WarSclerotic

TEL AVIV, Israel,

April 9 (UPI) — Israel battled a widely touted cyberassault during the weekend, supposedly organized by the pro-Palestinian hacktivist group Anonymous, and unleashed retaliatory attacks against dozens of sites in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and North Africa.

Media reports said the attacks by a so-called Israeli “strike force” targeted sites where the cyberassaults had originated in what Anonymous had claimed would be “the largest Internet battle in the history of mankind.”

It was not clear whether the Israeli retaliation, which appears to have been extensive, involved elements of the new military cyber command the Defense Ministry has been putting together under a $320 million program announced in 2012.

But it would make sense for it to be involved in the weekend cyber conflict since the military says the Jewish state, which has reputedly played a major role in repeated high-powered cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program since 2009, is being increasingly targeted by its Muslim foes.

The military declined comment after the attack Sunday, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, an apparent follow-up to a blitz by Anonymous and its affiliates during Israel’s 8-day clash with Hamas in the Gaza Strip in November.

“It’s not a military matter,” a spokeswoman said.

As it happens, the much-hyped cyberattack, dubbed #opIsrael, and the threat to “wipe Israel off the map of the Internet” announced April 5 on YouTube appears to have been something of a fizzle.

The Bank of Israel and several government sites, including the Education Ministry, the Tax Authority and the Central Bureau of Statistics, were reported to have been briefly shut down or defaced.

Up to 100 other sites, mainly small businesses without security software, were also affected by what Anonymous called the “Hackintifada #Free Palestine,” a reference to Palestinian intifadas, or uprisings against Israeli occupation.

Government officials downplayed the impact of the assault. But security sources believe further attacks are likely, and these may be more damaging than Sunday’s attempted blitz and may aim for more strategic targets.

The retaliation to Sunday’s attacks by an “Israeli Elite Strike Force” appears to have been Israeli hackers acting on their own initiative.

But there have been growing signs that attacks by supposedly independent operators, such as the weekend cyber thrust against Israel, are in fact the work of state actors.

Such attacks, Oxford Analytica observed, “can have a disproportionate impact on international relations … for motives and aims subversive to international order.

“The greatest danger could emanate from a ‘catalytic’ cyber attack, whereby a dissatisfied party — for example, a militant group acting under cover of a third state — instigates conflict among two other states — say, the United States and China.

“The capacity of existing conflict management mechanisms to mitigate the risks of such an eventuality does not seem promising,” Oxford Analytica cautioned.

In recent months, Israel’s military has inaugurated a cyber-defense control center as the Jewish state grapples with a sharp increase in cyberattacks, most of them supposedly from archenemy Iran.

At the same time, Israel’s amassing a multibillion-dollar arsenal of electronic weapons to use against the Islamic Republic in a largely covert campaign, but which could come out of the shadows if Israel decides to launch pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s contentious nuclear program.

The United States worries about Chinese attacks on its financial and industrial infrastructure. But Israel’s focus is almost entirely on Iran.

The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Israeli military source as saying there’s been a dramatic rise in cyberattacks on the digital infrastructure of the armed forces and Iran’s seen as the culprit.

“The world of attacks is changing rapidly,” he explained as the new center, two years in the planning, became operational in February.

“Few countries have this kind of defense ability,” he noted. “This is part of the military’s readiness to ensure continuity of conventional operations. This continuity is based on cybersecurity.”

Iran, on the receiving end of U.S. and Israel cyber operations, seems determined to enhance its offensive cyber capability, largely to deter the crippling 2009-10 cyber attacks on the uranium enrichment sector of its nuclear program using the Stuxnet worm.

In mid-2012, Western intelligence sources estimated Tehran had spent $1 billion to upgrade its cyber capabilities in less than two years.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Israel for his third trip to the region since he took office on Feb. 1, and for the second time in the span of two weeks. The impetus for these visits is the urgency he feels in the face of the “clock ticking” toward a point of no return.

Too bad the deadline he has set for himself has nothing to do with the Iranian nuclear program. No, on that score, he is confident that his boss, President Barack Obama, has everything under control.

“All options are on the table,” Kerry reiterated on Monday, following his participation in the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. But diplomacy, he stressed, is still the preferred route.

He’s right about one thing: Diplomacy is certainly Iran’s preference, particularly in light of North Korea’s military muscle-flexing, which is testing the waters for a buoyed Tehran.

In fact, the reason for Kerry’s country-hopping is to reignite peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. To this end, first he flew to Istanbul on Sunday, where he made an appeal to the Turkish government to “play a role” in pushing the process forward.

To say that this is delusional would be to diminish the depth of its derangement. Turkey has been making overtures to Hamas in Gaza and remains hostile to Israel, in spite of Obama’s brokering a restoration of ties between the two countries during his own visit to Jerusalem last month. And though a group of Israeli diplomats is scheduled to go to Ankara in the near future, the purpose of the delegation is to discuss the multi-millions of dollars in compensation to be paid to the families of the Turkish radicals who were killed during the “Free Gaza” flotilla raid in 2010.

Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made it clear to Kerry that Israel would have to meet a stringent set of preconditions before Turkey would agree to kiss and make up. These include lifting the naval blockade of Gaza.

Even Israeli Justice Minister and negotiation coordinator Tzipi Livni, known for her almost religious faith in the ability to achieve a peace deal with the Palestinians, did not think that Turkish mediation was a good idea.

In any case, Kerry’s first stop after arriving from Turkey on Sunday evening was Ramallah. There he met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The contents of that meeting were not released to the media, but Palestinian officials who wished to remain nameless leaked (or lied about) two interesting items. One was the assertion that the Obama administration is softening its position with regard to reconciliation between Abbas’ Fatah faction and Hamas. Another was that the Palestinian Authority had no intention of canceling efforts to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court – though “we are [temporarily] freezing them.”

The next morning, Kerry held talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, but at the American consulate in Jerusalem, not in Ramallah. This is because Fayyad is about to be fired by Abbas, and the expression “bad blood” in the Middle East has a more literal meaning than it does in the West. Still, Kerry can’t help Fayyad; nor does Fayyad have the authority to discuss deals of any kind with anyone.

Another pointless get-together was that which Kerry had with Israeli President Shimon Peres. Peres may be a favorite on Capitol Hill, but he is only a figurehead in Jerusalem. So his chat with Kerry was undoubtedly a repetition of the usual mantras. This was indicated by the remarks Kerry made to the press when the two peace partners (Kerry and Peres, that is) were done with their pow-wow.

“I have no illusions about difficulties,” Kerry said. “But you have to believe in the possibilities in order to get there, and you and I believe in them and I am convinced there is a road ahead.” He did not mention that this was the road to hell.

This proves what we already know about Kerry: He is not going to let facts get in the way of his foreign policy. He is a man on a mission, and nothing is going to stop him, not even rockets from Gaza that sent Holocaust mourners in southern Israel running for bomb shelters in mid-ceremony.

But a negotiated “two-state solution” is what Kerry was hired to execute, after all — well, that, and making the world safe from climate change. That, too, is a futile endeavor, but at least the weather is neutral. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have a political-religious agenda in which Israel is not even penciled in.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”