Rise and Kill First

Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman traces the history of Israel's targeted assassination programs from the pre-state era to the present day, arguing that since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other Western country. The book, based on approximately one thousand unauthorized interviews and thousands of classified documents, examines how covert killing became central to Israeli security doctrine, driven by the trauma of the Holocaust, the revolutionary roots of Zionism, and a perpetual sense of existential threat.

Bergman begins with the Jewish underground movements fighting the British Mandate in Palestine during the 1940s. Radical Zionist factions such as Lehi and the Irgun carried out assassinations of British officials and Arab leaders, while the mainstream Haganah, the paramilitary force led by David Ben-Gurion, initially opposed targeted killings. The Holocaust transformed this stance: After Jewish Brigade soldiers witnessed the destruction of European Jewry, a secret unit called Gmul executed former SS members, killing between one hundred and two hundred Germans in three months. The Haganah then assassinated pro-Nazi Germans in Palestine, marking the mainstream adoption of targeted killing as a tool of national defense.

After Israel declared independence in 1948, Ben-Gurion established three intelligence agencies: AMAN (military intelligence), the Shin Bet (internal security), and what became the Mossad (foreign espionage and covert operations), all under his personal control without parliamentary oversight. In the early 1950s, Palestinian fedayeen, or militants, infiltrated from neighboring territories, killing approximately one thousand Israeli civilians. AMAN operatives crafted explosive devices to eliminate the Egyptian officers organizing these raids, culminating in 1956's Operation Eunuch, the first formally ordered targeted killing in Israeli state history, which killed Egyptian captain Mustafa Hafez with a booby-trapped book.

A crisis erupted in 1962 when Egypt tested missiles developed by former Nazi rocket scientists. Mossad chief Isser Harel launched a campaign to eliminate the scientists, including the abduction and execution of one researcher and letter bombs that maimed a secretary instead of the intended target. Harel's obsessive media campaign led to his forced resignation. His successor, Meir Amit, recruited former SS commando Otto Skorzeny as an agent and used diplomatic pressure to dismantle the missile program.

Michael "Mike" Harari rebuilt the Mossad's operational division, Caesarea, establishing rigorous recruitment standards and strict discipline. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) founded Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist guerrilla movement, in 1959, but Israeli intelligence dismissed the group. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinian terrorism expanded internationally. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) hijacked airplanes, and the September 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed, became a turning point. Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized the Mossad to kill Palestinian operatives across Europe.

Harari's Bayonet unit systematically assassinated targets, and in April 1973, Operation Spring of Youth sent commandos into Beirut to kill three senior PLO leaders. A catastrophic case of mistaken identity later that year in Lillehammer, Norway, where operatives killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, exposed Mossad methods. Bergman argues that the overconfidence bred by these successes contributed to Israel's unpreparedness for the surprise Egyptian-Syrian attack in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In Gaza, officer Meir Dagan, born to Holocaust survivors, commanded undercover units that suppressed terrorism through tactics critics called extrajudicial execution. When Ariel Sharon became defense minister, he orchestrated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon with ambitions far beyond the approved plan, pursuing Arafat through Beirut. Air force commanders deliberately obstructed Sharon's orders to shoot down civilian airliners carrying Arafat, recognizing them as manifestly illegal. A massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by allied Lebanese Christian militias, carried out with Israeli knowledge, led to Sharon's dismissal. In 1988, a combined Mossad-commando force assassinated Abu Jihad in his Tunisian villa, but the killing failed to suppress the First Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising that had erupted in December 1987.

The Shin Bet's institutional corruption surfaced in 1984 when agency chief Avraham Shalom ordered the beating deaths of two captured Palestinian bus hijackers and orchestrated an elaborate cover-up. Whistleblowers eventually exposed decades of extrajudicial killings and perjury, and the president granted blanket pardons before indictments could be filed.

A new threat emerged after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, an emissary of Ayatollah Khomeini, founded Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militant organization, in 1982. Its military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, orchestrated devastating suicide bombings against American and Israeli targets. In 1992, Israel pioneered a revolutionary assassination method: A drone tracked Hezbollah secretary general Abbas Mussawi's motorcade in real time, designated his vehicle with a laser, and Apache helicopters fired Hellfire missiles. The killing backfired; Mussawi's replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, proved far more radical, and Mughniyeh retaliated with bombings of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, introduced suicide bombings inside Israel after operatives received training from Hezbollah. Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, known as "the Engineer," orchestrated nine attacks that killed dozens, undermining the Israeli-Palestinian peace process begun with the Oslo Accords. On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by right-wing Jewish extremist Yigal Amir at a peace rally, a failure the Shin Bet considered among its worst. The Shin Bet killed Ayyash in January 1996 with an explosive-laden cellphone, but retaliatory bombings helped topple Prime Minister Shimon Peres's government. A 1997 attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Jordan failed spectacularly: Operatives were captured, and Israel was forced to release Yassin from prison and provide the antidote to save Mashal's life.

During the Second Intifada, the second Palestinian uprising beginning in September 2000, Sharon authorized a comprehensive targeted killing campaign. Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter shifted from targeting individual bombers to dismantling entire organizational networks. The IDF adapted its drone fleet to carry precision munitions, creating a system capable of executing multiple simultaneous assassinations from a Joint War Room. After September 11, 2001, the United States modeled its own drone program partly on Israeli methods, and a secret agreement with the Bush administration traded significant reductions in settlement construction for American backing of targeted killings.

The campaign produced moral crises. A 2002 bombing killed Hamas commander Salah Shehade but also his teenage daughter and other civilians, sparking protests among reservist pilots and commandos. A signals intelligence officer in Unit 8200, Israel's military signals-intelligence unit, refused to relay targeting information for a strike he recognized as an order to kill anyone inside a Fatah office rather than a specific terrorist. In 2004, Israel assassinated Yassin and his successor, throwing Hamas into disarray but paradoxically removing the leader who had opposed cooperation with Iran.

Dagan, appointed Mossad director in 2002, focused on Iran's nuclear program and the "Radical Front," the alliance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. His strategy combined diplomatic pressure, sanctions, support for opposition groups, supply chain disruption, and targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists. In 2007, operatives discovered Syria's secret nuclear reactor by copying photographs from a Syrian official's hotel room; Israeli jets destroyed the reactor months later. In 2008, a joint Mossad-CIA operation killed Mughniyeh in Damascus. A 2010 assassination of Hamas arms procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai succeeded operationally but was exposed through CCTV footage, burning the team's identities and damaging relations with allied nations.

Bergman concludes that Israel's intelligence community achieved impressive tactical successes but disastrous strategic failures. The ability to locate and kill enemies anywhere fostered the illusion that covert operations could substitute for genuine diplomacy. Dagan himself underwent a late transformation: The man who built his career on targeted killing fiercely opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's push for a full-scale military strike on Iran and concluded that only a two-state political solution could end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He died of cancer in March 2016, his warnings largely unheeded.