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href="http://nationalpost.com/news/world/poisoned-toothpaste-and-exploding-phones-israel-linked-to-2700-assassination-operations-in-70-years">http://nationalpost.com/news/world/poisoned-toothpaste-and-exploding-phones-israel-linked-to-2700-assassination-operations-in-70-years</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Poisoned toothpaste and exploding phones:
Israel linked to 2,700 assassination operations in 70 years</h1>
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<div class="author-container wire-author" itemprop="author"
itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/person">Ethan Bronner
- January 27, 2018</div>
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<p>Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its
target’s life. Armed drones. Exploding cell phones.
Spare tires with remote-control bombs. Assassinating
enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of
Islamic holy men.</p>
<p>A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that
Israel has carried out at least 2,700 assassination
operations in its 70 years of existence. While many
failed, they add up to far more than any other Western
country, the book says.</p>
<p>Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for
Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of
Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories,
some using their real names. The result is the first
comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored
killings.</p>
<p>Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents,
and running more than 600 pages, “Rise and Kill First”
makes the case that Israel has used assassination in the
place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear
scientists, for instance, rather than launching a
military attack. It also strongly suggests that Israel
used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the
longtime Palestinian leader, an act its officials have
consistently denied.</p>
<p>Bergman writes that Arafat’s death in 2004 fit a
pattern and had advocates. But he steps back from flatly
asserting what happened, saying that Israeli military
censorship prevents him from revealing what – or if – he
knows.</p>
<p>The book’s title comes from the ancient Jewish Talmud
admonition, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and
kill him first.” Bergman says a huge percentage of the
people he interviewed cited that passage as
justification for their work. So does an opinion by the
military’s lawyer declaring such operations to be
legitimate acts of war.</p>
<p>Despite the many interviews, including with former
prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, Bergman, the
author of several books, says the Israeli secret
services sought to interfere with his work, holding a
meeting in 2010 on how to disrupt his research and
warning former Mossad employees not to speak with him.</p>
<p>He says that while the U.S. has tighter constraints on
its agents than does Israel, President George W. Bush
adopted many Israeli techniques after the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and President Barack Obama
launched several hundred targeted killings.</p>
<blockquote class="pn_pullquote">
<p>If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him
first</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the
methods of information gathering and the technology of
the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the
Americans and their allies were all in large part
developed in Israel,” Bergman writes.</p>
<p>The book gives a textured history of the personalities
and tactics of the various secret services. In the
1970s, a new head of operations for Mossad opened
hundreds of commercial companies overseas with the idea
that they might be useful one day. For example, Mossad
created a Middle Eastern shipping business that, years
later, came in handy in providing cover for a team in
the waters off Yemen.</p>
<p>There have been plenty of failures. After a Palestinian
terrorist group killed Israeli athletes at the 1972
Munich Olympics, Israel sent its agents to kill the
perpetrators – and shot more than one misidentified man.
There were also successful operations that did more harm
than good to Israel’s policy goals, Bergman notes.</p>
<p>Bergman raises moral and legal concerns provoked by
state-sponsored killing, including the existence of
separate legal systems for secret agents and the rest of
Israel. But he presents the operations, for the most
part, as achieving their aims. While many credit the
barrier Israel built along and inside the West Bank with
stopping assaults on Israeli citizens in the early
2000s, he argues that what made the difference was “a
massive number of targeted killings of terrorist
operatives.”</p>
<p>One of Bergman’s most important sources was Meir Dagan,
a recent head of Mossad for eight years who died in
early 2016. Toward the end of his career, Dagan fell out
with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly over
launching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said
intelligence techniques such as selling the country
faulty parts for its reactors – which Israel and the
U.S. were doing – weren’t enough.</p>
<p>Dagan argued back that these techniques, especially
assassinations, would do the job. As Bergman quotes him
saying, “In a car, there are 25,000 parts on average.
Imagine if 100 of them are missing. It would be very
hard to make it go. On the other hand, sometimes it’s
most effective to kill the driver, and that’s that.”</p>
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