A War for the Tech Economy

Since October 7th, Israel has been fighting for its ideological self-image as the “startup nation”. The collapse of the “smart fence” on the Gaza border, along with the disabling of its “see-and-shoot system“, was a decisive blow to this ideology. The slaughter of soldiers, civilians, and foreign workers with rudimentary weapons like knives or hoes underscored this defeat. When soldiers take photos of themselves burning houses in Gaza, let alone using catapults to launch fireballs into southern Lebanon, the high-tech ideology seems like a distant memory. After it had already become a cliché, Einstein’s famous quote suddenly became a reality: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” When the IDF uses sticks and stones, the promise of technological progress seems thwarted.

Yet, the IDF, along with market forces, does not give up so easily. The so-called “Night of the Drones”, when Iran attacked Israel in April, left Israelis in a state of euphoria – not only because of the success in protecting Israeli citizens, and certainly not due to the ability to rely on neighboring countries. On the Night of the Drones, the IDF also conducted a kind of fireworks show, serving as a temporary and much-needed restoration of the high-tech self-image.

Today, various commentators are asking about the purpose behind the pager attack and the subsequent communication device attack yesterday. Many of us are speculating that the attacks might pave the way for a larger Israeli incursion into Lebanon. Be that as it may, a direct line connects the Night of the Drones to the enormous recent operation: the system is striving to preserve the image of decisive victory through technological means. Below, I will expand on the interests at stake and the possible risks of the ideological commitment to tech.

Technology and the Idea of Progress

Since at least the late 19th century, many jurists have either implicitly or explicitly linked technological superiority to moral superiority. For those who, like myself, grew up in the 1990s, this idea is familiar from TV broadcasts of the American attack in the first Iraq War (1990-1991). Back then, talking heads told us about “smart bombs”, with the typical image being that of a missile penetrating through a window of a Baghdad building. American technological superiority, so went the story, was also moral superiority: precision allows hitting those who need to be hit, and sparing the lives of others.

However, even then, with a more sober look, it was clear that technological progress and moral enlightenment are not correlated. To understand this, it was enough to look back at the first international agreements on the laws of war. For example, the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 prohibited the use of cluster bullets. The pain that cluster bullets caused when detonating inside the body led to the opinion that it was an illegal weapon. However, prohibition on pain developed alongside the permissibility of large-scale killing in war – a phenomenon that significantly intensified with technological advancements.

When the customary prohibitions against superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering reemerged in discussions framing the 1977 Additional Protocols, they were deeply rooted in the experiences of colonized nations. But as Paul Kahn has observed in the context of torture, the consequent legal rules presented a moral decision that is far from clear: killing was often deemed preferrable to the infliction of pain.

The Rise of Targeted Killings

Nevertheless, the idea that technological advancement makes war more humane did not die. In our millennium, its most prominent symbol emerges precisely from Israeli policy and the corresponding Israeli legal response, namely that of “targeted killings”.

Following the assassination of Salah Shehadeh in 2002, an important legal discussion developed on the legality of targeted killings. The Israeli Supreme Court, specifically Judge Aharon Barak, allowed the policy. In a judgement that saw a first expansion of the concept of “direct participation in hostilities” (DPH), Barak gave his judicial green light, provided that arrest was not possible and the “collateral damage” was “proportionate”.

It didn’t take long for many in Israel and around the world to praise the decision as an embodiment of enlightenment in wartime. Particularly in the context of the US-led “War on Terror” across the Middle East, the idea was that technological progress allows for surgical strikes that save the lives of civilians and soldiers alike. Israeli legal experts made careers worldwide around this idea,.

At the same time, critical legal scholars, both within Israel and globally, often attacked the idea that precision means humanity. One of the main arguments in the critical literature is that even if we accept the assumption that individual strikes are more precise, the availability of such technology facilitates sustained and repeated strikes over time. Thus, it promotes a form of endless humanized warfare that avoids political solutions and peace. This is put forth as a political and moral disadvantage inherent in the supposed moral superiority that technology fosters.

The Fall of Targeted Killings

The attacks on pagers and other communications devices are interesting in this context. As reported, Hezbollah members switched to pagers precisely to disconnect from the technological network that enabled the policy of “targeted killings” in Lebanon. In a publicly televised address in February, Hassan Nasrallah told his followers that “the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent”. “Bury it,” he pleaded. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.” As the New York Times reported, Nasrallah “had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information”.

Against this background, it could have been predicted that there would be a return to less “advanced” and more traditional means of warfare. This indeed happened, as seen in the catapulting of fireballs across the Lebanese border. The Palestinians in Gaza had long waged low-tech warfare against Israel, often in the form of kites or fire balloons. Postcolonial theory tells us that the colonized often engage in a form of mimicry of the colonizer. With Israeli low-tech warfare, the process seemed to work in reverse.

However, since the IDF  and market forces clung to high-tech ideology as a lifeline in this campaign, a technological counter-solution emerged in response to Hezbollah’s shift away from smartphones; one that seems to have combined elements of a straw company, hardware production, as well as software and cyber technology. All of these elements were packaged into two operations that will undoubtedly capture the imagination of military tech investors worldwide, perhaps for years to come.

The pager attack thus embodies the startup nation’s response to Hezbollah’s attempt to go off the grid. As such, it reveals an important truth about the nature of high-tech ideology: it is an ideology that seeks to avoid ideology altogether, sanctifying technology in its place. But even for those who still equated technological solutions with moral superiority, this illusion should now have dissipated. The communications attacks are part of a form of warfare that is both endless and inhumane.

This is, first, because they represent a regression to the period before the St. Petersburg Declaration. Unlike the seemingly cleaner military action promised by modern technology, the communications attacks seem to have been designed to inflict injury. Reports detail that some of those hit by the communications attacks have been blinded or are suffering from severe abdominal injuries. Memes that seem to be circulated by a large and jubilant online community across the Middle East, constantly refer to possible harms to genitalia. The imagination of wartime castration is as old as war itself and as symbolic as can be. It turns out that a technological means can be no less painful than the cut of a knife.

Perhaps even more importantly, on the broader level of strategy, the military objective of this action remains unclear. “It’s doubtful whether it will bring the residents of the north back home,” a veteran Israeli national security commentator rushed to admit after the first pager attack. Of course, the communications attacks may have been a first step in preparation for a larger military operation that would somehow allow the displaced Northern Israelis to return to their homes. With a clear military objective such as that one, the attack may be deemed legal, depending on the levels of civilian casualties. Right now, however, it remains equally likely that these attacks advanced escalation for the sake of escalation. Such a policy may indeed express technological superiority, but it certainly does not elevate its perpetrators to any high moral ground.

What such an attack unquestionably does is showcase coveted Israeli espionage capacities and advance the interests of an Israeli economic elite that depends on weapon exports. The class of national security experts that tends to reap the economic benefits of advanced military technologies has recently become increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s attempt to consolidate power. Advertising their potential products and services on a global scale may, in the medium term, help mitigate their political opposition.

The Military-Secular Complex

The idea of sanctifying technology for the sake of technology developed significantly in Fascist Italy. Various thinkers and artists at the time advanced the idea of Futurism, according to which progress and modernity are expressed not by values but rather by aesthetic qualities, such as noise, and particularly in speed. In their view, the modern state was meant to be an expression of velocity and tempo. Within this secular ideology, the goal was to develop means for the sake of means, not for any external ends. It’s tempting to think that today’s Israel is waging a religious war led by Religious Zionism, which is also a major far-right party in the coalition. While this interpretation holds a great deal of truth,  equally significant is the ideology of means for their own sake — a realm in which secular Israel plays a crucial role (due to the potential of private profit).

However, the outcomes of the military-tech complex also reveal extreme arrogance towards the environment — not necessarily towards terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas, but towards the peoples of the region.

The New York Times’s detailed report of the incidents announces in its title that Israel has built a “Modern-Day Trojan Horse”. The idea comes from Greek history, but perhaps a better comparison might be found in Greek myth. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Today, Israel is attempting to develop secularized but God-like technological capabilities, at least in terms of their ability to generate surprise and change reality overnight.

Yet, by discarding moral or political considerations in favor of pyrotechnics,  Israel risks Prometheus’s ultimate fate: punishment. This punishment won’t come from the gods. High-tech ideology run amok is indeed creating waves of temporary euphoria among Israelis and their allies in the Middle East. But it also potentially exposes Israeli citizens and their allies to generations of revenge.