Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations

Ronen Bergman, “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” Random House, 2018, 631 pp.

Recently, in the news, there are reports of multiple targeted assassinations of Putin’s political opponents and newscasters in countries outside of Russia.  Russia is not alone in this endavor as the most recently the assassination incident in the Saudi’s Istanbul consulate illustrates.  I found this all rather shocking until reading this book and discovering this targeting is not confined to Russia nor to Israel nor to the Saudis.  The US targeted Diem in Viet Nam, Castro in Cuba, and the list goes on.  Reagan issued an executive order in the 1980s to end the US policy of assassinating political leaders.  Since then, it has been determined that this Reagan policy does not pertain to drones or bombers.

Author Ronen Bergman provides an exhaustive history of Israel’s targeted killings of its enemies and questions at what point does violence in the name of self-defense become an end in itself.  Since World War II, Bergman calculates, the Jewish state and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world — some 2,300 “targeted killing operations,” most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians, and others. Incidentally, President Barack Obama authorized 353 drone strikes against individuals during his eight years in office.

Israel’s leaders have developed a reputation for ruthless efficiency, honoring the Talmudic mandate, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Clandestine, behind-enemy-lines operations, Bergman writes, became “the core principle of Israel’s security doctrine.”  The threat Israel has faced is all too real. Since before the founding of the Israeli state, Arab terror gangs and suicide bombers have aimed at civilian targets — schools, cafes, supermarkets, passenger buses, commercial airliners, even a Passover dinner attended by dozens of elderly Jews have all been singled out by gunmen and bombers looking to inflict the maximum amount of pain on the most innocent of people. Imagine how swiftly and brutally the United States would respond if a gang of terrorists from Canada laid waste to a kindergarten or two in Detroit. Actually, there’s no need to imagine: After the 9/11 attacks, the United States threw out the human rights handbook and embarked on a spate of targeted killings, abductions, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial that was as much about vengeance as prevention of future attacks.

Many of the stories Bergman offers are not new, but he adds telling details. There have been storied triumphs. Israel’s clandestine assassination campaign against German nuclear scientists working for Egypt in the 1950s and early ’60s and against Iranian scientists during the past decade probably helped impede both countries’ nuclear weapons programs. The targeting of the men behind the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics probably contributed to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat’s eventual decision to cease the Black September terror operations. And the famed 1976 commando raid that rescued 102 hostages at the Entebbe airfield in Uganda was perhaps the ultimate in daring and efficient military action.

My Notes:

 Pg. xix: In 2003 Ariel Sharon appointed Dagan to the Mossad and put him in charge of disrupting the Iranian nuclear weapons project.  Dagan began to identify Iran’s key nuclear and missile scientists, locate them, and kill them.  They identified fifteen targets of whom they eliminated six by means of bombs attached to their cars by a motorcyclist.  In addition, a general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who was in charge of the missile project, was blown up in his headquarters together with seventeen of his men.  Some of these operations were in coordination with the US.

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Pg. xxii:  Since WWII, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world. Up until the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000, when Israel first began to respond to suicide bombings with the daily use of armed drones to perform assassinations, the state had conducted some 500 targeted killing operations.  In these, at least 1,000 people were killed.  During the Second Intifada, Israel carried out some 1,000 more operations.  Up until the writing of this book, Israel has executed some 800 targeted killing operations, almost all of which were part of the rounds of warfare against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2008, 2012, and 2014 or Mossad operations across the Middle East against Palestinian, Syrian, and Iranian targets.  By contrast, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the US carried out 48 targeted killing operations, and under Obama there were 353 such attacks.

Pg. xxiv:  The US has taken the intelligence-gathering and assassination techniques developed in Israel as a model, and after 9/11 transplanted some of these methods into its own intelligence and war-on-terror systems. 

Pg. 21f: On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to divide Palestine, carving out a sovereign Jewish homeland.  The partition wouldn’t go into effect until six months later, but Arab attacks began the very next day.  On May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the new state of Israel.  At midnight a simultaneous attack by seven Arab armies occurred.  The Arabs achieved significant gains early on.  But the Israelis rapidly regrouped and even went on the offensive.  After a month, a truce was mediated by the UN.  When fighting resumed, the tables were turned and the Israelis eventually conquered far more territory than had been allocated to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan.  From this day forward the Israelis have been dedicated to gathering accurate intelligence as their main defense against attack.

Pg. 81f:  The Israeli’s convinced Hitler’s favorite Nazi Lieutenant Colonel Skorzeny to cooperate in getting information (or they would kill him) from the German scientists helping the Egyptian Nasser as he, Skorzeny, was going to start a Fourth Reich and was reviving a network of SS and Wehrmacht veterans to build this new Germany. The German scientists working for Nasser would thus be required, under their Wehrmacht oaths, to provide Skorzeny’s phantom organization with the details of their missile research.  Thanks to the information gathered, the Israeli’s were able to crumble Egypt’s missile project from the inside by threatening the now identified German scientists with assassination if they continued.  (Colonel Skorzeny rescued Mussolini during WWII).

Pg. 105:  Between 600,000 and 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were driven out of the territory upon which the State of Israel was established and which it conquered during the war of 1948.

Pg. 114:  The Six-Day war began on June 5, 1967, with the Israeli’s bombing dozens of enemy airfields.  Within hours the Israeli’s destroyed nearly every combat plane that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan owned.  By the time the war ended on June 10, Israel was occupying territories that increased its size by more than 300 percent.  Its conquests included the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. 

Pg. 136f:  Beginning in 1968 the PLO began seizing commercial airplanes with passengers aboard; they began with an Israeli plane.   In 1972 the PLO targeted the Munich Olympics.  Even when all Israeli Olympians were being held as hostages (after two were killed), the Germans firmly refused to halt the Games, contending that West German TV has no alternative programming.  The Germans refused the Israeli request to handle the negotiations and freeing of the Olympians.  The forces the Germans deployed were untrained and disorganized.  They opened fire in an uncoordinated manner and did not hit or kill enough terrorists to neutralize the squad.  The terrorist lobbed grenades into the helicopters where the Israelis were being held.  The nine Israelis were burned.  Israel was now committed to striking terrorists anywhere in the world without necessarily informing the countries the terrorists were operating from.  The first hit list consisted of eleven names: terrorists involved in the Munich massacre.  Within a year of Munich, fourteen Palestinian militants would be dead.

Pg. 188:  The Yom Kippur War, also known as the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, was a war fought by a coalition of Arab states led by a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria against Israel from October 6 to 25, 1973

Pg. 204:  Operation Entebbe, was a successful counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on 4 July 1976.  One hundred were rescued and no concessions were made.  Idi Amin had the one hostage not rescued, she was in a hospital at the time of the rescue, killed.

Pg. 251:  Ariel Sharon set up a special task force (Salt Fish) to find Arafat and kill him at the same time as the Israeli’s planned to invade Lebanon.  There was a lot of opposition to this plan.  However, the invasion of Lebanon proceeded.  This invasion became a quagmire: an occupation that would last for another eighteen years.

Pg. 272:  Ariel Sharon was fixated on killing Arafat.  He even ordered the air force and the operations branch to come up with a plan to shoot down a civilian jetliner carrying Arafat as a passenger.  He was thwarted in his plan by monitoring personnel continuing to deny Arafat was on a plane, when in fact he was.

Pg. 311:  A wave of demonstrations swept across the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987.  The IDF had believed for years that it could control the Palestinians with minimal forces.  But when rioting mobs attacked the detachments of soldiers, who had no crowd dispersal equipment or protective gear, the soldiers responded with gunfire.  More than a thousand Palestinians were killed and Israel’s international standing took a nose dive.

Pg. 347:  French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and his prime minister, Jacques Chirac, orchestrated a number of deals with Iraq in the first half of the seventies.  Two nuclear reactors, one very small, and a larger reactor, which was expandable to seventy megawatts.  Although Iraq’s stated intention was to use the reactor for research purposes, the French knew that a reactor of that size would almost certainly end up being used to process fuel for nuclear weapons.  The French received $2 billion and favorable terms and a price reduction on their import of Iraqi oil.

Pg. 355:  Operation Opera was a surprise Israeli air strike carried out on 7 June 1981, which destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction. The operation came after Iran's unsuccessful Operation Scorch Sword operation had caused minor damage to the same nuclear facility the previous year, the damage having been subsequently repaired by French technicians. Operation Opera, and related Israeli government statements following it established the Menachem Begin Doctrine, which explicitly stated the strike was not an anomaly, but instead “a precedent for every future government in Israel.” Israel's counter-proliferation preventive strike added another dimension to their existing policy of deliberate ambiguity, as it related to the nuclear capability of other states in the region.

Pg. 358:  Saddam Hussein made a mistake by invading Kuwait in August 1990.  His defeat forced him to accept stringent international inspection.  UN inspectors then found what the Mossad had missed completely: By the time Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait was launched, in January 1991, Saddam was only a few years away from full nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capability, as well as the ability to manufacture missiles and warheads that could deliver those weapons to Israel. 

Pg. 486:  What the Jews call the Temple Mount and the Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary is perhaps the most sensitive place in the world today.  Located inside Jerusalem’s Old City, it is revered as the site of the rock from which God created the world, and where he called upon Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as well as the spot the Prophet Muhammad took off on his flight to Heaven with the angel Gabriel.  The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque stand there today.

Pg. 504:  Operations run out of the Israeli Joint War Room killed twenty-four people in 2000, eighty-four in 2001, one hundred one in 2002, and one hundred thirty-five in 2003. 

Pg. 563:  Thanks to its streamlined targeted killing apparatus, the Israeli intelligence community triumphed over something that for many years had been considered unbeatable: suicide terrorism.  By investing the resources of an entire country through dogged persistence and cooperation between the intelligence and operational arms, Israel proved that a murderous and seemingly uncompromising terror network can be brought to its knees (the operation planners are not so willing to die).

Pg. 564:  After Arafat’s death the Palestinians could no longer be kept under the PA’s control.  President Abbas failed in this regard, and Hamas took over Gaza and established a second Palestinian entity there.  Hamas succeeded in gaining control of Gaza thanks to the enormous assistance it received from Iran. 

Pg. 570f:  It became clear that there was a confluence of interests among Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria, and that the three of them were uniquely suited to work together against the Israeli’s: so the Radical Front was born.  The alliance of a terrorist organization, a pariah theocracy and a modernized nation-state allowed a sprawling network of guerrillas, self-styled revolutionaries, and criminal thugs to operate with an unusually robust level of military efficiency.  Now Israel was surrounded by what was basically a single coordinated force—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the PIJ in the territories, and Syria to the north—all funded with Iranian money and supplied with Iranian weapons.

Pg. 594f:  Israel’s 2007 pre-emptive attack on a Syrian plutonium reactor derailed Damascus’ drive for nuclear weapons, but spared the world the specter of mass destruction capabilities falling into the hands of the Islamic State group.  That’s the message behind Israel’s first-ever official account of its operation Outside the Box, the four-hour mission that began before midnight on Sep. 5, 2007, to destroy Syria’s top-secret and nearly operational al-Kibar nuclear facility just weeks before it went hot.

Pg. 607:  In June 2009, the Mossad, together with the US and French intelligence, discovered the Iranians had built a secret uranium enrichment facility.  Covertly, joint sabotage operations also managed to produce a series of breakdowns in Iranian equipment supplied to the nuclear project—computers stopped working, transformers burned out, centrifuges simply didn’t work properly. A new computer virus, Stuxnet, was introduced to cause this damage.

Pg. 630:  In many respects, the story of Israel’s intelligence community as recounted in this book has been one of a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures.  They are no closer to peace now than 50 years ago.