In praise of targeted killings of terrorists
Critics claim the deaths of murderers of Jews will make things worse. But if Israel’s enemies seek its destruction, victory over them should be the goal of the Jewish state.
It’s been a bad week for terrorists. The deaths of Hezbollah chief of staff Fuad Shukr in the group’s stronghold in Beirut and then Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Tehran were shocking blows to both terror groups. In one way or another, these two men have rivers of blood on their hands. Their goals and that of the organizations they lead are to destroy Israel and accomplish the genocide of its people. Yet whenever the forces of the Jewish state are able to kill such people, the official reaction of most of the international community, the Western foreign-policy establishment and the chattering classes is to shake their heads in disapproval.
Headlines about the deaths of Shukr and Haniyeh in America’s leading newspapers all emphasized the potential negative repercussions for Jerusalem. The assumptions of headline writers, and the reporters and editors who provided the stories to go with them, is that the strikes will accomplish nothing. Sure, they grudgingly acknowledge, Hezbollah and Hamas have done some bad things to Israelis. But each of these leaders can and will be replaced. As The Washington Post pointed out in an article, Israel has a long history of carrying out targeted assassinations and with many of them being carried out across international borders.
Such lists of past killings tend to be viewed in two different ways.
A history of targeted killings
On the one hand, they have contributed to the image of Israel’s intelligence services and its armed forces as being unmatched in skill and courage, and able to carry out astonishing acts of daring-do.
On the other, they are often seen as ultimately pointless in terms of their impact on the conflict between Israel and its enemies. After all, no matter how many terrorists the Israelis kill, there always seems to be more to take their place. The entire exercise is often treated as one in futility with many on the Israeli left, including some former intelligence officials, lamenting that the Jewish state should be devoting as much effort to achieving peace with its enemies as it does to trying—not always successfully—to eliminate them.
That was the theme of a major history of Israel’s intelligence efforts by current New York Times Magazine writer Ronen Bergman. His 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, was widely praised by the literary world and won the National Jewish Book Award in history that year. Relying largely on extensive interviews with ex-Mossad, Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces veterans (many with axes to grind, both political and personal), it painted a grim picture of a long cruel war being waged by Israel that hasn’t accomplished much in the way of providing security. While the tales he recounts often paint a picture of heroism and ingenuity, the ultimate conclusion is that the killings—whether of Palestinian terrorists or of scientists working on weapons of mass destruction aimed at Israel were at best only tactical triumphs.
Bergman, as avid a supporter of the peace process as he is a chronicler of Israeli secret operatives, treats almost all of the targeted killings—the famous successes and the infamous failures—as strategic defeats since they could not bring about an end to the conflict with the Palestinians or their supporters and abettors, especially those in Iran.
That attitude is being echoed in the coverage of the killings of Shukr, and especially, Haniyeh. They are seen as increasing the chances of the war Israel is waging in Gaza and the struggle against Hezbollah escalating into a wider regional war. The strikes have also been interpreted as lessening the chances of a deal for a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza since the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
The myth of Hamas ‘civilians’
Bizarrely, that led to a headline in The Wall Street Journal in which Haniyeh was eulogized in an article as “Hamas’s Leading Advocate for a Gaza Cease-Fire,” though it was subsequently toned down to read as merely the terrorist group’s ‘chief negotiator.’ ”
There are a number of problems with this approach, not the least of which is the notion of the “political” and “military” wings of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah being as starkly different as say the difference between active serving military officers in Western armies and the civilians who hold elected offices and give them their orders.
Haniyeh may have had different day-to-day responsibilities within Hamas than Yahya Sinwar, the group’s senior leader in Gaza who reportedly heads its military formations. But they are merely two sides of the same coin with the same ideology and purpose. The “political” leaders of an entity with the sole aim of mass murder, as demonstrated on Oct. 7 when it carried out the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, are not more peaceful or more interested in the welfare of Palestinians than the “military” wing of the group.
More important is the assumption that underlies much of the criticisms of Israel’s actions that Israeli attacks on terrorists are pointless since the conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah must be solved by political means and not by bloodshed. Instead of finding more creative and ingenious ways of killing people, Israelis are told they must stop shooting and find common ground with their foes—or at least stop actions that only inspire more outraged Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians to become terrorists and replace the “martyrs” created by foolish Israelis.
That sounds reasonable to Western minds, as well as to Israelis who prefer magical thinking about their nation’s security dilemmas to confronting reality. But it is profoundly mistaken because, as they continue to tell us over and over again, the members of Hamas and Hezbollah—and their funders and manipulators in Iran—aren’t interested in peace on any terms with Israel.
Targeted killings of leaders of terrorist groups make sense because that is what you do in a war against existential foes. It’s true that even the most important of these leaders can, at least in theory, be replaced. Still, disrupting their activities and causing them to operate with far more caution—even in places where they think they might be secure from Israeli attacks, such as in the heart of enemy capitals like Beirut and Tehran—may well save the lives of innocents that might have been lost had if the killers were able to go about their business unmolested.
Then there is the moral aspect of the equation.
Murderers of Jews must pay
Simply put, the leaders of Israel have and should always keep in mind the historical perspective of the struggle in which they are locked. For two millennia, Jews were killed with impunity by any and all foes wherever they lived in the world. The persecution of Jews by Europeans who regarded them as religious outcasts, deicides or, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, as members of an inferior race or by Muslims who saw them as dhimmi, a protected but despised minority, often led to pogroms and murder without the perpetrators fearing justice and retribution.
Zionism meant a cultural and political revival of the Jewish people as Hebrew was recovered as a spoken language and the Jews returned to live in sovereignty in their ancient homeland. However, the rebirth of Israel as a state also had to mean that Jews had attained the means of self-defense and the ability to ensure that those who shed Jewish blood would not go unpunished. If those who murder Jewish men, women and children are allowed to escape retribution and can go about as if their actions are accepted by the civilized world, then no Jew is safe.
That’s not the only reason why murderers like Shukr and Haniyeh must die. They should be pursued because the goal of Israel in this conflict should be to win it, rather than to merely survive another day while holding onto the vain hope that gentle reason, international mediation or concessions by Jerusalem will achieve peace. Peace may one day be possible but only after the terrorists’ complete and utter defeat.
And that is something that the same people who are clucking away about the supposedly reckless and pointless actions of the Israeli strikes reject as impossible. Hamas is an “idea,” they tell us, and cannot be defeated. So, too, presumably is the Iranian commitment to wiping Israel off the map and for which it has armed not just Hamas, but its Hezbollah auxiliaries and Houthi allies in Yemen to the teeth. The idea that the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet is but a passing phase that Arabs and Muslims will outlast is an idea. But it can be defeated in the same manner that the Nazi idea that the Jews can be exterminated was vanquished: by the utter destruction of those forces that supported and killed for it.
The argument for victory
As scholar Daniel Pipes writes in an important new book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, the only way out of the impasse isn’t by pressuring Israel into surrendering land, which only empowers the terrorists and gives them the ability to kill more Jews. It is only by eradicating the terrorists—in the Gaza Strip and wherever else they can be found—that Palestinians will be forced to conclude that their century-old war against Israel cannot succeed and that they must try something else. If, as Pipes writes in The Wall Street Journal, the killings of Shukr and Haniyeh represent a sign that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is returning to the goal of a “total victory” over Hamas and its Iranian backers, then it is not merely just but an essential step towards the only possible hope for peace.
That is something that the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris has been opposed to. From the start of the war that followed the Oct. 7 massacre, Washington has been seeking a premature end to the fighting before Hamas was defeated. That not only gave heart to the terrorist group and its foreign antisemitic cheerleaders, rationalizers and enablers. It also undermined any hope for rescuing or redeeming the more than 100 hostages that Hamas continues to hold captive as bargaining chips in the hope that they will buy them survival and victory over Israel.
By acquiescing to American pressure, Israel strengthens its foes and only ensures what will, at best, be a renewal of the conflict under even worse circumstances than in the past. Should the killings of the terrorists be a prelude to the sort of terrible deal for Israel that Harris mapped out last week, then they will have been meaningless. Throughout its history, many such brilliant operations like the ones carried out this week were not followed up on by Israeli leaders who sometimes feared the admittedly troubling consequences of international disfavor more than the prospect of terrorists surviving to kill again. The slaughter on Oct. 7 should have been an end to that sort of hesitation, as well as to the last vestiges of support for a “two-state solution.” It was peace processing and territorial retreats, such as those still favored by Israel’s critics that allowed Gaza to become an independent Palestinian terrorist state in all but name, which led to that infamous day.
Supporters of Israel and moral people everywhere should celebrate the demise of mass killers like Shukr and Haniyeh. They should do so not only because it is justice but because anything that leads to total victory over terrorists is a step towards peace, not more problems for Israel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
** This article was originally published by JNS.org **
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