What time is it in Israel? The question may sound trivial. It isn't – and that no regulator here can answer it with confidence should trouble you more than Waze insisting you are in Amman.
For years, Israelis have watched their phones place them in Jordan, Lebanon, or even out at sea. The explanation is familiar: Israel disrupts satellite-navigation signals to make it harder for Iranian missiles, drones, and other hostile systems to use them. The interference can be a necessary defense. But it exposes a less visible problem.
Because GPS is not a map. It is a clock. Each satellite broadcasts one message – this is me, and this is the exact instant I am speaking – and the receiver turns the delay into a distance. Position is a byproduct of arithmetic. Timing is the product.
That timing became the utility underneath the economy. Cell towers hand a call between them only if every tower agrees on the time to within a millionth of a second. Noga, the grid's system operator, compares the phase of alternating current at substations hundreds of miles apart. Bank transactions and security logs are ordered by timestamp. All lean on a navigation satellite, because it was the best clock ever handed to the public, free.
Which means that every hour Israel defends its airspace, it degrades the reference its own hospitals, substations, and payment systems run on.
Equipment copes for a while. A receiver that loses the satellites falls back on an internal oscillator – holdover – and rides it out until the battery drains. That is the story for jamming, and it is survivable. It is not the story for spoofing. Holdover engages only when a receiver knows it has been cut off, and a spoofed receiver does not know. It disciplines its clock to the lie and reports perfect health. The battery is never switched on, because nothing declares an emergency.
How wrong can it get? At a public interference trial in Norway last year, researchers recorded a receiver pulled a full millisecond off true time while reporting its own accuracy as better than 50 nanoseconds. Wrong by a factor of 20,000, and unaware. A millisecond is 700 times the tolerance a mobile network is engineered around, and a pull applied slowly enough is never alarmed at all.
So the failure is not a blackout. It is a country whose instruments are confidently wrong while every indicator stays green.
We know what that looks like, because it once happened by accident. In January 2016, a botched software upload during the retirement of an old GPS satellite put the time broadcast by 15 satellites 13 microseconds off. Failures ran two days. Digital radio dropped out across Britain and trading systems canceled orders. At the American national metrology laboratory, whose monitoring watched its own timescale rather than GPS, the first conclusion was that its own clock had failed.
Thirteen microseconds. One day. No adversary. Now ask what a control room in Israel concludes at three in the morning, where the signal is corrupted on purpose and has been for months. Then ask when. Interference is heaviest precisely when attacks are heaviest: the hour the network carries Home Front Command alerts, the grid switches under load, and analysts try to tell electronic warfare from a cyber intrusion. Each of those is a timestamp problem.
I assumed, before I checked, that Israel had no clock of its own. I was wrong, and the truth is worse.
Israel has one, by law. The Time Determination Law of 1992 defines Israeli time as UTC(INPL), generated by the National Physical Laboratory on cesium atomic clocks. Serious metrology, done well, for decades – and the laboratory's own materials warn that it matters more every year because of jamming and spoofing.
Now consider how far that warning has traveled. According to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, time dissemination in Israel is carried out by the telecommunications companies, whose standards are calibrated against the national standard once a year.
Once a year. That is a certificate stating an oscillator was healthy last March, not a time source. The clock exists, it is excellent, and the grid, the banks, and the carriers run on GPS receivers bolted to their own rooftops.
This is a bureaucratic seam rather than a technical problem, which is why it has survived. INPL sits in the Economy Ministry. The regulators who could compel its use sit elsewhere: the Communications Ministry, the Bank of Israel, the National Cyber Directorate – bodies that have guided rather than mandated. The laboratory that owns the clock cannot require anyone to use it.
Closing the gap requires no invention. Distribute UTC(INPL) over optical fiber with the transit delay measured and corrected; across a country this size, that beats satellite accuracy and cannot be touched from orbit. Israel already owns the fiber. Then require the grid, the banks, and the carriers to run two independent time sources, one terrestrial, and to check each against the other, so a clock being walked off quietly is caught by something that isn't. The program would cost less than one heavy night of interceptor fire.
When Israel celebrates the new year, it was celebrating a date on a calendar computed in the fourth century so that scattered communities would never again depend on someone else's report of what the sky was doing. That was sound engineering.
Israel builds its own interceptors, radars, and encryption. It already owns a national clock. It should plug the country into it.
The author is a physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributing opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal.