Cheerful and contented, senior Israeli defense officials visited the Gaza border on Wednesday to celebrate the completion of the anti-tunnel underground barrier after four years of construction. Among them were the defense minister and his deputy, the IDF chief of staff and several other high-ranking generals, along with other defense ministry representatives and Gaza-area regional council heads. Journalists, too, were invited to revel at engineering marvel and received a guided tour of the grandiose project.
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There's nothing inherently wrong, of course, with joyous ceremonies, and yet it's hard not to wonder what was actually being celebrated on our southern border. To be sure, the underground barrier, and the fact that it negates Hamas' ability to penetrate Israel with its underground terror tunnels, is a technological wonder worthy of praise and recognition. But is yet another layer of defense – buttressed by countless other technological tools encircling the shtetl known as Israel with walls and Iron Domes to protect the frightened Jews from the non-Jews plotting their demise – a reason to celebrate? Perhaps not.
When and under what pretext did the IDF abandon the ethos of "pushing beyond the fence," whereby victory cannot be achieved through a defensive posture and fortifications, but only by aggressively engaging the enemy on his own territory? And when was it decided that it was no longer a cardinal rule to never allow the enemy to breach a security perimeter? It isn't clear. What is clear is the fact that in 2021, officials entrusted with safeguarding the Jewish state are calculating when and how the enemy will rise to strike at us, instead of causing the enemy to tremble at the mere thought of the Jews coming to strike at him first.
The greatest irony in this farcical story is that as this ceremony was taking place, Hamas leaders were sitting in their offices, sipping warm tea, continuing to plot new ways to harm Israel and its citizens. They are also arming and equipping themselves virtually unhindered while holding a monopoly on the decision of when and under what circumstance the next war will begin.
We don't need to imagine how this manifests. It has already happened. When they infiltrated on land, we built fences. When they began firing missiles, we built the Iron Dome system, whose limits the enemy is always testing. When our enemies built underground terror tunnels, we invested astronomical sums of money into building an underground security barrier. We can only assume the IDF is already preparing for tomorrow's threat, when Hamas builds a system that threatens us from the sea.
In Israel, this threat will be taken seriously. Engineers will be recruited, vast sums of money will be spent, experiments will be held, until the solution is found. The construction will last a few years, and then, sometime around 2030, officers, defense officials, and journalists will again be invited, this time to some beach, to celebrate the completion of a sea barrier.
The sophisticated defensive systems Israel has built on its own are important and save lives, but the defense establishment has become addicted to them and the fictitious quiet they manufacture. We can only hope the weaning process from these systems isn't too costly.
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