Rise and Kill First: The Inside Story and Secret Operations of Israel's Assassination Program by Ronen BergmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an amazing work. It is detailed and specific (where it has to be and where it can be). It covers a wide breadth of Israeli history, starting in the pre-state period and runs up through Obama presidency. At times it reads like a Gabriel Allon novel: the level of detail and narrative for some of the operations is incredible: exciting, scary, thrilling.
It is, in part, a history of Israel: a history through the lens of fighting for survival and trying to get the upper hand in its wars through covert operations. But through this lens Bergman shines a light on many facets of Israel society beyond the Mossad or other Israeli covert agencies.
But it also humbling and a difficult to process work, for a Zionist like myself. I hold no illusions of Israel's perfection: moral or technical, but it is still a challenge to look at some of those failings squarely. There were many mistakes, errors: killing the wrong person, failing to kill the 'correct' person (missed opportunities to have taken out consequential targets), killing of innocents (so-called collateral damage). There were so many points when one has to stop and wonder how history might have been different if this particular event in time had turned out differently.
The two main questions Bergman wants the read to struggle with is: Were these targeted killings effective? Were they are justified? The answer, it seems to me after reading this book, is very mixed. Some operations were both, some where justified, but failed to achieved either strategic or tactical goals; and others were not justified. Some of these latter might have been mistakes about identity, but sometimes they were from overzealousness, overconfidence, or complacency.
In the end, Bergman's answer seems to be that while Israel's killing operations where quite often tactical successes, the long-term strategic consequences have been and are ambiguous at best, but in some cases worse. Worse, not so much because of the assassination itself, but either from unintended consequences due to the assassination or from the overreliance on this tool instead of other strategies. Personally, I am not sure. Trying to figure how things might have gone, the counterfactual, can be a fool's errand: we just can't know how things would have turned it out, so it is hard to compare scenarios. But the morality of such killing is troubling to me -- though better one or two operatives than tens of thousands of conscripts on a battlefield. And many of those killed deserved what they had coming to them, but I am not sure that justifies it. I'd rather live in world where diplomacy solved everything. But we don't. We live in world where there are evil people trying to do evil things and sometimes the only thing to do is to kill such people. But that's a dangerous and perilous road.
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