Delivered. It is a vertigo-inducing book, which one reads breathlessly, with a feeling of dumbfounding, which sometimes borders on uneasiness. Its title is inspired by a verse from the Talmud ("If someone comes to kill you, get up and kill him first"), often cited by Israeli security officials to justify their actions. In 900 pages, Ronen Bergman, a seasoned Israeli investigative journalist, tells the story of one of the most controversial practices in the Hebrew state: targeted assassinations.
Marked by the trauma of the Holocaust, convinced that the country and its inhabitants are in perpetual danger of annihilation, the founders of Israel considered the extrajudicial liquidations – and the innocent victims who accompany them very often – to be a necessary evil . Over the years, thanks to the development of military technology and the refinement of its intelligence agencies, including the Mossad, the Hebrew State has developed a murder machine without equivalent in the Western world.
Countless secret operations
The story opens with the ambush set for Thomas James Wilkin, an English police officer, shot down by radical Zionist militants in the streets of Jerusalem in 1944. And it ends with the elimination in 2010 of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, responsible for the acquisition of weapons within Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, killed by lethal injection, in his hotel room in Dubai, by a team of Mossad.
Between these two eras, the author retraces, with breathtaking luxury, an incalculable number of secret operations, aimed at silencing not only perpetrators of terrorist acts, but also political executives, high ranking officers and scientists from hostile countries. Some of these episodes are well known, such as the hunt for members of Black September, the underground Palestinian organization responsible for taking hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which killed eleven Israeli athletes.
In some cases, Bergman confirms the suspicions of involvement of the Israeli secret services, as in the elimination, between 2007 and 2012, of half a dozen Iranian nuclear experts, killed by bullets or by the explosion of a bomb attached to their car. Or in the assassination, in 1990, in Brussels, of Gérald Bull, a Canadian ballistics specialist, recruited by the Iraqi regime, to build a gigantic cannon capable of striking both Tehran and Tel Aviv.
