The history of the world is littered with selective murders, as old as civilization itself. Intelligence Operations – a covert form of State terrorism hidden under the controversial mantle of the principle of self-defense – whose declared objective is to deal an irreversible blow to the enemy or opponent, but which in most cases, as the annals show, do not eradicate the threat, but they accentuate and perpetuate it. Perhaps the most iconic and the one that first appears in our memory is that of Osama Bin Laden, leader of the armed group of Wahhabi-Saudi inspiration Al Qaeda, wonderfully recreated in the remembered film The darkest nightby Kathryn Bigelow.
But there are many others: the 2023 attack in Vancouver against Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom New Delhi accused of terrorism; the one perpetrated in 2017 against Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, asphyxiated with nerve gas in Kuala Lumpur; the plane crash in 2023 of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner group; or the death 50 years ago in Argentina of the Chilean general Carlos Prats, ordered by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The palm, however, belongs to Israel, who also boasts of such an infamous record. in his book Rise And Kill First (2018), the Jewish journalist Ronen Bergman assures that since 1945, the date on which the Hebrew terrorist organization Irgun accelerated its attacks against the British protectorate in Palestine, no Western country has carried out as many political assassinations as the Jewish State, the majority – around 500 between 1980 and 2000. The most massive was the one that took the lives of twenty Palestinian militants in Italy, France, Greece and Cyprus, in response to the attack against the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Games in 1972.
Regardless of the color of the government – whether labor, conservative or, like the current one, far-right, dominated by the settler party and ultra-orthodox groups -, since the dawn of this century, its main objective has been the Lebanese Shiite party Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian dictatorship and Hamas. In the case of the Palestinian Wahhabi extremist group, the first was against its leader and founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, victim of an Israeli missile in 2004. He was followed by Abdelaziz al Rantisi and Adnan al-Ghoul (2004), Nizar Rayyan (2009), and Saleh Al-Arouri and Ismail Haniya (2024), among others.
Observed from a distance, the effectiveness of these selective assassinations – based on the principle si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war) – are called into question. Twelve years after the disappearance of Bin Laden, the organization is still very much alive, especially in the Sahel, where it emerges as a systemic danger for Europe. Hamas has not lost its ability to threaten Israel, and everything indicates that the same will happen with Hezbollah after the assassination of Nasrallah. The explanation comes from a basic principle that governs these organizations: their hierarchical command structure is horizontal. They are governed by Shura Councils, made up of between seven and nine members, who make decisions in a collegial manner and allow succession to be automatic, with hardly any changes in tactics and strategies, with little room for dissent, and a divine will to persevere rooted.
They have achieved, however, the other objective: that the conflicts become chronic. But above all, and in the face of the inaction of States due to terrorist acts committed by governments in other States, they have managed to strengthen impunity by undermining international law and respect for human rights with every bullet, every missile, every poison. emanated after World War II. In 1976, and after the assassinations of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the US Senate declared political assassinations incompatible with constitutional principles, international order and morality. And then-president Gerald Ford banned them in an executive order. It started from a principle: in all wars – even asymmetric ones -, as in love, not everything goes. Especially if we want to avoid the deterioration of a moral world order, based on law and humanity.
