Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, July 31, 2024
“They should be pursued because the goal of Israel in this conflict should be to win it, rather than to merely survive another day while holding onto the vain hope that gentle reason, international mediation or concessions by Jerusalem will achieve peace. Peace may one day be possible but only after the terrorists’ complete and utter defeat.”
It’s been a bad week for terrorists. The deaths of Hezbollah chief of staff Fuad Shukr in the group’s stronghold in Beirut and then Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Tehran were shocking blows to both terror groups. In one way or another, these two men have rivers of blood on their hands. Their goals and that of the organizations they lead are to destroy Israel and accomplish the genocide of its people. Yet whenever the forces of the Jewish state can kill such people, the official reaction of most of the international community, the Western foreign-policy establishment and the chattering classes are to shake their heads in disapproval.
Headlines about the deaths of Shukr and Haniyeh in America’s leading newspapers all emphasized the potential negative repercussions for Jerusalem. The assumptions of headline writers, and the reporters and editors who provided the stories to go with them, is that the strikes will accomplish nothing. Sure, they grudgingly acknowledge, Hezbollah and Hamas have done some bad things to Israelis. But each of these leaders can and will be replaced. As The Washington Post pointed out in an article, Israel has a long history of carrying out targeted assassinations with many of them being carried out across international borders.
Such lists of past killings tend to be viewed in two different ways.
A history of targeted killings
On the one hand, they have contributed to the image of Israel’s intelligence services and its armed forces as being unmatched in skill and courage, and able to carry out astonishing acts of daring-do.
On the other, they are often seen as ultimately pointless in terms of their impact on the conflict between Israel and its enemies. After all, no matter how many terrorists the Israelis kill, there always seems to be more to take their place. The entire exercise is often treated as one in futility with many on the Israeli left, including some former intelligence officials, lamenting that the Jewish state should be devoting as much effort to achieving peace with its enemies as it does to trying—not always successfully—to eliminate them.
That was the theme of a major history of Israel’s intelligence efforts by current New York Times Magazine writer Ronen Bergman. His 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, was widely praised by the literary world and won the National Jewish Book Award in history that year. … [To read the full article, click here.]