The Security and Policy Failures Behind the Recent Attack in Israel
Things You Aren't Supposed to Say
The events that occurred yesterday were terrible: One struggles to see how Hamas plans to benefit from this. Their actions are likely to backfire, and it feels as if Hamas is acting under foreign influence rather than self-generated, strategic thinking: If there is any strategic thinking, I believe it is to keep this foreign supplier of weapons and goods happy. Otherwise, this action just doesn’t make sense. That said, we need to look at what security and policy failures caused this to occur.
This event occurred for three reasons:
1) Israel’s culture of gun control left their population with no way to defend themselves against such an attack: Israelis are allowed to own only 50 rounds, not enough to deal with a situation like this, and only 2% of Israelis own gun—and most of those Israelis are in the West Bank. Regular Israelis are even more disarmed than that. Clearly, Israel needs to change its attitudes towards gun ownership: The best defense against this sort of irregular attack is an armed population. As long as your average Israeli remains disarmed, these sorts of attacks will happen.
Now, if Israel is worried about arming less than loyal people living inside their borders, what I recommend is that there be a fast path for gun ownership, indeed maybe even a state subsidy to buy a gun and ammunition, for anyone who is an IDF veteran who was honourably discharged (or whatever status is the Israeli equivalent) and has no criminal history or history of mental illness. After all, if you trusted someone to serve, why can’t you trust them to own a gun?
2) Israel’s border fence was flimsy and unpatrolled.
A defensive wall does not work if it is not patrolled. The fence they produced is flimsy even in comparison to the old American border fence which was made out of surplus materials from Vietnam: Let alone the one that Trump had been building. Israel needs to build a multi-layer defense that is harder to circumvent.
A) The wall needs to consist of a barbed-wire fence like the one that is there now followed by a “slat fence” identical to the one Trump was building along the border:
B) Hidden cameras need to be mounted along its entire length. Defensive walls have to be paired with observation. The purpose of the wall is to slow down a breakthrough and give your forces enough time to mount a response.
C) I would then suggest placing landmines between the barbed-wire fence and the slat fence with built-in entry corridors that Israel guards more heavily—so that Israels own counterattacks are not hindered by the fence itself.
D) A road needs to be built alongside this fence to allow for armoured patrols, think Stryker-type vehicles, to proceed quickly to any point experiencing a breakthrough.
E) Drones, preferably a combination of small observation drones and armed drones, need to patrol the length of the border fence. Even if this means having a dedicated team, the return would be well-worth it. Israel could see a breakthrough as it was happening and immediately dispatch security forces, and armed drones, to plug the breakthrough.
3) Israel needs a way to look inside Hamas and the Gaza Strip. They need to buy off Palestinians in exchange for intelligence, possibly offering them a chance to move out of Gaza for a better life in Jordan—or some other country Israel has decent relations with. Massad failed at one of its most important intelligence gathering tasks. They need humint, human intelligence, inside Hamas and the Gaza Strip.
I suspect that Hamas had support from some other country in organizing this attack: Its scale was simply too impressive to be carried out without some other form of funding. The range of many of the rockets, along with the cost of employing things like paragliders and delivering them to Gaza, makes me nearly certain that Iran played a role in organizing these attacks. However that turns out though, Israel has to look at how its own policies abetted this tragedy.