Book Review

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Ronen Bergman, John Murray (Publishers) 2018

By Robert Barwick

Moshe Dayan, Israel’s famous general and hero of the 1967 Six Day War, was Chief of the General Staff on 30 April 1956 when he delivered the following eulogy for a young Israeli Defence Force reserves lieutenant who had been killed by Palestinian militants:

“Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance …

“We are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews, annihilated because they had no country, gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people. …

“We must not flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and await the moment when they are strong enough to get our blood. We will not avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak.”

In his 2018 book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Israeli investigative reporter Ronen Bergman called Dayan’s eulogy “the seminal formulation of Israeli militarism”. But Bergman writes that Dayan was also acknowledging that “from the perspective of the Arabs, [the Jews] came as invaders. Therefore the Arabs—justifiably, from their point of view—hated the Jews.” (Emphasis added.)

Moshe Dayan’s frank perspective takes on an even greater significance in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack in 2023. Contrary to the narrative from the Netanyahu government and its apologists around the world that Hamas “started” a war with its “unprovoked” attack, one can imagine the eye patch-sporting general asking: “What did we expect?” By the formulation in his eulogy, he certainly would have demanded an explanation from Netanyahu as to how Hamas had been able to breach Israel’s security (for which an adequate explanation still has not been given). As a military leader of the fledgling state in 1956, Dayan was very familiar with the true history of violence in Israel, and he knew it was not one-sided, as Israel’s apologists today pretend it is; in fact, Dayan knew very well that the original perpetrators of terrorism, and genocidal ethnic cleansing, were on the Israeli side, not the Palestinian side. He justified some of it in his eulogy—in the Zionist terms of being essential to securing a homeland that would ensure the survival of the Jewish people—but he couldn’t deny it.

Much of Dayan’s perspective is lost in modern Israel, which has become increasingly messianic, gripped by a religious fanaticism that its actions are ordained by God. Ronen Bergman’s book, however, documents important facts about the cycle of violence that has raged between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1940s, of which most people today are ignorant. It is not comprehensive, by any means, because as the author explains in a note on the sources for his book, the Israeli security state did everything it could to suppress its own archives and block insiders from speaking to him. Enough contrarian ex-Mossad and Shin Bet officers did speak to Bergman, and share their files, that he was able to compile a stunning picture of how Israel’s self-justified attempts to “protect” its security has fuelled decades of terrorism on both sides.

None of what Bergman reveals is a justification for terrorism, but it is an explanation, and it does illustrate the double standard that the label of terrorism is not used when a state perpetrates a massacre, only when a resistance force is the perpetrator.

He documents numerous instances of horrific, undeniable Israel terrorism, including:

• The wave of pre-1948 Jewish terrorist attacks in British Palestine committed by the notorious Irgun and Stern Gang, the leaders of which later became leaders of Israel;
• The 1953 Qibya massacre of 69 mostly Palestinian women and children by future Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and a force of 130 men who snuck into the village and used explosives to deliberately blow up 43 houses with everyone sleeping inside, as revenge for Palestinians killing 15 Israelis a few days earlier (not covered in the book, but which this writer discovered when looking for more information about the Quibya massacre, is the equally horrific Kafr Qasim massacre, when the IDF summarily executed 49 Palestinian civilians, including 19 men, 6 women and 23 children, for breaching a curfew that had come into effect only hours earlier, and which the IDF officers knew the Palestinians were unaware of because they had been working in the field all day, but they shot them all dead anyway);
• Ariel Sharon’s secret IDF unit which in 1981 killed hundreds of civilians in a wave of terrorist car bomb attacks in Lebanon against Palestinian targets, for which they set up a fake terrorist organisation called Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners to claim responsibility, in order to try to provoke a retaliation by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation that would justify a full-blown Israeli invasion of Lebanon;
• The 16 September 1982 massacre of at least 700 and as many as 2,750 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon by Phalangists, the Lebanese Christian militia, operating under Israeli guidance; and many more.

Aside from such terrorist attacks, Bergman’s book documents myriad incidents of Israel assassinating its designated enemies, which is its favoured method of supposedly countering threats against the Israeli state, whether from terrorist groups, or from other states, or from the development of threatening technology i.e. its assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

While we are constantly told that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” and the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”, what emerges from the book is the picture of a state that justifies all manner of international crimes on the basis of protecting itself from threats, and seems to get away with it, thanks to its great and powerful friend the USA. Does it really get away with it though? Israel, as the protagonist in the conflict with the power, has not merely perpetuated a cycle of violence for almost eight decades, but has fuelled it. This violence has claimed the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians over the decades, most recently on October 7, 2023 (although the historical Israeli civilian death toll is dwarfed by the Palestinian toll, even prior to the 50,000 deaths in Gaza in the last 15 months). It has made peace impossible to achieve, kept Israel’s citizens in a state of permanent fear, and increasingly radicalised them into the outlook of the extremist messianic cult that now controls the Netanyahu government through National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir1 and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believe they must be hardline to fulfill biblical prophecy so the Messiah can come and destroy all their enemies. (The Australian Citizens Party exposed this extremist agenda and its foreign backers in its December 2023 report, “Plunging towards World War III: The Made-in-London ‘Temple Mount Plot’ Behind the Israel-Hamas War”.)

Peace will never be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians unless the truth that is exposed in Bergman’s book—that the state of Israel is also a perpetrator of actual terrorism and therefore has no moral authority over the Palestinians—is acknowledged. Only then will the rest of the world take a more even-handed approach to persuading both sides to agree to the preconditions for a peaceful settlement.

Australian Alert Service, 22 January 2025