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

"In stark contrast to some of the other books which were written by insiders, this book is 100 per cent unofficial and unauthorised. It’s written by a journalist, albeit a journalist with a history PhD. It’s based on interviews and documents that he’s been given over the years. It’s the kind of story that the Israelis didn’t want telling and, in fact, tried to prevent the book from being published. It deals with the most controversial area of covert action: that of assassination and targeted killing. It focuses on perhaps the most feared and most mythologised intelligence service of all, the Israeli Mossad. The thing I found most striking about this book was the scope and scale of the Israeli targeted killing program. According to the book, since the creation of Israel, the Israeli state has engaged in more targeted killings than any other country in the whole western world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think this book is really useful. First of all, it’s a great read and he’s a great writer. Also, it’s very balanced. He points out some of the operational successes where assassination has actually worked. He recognises the moral price which Israel might be paying for relying so heavily on assassination. He also uncovers or explores some of the reasons behind Israel’s focus on targeted killing as a tool of foreign policy. Israel does this more than America, certainly more than Britain and France. He says this is for a variety of reasons: it can be traced back to the revolutionary, activist roots of Zionism; it can be traced back to the trauma of the Holocaust; and it can be traced back to the perpetual threat of annihilation which Israel feels it faces on a daily basis. All of this leads to a quite staggering program of targeted killing which Bergman has uncovered. It’s a remarkable piece of investigative journalism, shining a light on the most secret part of a very secret intelligence agency. Yes, it’s an important argument. Regardless of the ethics and morality of doing this, there’s a lot of debate about whether it actually works. It depends on who the target is; it depends how much of a cult of personality there is around them and how effective they are. For example, plans to kill Hitler were nipped in the bud because the Brits realised that he would be replaced by someone much more effective—Hitler was actually a pretty weak military commander—so they decided against killing him in that particular instance. Killing bin Laden, for example, arguably changed the nature of al-Qaeda because his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was quite different in approach. So, in some cases, maybe it can change the outlook or the structure of the organisation. But Bergman argues that it can be useful because, even if they are eventually replaced like for like, you have, in the meantime, in the case of Israel, prevented a suicide attack. You have taken away an immediate threat, someone who was in the planning stages of launching a suicide attack and, therefore, that can be seen as justification. Yes, that is definitely a factor. Israel obviously faces the very real threat of suicide bombing much closer to home than Britain or America. We’re talking about assassination here of terrorists and terrorist leaders, rather than statesmen or world leaders. So, yes, that maybe distorts the numbers. But I think what is still striking is this willingness to turn to this very controversial tactic. Britain and America, traditionally, even in counter-terrorism, would try a more police-based, judicial criminalisation approach, in contrast to the Israelis who are much more willing to use targeted killing. This is at least until post-9/11, when we started to see the Americans step up their drone program quite dramatically. France has a reputation for being quite activist in covert action, but a lot less is known about it unfortunately. The Chinese are stepping up some of their efforts at the moment, particularly through propaganda. But it’s mainly dominated by Britain, America, Israel, and France. The problem we have as writers and scholars is that it’s really hard to know. There have been news reports of various covert operations in Africa, for example, but, because it’s quite contemporary, we don’t have the archival basis to demonstrate these things. And, also, we suffer massively from an Anglo-American centrism in the history of this activity. The overwhelming majority of our case studies and scholars and historians working on this are looking at the CIA and, to a lesser extent, Britain. This definitely pollutes our understanding of it as a global issue because there may well be numerous examples in southeast Asia, for example, that frankly we don’t know about because no one has published on it in the English language. The great history books of the future are going to be people going into the archives of countries in southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America and uncovering covert action in the hidden history of those countries. I doubt it would be on the same scale as America and Britain, because America and Britain use this as a global tool whereas other countries don’t have quite such a global reach. They might use intelligence for more domestic purposes. But there’s great scope for historians to broaden our understanding of covert action beyond the Anglosphere. I wouldn’t say it was covert action because it’s not interfering in the affairs of other states. It was a domestic assassination. Whereas, when the North Koreans were sabotaging or disrupting the British parliament’s email addresses or the NHS, that would count as covert action. One of these reasons why these states don’t do as much international covert action is because authoritarian regimes traditionally focus their intelligence resources on suppressing internal dissent rather than trying to mess around in other countries."

"Yes. I’m a big fan of your website, so I know this book was already picked by my friend and colleague Rory Cormac. And, I think, for very good reasons. This book is the book we all want to write: an incredibly detailed account of the history of the targeted killing or assassination programme from Israel’s founding, or a little earlier, to the present. It has incredible access to former officials, both granted access and access that Bergman, like, obtained. He received a lot of documents, and so on. He makes the argument that no other country in the Western world has used assassination as much as Israel since the end of the Second World War. It’s very difficult to verify such an argument empirically, because assassinations primarily happen in secret. It depends how you define assassination. But it certainly puts Israel and its programme of targeted killing very much at the centre. The discussion is, I think, very interesting because it showcases the number of rationales used by Israel to rely on assassination. These varied over time. At one point, they were primarily to instil terror—for example, in the British authorities when there was still a mandate for Palestine. The rationale was at times self-defence, at times state security. Sometimes it was pure revenge, as in Operation Bayonet, or Operation Wrath of God, which was the campaign of assassination after the terrorist attack during the Munich Olympics in 1972. Some people have drawn parallels between that campaign and the current campaign against the leadership of Hamas, suggesting that it might be encountering the same problems, that both people who were responsible and people who only had a tangential connection to the terrorist attacks are being targeted. But what Bergman does really well is showcase the strategic and moral dilemmas surrounding the use of assassination, and the fact that it doesn’t always work. It might work in the short term, but whoever you’re killing might be replaced by somebody worse. You might also kill innocents, and a lot of them. You might kill people who are important in broader geopolitical dynamics—for example, when Israel killed Hassan Salameh, an important CIA contact within the PLO. There are also, of course, diplomatic repercussions when operations fail and Israeli operatives are caught red-handed often carrying fake passports from friendly countries. The book covers a lot of ground from the changing rationale to the changes in personnel. It moves from the 1940s to the present day, and the international context changes radically. Similarly, there is a plethora of methods that Israel uses, from your simple shooting to poison to explosives. More recently, Israeli has become a pioneer of the use of drones for assassinations and targeted killings. But the book keeps its focus on the operatives conducting assassinations, how they are conducting it, why, with what methods. It also focuses on the need for political (often prime ministerial) approval for these operations."