Two millennia ago, Chinese emperors built the Great Wall to keep barbarian tribes away. In 1216, Genghis Khan bribed a sentry to open one of the gates for him, and he entered China with his marauding Mongol horsemen.
Roman Emperor Hadrian raised a wall in 122 AD to keep Roman Britain safe from the tribes in the north, and posted sentries to guard it. But there was no sentry around when the Pict tribesmen came in hordes. They simply scaled the wall.
Fast forward to modern times. Having faced the brunt of German invasions several times, including in the First World War, France built the famous Maginot Line, a formidable fortification along their border with Germany in the 1930s. They spent almost six per cent of their military budget on the project, even cutting back on making warplanes and tanks. Complete with underground rail tracks, recreation rooms and even air-conditioned sleeping cells for off-duty sentries, the Maginot Line was declared the world’s most formidable border that couldn’t be breached with bombs from aeroplanes or shells from battle tanks. And the French proudly declared: “They shall not pass.”
When they came four years later, Nazi Germany’s panzer divisions didn’t ‘pass’ the line; they bypassed it. They spotted a thinly guarded stretch in the Ardennes forest and crossed over. In six weeks, France fell to Hitler.
Something similar happened to Israel recently. After winning three wars and several nasty battles in the 20th century, Israel began walling itself in the 21st century. After the Passover massacre in Park Hotel in 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, building an improved fence on the Gaza border. Next, they built a 245-mile fence on the Egyptian border to guard against the Sinai-based groups. After the Palestinian protests in Syria in 2011, they built an eight-meter-high wall from Majd al-Shams. In 2016, they built a fence on the Jordan border.
Once the Hamas began pounding them with rockets from Gaza, they built an ‘Iron Dome’ of radars, sensors and rocket-busting missiles that detected the incoming rockets and shot them down or deflected them. In 2017, they began building the world’s supposedly most formidable fence on the 40-km Gaza border, which took three years and a billion or more dollars spent on sensors, cameras and booby traps. Even a desert rat or a giant lizard scampering up a pole would have set alarms ringing, sirens hooting, traps shutting and machine guns blazing.
Yet, look at what happened in October 2023. A ragtag army of ill-trained militants, who knew nothing more about warfare than shooting civilians and launching inaccurate rockets into towns, breached the Gaza fence in the night and rode into Israel on jeeps and motorcycles. No cameras picked them up, no sensors sent signals, no sirens hooted, no traps snapped shut.
What had happened? Simple. The Hamas men didn’t use electronic toys that emitted signals, and so Israel’s sensors picked up nothing. They walked in electronically naked. No alarms beeped, no sirens sounded, and there was no sentry to shout, “Hey, who goes there?”
Apparently, the walls and fences had affected the mindset of the soldiers, their commanders and Israel’s rulers. To put it simply, the guard commanders’ eyes were not on the horizon, but on the monitor screens. The screens showed nothing, since there was no electronic breaching of the fence, but only manual.
Moral: you may build walls and forts, but also ensure that your sentries and soldiers too keep their eyes open.
