ISRAELI MILITARY: ASSASSINATION POLICY

There sons and four grandchildren of hamas political leader, ishia assassinated in gaza their names added to a long list of people killed by israeli targeted operations worldwide. So why does israel pursue such a policy and what's its impact? This is inside story, hello.

to the program I'm sill ramen, these seven family members of hamas political leader, isma, hania assassinated by israel on wednesday in gaza, are the latest victims of israeli. Targeted killings. Israel has been doing this around the world for decades. The reputation of its overseas intelligence are mossad has become part of israeli propaganda in cinema and tv serials a license to kill anyone. Israel considers an enemy, the niceties of international law ignored, as are the politics or criminal repercussions of such acts. So is this tactic? An official policy of israel and if so, what's its impact or is it just about vengeance, we'll put that to our guests in a moment, but first this report from ktia lopez hudan. It was a targeted israeli strike in gaza city, that assassinated three sons and four grandchildren of homas political leader, isma hania. He says the killings will simply strengthen palestinian determination they believe that, if they kill or assassinate leaders or their next of kin, that we will abandon our people, that we will abandon our resistance.

They are mistaken. This noble blood that is spilled, including my own children, will harden our resolve. Make us more defiant, more adamant to continue to march on this road, the road of struggle and existence until we win our freedom and the lawful rights of the palestinian peoples are restored. The attack follows israel's bombing of iran's consulate building in the syrian capital damascus that killed several top iranian officials. Earlier this month, another suspected israeli drone strike in lebanon's capital back in january, killed, sali aluri, the founder of hamas's armed wing, palestinian leaders say those killed are quickly replaced. We are a resistance movement and the resistance must be victorious. The resistance will be victorious for decades. Israel has assassinated people in the occupied territories and abroad, palestinian leaders and iranian scientists among them. According to studies by israeli author ronan bergman up until 2018 israel assassinated 2700 people worldwide in the past leaders, who've rallied for a two-state solution have also been targeted. Palestinian president yasid arafa died unexpectedly in 2004, and many suspect israel may have been behind his death now decades later, the war in gaza has reignited past tensions and fueled new ones. Some believe the israeli assassinations of hania's family were intended to derail negotiations between israel and hamas bb and I had a long discussion. Us president, joe biden is pressuring israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu to reach a ceasefire, but many now say: israel's. Continued use of assassinations will further risk the long-term prospects of peace in the region. Kia lope, oan, al jazer for insight story. Let's bring in our guests now in tel aviv ilan bab, professor of history, ex university in the uk in boston ramik, kururi, distinguished public policy.

Fellow at the assam faris institute at the american university of beirut, a columnist and analyst, and in pittsburgh pennsylvania colin clark, director of research at the sufian group, specializing in the future of terrorism, security and transnational crime. Very warm welcome to you, gentlemen, on this edition of inside story ilan papy can I come to you in tel aviv. First, you know, we've got the facts. There israel says that those that were killed, killed yesterday were hamas terrorists and collateral damage.

The palestinians say they were the children of is h. It's all about the narrative, isn't it and the message getting out to the international audience? Yes, uh I think you for having me in your program. Uh, yes, I think it is. It is about the narrative and it's also about uh how detailed ai can be uh part of the israeli narrative. I, don't know if this came out in english, but definitely in hebrew was that this was a decision taken by a very junior officer uh, who took the decision uh in a a blink of a moment uh because of the uh intelligence that he received, which I think is a lie. I think israel knew exactly who they targeted. They knew these were the the the sons of is I. Do think also that they knew that they were grandchildren and there, but didn't care uh and therefore uh.

It's it's not just a matter of one narrative against the other. It's really a fabricated kind of an explanation for something that you know the pictures themselves tell the story in a very clear way, but I do agree if I may just add something uh uh, although there might be an immediate reason for this, as as your reporter has me mentioned, you know that netan wanted this act in order to derail uh. The negotiation, which is definitely a feasible and probable explanation. One should remember that the zanis movement, even before the creation of the state of israel uh targeted, palestinian uh, uh political elites, cultural elites, uh out of this kind of orientalist belief that if you hit the elites or the leaderships, you have an easier uh way of or easier time in oppressing and repressing uh the people you want to colonize ethnically cleanse or or imprison in big prisons, as they did in the west bank in the gaza strip sure so. I think there's also an historical structure here and probably also more immediate uh reasons and I'm sure we'll talk about them a bit later. Indeed, we will. We will unpick this as we go along uh, hopefully quite deeply. I just want to go to ramy curry about this, because the impact of such an assassination, however, you want to describe it assassination targeted killing it it.

It has an impact, its surprises and its shocks. That's what the israelis want. It's what the reaction might be from the palestinians in the short term and the long term to this well, the israelis have uh shown clearly since the priate zionist days, um really the last century, they're very good at killing, palestinians they're, very good at ethnic cleansing. Um, expanding colonial settlements, koling western imperial powers to helping them set up their settler. Colonial aparte state they're not very good at understanding the realities of how people in palestine and arab countries actually behave as human beings uh, and they behave actually exactly the same as jews and israelis behave that if you're subjugated or tortured or uh deported or humiliated. You react with resistance, you fight back. You may not fight back immediately, but you fight back the whole growth of hamas hisbah. Now in sah and yemen and others. This phenomenon of the last 40 years, uh, has profoundly changed: the landscape of the arab israeli conflict and the regional uh picture, and the israelis and the americans with them I think don't understand, uh that these the people are willing to fight. They know they're going to get killed. They don't uh shy from uh taking actions or making statements uh against israel um and the israelis just keep practicing their same policy of trying to kill leaders without any real impact, because the arabs, the hamas, the hasah and others are prepared for this. And there are lines of succession that are very uh, very clear uh. So this is a a real problem: uh for the israelis, how how to come up with a better policy than the failed one that they continue to use now and we'll talk about those lines of succession as well in the program colin I come to you in pittsburgh I mean targeted.

Killings are justifiable from the israeli point of view. Uh they've been going on for decades, not just in the occupied territories, as as our report did say. Why has this specific israeli policy that's been running for quite a long time is very evident and obvious allowed to continue in the international domain without any obvious sanction from the us from europe in general yeah well I mean it would be difficult for the united states to say much credibly, given uh the way the united states has uh. You know engaged in the global war and terrorism. I think you know uh, basically setting a precedent uh for targeted assassinations.

Uh of terrorists, without uh due process without trial, you know, but this goes far beyond the united states. This is something that the israelis have uh touted as an effective counterterrorism, tool uh there's been many books, many studies written on uh, you target assassinations as a counterterrorism policy and and so uh. What we haven't seen is targeted assassinations bringing success. Often it's the opposite: they're removing leaders, uh and in the process up through the ranks, come even more battle hardened, more extreme uh leaders, uh they're, eliminating people that they could probably do business with uh I' I'd suggest. Looking at the case of northern ireland, where uh you know, jerry adams and martin mcginness were labeled terrorists by the british but. Ultimately, those are the people that delivered peace.

Indeed, ramy curri. Let me just bring you in again with with colin here uh that if russia does this and we've seen this quite openly in the last few years, such as uh, the poisoning of litan yenko in 2006 sc by sergey scripp in 2010, george marov, the the very famous poisoned umbrella incident in 1978 on watero bridge. There's a lot more as well: there were sanctions galore on russia, colin israel. Does it in the name of self-defense or postol course, revenge or terrorism, no one bats, an eyelid yeah. So this is something that uh the united states has has failed consistently to bring pressure on on the israelis uh. You know with regard to the way they conduct counterterrorism. The biden administration has probably broughten more pressure than than some previous administrations, but even there, and especially an election year, uh you're, reaching kind of the maximum amount of of pressure you're likely to see I think the biden administration has mishandled this conflict in many ways uh. But there's a big growing riff between biden netanyahu and it's one that's likely to get worse before it gets better. Ry can I bring you in on that yeah sure there there's a kind of standard double standard or hypocrisy or imperial behavior that big powers use, british american russians all over the world that they're allowed to break the law. They're allowed to kill uh with abandoned, but other people cannot do that and must be uh held accountable in front of some kind of court or uh, possibly sanction.

This is how imperialism works, and this is what the zionist successfully played on starting in you know, 1910 or so they got the british the power of the day to support them in creating a jewish homeland and and an israeli state and a land that was 93% palestinian arab and then the americans after world war ii became the big imperial western power and that's where israel has focused uh its lobbying and pressure. They still have immense israel still has immense pressure, uh on the white, house um, much of congress and some state legislator. In the us and every other dimension of american politics, the ability of israel to expect complete support has has frayed badly and is fraying quickly in campuses, labor unions, media, uh, all kinds of the churches, other institutions, but you still have the white house pretty much giving israel everything it wants, even though, as colin said, there is now verbal uh, um scolding um, but the verbal scolding from the white house is paired with uh massive new weapons transfers and uh financial aid and no real uh diplomatic pressure at all, so we have to judge people by what they do. What the americans do is basically say: keep killing uh we're going to be with youan pepe in tel. Aviv can I just get

your opinion on certainly what the answers we've just had, but about this policy of targeted killing I mean through the years and the decades uh since the the establishment of israel the narrative of how you describe in israel, palestinians or arabs must have changed, especially when we had incidents such as the oslo accords peace with egypt? You know not. Everybody was the enemy. Now, how is it perceived yeah, first of all, uh just to agree with the the other two guests. I've just finished a book called lobbying for zionism on both both sides of the atlantic and it's very clear that both in britain and in the united states uh, the lobby is uh more than 100 years old and therefore works by inertia. There's no need to tell biden what to say when it comes to uh uh, not scolding israel, for its uh policy of killing and therefore it will take quite a while, before this kind of impact on the american uh political decision making would change. Although, as as I think ramy mentioned, the civil society has already changed and therefore I think we should be more optimistic about uh future changes in american policy, but not in the immediate future.

Now uh uh for your question, I I I, do think that the exception is the dehumanization of the palestinians uh I'm, sorry, the rule, the rule is the dehumanization of the palestinians and the exceptions are the moments where you get the impression that maybe palestinians are treated in a different way, but I think all in all in the 120 years of the presence of zionism in historical palestine, the palestinians were dehumanized and dehumanization is a very important part of a settler. Colonial project such as zionism, because settler colonial projects are projects of displacement and replacement, and you

cannot massively ethnically cleanse people or genocide them as you do now, if you don't dehumanize them and therefore that means that not only men are target ted, but also babies and and women, and- and this was uh, the kind of israeli major perception of palestinians now in moments such as the one that unfolded after the service of october, this kind of dehumanization of takes even a more extreme uh form in a way that people allow themselves to say things uh of a genocidal nature that maybe, during more relaxed or calm periods that they are hiding but I think all in all uh. In order to implement the idea that historical palestine should be a jewish state, you had to dehumanize the native indigenous people of palestine, otherwise uh the moral basis of the whole project would have been exposed and and I think that uh, the israeli educational system, the cultural system the socialization processes in the israeli army all kind of create one cohort of graduates after the other. That I'm afraid would continue to see the palestinians as subhumans uh as potential terrorists. Let me just get in there as well deserve everything that comes in their direction yeah, we want to bounce.

We want to bounce the conversation around because you know again, as you say, it comes around that whole issue of silencing your critics, uh colin clark in pittsburgh. Just some examples here about the way israel's policy to silence its critics or get of them works and just for our viewers in 1979 ali hassan salame was the plo leader behind the uh attacks on israeli athletes of the 1972 munich olympics was killed in a remote control bomb in beirut in 2004, shik yasin, the founder of hamas, killed again by us, apache, hellfire missiles in gaza city in 1981. However, in sa paulo in brazil we have jose alberto albano de amar, a brazilian air force lieutenant, who is killed according to the facts that we have at the moment radioactive poisoning, because he mossad agents and israel didn't want brazil becoming a nuclear power. You have the very loud brash attacks on on people in your neighborhood, but further a field away from israel on a different continent. You want to do it a little bit more quietly, it's all about keeping faith or keeping good relations with your allies yeah, and this is a global campaign right. This is transnational and it has been for decades but uh, even with all of the examples that you point to and I could point to several others uh actually uh. What has it done to counter hamas nothing? This is an organization that has actually grown more powerful over the years. So uh, you know targeted assassinations are a tactic, but if they're divorced from a strategy and I would argue a political strategy, you're going to end up in a situation like the israel are in now, where they've had a military campaign, totally divorced from any viable political strategy uh and it's likely to do to to basically kick the can down the road, we're going to be back in the same situation in a year, 18 months, two years uh, but actually you're, going to have a younger generation of palestinians that are even more enraged than the previous generation, because of what they've just lived through rabie curry, very again briefly, I would say, because you want to bounce through this conversation, the policy has changed, hasn't it from the 1950s, where the israelis would use these sorts of targeted killings as a last resort.

A last clinical method- yes I, think so they they israeli supreme court uh, formerly approved targeted assassinations um.

So this is a policy that has the support of the highest levels of the law in u in israel and therefore they just do it uh at r as much as they want they killed as they're doing in gaza now, and they don't get any real accountability. Uh or pressure to stop, but but, as colin said, they're not really succeeding, and if you look at the trend in the last 40 years, the people fighting back against israel uh some governments, some uh armed non-state actors, are much more sophisticated, technologically militarily they're uh doing things that were never possible 20 30 years ago, israel is much more vulnerable um and there there's really a huge need to reassess the entire israeli approach to engaging with or addressing the the palestinian challenge. And you know, when palestine 48748 happened, that there was a one and a half million palestinians there's now 13 million of them. Most of them are still within 100 miles, radius of palestine and israel they're, not going anywhere. They they want a peaceful resolution, but the israelis don't want a peaceful resolution.

They want the jewish superstate in palestine and israel that that acts as the uh external arm of western imperial powers, and there are enough western, imperial powers, who want to do this, and therefore we have this continuing situation, which is a catastrophe uh for everybody, elan pape. In tel, aviv can I just ask how the palestinian uprisings of the inada actually impacted on the way that israeli policy changed when it comes to dealing with the palestinians in you might say, pre-int to post, inter father, well, I think the israelis uh uh government or the israeli government uh immediately after the occupation of the west bank and the gaza strip uh, took a strategic decision that, on the one hand, it will continue to control the west bank and the gaz will never really fully withdraw from it uh but might rule it either directly or indirectly, that was one decision, and the second decision is that, if the palestinians would resist this isra strategy, israel would react with all its might. If you want, they offer two models of a prison, an open prison if the palestinians behaved well, namely, would not result to an uprising and a maximum security prison. If they did react with collective punishment that we all are familiar with a demolition of houses, mass arrests without uh, a trial, ex expulsions and, and indeed uh uh summary executions and killings. So so I think this has not changed. Although israeli governments have changed, and maybe the tactics have changed, the basic israeli uh uh strategy is to continue if I may just end the sentence uh to police, the israeli army is a police force. It polices and not only the army. Hundreds of thousands of israeli are involved in daily maintenance and policing the two prisons that they've created one in the the west bank and the big prison that has um revolted in gaza, and this is going to chip in there because I think we're just going slightly off topic here, because again, you know we're focused on this on this.

On this issue of targeted killings and- and you talk about the general perception of of certainly how uh the palestinians are treated, but how does the israeli public the israeli dispora listening on radio watching television news programs react to the narrative that is a targeted killing right now, yes, but I. Think you, you know, you cannot separate the killings from the strategy in the ideology in this I I I disagree a little bit with ramy and the other guests, because I do think this is the strategy, it's a horrific strategy, but it is a strategy with a hope that one day that can they can really make the whole of palestine a jewish state. Now, as far as israeli public uh is concerned, it has the full support of the israeli jewish electorate and and and that's why I think you have to connect it to the way uh uh, the jewish public is educated, indoctrinated to dehumanize the palestinians. This is seen as actually a work of the elite part of the israeli army.

This is the height and look at the situation. Now there is no picture of triumph in gaza there is a hope that the israeli public would see the killing of the three children of han as at least equivalent to a picture of victory, because they have totally failed uh in that operation that they have started on the 8th of october against I'm. Going to stop you there, if you don't mind ell and just pop over to colin uh in in pittsburgh,

because I just wonder what the strategy will be now, because we've seen targeted killings in lebanon in in the past few months as well, uh we're seeing a ratcheting up of violence from israel, though they haven't, admitted it, but we we know generally commentators believe they are behind, obviously that the bombing of the iranian consulate office in damascus. It is ratcheting up in a way that the global uh politique do not want, and it's worrying, america. Well. The cynic in me would say that this is a deliberate ploy uh by you know, netanyahu and his cronies to deflect attention away from gaza uh and which is a conflict. That's not going well for the idf and to broaden the conflict to drag in iran and, namely to drag in the united states uh as a way of kind of saying, look, this isn't just an israeli thing. This is a regional issue and I'd argue we're in a low boil: regional civil regional war, now uh, when you consider, what's going on in lebanon in yemen uh in iraq, uh that that es and flows and so I think that's. The goal of netanyahu is to paint this as something broader uh and to take the focus away from gaza because again uh when you're killing, you know uh the kids and grandkids of political uh, hamas political members uh. That means means that you aren't able to achieve your goals, and so you're you're kind of reaching they're looking for tactical victories right maran is, is the highest ranking. Hamas, member uh that's been killed so far, uh the israelis have very few tactical victories to point to and they have 33,000 civilian deaths that the world is asking. Why right ramy very quickly, then let let me just come in here are the israelis running out of ideas when it comes to targeted killing and therefore these um over the- border incidents are a way of deflecting, perhaps the lack of I don't want to say imagination, but the lack of direction that that the israeli military or politique have right now, yeah, there's two dimensions.

This one is that the israelis are still trying to defeat hamas, which they're not going to be able to do no more than they could defeat, hasbalah or others they're they're, trying that with massive killings and destruction. The other part of this is relates to what elan said about the ideology of zionism for the last 20 years. I've just finished a a little study of uh israeli propaganda points, uh, which I'm going to publish next week, analyzing. What they've been saying for the last 100 years and the last 55 years in which I've engaged in debates with israelis and pro-israeli people in the west and and this shows that israel has consistently said that it wants the estate for the jewish people.

But it's parallel with its self image as a bastion of western democracy, humanism, enlightenment and a good life, and they want to bring this to the uh uncivilized arabs. And so they see this confrontation as not just with palestine, but with iran and with syria and with other people in the region, and they desperately want the united states to fight that battle for them. But the united states is pretty irresponsible, but not quite to the extent that they're going to get into a war with hisbah and iran so is israel is in what the political scientists call a real pickle. They don't quite know what to do and all they can is keep killing and keep telling lies and exaggerations, and this is what we're going to keep seeing. Indeed, sadly, we have to leave it there. There is so much more that I wanted to ask, but I'm sure we'll be coming back to this subject with you, gentlemen, again here on inside story I'd like to thank you so much for joining me. Elan pape ramik, kururi and colen clark thanks so much for your time, gentlemen, and thank you as well for watching as well. You can see the program again anytime by visiting our website at ala.com and for further discussion. Go to our facebook page. That's facebook.com/ aj inside story. You can also join the conversation on x our handle there is at aj, insid story from is raman and all of the team here on inside story thanks very much for your time and your

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