An instructive video circulating on the internet shows Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu showing off his kill list to US Ambassador Mike Huckabee and proudly claiming that he has eliminated “two names” that day, further confirmation that assassination is a routine tool of Israeli policy. Over the past two years, Israel has successfully targeted the military and political leadership of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, serially eliminating officials almost as soon as they step into the shoes of their murdered predecessors. Most recently it has wiped out a senior tier of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Reportedly, Netanyahu attempted to stave off Trump’s move toward a ceasefire by claiming there was an opportunity to kill Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba. For Israel, it seems, there is no political problem that cannot be solved, at least in part, by the elimination of individuals. He Was ‘Dealt With.’ The first group known for deploying assassination as a key instrument of political strategy was the medieval Ismaili sect known as the Assassins, who for centuries successfully targeted rulers across the Middle East until they were ultimately crushed by the Mongols. Political murder never went entirely out of fashion. It was favoured by groups such as the Social Revolutionaries in tsarist Russia, and was enthusiastically adopted by militant Zionist organisations in Palestine, notably the Irgun and Lehi, which targeted British officials and others who stood in the way of the nascent Israeli state. Among their victims was Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish diplomat who, as UN mediator, drafted a peace plan deemed unacceptably favourable to the Palestinians. He was duly gunned down in September 1948 on the orders of one of Lehi’s leaders, Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was subsequently recruited to take charge of Mossad’s first targeted killing squad. Emerging later from the shadows to enter politics, he rose through the ranks of Likud, becoming foreign minister in 1980 and prime minister three years later. Meeting the UN official Brian Urquhart for the first time, he greeted him warmly. ‘I am so happy to meet you,’ he rasped . ‘I have never dealt with the UN before.’ ‘Oh, but you have, foreign minister,’ Urquhart replied. ‘You dealt with Count Bernadotte, did you not?’ Amid many fits and starts, the Israeli assassination program became steadily more elaborate and ambitious. For the proposed elimination of a single senior Palestinian fighter, Iyad Batat, in the West Bank in 1999, according to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, commanders assembled a joint force consisting of no fewer than nine separate security agencies and units. In Rise and Kill First (2018), his encyclopedic history of the assassination program, Bergman reports that by the year 2000 Israel had launched some five hundred targeted killing operations. By the time the book came out, in 2018, it had conducted eight hundred more. Israel’s use of assassination as a preferred policy tool has long been recognized, and celebrated, in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and killed by a militant Palestinian group calling itself Black September; most of the hostages died during a staggeringly inept rescue attempt by the German police. In response, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, authorized Mossad to eliminate the organizers of the attack in a covert campaign called Operation Wrath of God. Beginning with the shooting of a young Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter, as he walked up the stairs to his apartment in Rome, the hit team killed nine people over the course of the next two years. Some were gunned down in the street; others were dispatched by bombs planted in homes or cars. Kill the Waiter, But don’t Forget the Shopping In July 1973, however, Mossad assassins murdered a man in Norway whom they believed to be one of Munich’s chief planners, Ali Hassan Salameh. The victim was in fact a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who had been living peacefully in Lillehammer for the previous nine years and was killed as he walked home from the cinema with his Norwegian wife, who was seven months pregnant. A passer-by noted the licence plate of the getaway car, which the killers didn’t immediately abandon because one of them had been out buying kitchen appliances for his new house near Tel Aviv and didn’t want to carry a heavy bag or leave them behind. The next day, members of the team were apprehended by Norwegian police when they turned up at the airport in their rented car. One of them, it turned out, was acutely claustrophobic and soon started talking after being taken into a windowless room for questioning. Others were carrying fake passports and compromising materials that led to the exposure of Mossad operations across Europe. Despite this fiasco, the reputation of Israeli intelligence only gained in luster. Operation Wrath of God became a staple in print and on screen, culminating in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 laudatory movie Munich, nominated for five Academy Awards... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to Spoils of War to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
© 2026 Andrew Cockburn |