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A new kind of war

Op-ed: Israelis frightened by notion of losing to Arabs on technology, hacking front

Customarily, we are intimidated with the vision of a “nuclear Middle East,” yet the real threat we face has to do with the nightmare scenario of a “high-tech Mideast.”

 

We would know how to contend with more military power directed at us. What scares us is losing our exclusivity over sophistication and progress, not to mention the humiliation involved.

 

We would be able to live with losing to the Arabs in a war on the battlefield, but losing on the start-up front? And to the Saudis no less?

 

There is no doubt that the Arab Hackers Spring is a strategic threat that could eliminate our self-perception as a small disk on key surrounded by primitive enemies, as well as our status as the only cool place in the Middle East.

 

A life-seeking nation cannot ignore such blow to national moral and stamina. It was therefore good to see all those Israeli online heroes rising up last week – some of them are older than 12 let’s hope – and restoring some of our honor via bold operations such as bringing down the website of Abu Dhabi’s stock exchange or exposing the Facebook details of Saudi nationals.

 

However, the State of Israel must not make do with the heroic acts of these few individuals; in order to curb the Arab coolness at early stages we must resort to an orderly policy of retaliatory operations. The variety of actions we could adopt towards these Arab arch-programmers is almost unlimited.

 

We could send our Air Force commandoes to Twitter, or infiltrate Facebook and replace the profile photos of trendy Kuwaitis with scary images of swords, for example.

 

However, at the end of the day we may choose to hit the Saudi hacker with the advanced Israeli technology of dropping a 10-ton bomb on his house.

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 01.24.12, 00:01
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