Above: Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was one of the latest victims of Israel’s targeted assassination<\/p>\n
In his voluminous book \u201cRise and Kill First\u201d<\/a> (2019), Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman opens with the blunt statement that \u2018\u2026since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.\u2019 This comes to nearly 2300 operations, killing several thousand people.<\/p>\n The statement is controversial and there is no empirical evidence to support it. In fact, it\u2019s quite possible that in their wars in the Middle East and North Africa in the last three-quarters of a century, France, Britain and the United States engaged as frequently and indiscriminately as Israel in assassinations and controversial black-ops.<\/p>\n What remains uncontroversial, however, is that none of these countries placed targeted killing in as comfortable a moral zone as Israel has done. The recent assassination of Iran\u2019s top nuclear scientist\u00a0Mohsin Fakhrizadeh comes as a reminder, yet again, that Israel\u2019s targeted killing can\u2019t be fully explained in geo-strategic terms only. Judging by Israel\u2019s behaviours so far, the high frequency of assassinations must be seen as a symptom of a particular worldview, one related to Israel\u2019s unique perception of threat. In this article I explain the psychology and manipulation of that psychology that justify Israel\u2019s security doctrine and, by extension, the adoption of targeted killing as a state policy.<\/p>\n The phrase \u201crise and kill first,\u201d comes from the Babylonian Talmud, which reads: \u201c..If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.\u201d Seemingly promoting a doctrine of self-defence, \u201crise and kill first\u201d in its original historical context was merely a \u2018revolutionary fantasy,\u2019 simply because the Jews in exile were mostly helpless.<\/p>\n But with the emergence of Zionism, history took on a selective tone and was employed in an over-compensatory fashion. \u2018Revolutionary fantasies\u2019 had to be transformed into a physical reality. Phrases and slogans, as well as historical events with little significance, were readapted (and magnified) for the Zionist goals.<\/p>\n The so-called \u2018New Jew\u2019 \u2013 tenacious and independent \u2013 was meant to abandon the long embraced narratives of victimisation that characterised life in the galut<\/em>. The Shoah<\/em> came to confirm that, indeed, the alternative to Zionism was annihilation. The lesson was that in order to thwart the possibility of a future victimisation, passiveness had be replaced with extreme militarism. \u201cRise and kill first\u201d has since become not only a military doctrine, but a chief principle in the formulation and implementation of security measures.<\/p>\n But, to what extent were the Zionist claims and goals realised?<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Israel is a significant military power (thanks largely to the United States and certain Western countries), and its intelligence arm is far-reaching. So, in a strategic sense, \u2018abandoning the passiveness of the galut<\/em>\u2019 was a success.<\/p>\n However, whilst presumably eliminating \u2018passiveness\u2019, militarism failed to end the sense of insecurity and victimhood that dominated the Jewish consciousness. More ironic yet, the militarisation of almost all aspects of society (in order to deflect insecurity) and the excessive aggressiveness against Israel\u2019s enemies, has created the same (if not worse) insecurity that the militarism was meant to eliminate. In turn, that intensified the mainstream society\u2019s belief that, indeed, \u2018everyone is against us.\u2019<\/p>\n Israeli scholars Daniel Bar-Tal and Dikla Antebi in the 1990s framed this phenomenon in terms of \u2018siege mentality\u2019. It is a collective mindset where a group of people think of themselves as constantly attacked, oppressed, or isolated by hostile forces who seek to destroy them. Any actions to ensure security, no matter how aggressive or controversial, are deemed morally and politically comprehensible. And any militant responses to these actions may be seen as unjustified and amoral, consequently emphasising the group\u2019s sense of victimisation, and ultimately producing the worst sort of self-defence and security ethos: \u2018if we don\u2019t kill, we will cease to exist.\u2019<\/p>\n From a \u2018victim\u2019s\u2019 perspective, morality or consequences are of little importance. Because central to victim mentality is the feeling that one is neither responsible nor accountable for their actions, and forever entitled to sympathy. Any worldview that contradicts this mentality is perceived as antagonistic, and might be taken very personally.<\/p>\n As if to say, if you oppose Israel\u2019s policies, this must mean you deny Jewish victimhood, and this in turn means denying the Jewish State\u2019s (and Jews\u2019) legitimacy and right to exist. Israel\u2019s apologists see the Jewish State\u2019s very inception as a \u2018redemption\u2019 or \u2018victims\u2019 justice\u2019 after two millennia of exile. In order to feel safe and curb the constant feeling of anxiety, a victim needs to remain in control (of their fate), even if that means resorting to extreme and controversial measures, not only against threats, but against the faint possibility of a threat emerging.<\/p>\n This has always been Israel\u2019s notion of pre-emptive security and military doctrines. Think of the 1967 Six-Day War. The attack on neighbouring Arab countries was justified as a pre-emptive strike to thwart a pending Arab attack. Since then, evidence shows it was unjustified: At the time, even though Egypt and Syria were quantitively superior, Israel possessed a distinct qualitative advantage in terms of modern jet fighters and missiles that made it nearly impossible for Egyptian air force to penetrate Israeli airspace. Meanwhile, Israeli jet-fighters were penetrating Egyptian airspace up to the Suez Canal on a daily basis and even had flown over Cairo on several occasions (see Guy Laron\u2019s book \u201cThe Six Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East\u201d).<\/p>\n In 1981, to justify the attack on Iraq\u2019s reactor, Menachem Begin invoked the Shoah <\/em>victim narrative despite very little evidence Iraq was planning or had any interest in attacking Israel. The sheer fear of Iraq possessing nuclear capabilities triggered Israel\u2019s fight-or-flight mode, leading to the destruction of the Iraqi reactor. To Begin and many in his circle, the equation was clear: either this \u2013 a controversial strike \u2013 or another Auschwitz<\/em>.<\/p>\n For the pilots who carried out the mission (Operation Opera), as it was shown in the History Channel documentary Raid on the Reactor<\/a> (2006), the aim was to prevent another Shoah. <\/em>IAF pilot Lt. General Shafir says: \u201cmany of us are grandsons and sons of people who\u2019d been through the Holocaust\u2026<\/em>we\u2019d been part of a mission to prevent another Holocaust\u201d [02:31]. And: \u201cI felt I was flying for my grandfather who died in a Concentration Camp\u201d [25:33].<\/p>\n Today, such a mindset is firmly in place, and whatever information the intelligence formation shows about Iran (or any other opponent), chances are it\u2019ll be filtered through layers of collective memory and emotional orientations. Once fear is so strong, it acts as a filter for information processing. In fact, social psychology has long identified such a phenomenon and framed it with a theory called feelings-as-information. As highly anxious individuals, many Jewish-Israelis \u2014 leaders across the political spectrum included \u2014 are inclined to selectively search for and absorb information that confirms the validity of their fears about Iran and ignore the information that does not.<\/p>\n Even though there is a largely psychological drive to Israel\u2019s security perception, collective memory never failed to provide Israeli leaders with the right tools to pass controversial laws and justify military actions. I\u2019m talking about the difference between the genuine psychological after-effects of trauma\u00a0and the conscious utilisation of this psychology for political purposes.<\/p>\n On one hand, understanding today\u2019s conflict in light of Jewish history provides meaning and purpose to many in Israel. In its extreme form, today\u2019s conflict(s) is seen, among other things, as a continuation of the Jewish \u2018continuum of suffering\u2019 since the ancient times. To some right-wingers, the Palestinians and Arabs are the modern reincarnation of the ancient Amaleks.<\/a> Any Palestinian act of resistance \u2013 violent or peaceful \u2013 therefore, is interpreted as another step in the diabolical plan to annihilate the Jews.<\/p>\n On the other hand, wallowing in victimhood has given Israeli leaders (and the public) the tools to frame the criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism; in other words, directed at Jews qua Jews and not because of Israel\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n Think for example of how Israel\u2019s enemies have been framed in existential terms, and made historically relevant in order to emphasise Jewish-Israeli victimhood and therefore: justify (to themselves and their enemies) Israel\u2019s controversial military actions; alleviate the society\u2019s collective guilt about the occupation; and pressure the international community for financial and logistical aids.<\/p>\n Egypt\u2019s Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, was repeatedly depicted as a Nazi. In the book \u201cSemites and Anti-Semites\u201d<\/a>, Bernard Lewis tells us that Israel\u2019s daily Ma\u2019ariv <\/em>justified the 1956 invasion of Egypt by claiming that it prevented Nasser from becoming \u2018Hitler of the East.\u2019 To Israel\u2019s Foreign Minister Abba Eban in 1969, \u2018the 1967 borders are the borders of Auschwitz.\u2019<\/a> And, to Menachem Begin, the PLO was a \u2018neo-Nazi organisation\u2019 and, on the eve of Lebanon\u2019s invasion in 1982, going after Arafat was parallel to pursuing \u2018Hitler in the bunker<\/a>.\u2019 Later on, Begin justified the invasion of Lebanon as a pre-emptive measure meant to prevent another Treblinka. He said: \u201cwe have decided there will be no more Treblinka.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Today, collective memory is instrumentalised to place the Palestinians in a similar historical context. This heightens the Jewish-Israel public\u2019s sense of threat and, as a result, any policies against the Palestinians \u2013 assassinations included \u2013 become moral and legitimate. In that worldview, Palestinians can commit diplomatic antisemitism by joining UN bodies and treaties. They also commit \u2018popular struggle antisemitism,\u2019 by throwing rocks or going out on protests. Palestinians can also commit \u2018literary antisemitism\u2019 by writing about the Palestinian struggle.<\/p>\n The type of resistance is irrelevant as long as it contradicts or opposes Israel\u2019s righteous self-image as a historical victim or takes exception to the country\u2019s superior moral entitlements.<\/p>\n I remember in 2017 at a Jerusalem Post Conference in New York, Ronald Lauder, the President of the World Jewish Congress, describing BDS as a form of antisemitism, \u2018although in disguise.\u2019 He said: \u201cIt\u2019s a political form of antisemitism cloaked in the guise of anti-Israel sentiment\u2026Palestinians have pushed BDS with the goal of wearing down the Diaspora Jewry\u2019s support for Israel \u2026to strengthen the Palestinians\u2019 position and put pressure on Israel to make concessions. That\u2019s one of the key reasons why we need to expose BDS for the fraud that it is.\u201d<\/p>\n It does not take much to see the cognitive distortion in Lauder\u2019s reasoning. On one hand he admits that BDS is a political tool to pressure Israel towards concessions to the Palestinians, yet he equates political pressure to a form of irrational racism.<\/p>\n In this over-dependence on and\/or outright manipulation of Israel\u2019s \u2018sense of threat\u2019, Lauder follows a line of reasoning embraced by almost all of Israel\u2019s leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu. In this type of reasoning Israel is always an effect in the causation chain, but never a cause.\u00a0Lauder nevertheless did not go as far as labelling BDS a strategic threat to the Jewish State<\/a>, as Netanyahu repeatedly had done.<\/p>\n This is almost the same type of psychology and manipulation of psychology that has been implemented against Iran, and which allowed if not morally legitimised the assassination of some of Iran\u2019s scientists. In the past decade, Jewish Israelis increasingly believed Iran\u00a0presented an existential threat<\/a>.\u00a0 Thanks to the political rhetoric and incitements by Israel\u2019s politicians, especially Netanyahu, and to the Trump Administration\u2019s overhyped antagonism against the Islamic Republic, the belief that Iran is an existential threat has intensified. The mere fact that Trump cancelled the Iranian nuclear deal proved to many in Israel that indeed, our feelings about Iran are genuine, and hardly a misplaced historical projection.<\/p>\n Realistically, however, evidence shows that regardless of all the anti-Israel bluster and occasional demagogic and antisemitic slogans, Iran remains a highly cautious country making realistic calculations. There are no signs that the official bodies in the country \u2013 despite the tightening US sanctions and Israel\u2019s endless incitements\u2013 seek a regional war. What\u2019s at stake is a lot more than simply teaching Israel a lesson. Not to mention that \u2018Iran as an existential threat\u2019 isn\u2019t a hegemonic view among Israeli military generals<\/a> or intelligence officers<\/a>.<\/p>\n A master manipulator, Netanyahu needs the \u2018antisemites\u2019 in Tehran not only as a smokescreen for his corruption, but mainly to justify and rationalise Israel\u2019s fear and anxiety. A collective that sees itself as victims requires an external enemy to confirm and validate these feelings \u2013 even if that enemy is only a reconstruction of an older trauma. In the absence of, say, the Nazis, the Iranians are the replacement.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s remember that a decade after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Israel still saw Iran as a potential ally. In his study, \u201cIsrael\u2019s Construction of Iran as an Existential Threat,\u201d<\/a> Gareth Porter explains that it was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 who broke away from this view and began the construction of Iran as a threat. After Rabin, the first Netanyahu government didn\u2019t feel Iran represented an existential threat. Uzi Arad, then the head of the Mossad, advised Netanyahu that Iran\u2019s missile programme was never directed at Israel but had emerged in the crucible of the eight-year-long war with Iraq.<\/p>\nThe Burden of Collective Memory <\/strong><\/h2>\n
I\u2019m a Victim, therefore I kill <\/strong><\/h2>\n
Capitalising on the Psychological\u00a0 <\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u00a0A Needed Threat<\/strong><\/h2>\n