It has become a cliche that we don't realize how dependent we've become on technology until we lose it. For those of us who lack a good sense of direction, the magic of GPS technology in the little boxes of our phones has been a true modern-day miracle.
Like millions of Israelis over the last six months of war, I received a disorienting shock several months ago at the end of a day of work in the city of Haifa, a place I visit only occasionally and don't know well. I set my destination in Waze and glanced at the screen on my dashboard expecting, as always, to be guided by straight lines and a reassuring voice.
Instead, I was met with a jumble of intersecting roads overlapping one another in a tight circle and leading nowhere. More alarmingly, my current location showed up as a suburb of Beirut, or the Damascus airport. After driving in circles, I called a Haifa-based friend to act as a human GPS and guide me toward the road home to my Tel Aviv suburb.
The culprit behind the jamming was neither a mortal enemy nor a mischievous hacker, but Israel's own military. Since October, the Israeli army has been operating GPS jammers in the north to prevent Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis or any hostile force from aiming suicide drones and missiles at Israel with accuracy. Unfortunately, this also prevents navigation apps from working.
Residents of Haifa and other northern cities have since become inured to the situation, relying on their own instincts to get around. The rest of us dusted off any old maps of northern Israel we had hanging around the house and put them in our cars in preparation.
But after the assassination of Iranian General Mohammad Reza Zahedi in a strike attributed to Israel in Damascus last week, the scrambled map syndrome moved closer to home. I was driving to work in Tel Aviv when suddenly the familiar chaos reigned on the navigation app. I didn't get lost, but without the smooth guidance of my Waze overlord steering me around traffic tangles, I was late to a meeting.
As I sat in traffic, it occurred to me that the insecurity and uncertainty I felt on the road with my useless GPS felt perfectly in line with the national mood since October 7. Lost and looking for direction, we expect a calm, authoritative voice to guide the nation in a direction – any direction – that will extract it from its current distress.
Instead, we face a government that is a scrambled screen with arrows pointing at each other, providing no reassurance as to where we are heading or when we might escape the place we are in.
The headlines of the past few days tell the story: We have been told since October that the goal of the Gaza war is "total victory" over Hamas and, more recently, that for it to happen a full assault on Rafah is crucial. We will never get our hostages back without relentless military pressure. And yet there is one brigade combat team in Gaza and seemingly little preparation for a Rafah operation as international pressure grows.
The safe return of the hostages is meant to be our top national priority. And yet, the Netanyahu government is only grudgingly granting the negotiating team room to maneuver. Are we on the road towards a cease-fire deal that includes a hostage release? Or are we forging ahead on the highway to a supposed "total victory"? Which way are we headed? Nobody knows.
As for who will rule in Gaza and how we will live alongside it, Bibi has not provided even the minimum level of communication expected of a malfunctioning GPS that tells us it is recalculating its route – because that would imply that he had planned one at all.