We blew up their beepers. Back to business.

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Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, in his televised speech to his followers, said Israel had crossed every red line and committed war crimes, breaking all the rules. He was speaking of the “big-beeper-blow-up caper,” in which a foreign country (spoiler alert, possibly Israel), caused thousands of devices to explode at once.

The war (as well as the war-not-yet-a-war) has been, from the beginning, full of scenarios for which the rules have not yet been written. It has been that way since terrorists using high-tech sports equipment – power hang gliders, lasers and go-pro cameras – took out the heart of Israel’s high-tech surveillance system.

In both cases, the Ian Fleming moments were opening salvos. Both sides shot their wads – they were acts that can’t be repeated. The actual war is a combination of medieval dungeons, WWI and II tanks, planes and gunners fighting house-to-house and launchers lobbing flaming bits of material over the walls.

And we have another technology, as old as the Romans – concrete – that keeps the war on a steady boil. Concrete bunkers have been around through untold wars; the comfy ones we are now able to supply are enabling entrenched leaders on all sides to keep sending others to risk their lives, to invite deadly reprisal to rain on the citizens of their own countries.

Taking out the observation towers, hitting people with their beepers: We are engaged in a war of wits, looking for the hole in the other side’s defenses, the back door that will allow us in. But we are not using our wits to find ways out of the impasses we have led ourselves into. There is something Sisyphean about shooting missiles to have them shot out of the air, killing enemy fighters only to have new ones pop up in their place. To pretend we are on the path to victory, even as we open new fronts in our never-ending war.

If you think about it, all of our cutting-edge spy technology could be used for peace-keeping as well as for fighting. The military said as much when they informed the war cabinet that the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egypt-Gaza border could be policed with existing surveillance technology, rather than with humans in tanks.

Imagine if the brain power and funding that went into weaponizing beepers and selling them to the Hezbollah went to solve climate change, instead

This is technology we already have on hand. Just ask the young women soldiers who had been posted at observation stations near the Gaza border. The error was not in the technology, but in human beings who thought they knew better. We were able to precisely target Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, know almost before they do when they’ll step outside for a breath of air, and take them out with exact weapons. Our technology locates incoming rockets and missiles, calculates their trajectories, sounds alarms and shoots them out of the air.

We have the technology to detect tunnels; we could be developing better technology to detect other contraventions of peace agreements, for example, weapons smuggling. The latter would help cut down on killing inside our borders, as well, if we actually had the incentive to apply it.

Technology, in the right hands and developed for the right purpose could be a boost for Palestinian economies and promote collaboration. I have seen the beginnings of such collaboration in science labs, with people from across the fence who had to travel hours each day just to get to class. Imagine what would happen if working together was not just easier, but encouraged. Imagine if the brain power and funding that went into weaponizing beepers and selling them to the Hezbollah went to solve climate change, instead.

I’m not dreaming up some Eden where Jews and Palestinians all come together to share regular meals and celebrate one another’s holidays. We will need many years of healing before there can be any widespread trust. But I am imaging a future in which the extremists, even if they do not disappear, become irrelevant, where arms are not the biggest growth industries.

Trojan horses are as old as the Greeks. The idea of converting war-time tech to peace-time uses is as old as the biblical admonition to “beat your swords into plowshares.”

Our technology may be new, but war is as old as humanity. So too are truces. We have not so much rewritten the rules of war, as some claim, as forgotten how to bring about a cease-fire. If we can spend two years figuring out how to blow up beepers, we can remember how to sign a piece of paper and hold both sides to an agreement.