemy with complete surprise (and this is the correct treatment in the north as well). To restrain and not be dragged into cycles of reactions and "deterrence" and friction but to wait with endless patience and bite the lips hard and be tensed like a spring, and then strike on our initiative - this is the iron snake. The transition every year-two years-maybe-three from zero to one hundred in one moment, which eliminates the rival system. This is the whole Torah. Not some conceptual conceptualization or insight that miraculously manages to adapt to a changing world, but a creative and dreamy shaping action that the enemy hasn't even imagined, at a time when he is asleep and least prepared, and most suitable for us. The security doctrine has been slaughtered, and must be replaced with a doctrine of insecurity - all Persian venomous snake. Intentions are an elusive thing - capabilities must be negated. The way to prevent surprise is not warning and deterrence - but counter-surprise, again and again. Sudden forever, when in the street a warrior - his eyes in you are stunned.
Organizationally, the meaning is the end of the Israeli worship of intelligence, of knowledge, of epistemology - the Israeli sin of knowledge. The ethos of intelligence must be replaced with a new ethos - planning, and the discovery of the other side's secrets - with the creation of an internal secret. Not prophecy and warning and fortune-telling - but a dream. Instead of external learning about the enemy in the intelligence wing - we need to focus on the planning wing, in the center of internal learning, and direct the best minds, resources, social prestige and organizational power to it. To correctly conceptualize the basic change before disaster, almost in real time? This is an inhuman demand, Zvi, and certainly from an army, which is a mental turtle. But to act, and especially in a big way? Even a snake can. Whoever doesn't surprise - is surprised. The general Israeli corruption ensured that temporary quiet would always be preferred over temporary discomfort and paying prices in the present for the sake of the future. Long-term dreaming was replaced by momentary pleasure, until the next round. Hope of two years - to be a baby in our country. Until the corruption turned into slaughter (of babies). And you were only happy - and slaughtered on your holiday.
Where did brilliant IDF strategists like Omer Dank or Zvi Lanir err? Not in "basic surprise", but in the basic setting itself. In neo-Kantianism, where the main direction is from the world of phenomena to the categories of reason. In the dominant perception of strategy as a strategic
environment (changing), to which we respond (with discretion of course, or with a change of mind, that is: through the mediation of the world of knowledge). The mistake: reactivity. Like writers who "respond" to reality/situation/burning-news-issue and chase after relevance, because they are by definition behind (the events), instead of understanding the essence of strategy (and literature!) as a creative medium - in which we create reality. The Yaalon idea of Sisyphean decision in consciousness as a final result misses the creation of consciousness shock precisely as a first result, as the head of the snake - to create the basic surprise yourself: from dream to new reality. Boom!
If so: not decision in consciousness, but in the subconscious, in the transition from ambush to enemy. The kingdom of reptiles exists in the sub-threshold world, elusive, below knowledge, and therefore it is not a position that needs to be held, and it knows also how to retreat and fold without losing the venom instinct. The shaky standing on the legs of warning, deterrence and decision - which perhaps sufficed (roughly) against the Arabs - must be replaced with Persian, snake-like principles: ambush, surprise and cunning. And the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field. Who said that thinking in images is less strategically effective than "rational" thinking of talking heads? How do you want a victory image if you don't know how to paint? Hamas painted us our inferno porn using GoPro cameras in resonating and gut-wrenching images, descending to the depths of the Israeli psyche, and when did we last hold the brush?
How could a snake have, for example, dealt with the root of the prisoner issue and the kidnapping equation of the last two decades? To zero out one side of the equation at the first possible opportunity: to wait for the next initiated strike from its side (always in darkness, at night), and in the same half of the night also arrest all Hamas activists in the West Bank in their beds, define it as a Nazi organization, and under the section of doing justice to Nazis and their helpers to execute suddenly and secretly (whose leak and gradual horrifying internalization, without an event) all the prisoners in euthanasia by a citizen whose family was murdered and scatter their ashes in the sea, so that Hamas will become from now on an underground organization - whose very membership means the death penalty, and its suppression is absolute. This is just one possible example among many for snake thinking - a snake thinks through multi-scenario planning and detailed imagination, that is dreaming, and not in the form of "response". Its goal is to astound the opponent, to perform what is inconceivable to him. But today, the likely scenario is that what will be performed is the inconceivable to us.
Artificial intelligence will bring to Israel accelerating and running and flying security adaptation challenges, with ethnic biological weapons being the number one candidate for the next Holocaust, and an open language model can explain why (and it will indeed be asked). But even against robots whose reaction speed is a hundred times that of a human or swarms of autonomous drones or a final nuclear revenge of ayatollahs on the verge of collapse we will not be able to cope. To the range of emotions that Israel evokes today - sadness, anger and shame - fear will also be added. Will Israel, which arose in a storm, only gradually deteriorate, as a boring story of decline for historians? From a certain stage, it can also fall off the cliff. Yom Kippur and deterioration to hell.
But Cassandra's curse will ensure that despite all the dreams and learned articles - Israel will not learn. And if it learns - it will learn the wrong lessons (as in Yom Kippur). And if it learns the right lessons - it will not implement them. And if it implements - it will be too late. In the end, the eternal Nazi phenomenon - the anti-rational - has not bad chances against the Israeli phenomenon. A surprise Holocaust needs to succeed only once. And what's worse than preparing for the previous war? Preparing for the previous Holocaust. And after all, the entire Zionist enterprise is such a preparation, which actually increases the risk for the next Holocaust, in a disastrous way. But when we come to mourn the Israeli tragedy - let's not forget the malignant hubris, the sick society, all the times they deceived us, all the times we deceived others - and all the disgust.
At the current stage, it is clear in hindsight wisdom that Zionism was a mistake, from the moment it did not arrive in time to soften the Holocaust (and if there had been a Jewish state even in the twenties, wouldn't it have been the first target of the Wehrmacht, which would have conquered it first with ease and carried out a concentrated Holocaust in it? Hitler would have invaded the Jewish state from the sea not long after Poland, and the world would have come to terms with gas chambers in Tel Aviv as well). And alas, enough decades have passed for a clear perspective: all the current products of Israel - from science and culture to children - are pathetically inferior compared to those products of Jews in exile, in the control group. The Hebrew experiment failed big time (but we'll always have Bialik!). It was based on human capital accumulated not here, in the loan and savings method to cover the baldness, until the decline of generations exposed the nakedness of the land.
And above all this, a huge, dramatic and fateful story a hundred times more than Gaza is happening in the world right now, and it is the story of artificial intelligence - do we really want our story to be Bibi? Doesn't the wretchedness embarrass us? The conclusion from all this for the individual Jew is clear - ancient Jewish wisdom - to take the legs and leave the land that devours its inhabitants. Slaves ruled over us - there is none to deliver from their hand. And who promised correction? For if You have utterly rejected us - You have been very wroth against us.