‘Rise and Kill First’ Shines Light on Israel’s Hidden Assassinations

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations Ronen Bergman 2018

from the NYT 2018

A reader might begin a 750-page history of killing committed by Israel’s intelligence services with some trepidation; the tightrope is high, and it’s shaky. Much of the truth is classified — and much of it is in dispute. The moral quandaries are, to put it mildly, enormous.

Ronen Bergman knows this. And from the looks of “Rise and Kill First,” he knows more than he’s supposed to. In 2011, the Israel Defense Force’s chief of staff accused him of “aggravated espionage”; a historian for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, told Bergman he would refuse to talk to him even if everybody else did: “I despise whoever it was who gave you my phone number, just as I despise you.”

Still, Bergman, a journalist based in Israel, managed to conduct a thousand interviews along the chain of command, from political leaders to intelligence operatives. For a subject as contentious and bloody as this one, he leads with some numbers and a brute fact: “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.”

What follows is an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject. Blending history and investigative reporting, Bergman never loses sight of the ethical questions that arise when a state, founded as a refuge for a stateless people who were targets of a genocide, decides it needs to kill in order to survive.

Of course, such decisions are kept secret. Israel neither confirms nor denies the existence of the targeted assassination program that Bergman so assiduously documents. The book’s title comes from the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This is assassination defined as self-defense. But as Bergman shows, motives aren’t always so righteous and clear-cut; revenge, wrath and other impulses have ways of sneaking in. Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionist underground movements employed what they called “personal terror” — a campaign of bombings and killings — against the British, who controlled Palestine and restricted immigration by Jews trying to flee Europe.

“We were too busy and hungry to think about the British and their families,” one assassin told Bergman, recounting how he shot a British officer on a Jerusalem street in 1944. “I didn’t feel anything, not even a little twinge of guilt. We believed the more coffins that reached London, the closer the day of freedom would be.”...

read more here