Life in Silico

Yesterday (Thurday) was Yom Ha’atsma’ut - Israel’s 60th Independence Day - and there was much rejoicing. Unfortunately, such dates get to be very banal. How banal? In the first speech of the celebration night, in the big, official ceremony on Mount Herzl, the Knesset Speaker mentioned Nisim Gini (page in Hebrew), the youngest “soldier” to die in the War of 1948 (defending of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City). She of course praised him and lamented about the conditions under which 10 year olds must take up arms (although it appears his job was to keep look-out - he was killed by a sniper, not during an actual fight), but this is very suspect when the Hagana was itself recruiting 12+ year olds (I bet it wasn’t for combat, but still). Contrast this with Palestinian children being recruited for suicide missions and in general for “resistance” (which involves them being in combat areas, throwing Molotov Cocktails on soldiers and getting killed). True, the magnitudes involved are different, but this sort of “PR” is bad anyway you look at it. We should remember Gini, his courage and his sacrifice, but we should also remember that recruiting children is wrong. It’s wrong today, it was wrong in 1948.

The general theme I find annoying in ceremonies such as these is the idealization and the symbolism, which drowns reality and history. A pretty lie is still a lie; a sympathetic half-truth is still not the whole truth; a morality distorted ad hoc is still wrong. But real people lived and died at the time. Surely their memory deserves more than the banal, rehashed, regurgitated speeches we keep hearing over and over. Surely our own history is not composed of a few stock characters in a predictable fairy tale of David and Goliath!

Now, to the good stuff. The ceremonies were two days ago in the evening, and the next day - yesterday - there were parades of the navy, the air forces and paratroopers, which I attended in Tel Aviv. Five (I think) cruisers and a submarine (our navy is small) made their way from Haifa to Ashkelon, followed by a more impressive air parade, beginning with helicopter triplets, followed by cargo and fuel planes, unmanned aircraft, and then the fighter planes. There were four planes who made impressive coordinated maneuvers with paint trails following, and a lone fighter plane who did cool stunts (such as flying parallel to the sea, and suddenly steering straight upwards into the sky). Finally there were simulated paratrooper landings into the sea, and their for-show rescue. Unfortunately, it didn’t go without incidents - due to strong winds, one of the paratroopers made a rough landing on some of the viewers, severely injuring two.

Later we went to the exhibit of Israel’s military intelligence community - the military handles SIGINT and VISINT mostly. This was even more impressive. The whole deal is very hush-hush, of course, but still we got to see the SIGINIT-on-a-plane system, map-making satellites (Israel is going strong in the satellite business), unmanned aircraft with cameras, propaganda articles of Palestinians, Iranians, etc., caricatures, captured weapons, a simulated underground tunnel of the sort the Palestinians build for weapon transfer below the Egyptian border, recreations of Hizbullah’s rocket-firing positions and so on. The importance of Israeli intelligence cannot be overstated - Israel, being a small country with limited resources, needs to know how to allocate those resources, when and whereto direct its firepower.

Riding the surge of patriotic feeling, I have to comment on how much was done here. Criticisms taken into account, Israel still comes out ahead of many more peaceful, more mature, more resource-rich nations, against many odds. Consider similar nations from the “batch” that got their independence from some colonial power around that time, such as Jordan, India, South and North Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Of them, only India and South Korea are comparable.

The reason for Israel’s success in the face of the odds, I think, lays in the “life-dinner” principle, taken from evolutionary biology. Consider a fox chasing a rabbit. From the fox’s point of view, catching the rabbit is important, but not crucial - there are other rabbits around, also rats, moles, hares. The fox is running for its dinner. From the rabbit’s point of view, escaping is crucial - if it’s caught, that’s the end of the road. The rabbit is running for its life.

Israel is far from a herbivorous rabbit, but the analysis of the cost-benefit is similar. The Jewish settlers had created new lives in Erets Israel, they had nothing to return to after World War II, and those who were born here knew no other homeland and spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue. Defeat for the settlers in 1948 meant an end to this life - either by physical death, expulsion, or subjugation to the Arab power that be. Defeat for the Arabs meant a lot - a piece of land captured by an essentially foreign force, the colonialists they worked hard to overthrow back in power through the back door of Zionism. But it wasn’t their lives at stake - the piece of land was small, the local Arabs didn’t even have to fight, and many chose to stay. (You can judge for yourself how well-off are Israeli Arabs today.)

Consider the War of Attrition was initiated by Egypt following the defeat at 1967. Nasser couldn’t beat Israel in a decisive battle, so he would take it man by man. As Mohamed Hassanein Heikal explained:

If the enemy succeeds in inflicting three-thousand casualties in this campaign, we can go on fighting nevertheless, because we have manpower reserves. If we succeed in inflicting ten-thousand casualties, he will unavoidably find himself compelled to stop fighting, because he has no manpower reserves.

The same rationale works with time and territory. The Arabs can lose all the wars they want, Israel cannot afford to lose even one. And this incentive is relevant even today, most notably with Ahmedinejad’s prophecies of Israel’s impeding doom, which remind of similar statements made by past greats such as Nasser. And just like the War of Attrition, or any other war, we have no choice but to face up to a nuclear Iran. Happy 60th birthday, Israel.