I've noticed a trend over this year in the way Palestinians are fighting their cruel occupiers. Whenever Israel finds a way to negate the way they fight, they simply adapt and maneuver. They find a new way to fight back, ways that are creative and totally unrelated to the way they previously thought, so the Israelis have a harder time predicating how to combat the resistance. They think outside the box.
The first way the Palestinians fought this year was with rockets. They did this because this was one of the few long range weapons they have. Unlike the Israelis, they do not have artillery and jet fighters to kill their enemies from miles away. They have whatever small arms they can smuggle into Gaza or whatever they can make at home. These rockets were not particularly effective, as they are impossible to aim at the distances the Palestinians had to fire them at, but, at least they were a weapon.
The Israelis found a way to counter these rockets and bring down causalities from them almost 99%. Basically they hardly killed anyone with rockets during the 2014 summer war. The Israeli Iron Dome shot down the rockets before they could hit their targets.
But the Palestinians adapted. They switched from shooting rockets to doing raids from tunnels. They would dig under Gaza, through the border, and up into Israel, where they would launch sneak attacks against Israeli military targets. Contrary to Israeli propaganda, Hamas did not use a single tunnel to launch attacks against Israeli civilians, they only targeted military units. This is contrasted with Israel, whose killings were 75%-90% civilians. Hamas killed 66 Israeli soldiers during the war, and a big chunk of those deaths were from tunnel raids. The other deaths came from classic guerrilla warfare operations in Gaza as Israeli ground troops rolled in.
These tunnels caught the Israelis by surprise. They didn't anticipate that Hamas had built as many tunnels as they did. They couldn't negate them with their superior airpower. Jet fighters can do nothing against tunnels that are as deep as the Hamas tunnels were. So, they had to send in ground troops and bulldozers into Gaza to destroy the tunnels. This is how Israel negated the tunnel method of fighting. Although this cost them some ground troops, Israel succeeded in destroying the Hamas tunnels.
By the fall of 2014, after the war had ended, the Palestinians had to come up with a new way to fight. They are not allowed to possess firearms in the West Bank, apparently, Palestinians are not humans, therefore, they are not supposed to enjoy the universal human right of self defense. Jews, however, are allowed to own any firearm that they want. So, Palestinians find an ingenious way to fight with what they've got: cars.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11211675/Israel-on-brink-of-third-intifada-after-new-car-attack.html
It's an interesting tactic, something that you could never predict judging by their past tactic, which was tunnels. The two bear no resemblance. And unlike guns, Israel cannot ban Palestinians from driving cars, otherwise, they'd be just like Saudi Arabia in that regard, who bans women from driving. It's politically and economically not viable, which makes it a good tactic.
Same thing with this last tactic that Palestinians are using at the same time as the cars: knives. Yep, regular pocket and kitchen knives. Nothing super high tech here. But Israel can't do anything about it before an attack happens. You can't ban knives.
It will be interesting to see if this resistance fizzes out and dies down like many other times, or if it will actually culminate into another Intifada. It's simply too early to tell. Anyone who tells you it's a third Intifada doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. But there is one guarantee: Palestinian resistance will never die. You cannot kill an idea, and you cannot take away peoples' basic human rights and them just sit there and not do anything about it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11211675/Israel-on-brink-of-third-intifada-after-new-car-attack.html
It's an interesting tactic, something that you could never predict judging by their past tactic, which was tunnels. The two bear no resemblance. And unlike guns, Israel cannot ban Palestinians from driving cars, otherwise, they'd be just like Saudi Arabia in that regard, who bans women from driving. It's politically and economically not viable, which makes it a good tactic.
Same thing with this last tactic that Palestinians are using at the same time as the cars: knives. Yep, regular pocket and kitchen knives. Nothing super high tech here. But Israel can't do anything about it before an attack happens. You can't ban knives.
It will be interesting to see if this resistance fizzes out and dies down like many other times, or if it will actually culminate into another Intifada. It's simply too early to tell. Anyone who tells you it's a third Intifada doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. But there is one guarantee: Palestinian resistance will never die. You cannot kill an idea, and you cannot take away peoples' basic human rights and them just sit there and not do anything about it.
