Rise and Kill First Quotes

“Dagan had no love for the media. “I’ve reached the conclusion that it is an insatiable monster,” he would tell me later, “so there’s no point in maintaining a relationship with it.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“policy. The lessons that the new Jews of Palestine learned from the Holocaust were that the Jewish people would always be under the threat of destruction, that others could not be relied upon to protect the Jews, and that the only way to do so was to have an independent state. A people living with this sense of perpetual danger of annihilation is going to take any and all measures, however extreme, to obtain security, and will relate to international laws and norms in a marginal manner, if at all.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Indeed, in many respects the story of Israel’s intelligence community as recounted in this book has been one of a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures. Toward the end of his life, Dagan, like Sharon, understood this. He came to the conclusion that only a political solution with the Palestinians—the two-state solution—could end the 150-year conflict”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“It suits us to think that it was the extreme fascists, the fanatics, who were the killers,” he said. “The truth is otherwise: The battalion that carried out this massacre was a rear-echelon Wehrmacht unit. The fighting units were at the front.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Israel’s reliance on assassination as a military tool did not happen by chance, but rather stems from the revolutionary and activist roots of the Zionist movement, from the trauma of the Holocaust, and from the sense among Israel’s leaders and citizens that the country and its people are perpetually in danger of annihilation and that, as in the Holocaust, no one will come to their aid when that happens.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Black”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“For by subterfuge you will make war.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“OPERATION FLAG BEARER WAS a particularly thorny case. At least twice, according to Shin Bet records, authorization for a hit on Flag Bearer was withheld for fear of harming innocents. The first time was on March 6, 2002. Shehade had been placed with a high degree of certainty in a south Gaza apartment, but because of the presence of a large number of civilians in the same building, along with the knowledge that his wife, Leila, and possibly also his fifteen-year-old daughter, Iman, were with him, the attack was called off. Three days later, a suicide bomber sent by Shehade blew himself up in Café Moment, near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, killing eleven civilians. On June 6, another attempt on Shehade was called off, for similar reasons. Twelve days after that, a suicide bomber from the Hamas military wing killed nineteen passengers on a bus in Jerusalem. The frustration in the Israeli security establishment was palpable. As IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon said, “I told my American counterparts about this business, and it exasperated them. I told them that at first we held back because his wife was with him, that he never moved without her. From their angle, that was insane. ‘What,’ they asked me, ‘because of his wife you didn’t attack?’ Their criteria regarding collateral damage was very different from the suspenders that we’d tied our own hands with.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Nissim, who was the son of a chief rabbi of Israel, would never regret that he’d persuaded Rabin. “In the whole world,” he said, “there isn’t another army that is as meticulous as the IDF about values and norms of conduct and assuring that innocent people aren’t hurt. But there is a Talmudic precept: ‘If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Ezer simply didn’t understand the Arabs. … Concessions to the Arabs are taken by them as a sign of weakness and weariness of the struggle.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Israel was a “cancerous growth, this contaminating germ,” he said in a television interview, “a forward imperialist garrison in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world. It is a society of war, a warlike society of warriors, men and women alike. There is no civil society in this entity.” The meaning was clear: All Israelis, whatever age or gender, were a legitimate target for jihad. Gradually,”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Finally, a recruit would undergo one last test. The agency would send him home, to his own neighborhood and his own social circle, in disguise and with his alias. If he could circulate there, among those who knew him best, without being identified, he was deemed capable of operating in a hostile nation of strangers.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“The divide between the combat-sated generals, who once had "a knife between their teeth" but later grasped the limits of force, and the majority of the people of Israel, is the sad reality in which Meir Dagan's life came to its end.

ch 35 [paragraph 10] p.631”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“near Nazareth,”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“during the presidency of George W. Bush, the United States of America carried out 48 targeted killing operations, according to one estimate, and under President Barack Obama there were 353 such attacks.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“All of those attacks were carried out by a hitherto unknown organization called Ailool al-Aswad—Arabic for “Black September,” so named to memorialize the massacre in Jordan. The name may have been new, but this was not a new organization. The Mossad quickly discovered that Black September was another of the ever-evolving Fatah factions, led by Salah Khalaf (nom de guerre: Abu Iyad), the former commander of Rassed, the PLO’s intelligence branch, who was trying to maintain his terrorist standing amid recurring infighting.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“Arafat, who took to wearing a kaffiyeh headdress draped to look like a map of Palestine, had become the symbol of the Palestinian struggle.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“debasement.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

“ophthalmology, when his father summoned him back to”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations