Israel’s Killing Creed in Peace and War

Dina Ezzat

Out of the firmly hidden and safely guarded closet of one of the world’s most secretive organizations, Ronen Bergman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Israeli investigative journalist, has dragged out accounts and testimonies of over a century of targeted assassinations committed by Israel and the Bar Giora organization, which, founded in 1907, was later absorbed into the Haganah. His book, called Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, is a thriller in its own right, but it is also much more than that. It is an almost unique work on the political and military history of Israel, the last occupying power of modern times, and also on the Palestinian Cause, one of the most extended humanitarian and political crises in the world today that has been dragging on since the early decades of the 20th century.

The title of the book is taken from a Talmudic verse that reads “if you see someone coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This verse is part of the religious ethos that Israel has observed since its establishment in 1948. It is also a justification for killing as an exercise of self-defense, currently allowed under Israeli law. However, Bergman’s choice of title for his book, which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in the US in the history category, also comes from a conversation that he says took place during the planning of one of the targeted assassinations he describes. This conversation took place in 1988 between Likud Party member Moshe Nissim, the son of Israel’s leading rabbi at the time, and Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli Minister of Defense, at a meeting where a vote was being taken on the killing of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) in Tunis. In order to secure enough votes for the killing to take place, Nissim took Rabbin to one side and reminded him of what he said was the “sacred commitment” to kill anyone who was thinking of harming a Jew. At the time, al-Wazir was masterminding PLO operations against Israeli targets. Rabin agreed that Abu Jihad should be killed, which duly took place by gunfire in his house in Tunis in front of his horrified wife.

The level of detailed information that Bergman offers in his book is remarkable, leaving no room to doubt the accounts he shares across the 35 chapters of its over 600 pages. This level of investigation has come from eight years of labor, in which Bergman has accessed thousands of documents and spoken to dozens of sources directly party to the planning and execution of the targeted operations, including Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister between 1999 and 2001. It is this level of access that prompted attempts by the Israeli security and intelligence agencies to try to block the publication of the book before it came out. In his introduction, Bergman said that the Mossad tried to prohibit some of his sources from talking to him, though “in most cases after they had already spoken to me,” he says. By the time his New York Times best-selling title appeared in 2018, many of the sources who provided Bergman with the insight he gives in the book had died “of natural causes,” as he writes in his introduction.

The book is not just about Israel’s secret targeted killings, which over time have become much less secret, of leading Palestinian political figures, first from the secular resistance movements, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and then from the Islamist resistance movements including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is also about the earlier killing of British officials running Mandatory Palestine in the early decades of the 20th century who were opposed to allowing Jewish immigration to Palestine above British-designated limits. It describes the killing of Jews obstructing the schemes of Bar Giora, later the Haganah, and the killing of scientists involved in military research programs in the Arab and Muslim countries, especially Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. It also describes the killing of German officials having Nazi Party affiliations and thus considered to have Jewish blood on their hands. At times, as the book shows, the killings came after the targeted individuals agreed to cooperate and provide secret information in the hope of saving their lives.

According to Bergman, the idea of targeted killings emerged in 1907 when Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire and about a decade after the appearance of Zionism as a political ideology in 1896, when Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, published his book “The Jewish State.” This was many decades prior to the Holocaust in Europe that was later used as a justification for the targeted killings of former Nazis who were hunted the world over by Israel.

Signature Killings

As the book shows, in their earlier phase, the killings were designed only to eliminate the targeted individuals without harming others, at least as much as possible. However, by the late 1970s, there was much less apprehension about the possibility of harming others, including passers-by who might be killed when a booby-trapped car was blown up by remote control on a Beirut street with the aim of killing a targeted Palestinian, for example. Eventually, group killings were also endorsed. In April 1973, a joint Israeli security and military operation under the supervision of Ehud Barak was carried out in order to kill three leading Palestinian resistance figures, Mohamed Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Nasser, and Kamal Edwan. A few decades later in 2003, Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, called a leadership meeting in Gaza that Israel learned about and decided to target by striking the top floor of the building in which it was scheduled to convene. However, nobody died in this targeted killing, since the meeting in fact took place on the ground floor of the building, allowing those present and others  to run for their lives.

With the passage of time and the rise of more radical Likud Party leaders like Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, all of whom occupied the post of Israel’s Prime Minister, targeted assassinations became more frequent and more daring. The idea of “low signature” assassinations, in which Israel’s involvement would not be obvious, seemed to retreat in favor of “blue and white signature” assassinations, where it would not bother to disguise its responsibility and where the operations became not just about eliminating an individual or individuals assumed to constitute a threat to Israel but also about deterring others, an idea that became central to Israel’s security and military creed. As Bergman shows, Menachem Begin required little time to deliberate before targeted killings were approved. Ariel Sharon was obsessed with killing PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to the extent that he nearly had a plane carrying someone who happened to look like Arafat blown up, with this individual turning out to be Arafat’s brother Fatehi. Netanyahu has been anything but hesitant when it has come to targeted killings.

The Israeli argument about carrying out such killings is that they can prevent wider conflicts from taking place. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel killed scientists from the then East Germany who were assisting then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in building a long-range missile system, arguing that this was necessary in order to defend Israel from an “existential threat” and to avoid further wars with Egypt. Even so, in 1967 Israel attacked Egypt and occupied the Sinai Peninsula. In the early 2000s, the Mossad proposed the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists to stop Tehran, under the rule of Shia clergy who had turned Iran from a close ally of the US under the former Shah to a firm foe, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Netanyahu, who had earlier approved the killing of Iranian scientists, wanted to go further by doing what his predecessor Menachem Begin had done in Iraq in the early 1980s, when he had ordered an attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor after having killed the Egyptian and Latin American scientists helping the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear programme.

Bergman quotes Meir Dagan, the then chief of the Mossad, as saying that Netanyahu was “behaving irresponsibly for his own egoistical reasons” in wanting to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities and make this signature act of Israel sufficiently bold. Dagan was more in favor of a long process of killing all the scientists working for the Iraqi program. But Netanyahu’s more radical approach towards targeted killings was not something unique to him or that only developed over time. Instead, according to Bergman’s book, it was almost always present. In 1931, for example, a group of radicals unhappy with what they considered to be the too restrictive assassination policy of Haganah commander David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first Prime Minister, decided to form the Irgun, led in the 1940s by Menachem Begin. Bergman is also far from suggesting that Israeli Labour Party Prime Ministers were not as happy to approve targeted killings as Likud ones. He makes several references to Yitzhak Rabin’s determined focus on killing Wadie Hadad, the mastermind of PFLP operations including several hijackings of planes carrying Israelis and Jews in the 1970s, for example. However, even at moments when Labour, and previously Mapai, were in the driver’s seat, their opponents on the extreme right of Israeli politics were still pushing for a more radical approach, as was the case when Yitzhak Shamir overlooked the directives of David Ben-Gurion and kept him in the dark about some secret assassinations.

Spies and Killers 

Bergman’s book, despite the justificatory tone that dominates most, but not all, of its pages, does not suggest that there are doves and hawks in the long-established Israeli policy of targeted assassinations. In fact, he says that in the view of some top Israeli politicians had it not been for these underground operations, the state of Israel “would not have come into being” and might not have survived for long. He shows that each successive Israeli Prime Minister and chief of the Mossad, Aman, or Shen Beit has harnessed every possible tool to secure the elimination of anyone whose name has appeared on Israel’s “Red Pages.” However, with that said, there was also often a high level of cautious decision-making that some, though not all, top Israeli politicians observed, especially when it came to operations that could affect the US, Israel’s most important ally. Even so, it was Menachem Begin who in 1979 ordered the killing of Palestinian politician Ali Hassan Salamah, despite his being aware that the CIA was communicating with Salamah as a secret channel to Yasser Arafat. A few years later during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon under the supervision of then Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, Begin reacted with fury to then US President Ronald Reagan, who told him that Israel was “committing a Holocaust” in Lebanon, in a reference to the massacre of the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila in September 1982.

A key feature of Bergman’s book is the context it offers to important political and military episodes in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. This is precisely what it does with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was designed to eliminate the PLO from the south of Lebanon and, at least as far as Sharon himself was concerned, to eliminate Arafat as well, rightly perceived as the father of the Palestinian cause whose death might lead to irreparable rifts within the Palestinian resistance movement. During the invasion, facilitated by intelligence provided by Lebanese who did not want the Palestinian presence in their country and who willingly offered information designed to assist the Israeli forces, Sharon used Lebanese Phalange forces to carry out the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which they did readily and ferociously.  

Arafat, however, was not killed, and he only died in 2004 in a French military hospital after having suffered from a range of anomalous symptoms. While Bergman suggests that Arafat might have died of AIDS, given information that Israel, particularly Sharon, apparently had about a relationship between the Palestinian leader and one of his bodyguards, he does not exclude the possibility that he might have been poisoned by Israel. The latter had previously resorted to slow-poisoning operations to eliminate its adversaries, including a case in which a close associate of one PFLP leader replaced his toothpaste with a tube provided by Israel that contained poisonous material.

Bergman’s book sheds considerable light on the use Israel has made of intelligence and assistance offered by various “collaborators,” “informants,” and “spies,” mostly Arabs and in some cases Arab Jews or members of other minorities in the Arab countries including Kurds in Iraq. Some of those who assisted Israel in exchange for money did so either to pay off debts or to enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Others were recruited through sexual relationships. Not all Israel’s spies were close to political leaders, as Bergman shows. Arab leaders and Arab officials could also take part in spying. Bergman’s book confirms the famous story, the subject of much speculation, that King Mohammed V of Morocco allowed the Mossad to listen in on an Arab summit meeting that he was hosting in exchange for help in eliminating Mehdi Ben Barka, a well-known Moroccan dissident in Paris in 1965.

For Bergman, some things are certain: Israel valued the intelligence its spies offered, paid them generously when it had to, protected their identity, and always hoped they could be saved if caught, unless they were Jews, in which case it would act to save them from the inevitable end itself. In the 1960s, shortly after the Syrian authorities caught and executed Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who was well-embedded in Damascus, Israel rushed to get help from the Germans to secure the extradition of Wolfgang Lotz, a spy in Cairo when he was caught by the Egyptian authorities.

In Peace and War 

The argument that Israel kills out of self-defense is underlined in Bergman’s book. However, it is also repeatedly mentioned that Israel has killed targets both in war time and in peace time and irrespective of peace agreements for as long as it has been able to get away with doing so. One of several examples of this is the Israeli attempt to kill the prominent Hamas figure Khaled Meshaal in Amman in September 1997, a full three years after the signing of the Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty between King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. At the time, Bergman notes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to instruct his officials to provide the antidote to the poison that the Israeli agents had used to try to kill Meshaal in order to avoid the fury of the Jordanian monarch whose valuable assistance to Israeli officials over the decades could have been undermined.

The book shows that often enough Israel has resorted to killings to end the chances for peace just as it has resorted to peace to end the chances of resistance. In September 1948, Bergman writes, just a few months after the Arab-Israeli War, Yitzhak Shamir ordered the killing of UN Envoy Folke Bernadotte, who was heading to Palestine with a peace proposal that the Arab capitals seemed willing to engage with. Bernadotte was not unaware of the threats hanging over his trip, but he insisted on going nonetheless, arguing that “the UN flag protects us.” Four years before that in the midst of sporadic raids by militant Jews against Arab villages in Palestine, Shamir had ordered the killing of Thomas Wilkinson, a Palestine-based British police officer who was investigating crimes committed by the “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” group that was considered a terrorist organisation by the British.

It is hard to know how far Israel benefitted from its targeted killing policies. In 1988, during the planning for the killing of Abu Jihad, Ehud Barak suggested that the operation should also include the killing of Mahmoud Abbas (Abou Mazen). But a few decades later, when Abou Mazen took over the leadership of the Palestinian Authority after the death of Arafat, the Israeli security bodies admitted that he was doing better job than his predecessor when it came to quelling militant resistance against Israel and security cooperation with them. In an interview with Bergman for the book, Ehud Barak said that it was hard to assess things in retrospect, but that at the time it seemed reasonable to eliminate Abbas, seen as the diplomatic arm of Arafat who was lobbying support for the Palestinians.

Bergman’s book questions the wisdom and the outcome of some of the killings it describes, including that of Abbas Mussawi, the first Secretary-General of Hezbollah who was killed by Israel in 1992. This did not prove to be good news, given that his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to the Israelis that “black has shades” and that if Mussawi was black, then “Nasrallah was blacker than black.” The book also shows that the intensive targeted assassinations that were ordered by Ariel Sharon to end the suicide bombings carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad failed to deliver. It was only when Sharon agreed to suspend the targeted assassinations that the suicide bombings were paused.

It does not seem that Bergman’s book is intended to indict Israel’s policy of secret targeted killings. It seems to be more like an attempt to show the limitations of what this policy has brought for Israel and Israelis and how it could leave Israel in a position of violating international law. He describes several Israeli politicians asking for legal advice on some of the operations from the point of view of international law, for example. While it was first published some six years ago, the book is just as relevant, if not more so, to understanding Israel’s actions today.