The day is not far off when the Israel Defense Forces will have supersonic F-35 stealth fighters capable of flying to Iran and back. Some day in the not so distant future, we will have sophisticated long-range missile boats and an armada of state-of-the-art tanks. Yet Israel, equipped from head to toe with radars and satellites that can peer into Bashar Assad's palace and see what he is having for five o?clock tea, has not been able to do anything about the Arabs' most primitive weapon.
During the Gulf War, Iraq fired 39 old-fashioned Scuds with 250-kilogram warheads at Israel. A whole army of American planes, British commando units and satellites watching the goings-on from outer space could not even detect, let alone destroy, a single mobile rocket launcher. In Operation Accountability in 1993, with the IDF sitting in Lebanon, Yitzhak Rabin as defense minister and Ehud Barak as chief of staff, we were unable to stop the Katyusha fire on the Galilee. In Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, we were equally unable to stop the Katyushas. In the Second Lebanon War, not only did the Katyushas and missiles keep raining down on us, but we left behind an enemy that managed to replenish its arsenal with 20,000 rockets and missiles of every kind before the year was up.

The Qassam rocket, dismissed at first as a pesky gnat, has turned the lives of Sderot residents into hell for the last seven years. The Qassam?s primitiveness turned out to be its asset: easy to shoot, hard to spot. The army has come to realize that there is not much it can do. Most of the time, the noise is greater than the damage.