The political leaders, defense establishment and much of the public appear to have found a new-old love: targeted assassinations. This is the obvious conclusion from all the pride and boasting about the assassination of six top Islamic Jihad commanders. If this is the main accomplishment of Operation Shield and Arrow, then Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and on Gaza in particular, is in quite a sorry state.
Once upon a time, the defense establishment – the Mossad, Shin Bet and IDF – held an ambivalent attitude toward the use of assassinations as a tool for fighting the enemy, whether enemy countries or terrorist groups, and the tactic was always considered a last resort.
The first targeted assassination was carried out by Israel in 1956, when Unit 154 (today Unit 504) of army intelligence, which ran agents on Israel’s borders, sent a package bomb into Gaza that killed Colonel Mustafa Hafez, an Egyptian intelligence officer who dispatched fedayeen cells into Israel.
In the 1960s, there were several assassination operations by the Mossad – against German scientists who aided Egypt’s armaments program, and against Herberts Cukurs, a Nazi war criminal known as the “Butcher of Riga.” A Mossad cell assassinated him in 1965 in Montevideo, Uruguay.
After the Six-Day War, the intelligence community resumed using targeted assassinations, but only sparingly. The Mossad sent cells of fighters to assassinate Palestinian terrorists in Europe in response to terror attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, like the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
In the same era, Shin Bet operatives were operating in the West Bank and Gaza, either directly or indirectly through Palestinian agents. In the 1970s, and to a greater degree following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israel also began assassinating Palestinian and Hezbollah militants.
But the big change in the targeted assassination policy came in the wake of the second intifada, when Avi Dichter was leading the Shin Bet. The tactic became very widely used. Hundreds of militants were assassinated by a variety of methods, and the latest technologies were incorporated in the effort – such as drones and, later, suicide drones.
Occasionally, radical proposals were suggested during discussions at the highest political and military levels, such as targeting Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein for assassination. This was after the 1991 Gulf War in which 39 Scud missiles were fired at Israeli cities. The preparations for this operation, for which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin likely would not have given final approval in any case, were halted in the wake of the Tze’elim disaster in which five Sayeret Matkal fighters were killed during training for the operation.
But Israel has never determined whether targeted assassinations are an effective policy that serves a worthy purpose, or merely the result of a desire for vengeance. Fifty years ago, after Mossad agents shot and killed a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway in a case of mistaken identity, there was urgent discussion in the security establishment about whether the assassination tactic should continue to be used. David Kimche, the future deputy Mossad chief, told me at the time that the Mossad should not be in the business of assassinating enemies because “We’re not a mafia, we’re not Murder, Inc.”
The first and only attempt to seriously address this issue was by a subcommittee of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee following the failed assassination attempt of Hamas official Khaled Meshal in Amman in 1997. Members of the subcommittee that investigated the failed operation included Yossi Sarid, Benny Begin, Ori Orr and Uzi Landau. Much of its report, in which it attempted to formulate something like a “targeted assassinations doctrine” – when, under what circumstances, and against whom this tactic should be used – remains classified.
The committee, as well as outside experts, appear to have basically agreed that assassinations, particularly outside of Israel, are only appropriate in exceptional circumstances. The most prominent example of this is the assassination, attributed to the Mossad and CIA, of Hezbollah “defense minister” Imad Mughniyeh by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008. Since then, Hezbollah has struggled to find a worthy replacement for Mughniyeh, who was considered especially skilled in devising terrorist operations throughout the Middle East, not only against Israeli targets.
In its concluding remarks, the 1997 subcommittee wrote, “Over the years, Israel’s governments have not clearly formulated a policy for combating terrorist organizations that is based on rigorous thought and consistent logic. In the absence of a clear doctrine for anti-terrorist activity, the component of response to terror attacks has taken on great and damaging weight.” Evidently, none of Israel’s governments over the past quarter-century have read this spot-on assessment, or if they did, they immediately forgot it.
One way this may be seen is in the series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists that are attributed to the Mossad since 2009, the most recent being the 2019 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist.
But it's even more apparent in the policy Israel has employed in recent years in successive operations in Gaza. From one operation to the next, as Israel’s frustration mounts, so does the blind faith and stagnant thinking that targeted assassinations will solve the problem. For some ministers and security chiefs, targeted assassination have become the ultimate method and a substitute for a real strategy.
Israel's Targeted Assassinations Are a Poor Substitute for a Strategy
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18.05.2023
The political leaders, defense establishment and much of the public appear to have found a new-old love: targeted assassinations. This is the obvious conclusion from all the pride and boasting about the assassination of six top Islamic Jihad commanders. If this is the main accomplishment of Operation Shield and Arrow, then Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and on Gaza in particular, is in quite a sorry state.
Once upon a time, the defense establishment – the Mossad, Shin Bet and IDF – held an ambivalent attitude toward the use of assassinations as a tool for fighting the enemy, whether enemy countries or terrorist groups, and the tactic was always considered a last resort.
The first targeted assassination was carried out by Israel in 1956, when Unit 154 (today Unit 504) of army intelligence, which ran agents on Israel’s borders, sent a package bomb into Gaza that killed Colonel Mustafa Hafez, an Egyptian intelligence officer who dispatched fedayeen cells into Israel.
In the 1960s, there were several assassination operations by the Mossad – against German scientists who aided Egypt’s armaments program, and against Herberts Cukurs, a Nazi war criminal known as the “Butcher of Riga.” A Mossad cell assassinated him in 1965 in Montevideo, Uruguay.
After the Six-Day War, the intelligence community resumed using targeted assassinations, but only sparingly. The Mossad sent cells of........
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