A través de los muros

At the time we send this book to press, the Israeli Army is preparing its ground attack on the Gaza Strip, which it has promised will be devastating in retaliation against the Hamas militias' offensive on its territory. We know that Israel will not find an army in Gaza, but rather a guerrilla system that relies on its unbeatable knowledge of the terrain and an extensive network of tunnels. It is unknown, however, if on this occasion the Israeli troops will replicate the unusual military strategy that they resorted to in the past, for nearly a decade, coinciding with the Second Intifada. At that time, the attacks against Palestinian cities were orchestrated by developing an absolutely unprecedented tactic: instead of progressing along the tortuous paths of the different neighborhoods or refugee camps, the soldiers advanced from house to house, crossing walls, floors, ceilings, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, without ever setting foot on the streets. Thus, completely transforming the concept of space (transfiguring the interior into the exterior and vice versa), they protected themselves from the crosshairs of the Palestinian combatants and turned the homes of civilians, in a traumatic and humiliating way, into the true battlefield. But how did the Israeli military high command conceive such an idea? The military tactic of "reverse geometry", complemented by concepts such as "swarm intelligence", "non-hierarchical attack" or "polycentric networks", was created by a series of Israeli generals who tried to appropriate the proposals of critical thinkers and radical libertarians such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari or Guy Debord, giving rise to a spooky postmodern turn that sought to reinvent urban warfare by making its troops a kind of "inverted guerrilla."