Why Israel Loves to Kill Palestinians | M.R. Narayan Swamy

Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western World. But there is something more stinking. As celebrated Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman observes, in many cases Israeli leaders have even determined that in order to kill a designated target, it is moral and legal to endanger the lives of innocent civilians who may fall in the line of fire.

If you know this mentality, it becomes easy to understand the genocide now taking place in Gaza and the casual way Israeli soldiers or intelligence operatives kill anywhere. Israel has mastered the art of waging war without moral compunctions. It is another matter that such recklessness is eating Israel from within, and this wanton disregard for life finally recoiled on it at the hands of Hamas last year.

The genocide of six million Jews by the Nazis laid the ideological foundation for Israel as it drove away hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to birth a Jewish state. Israeli founder leaders vowed that never again would the Jews be dishonoured. With Palestinians eager to undo the injustice meted out to them, with Arab backing, Israel militarized itself more and more, developing in the process the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history.

One must concede that Mossad, Israel’s best known intelligence agency, did not earn its global reputation merely on the strength of random or targeted killing missions. When Nikita Khrushchev spoke at the 20th CPSU Congress, it was Mossad which laid hand on his speech, beating every Western intelligence agency. What first gave Mossad the image of a ruthless and capable espionage agency was the daring abduction in 1960 of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of Hitler’s Final Solution, from Argentina. One can go on and on.

After the 1967 war when Israel expanded its size by 300 percent, humiliating the Arab world, one intelligence official, Shlomo Gazit, warned in a secret note to Israeli government and military leaders that the enemy should not be mocked at. Calling the moment a historic opportunity to end the Jew-Arab conflict, the memo called for an Israeli military withdrawal and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in exchange for a final peace treaty. The plea was unceremoniously rejected – a logical outcome of an arrogant thinking that envelops Israel even today.

The same thing got repeated when Ariel Sharon, later an Israeli defence minister, advocated hunting down and arresting or killing Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat who were wedded to resistance when he headed the military in Gaza Strip. The region’s military governor, Brigadier General Yitzhak Pundak, argued that the way to curb Palestinian violence was to improve the quality of life for the territory’s inhabitants and allow them to manage civilian and municipal affairs on their own. “Sabre rattling and killing for the sake of killing,” he warned, “couldn’t take us anywhere but to an intifada (popular uprising).” Even some Israeli soldiers could sniff the long-term dangers.

Once Israel adopted the doctrine that Palestinian guerrillas should be pursued mercilessly, hunted down and eliminated, the State became a well-oiled and well-polished killing machine. Once the enemy had been demonized, then anything and everything was fair. Starting from the 1960s in particular, cold-blooded tactics turned into a strategy. That a section of the Palestinians indulged in terror was not in doubt; rampant hijackings of civilian planes amid global media glare only justified the Israeli aggression. What the Israeli leaders did was that they branded the entire Palestinian community black in the name of fighting terror, notwithstanding the Oslo peace accord with Arafat.

Over time, quietly and in total secrecy, Israel developed an extrajudicial legal system that justified anything that was morally and ethically wrong. When Israel, for example, decided to avenge the 1972 cold-blooded murder of its athletes in Munich, Mossad killed people it could, not necessarily those it believed it should. One Israeli security official lamented: “Some of the Arabs we killed in that period, we don’t know why we were killing them, and they also don’t know to this day why they died,”

Yet, there was a time when Israeli policy makers believed that explosives could not be used in densely populated blocks in Beirut where top PLO men lived as it would cause unacceptably high civilian casualties. It did not take too long for this spark of humanity to disappear. By 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighbourhoods across Lebanon. If you see what Israel does today, it is easy to conclude how much more the State has decayed.

There is a parallel to how Israel is conducting itself now in sovereign Lebanon to the 1982 invasion of that country after the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador in London. The 1982 incursion was meant to kill Arafat although the potential London killer was linked to Abu Nidal, Arafat’s sworn enemy. Facts and truth did not matter to Israel. The issue of collateral casualties became less important. One Israeli official said it made no difference which Palestinians were killed in Lebanon – “they either were terrorists or would become terrorists or (give) birth to terrorists”. But Israel was contemptuous only of Arab lives. When the Mossad targeted PLO personnel in Europe, it took care to ensure that innocents were not harmed.

The sheer callousness towards Palestinian death and suffering in Gaza today is the result of Israeli policies that got embedded in its security apparatus from the 1960s. A rock could be used to crush an arrested Palestinian’s head; sleep deprivation, painful stress positions as well as exposure to extremes of heat and cold were part of physical and psychological torture perfected in Israeli custody; one Israeli interrogator killed an Arab prisoner by flinging him from one wall to another till he died. Many earlier PLO activists were found dead even before they reached detention centres. If many prisoners were tortured to death, many took their own lives, unable to bear the pain. Israeli intelligence operatives were proud of what they did; if the world questioned them, outright lies were parroted.

The problem with the Israeli attitude was that many times the executioners realized they had blundered but it was too late. Much after they shot dead Arafat confidant Abu Jihad in Tunisia, even Israelis who took part in the killing realized that his restraining and sobering voice would have been highly beneficial after the Palestinian National Authority was set up in 1994. Had Abu Jihad lived, Hamas might not have been able to consolidate itself. Some Israeli intelligence officials believed that Islamists would be a counterweight to the PLO. The strategy completely boomeranged.

Palestinian religious-political head Sheikh Yasin, who founded the Hamas, once coolly told an interrogator that the struggle against Israel would never end. “We will take what you give, but we will never give up what our armed struggle. I do not have a time problem. Ten more years, a hundred more years – in the end you will be wiped out off the face of the earth.” In its bravado, Israeli finally killed Yasin. It was another blunder. Yasin had strongly opposed any ties with Shia Iran. He despised the Iranians. Once he was gone, the Sunni Hamas had no problems in embracing Iran, creating a powerful alliance also involving Hezbollah that would torment Israel.

Ronen Bergman moans in his celebrated book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (Random House, New York), from where I have drawn a lot here, that the intelligence community’s very success fostered the illusion among Israeli leaders that covert operations could be a strategic and not just a tactical tool – that they could be used in place of real diplomacy. The delusion persists.

It is not that Israeli intelligence agencies never blundered. They went off the track many times, seriously embarrassing themselves and their government. Many times wrong and innocent people were killed, including in Europe. There was hypocrisy too. For all the bravado over the Entebbe airport rescue, it were the Israelis who originally helped Idi Amin to seize power in Uganda. The Israeli military had no shame in collaborating with the Phalangists in Lebanon whose fighters adorned their belts with ears severed from the Palestinians they killed.

A section of Israeli military and intelligence agencies, however small, revolted against the brutalities sanctioned by their country. But as Bergman says, thousands of Israelis had become complicit in the policies of killings over time. By 2002, no Israeli could claim ignorance of what was being done in his/her name. One Israeli official even gloated: “They are all Arabs. They are all terrorists.”

The book quotes Gabriella Blum, one of the authors of the memorandum that legalised assassinations, regretting much later that what was originally authorised “as an exceptional act to be taken in exceptional cases became a regular practice”. Bergman also makes a grave confession: “If I knew the answer to the question of what killed Yasser Arafat, I wouldn’t be able to write it here in this book, or even be able to write that I know the answer. The military censor in Israel forbids me from discussing this subject.”

Berman’s book came out in 2018. Nothing has changed since then in Israel. If anything, Israel’s moral compass (it probably had one a long time ago) has by now completely collapsed. Bergman’s work greatly helps us to understand why Israel so callously kills Palestinians – and still claims a moral high ground.