The Palestine-Israel conflict features shocking behaviour on both sides—Hamas targeted civilians in violation of the law of war, and Benjamin Netanyahu struck back by cutting off essential services in Gaza, as if with a tourniquet.
It would not be proper to say that the conflict is between Palestine and Israel, because such behaviour may not be acceptable to significant populations of both nationalities, though it is being done in their name. The Biden administration has done worse, shooting down a UN Security Council resolution calling for a humanitarian pause in the siege of Gaza, and choosing instead to work towards an unprecedented defence package for Tel Aviv and to prioritise the resupply of its Iron Dome missile defence system.
What may irritate Netanyahu the most, apart from the security collapse which has temporarily decommissioned his political career, is that the conflict has highlighted the limits of defence and security technology, which is an important export of his country. A community that Israel has pushed back into the Stone Age, technologically speaking, has successfully breached the most carefully monitored border on earth, which is propped up by a $1 billion investment. The illusion that technology is a security solution that just works has popped like a soap bubble.
Tel Aviv advertises its status as the unicorn capital of the region. It leads in security-related software including the zero-click Pegasus spyware, which was wound down after too many governments, including India’s, started using it to snoop on political opponents and to drop incriminating payloads on their devices. In the current conflict, Israel is reported to be preparing to issue its new Iron Beam laser weapon to frontline troops to bring down missiles that are too close for the Iron Dome defence system to engage with. In addition, Israel has free access to the most modern American military hardware.
Gaza, on the contrary, is low-tech. In everyday life, it’s roughly where India was in the 1990s. Even before the Israeli blockade, power cuts and shortages, including of essential medicines, were commonplace. Israel, which has 5G communications, has kept Palestinian mobile services throttled back to 2G speeds. That has direct implications for the military capabilities of Hamas, which tailored its strategy accordingly. It abandoned the use of high-technology weapons in favour of small arms and used paragliders and motorcycles for transport, along with basic drones that dropped munitions on border surveillance posts. It used the shock value of low technology and took advantage of the complacency of a high-technology nation.
The success of Hamas in kindling what could have turned into a regional war once again brings into suspicion the selling of technology as a universal solution. Its promoters speak of technology as if it were a moral, civilising force, even-handedly improving the human condition everywhere. But technology is value-neutral, and it is likely to create problems for all.
In recent years, India has faced the challenge of technology creep—the seepage of technology into areas and roles where its use is not properly regulated. The imposition of Aadhaar has been controversial because the direct benefit transfer enabler has also been exclusionary. After it was applied to the public distribution system, there were reports of starvation deaths because beneficiaries who depended on subsidised rations were no longer able to collect them if their IDs were not in order.
That was almost a decade ago, but now the very same problem is seen in the falling employment rates under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This does not reflect lower demand for jobs, but the inability of candidates to authenticate themselves correctly with the online attendance system. Workers are expected to authenticate themselves at the job site, where there may be no mobile signal at all. Their inability to correct errors in the database also prevents authentication.
As a result, millions of workers who used to seek MGNREGA work earlier are going back to working as urban day labourers, taking up menial roles, or have stopped seeking work altogether. The system is generating unemployment and, since demand for MGNREGA jobs is also a barometer of the health of the job market, it is concealing the problem. The real numbers of the unemployed are less certain, and this will affect planning. But Aadhaar, which was originally a voluntary ID, is now so deeply entrenched in the system that policymakers wouldn’t dream of withdrawing it from roles in which it is deployed.
Israel, which has defined itself as a high-technology state, faces a similar dilemma in defence. Deeply committed to defence technology, it can’t dream of rolling back to the human-centric milieu of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. At that time, the boot was on the other foot. Jerusalem was besieged and poorly equipped nationalist soldiers of the Palmach did a suicide supply run to the city every day through the valley of Bab-el-Wad. They carried food and medicines in trucks with homemade armour plating, and their sacrifice was acknowledged in Haim Gouri’s famous anthem Bab-el-Wad.
The fledgling Jewish state had won that round. Now, the tables are turned as the poorly equipped but inventive Palestinians clash with technologically superior Israel. In this telling, the nationalities of David and Goliath have been swapped, but the story remains the same—technically superior arms are unlikely to decide the issue.