Put Israel To Sleep: When Peace Is Really Preparation For War
What if a peace agreement is not actually intended to produce peace?
That disturbing question is again confronting Israel after reports that one Arab country allegedly advised another to show flexibility toward Israel, reach an agreement, lower Israel’s defenses–and use the resulting calm to strengthen itself for a future confrontation.
Some reports have suggested the countries involved were Saudi Arabia and Syria, although that has not officially confirmed.
But the alleged strategy itself should sound painfully familiar to Israelis.
Because one of the most dangerous lessons of October 7 was that quiet does not necessarily mean peace.
Sometimes quiet is when your enemy is preparing.
The Lesson Of Hudaybiyyah
Israeli Arab affairs journalist Tzvi Yehezkeli has reportedly compared this mentality to one of the most famous episodes in early Islamic history: the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah.
In 628, Muhammad entered into a ten-year truce with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca.
This period of peace proved enormously advantageous to Muhammad’s movement. His political and military position grew substantially stronger. Two years later, after an allied tribe of the Quraysh attacked an allied tribe of Muhammad–an event regarded as violating the agreement–Muhammad used that pretext to march on Mecca with a dramatically larger force and conquered the city.
Hudaybiyyah illustrates something strategically important:
A truce can transform the balance of power.
An adversary who cannot achieve his objectives today may accept peace today while never abandoning those objectives tomorrow.
And Israel has encountered that thinking before.
Arafat Actually Invoked Hudaybiyyah
Perhaps the most chilling example came from Yasser Arafat himself.
Just months after the Oslo Accords transformed the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, Arafat addressed Muslims in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 10, 1994.
He explicitly compared the agreement he had reached with Israel to Muhammad’s Hudaybiyyah agreement with the Quraysh. Contemporary documentation of the speech confirms the comparison.
Think about the implications.
Israelis were being encouraged to believe they had entered a new historical era.
Peace conferences were held. Handshakes were celebrated. Palestinian institutions were established. Israeli territory and security responsibilities were transferred in the expectation that political accommodation would gradually replace conflict.
Yet Arafat was simultaneously speaking to a Muslim audience using the historical analogy of a temporary truce made during an unfinished struggle.
Israel heard peace.
Arafat’s audience heard Hudaybiyyah.
That should have produced far more uncomfortable questions than it did.
Hamas Perfected The Strategy Of Quiet
Then came Gaza.
For years Israel fought Hamas, reached ceasefires, restored calm and repeated the cycle.
Each round produced the same hope: perhaps Hamas had finally been deterred.
But Hamas was digging.
Building tunnels.
Producing rockets.
Training terrorists.
Collecting intelligence.
Planning.
Israel increasingly interpreted extended periods without major conflict as evidence that Hamas preferred economic stability to another devastating war.
Hamas apparently interpreted those same periods as opportunities.
Then came October 7.
The lesson was catastrophic: an enemy temporarily choosing not to attack is not necessarily an enemy who no longer wants to attack.
Sometimes deterrence works.
Sometimes the enemy is simply waiting.
Syria Makes The Question Urgent Again
That lesson matters enormously as Israel considers potential arrangements with Syria.
Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has publicly acknowledged negotiations with Israel over a security agreement intended to reduce tensions along their border.
Israel certainly has an interest in preventing another hostile front from emerging.
But any agreement must answer a far more important question than whether the other side is willing to sign a piece of paper:
Has its strategic objective changed?
There is an enormous difference between genuine peace and tactical accommodation.
Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel has survived for decades. Jordan’s has as well. The Abraham Accords produced meaningful diplomatic and economic relationships.
Israel therefore should not assume that every agreement with an Arab or Muslim government is fraudulent.
But neither can it afford the opposite mistake–assuming that every signature represents reconciliation.
Peace Requires Open Eyes
The Bible repeatedly warns against declarations of peace that conceal a much more dangerous reality.
Jeremiah warned of those who declared “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace.
Paul similarly warned that the language of “peace and safety” can precede sudden destruction.
Scripture recognizes something human beings continually forget:
Wanting peace badly enough can make people believe peace exists when it doesn’t.
Israel should pursue genuine peace wherever possible.
But October 7 permanently changed what Israel can afford to assume.
A ceasefire is not peace.
Silence is not surrender.
Negotiation is not necessarily reconciliation.
And a signed agreement is only as valuable as the intentions and capabilities of the people signing it.
If reports are true that one regional government advised another to “put Israel to sleep” through an agreement while preparing for a future confrontation, Israel should remember a lesson written repeatedly across its history:
Make peace when peace is possible.
But never sleep because someone promised you peace.
The End Of Forgetting: AI Will Soon Remember Everything You Say
For most of human history, conversation was temporary.
You could sit across from a friend at lunch, talk with your spouse in the kitchen, debate politics with coworkers, counsel someone at church or make an offhand remark—and unless someone deliberately wrote it down or recorded it, those words disappeared into memory.
That assumption is beginning to collapse.
A new generation of wearable artificial intelligence devices is being designed to accompany people throughout the day, listening to conversations and transforming them into transcripts, summaries, reminders and searchable personal histories.
Amazon’s Bee wearable, for example, processes conversations throughout the day and uses them to understand a user’s patterns, preferences and relationships. Amazon says the device processes conversations without retaining the original audio, but the information extracted from those conversations can still become part of the personalized AI experience.
Plaud’s NotePin S can be worn on the body and is designed to record conversations, transcribe them and generate AI summaries.
Limitless developed an AI pendant around an even more ambitious concept: record large portions of your day and allow artificial intelligence to organize, summarize and search what happened. Its system has allowed users to retain audio anywhere from a day to indefinitely, depending on their settings.
The convenience is obvious.
Never take meeting notes again.
Never forget what someone promised.
Ask your AI what your doctor told you six months ago.
Search a conversation from last year.
Automatically generate a list of everything you agreed to accomplish this week.
But underneath that convenience is a much larger transformation.
We are moving from the Internet remembering what you typed to artificial intelligence remembering what you said.
And that raises one of the most important privacy questions of the AI age:
Who controls the memory?
Your Digital Footprint Is About To Get Much Bigger
Americans already leave enormous trails of digital information.
Our phones know where we travel. Search engines know what interests us. Online retailers know what we purchase. Social networks know who our friends are. Apps can collect information about our habits, movements and preferences.
Wearable AI adds something enormously valuable to that profile:
our actual conversations.
What do you worry about?
What does your marriage look like?
What do you think about your employer?
What political opinions do you express privately?
Which medical problems are you discussing?
What are your financial concerns?
Who are you meeting?
What did you promise someone?
What subjects make you angry, frightened or excited?
Conversation contains information that people would never deliberately type into Facebook or enter into a Google search.
Yet increasingly, that information can be captured, converted into text, categorized and made searchable.
A searchable transcript is fundamentally different from a recording sitting forgotten on a hard drive.
AI can potentially identify names, subjects, dates, decisions and recurring themes across thousands of conversations.
What once required someone to listen through hundreds of hours of audio could eventually require a simple question:
“Show me every conversation in which this person criticized his employer.”
That changes the value of the data dramatically.
The Person Being Recorded May Not Even Own The Device
There is another problem that receives far too little attention.
The purchaser of an AI wearable may have willingly agreed to being recorded.
Everyone standing around him did not.
Imagine walking into a business meeting and discovering that someone’s necklace has been creating an AI transcript.
Or speaking privately with a friend whose wearable is quietly documenting the conversation.
Or a pastor counseling a church member.
A teacher speaking with a student.
Parents discussing family problems.
Employees complaining about management.
Limitless explicitly tells its users that they should notify people and obtain consent before recording them, and its pendant uses a visible recording light.
That is important protection.
But it also demonstrates the larger problem.
Technology now makes it remarkably easy for another person’s device to turn your words into someone else’s database.
And once the culture becomes accustomed to these devices, people may simply begin assuming that everything they say could be preserved.
The result could fundamentally alter human conversation.
Today’s Promise Is Not Tomorrow’s Guarantee
Many AI companies emphasize privacy protections.
Plaud says information sent to its AI providers for processing is subject to zero-data-retention arrangements and is not used by those providers to train their models.
Amazon says Bee does not retain the raw conversational audio it processes.
Those safeguards matter.
But privacy concerns are larger than whether one particular company currently stores one particular type of file.
Companies can be acquired.
Terms of service can change.
Accounts can be compromised.
Governments can issue legal demands.
Employees can misuse access.
Databases can be breached.
And even when the original audio disappears, information derived from the conversation may still have tremendous value.
Bee’s own privacy notice, for example, describes potential permissions involving contacts, calendars, messages, microphones, sensors, health and fitness information and other phone features depending upon what the user enables.
That illustrates where personal AI is heading.
Not simply toward knowing one conversation.
Toward understanding the context of your life.
We May Build The Surveillance System Ourselves
The most remarkable aspect of this revolution is that nobody needs to force these devices upon us.
We will buy them because they are useful.
That is how many of the most powerful surveillance technologies have already entered society.
We voluntarily carry GPS trackers because smartphones are convenient.
We installed microphones in our homes because voice assistants were useful.
We put internet-connected cameras at our doors because they improved security.
Now we may begin wearing artificial intelligence capable of documenting our everyday lives because we don’t want to take notes.
There may never be a government announcement declaring that every conversation will be recorded.
Instead, millions of individuals may gradually construct that infrastructure themselves.
One device at a time.
One meeting at a time.
One conversation at a time.
For decades we worried about a future in which computers would know everything about us.
We may have misunderstood how that future would arrive.
It may not begin with a surveillance camera mounted on every wall.
It may begin with a small AI device pinned to someone’s shirt.
The most consequential feature of tomorrow’s artificial intelligence may not be that it can speak to us.
It may be that it never forgets what we said.