From time to time, a book comes along that does much to shed light on a vexing issue. One such book is the recently released Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman (Random House, 2018). To those who have wondered why efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have repeatedly proved futile, Bergman’s tome provides considerable insight. That the conflict directly and indirectly stoked Islamists violence around the world makes the book of global interest.
To be clear from the outset, the book is not some hatchet job on Israel by a detractor. The author is a Jewish journalist who has been the defence correspondent for the Israeli daily YediothAhronoth and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He has received prestigious awards from prominent Jewish organizations, including Israel’s Sokolow Prize and B’nai B’rith’s International Press Award.
So, Rise and Kill First is a book written with purity of heart and the best of intentions. That makes the content all the more chilling. In places, the book reads like an action-adventure novel, with more than a dose of bloodshed, plotting, dissensions, lies, betrayals and subversion of the law.
Here’s its essence: Over the years of coping with the insecurity posed by its Arab neighbours, Israel has developed supreme confidence in its ability to eliminate real and perceived threats anywhere anytime. And this confidence has resulted in the conviction that the path to Israeli security is not through negotiations, but through assassinations and sabotage. And so over the years, Israel has developed a massive network of assassins and saboteurs to eliminate “enemies of Israel.”
“Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” Bergman writes. “On innumerable occasions, its leaders have weighed what would be the best way to defend its national security and, out of all the options, have time and again decided on clandestine operations, with assassinations the method of choice.”
Israel is, of course, a country that was born out of the greatest horror of modern history: the Holocaust. And it was born into hostility, among Arab neighbours who rejected the creation of a Jewish state out of what had been known as Palestine. And so developed a militarist resolve and fervency for survival.
Yet, some of the assassinations have not been to eliminate a threat but to revenge a wrong. That’s the case of Israel’s policy of hunting down and assassinating former Nazis who fled Germany at the end of World War II and have taken new identities elsewhere. But for the most part Israel’s assassination machinery has targeted actual and perceived threats.
In time, the desire to maintain a global aura became itself a reason to act. Thus, when in 1988 the Israeli security cabinet was meeting to authorize the assassination of Hamas chieftain Abu Jihad in Tunis, the decisive argument wasn’t about the threat he posed or the risk of the mission. It was an appeal to Israel’s identity as a country of valour.
“The IDF (Israeli Defence Force) has in the past executed actions with great resourcefulness and creative thinking, but it hasn’t happened for a long time,” Bergman quotes Finance Minister Moshe Nissim as telling a wavering member of the committee. “We have to renew the sense in the world, in the international community — but first and foremost, among the citizens of Israel — that the IDF is the same IDF that has done marvelous things over the years. We have to carry out this mission for the sake of the national morale.” The wavering minister was persuaded and the vote carried.
What Bergman has shown with remarkable detail is that much as the policy of assassinations and demolitions has had considerable tactical success, it has been a strategic failure. It has come at an enormous moral cost to Israel and has proved to be of limited long-term value.
Moreover, the radius of those deemed “enemies of Israel” who must be eliminated has grown. Initially the targets were Palestinians implicated in attacks. Then it widened to Palestinian political leaders, including people Bergman describes only as activists. Then the radius extended to nuclear scientists in adversarial countries.
The Israelis even assassinated Palestinian officials and blew up a ship just to thwart a public relations stunt that sought to replicate the Jewish “Ship of Return.” The plan was to sail from Cyprus to Haifa with Palestinians forced out of East Jerusalem. And to Israel that was enough of a threat to justify assassination and sabotage.
In some incidents, the killings were so gruesome they could only be described as barbaric. Bergman narrates an incident in which Israeli soldiers used stones to bash the head of a Palestinian who had partaken in hijacking a bus. On another occasion, on a street in Athens, Israeli agents showered a Hamas operative with bullets as his three children in the car screamed in terror.
It was another demonstration of the lethal reach of Israel’s Mossad and sister agencies, what Bergman describes as “arguably the best intelligence community in the world.” The reach is augmented by cooperation with US intelligence outfits. And then, there are activist members of Jewish communities around the world, who constitute volunteer shadowing agents.
With the expanding definition of enemies of Israel, one has to wonder whether vocal critics of Israeli policies will — or have — become “enemies of Israel,” with all the implications. Might U.S. student activists who advocate sanctions against Israel become targets? How about writers, academics and other critics? If not today, perhaps tomorrow. Bergman writes that Israel’s assassination planners believe in patience. They plot and strike when it is most opportune, and that could be many years down the road.
In February, the Israeli daily Haaretz carried a brief story about a new ap that enables the tracking of American neo-Nazis. “FashMaps uses neo-Nazi and white supremacist message boards to find out where they reportedly live and congregate, and pinpoints the locations on a ‘Nazis in Your Neighbourhood’ map,” the paper reports. What might be the purpose? To target them for “liquidation”? to use some assassins’ preferred terminology. Odorous as their views may be?
During an interview with the U.S. National Public Radio, Bergman was asked whether he feared for his life. He deflected the question by saying that he was more concerned about the fate of his sources. It was his existentialist way of saying that he knows he is a marked man and has accepted it.
Israelis are wont to complain that their government is held at higher standards than other governments. Yet, if the grisly details revealed in Rise and Kill First were revealed of most other countries, there will be a heavy price to pay. (The spat between Britain and Russia over the poisoning of a Russian defector is one to watch in this regard.) But with Israel, there probably will not be so much as a rebuke, certainly not when the White House is occupied by the best friend that Israeli has had there perhaps ever.
Anyone who hopes that Bergman would so much as hint that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be disappointed. Sure, Israel’s old guards who masterminded past wars and assassinations have largely taken a conciliatory tone, convinced that the conflict requires a political solution. However, their voices — along with those of contemporary generals — have “ebbed” in Israeli affairs. “New elites—Jews from Arab lands, the Orthodox, the right wing — are in ascendancy,” Bergman writes in the last substantive page.
It is a somber acknowledgment that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has already lasted about 70 years will last a whole lot longer.
In all likelihood, Israel has marked Bergman as an enemy. But what he’s done with this book is much like what people do when they seek to restrain an intoxicated friend. As with liquor, so it is with military power.
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