Among the anomalies of Israel’s practices in the concert of nations, the selective assassination of its enemies has been a constant throughout its history. In its work Rise and Kill First (2018), Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has documented more than 2,300 operations with several thousand targeted assassinations on different continents, most of them Palestinian leaders, but not only: there are Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese. Dealing a mortal blow to the enemy is the old Israeli dream to end its problem with Palestine. But it is in vain: neither the problem will be solved with violence nor the enemy is an individual.
It should not be overlooked that the list of special operations has not limited its target to the assassination of Palestinian political or military leaders. For years, intellectuals have been the target of particular cruelty: a sticky bomb killed Gassan Kanafani, a narrator and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Beirut in 1972; a commando machine-gunned Kamal Nasser, a poet, painter and spokesman for the PLO, in his office, also in Beirut in 1973; a shot in the back of the head killed Naji al Ali, a radically independent cartoonist, in London in 1987…
Arafat was always a target of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, which failed to kill him, although it took several of his aides along the way. However, his strange death, apparently due to poisoning, remains far from clear.
In political terms, there are two decisive assassinations. In 1988, a few months after the start of the First Intifada, the Mossad launched a complex operation in Tunisia, with the landing of its special agents. The target was Abu Jihad, then number two in Fatah and responsible for coordination between the PLO and the Palestinian popular uprising in Gaza and the West Bank. In 2004, in the midst of the Second Intifada, the Mossad handed over to the Army: a hail of missiles fired from a combat helicopter assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and leader of Hamas, in Gaza.
Neither the first nor the second intifada stopped Israel, nor did it improve its security, nor did it solve any problem, Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli, if such a distinction is possible. Quite the contrary. After each assassination of a Palestinian leader, a period of greater instability has begun, as well as greater determination in the resistance of the new generations. Ismail Haniya, the Hamas leader assassinated by a drone in Tehran, will have a successor, and the spiral of violence will not be stopped unless there is justice and reparation.
Despite this vast experience, Israel is going ahead, this time with the genocide in Gaza as a backdrop. Israel has turned these practices of annihilation of Palestinian personalities into a matter of state, and what is even more serious, they have been sanctioned by the complicit silence of the international community. Genocide and selective assassinations: a cocktail that leads nowhere.
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