“Rise and Kill First,” Ronen Bergman’s revelatory and astonishing history of Israel’s targeted assassinations, is a brilliant and prodigiously researched work. Readers will be riveted and amazed both by the scale of the killings carried out by the Israeli security services and by their tactical genius. They will likewise be appalled by the price in human lives, both innocent and not so innocent, at which Israel’s survival has been purchased. And they will be profoundly saddened as they comprehend how that survival has required the best and bravest of Israel’s young men and women to steel themselves against the fundamental moral precepts that govern ordinary life.
Bergman bluntly tells us – and most readers will agree – that the targets of Israel’s assassinations deserve to die. They have planned and
executed the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians – men, women, children and infants – as they go about the activities of their daily lives. No cause, no grievance, can ever mitigate such atrocities. And in war, where there is no realistic possibility of arresting and trying the perpetrators, the justice of striking them down is, at least to this reader, not open to serious moral question.
But things are not always so simple, even when the target of an assassination is a terrorist murderer. As in one instance recounted by Bergman, it may happen that, despite the best efforts of counter-terror forces to ensure that the target will be at home alone when the hit occurs, he must be shot in front of his wife and teenage daughter. Unpleasant, says the operative in relating the story to Bergman, but the job must be done. And he does not hesitate to do it.
Infinitely worse, of course, is the loss of totally innocent life that is the virtually inevitable by-product of assassinations carried out from the air or by explosive. As detailed by Bergman, Israel does try to prevent this, and countless operations have been aborted because of the likelihood that unacceptable “collateral damage” will occur. But if no harm to innocents were deemed tolerable, many operations could simply not be carried out.
And that would not be without consequence to innocent Israelis. As Bergman shows, in some cases where operations were called off because of the likelihood of harm to innocent bystanders, the terrorists thus spared have gone on to commit attacks in which dozens of Israeli civilians were killed. That causes one security officer to tell Bergman that although it causes him genuine pain when an Arab child is killed in an Israeli operation, if a child is going to be harmed, he would prefer that the child not be Israeli. Is it wrong, or natural, to care for one’s own people first?
The Israeli government has no doubt about the answer. And although many innocent Arab lives were lost in the unprecedented number of Israeli assassinations that took place in response to the horrific wave of terrorism that struck Israel during the Second Intifada, those operations, together with the IDF’s Defensive Shield offensive in the West Bank, gave the lie to the familiar bromide that there is no military solution to terrorism. The Israelis found one, putting down the Second Intifada by force of arms. In winning that victory, Israel’s program of targeted assassinations played an important part.
More recently, Israel has targeted Iranian scientists working on the country’s nuclear program for elimination. That caused a female Mossad agent to stand up at one meeting and declare that her father was a scientist who had helped develop Israel’s nuclear capacity and ask her colleagues whether they would consider him a legitimate target for assassination by the enemy. Her question did not receive much by way of an answer, but the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists continued.
Unfortunately, the dazzling feat of groundbreaking reportage and riveting narrative achieved by Bergman in “Rise and Kill First” is marred in the book’s final pages by some unaccountable and highly misleading statements about the agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear program (formally known as the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”(“JCPOA”))reached between Iran and six world powers in July 2015. Relating the prior clash between former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the feasibility and wisdom of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Bergman writes that the JCPOA , which mooted their debate, was
an Iranian capitulation to a number of demands that the ayatollahs had been rejecting for years. Iran agreed to dismantle the nuclear project almost entirely and to be subject to strict limits and supervision for many years into the future
In view of the heated controversy then raging in the United States over whether the JCPOA would effectively restrain Iran’s nuclear program, or put it on a glide path to becoming a nuclear-armed power, Bergman’s characterization of the agreement as an “Iranian capitulation” is nothing less than startling. And while one might argue that whether the deal was a good one or a bad one is a matter of opinion, Bergman misstates the underlying facts on which his opinion is based.
Thus, contrary to his assertion, the deal did not require Iran to “dismantle” anything, let alone its “entire[ ]” nuclear project; it only required that Iran mothball centrifuges that exceeded the agreement’s limits during its term. And the agreement provided that its restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium to near-fissile purity would sunset after 15 years, hardly a prohibitive period to religious fanatics playing a long game.
Further, the agreement placed no restrictions on Iran’s development of ballistic missiles, and its research on high speed centrifuges was allowed to continue. As to the latter, even Barack Obama acknowledged that, after the agreement’s sunset, high-speed centrifuges could “[shrink] breakout times [for Iran to construct a nuclear bomb] . . . almost down to zero.”
Bergman refers to none of this in characterizing the JCOPA as an “Iranian capitulation.” Similarly, while asserting (without much explication) that the agreement represented “a double triumph” for Meir Dagan, he fails to mention that the JCPOA was opposed not only by Benjamin Netanyahu, but also by opposition leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, in very strong terms.
The result is that a not otherwise-informed reader could well come away with a false, or at best incomplete, picture of the issues surrounding the Iran nuclear agreement. To me that is a grievous fault, but one paragraph in a book of more than 600 pages cannot affect its overall quality.
Bergman ends his book with a lament that Israel’s intelligence and security agencies have been so successful as to foster “the illusion among most of the nation’s leaders that covert operations . . . could be used in place of real diplomacy.” Toward the end of his life, Bergman writes, Meir Dagan (who is the deserved hero of this book) realized “that only a political solution with the Palestinians – the two-state solution – could end the 150-year conflict.” Ill with cancer, Dagan tried with his last energy to persuade the Israeli public to elect a leadership that would vigorously pursue that aim.
But his efforts were to no avail. Despite the enormous adulation he enjoyed as the ultimate Israeli master spy, Dagan’s speech, as well as the calls of many other former heads of the intelligence and military establishments for a compromise agreement with the Palestinians
. . . have all fallen on deaf ears.
One can easily imagine what may animate the longing for peace of retired heroes like Meir Dagan. They have dedicated their lives to protecting Israeli civilians from the remorseless terrorists who would murder them, and that has required them to do terrible things. Reflecting on what they have seen and done, it would not be surprising for them to feel moral qualms and wish there was another way. As one former head of the security service observed in the film The Gatekeepers, “[w]hen you leave Shin Bet, you become a bit of a leftist.”
Being removed from the dirty business of targeted assassinations, the average Israeli voter may see things more dispassionately. What he sees is the Palestinians’ unremitting intransigence, their rejection without counteroffer of generous Israeli proposals for a two-state solution, the Palestinian Authority’s pension payments for the murder of Israeli men, women and children, and the Holocaust denial and gross anti-Semitism of Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate president of the PA.
What exactly can be done to persuade such people to negotiate in good faith about peace? Ronen Bergman doesn’t say.
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