It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a katbam!

The word of the year will surely be “katbam,” actually an acronym for “unmanned aircraft,”  termed an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, in the English press. In short – a drone. We are living through the attacks of the killer drones, and it is not in the least bit amusing.

I admit the news was on in our house yesterday, at least for the beginning. I watched in mounting horror while, even as helicopters and ambulances sped off to hospitals, the commentators theorized about the failure to shoot down the drone that killed four and wounded dozens of others in dispassionate terms: The katbam was flying too low, it was taking evasive maneuvers, it could have been confused with a migratory bird. They described the Hezbollah’s increasing use of katbamim and our efforts to combat them in terms of computer games or the rapid evolution of T cells fighting viruses. “We are continually developing new means of identifying and destroying them. We can’t tell you what those means are,” they intoned to the cameras.

In general, the news teams do not report the exact site of rocket-falls or drone attacks. But the vagueness of the area they announced hinted at a military target. Only this morning did they reveal the hit was on the dining hall of trainees.

By letting us guess at the site, the katbam had become a new weapon of terror, striking randomly in the heart of our country. By admitting it had hit an army base, the katbam was actually revealed to be a weapon of war. Not one that could win a war, but a means of retaliation for the ongoing incursion into southern Lebanon. It tells us that the Hezbollah drone operators have good targeting capability, that they know when the army mess is full, that, as opposed to their rockets, their drones can sometimes penetrate our warning and counter-attack systems. Because of the latter, the terror remains.

“We are in the midst of an ‘event,’” said one commentator. “We will have some hard days ahead,” said another with the appropriate grim expression. “And if we can’t tell the katbamim from birds, we need to shoot birds,” he added.

In a further example of evolving war and learning from our enemies, the New York Times reported Israeli soldiers have been using Gazans as human shields. Captured people are sent into buildings or made to pick up objects to check if they are booby-trapped. Others are coerced into acting as guides. Of course, I completely condemn this illegal practice. It demonstrates to me how vicious, on a personal level, the war in Gaza has become. For soldiers on both sides, it has devolved into a war for survival, and any means are deemed legitimate. It is Yeats’ “mere anarchy loosed upon the world,” in a highly concentrated version. It is a practice in a war that sees no tomorrow, in which lethal pitfalls are endless and humans are expendable.

Both incidences – revealing our army’ illegal actions and the penetration of a katbam far into our airspace – exhibit our weaknesses at a time when we are winning. We are winning, but not yet prevailing, entering into a new risky adventure with Iran that we could very well lose.

Do I need to point out that we should actually be seriously negotiating for a ceasefire while we’re still winning? Do I need to bring up the subject of the hostages, another of our weaknesses?

And please, leave the birds out of it.