Israeli Journalist Ronen Bergman Reveals Israel’s Terrorist Bombing Campaign In Lebanon
Between 1979 and 1983 a “shadowy group” calling itself The Front for the Liberation of Lebanon From Foreigners (FLLF) committed dozens of terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Syria which caused the deaths of hundreds of civilians. The FLLF was also behind the failed assassination attempt against John Gunther Dean, the American ambassador in Lebanon, on August 27, 1980. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLO), whose members were targeted by the FLLF, accused the Front of being a proxy for the Israeli security services. Ambassador Dean, who criticized Israel’s actions in Lebanon shortly before the attempt on his life, also pointed the finger at Israel. This accusation (as well as Dean’s belief that Israeli agents were involved in the death of Pakistani President Zia ul Haq) would eventually lead to him being declared mentally unfit, ending his 30 year diplomatic career.
But Dean and Arafat have now been vindicated by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, who interviewed the men behind the terrorist campaign of the FLLF for his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. The book received widespread acclaim from critics, security experts and the media, who simultaneously display remarkable discipline in collectively ignoring the implications of what it actually reveals. As journalist Rémi Brulin details in a review for Mondoweiss, Israel’s terrorist bombing operations have been portrayed as a “counter-terrorism” program of “targeted” assassinations.
In the book, and on the pages of the New York Times, Bergman recounts how in 1979 Refael "Raful" Eitan, the head of the IDF, Avigdor Ben-Gal, head of Northern Command, and Meir Dagan, “a legendary spy and assassin” whom Ehud Barak called “our expert on Lebanon”, established the FLLF with the aim of causing “chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.” Bergman interviewed both Dagan and Ben-Gal, as well as many other former agents and officers involved in these operations, which neatly conform to most accepted definitions of terrorism. The U.S Department of Defense, for instance, defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
While revealing this program, which he admits “killed hundreds of people”, Bergman also attempts to cover it up with a veil of equivocation. The intended targets, Dagan and Ben-Gal claim, were always terrorists, PLO operatives, and never the civilians around them. But faced with the undeniable fact that the majority of victims were noncombatants, Dagan immediately shifts the blame to his Lebanese proxies, referred to in the book as “a pack of wild dogs”, a term featured prominently as the title of the relevant chapter. “You can give him explosives and tell him to go blow up a PLO headquarters somewhere,” Dagan explains, but the “wild dogs” have an agenda of their own, “so sometimes it happened that it (the bomb) went off somewhere else.” The use of agents from among the savage Arabs has unfortunate consequences and carries a “moral price”, but to Dagan these are preferable to sending Israeli agents (who presumably would follow a higher moral code), thereby putting Jewish lives at risk.
The indiscriminate use of car bombs in crowded streets and refugee camps is beyond the pale for most westerners, which may account for the media blind spot concerning Rise and Kill First. As if part of some eerie conspiracy, neither The New York Times, nor The Washington Post, nor The Guardian, nor the progressive online news outlet The Intercept, nor the nominally Leftist Israeli daily Haaretz, which calls some of the revelations sickening, mention the FLLF terror campaign even once in their reviews. Haaretz refers to Dagan’s murderous operations in Lebanon simply as “targeted killings”. Writing for the New York Times, former CIA analyst Kenneth M. Pollack compares Israel’s “targeted” assassinations to a drug “that Israel uses to treat the worst symptom (terrorism) of a terrible disease (Palestinian anger)”. This echoes Bergman’s own view that “the standards of conduct prevalent in corrupt and civil-war-torn Lebanon began to infect the Israelis.” According to this view, even when Israel perpetrates state terror it remains the victim of terror, being as it were infected by the Palestinians, whom it attempts to cure by administering extrajudicial killings, a drug to which it is itself addicted, “in part,” writes Pollack, “because it is so effective at suppressing the symptoms (Palestinian terrorism).”
Rise and Kill first is a trove of Israeli war crimes, including some committed by Israel’s naval commandos, Flotilla 13, but Bergman prefaces every account with descriptions of terrorist attacks committed by Palestinians against Israelis, creating the sense that Israel’s crimes, no matter how heinous, are always committed to protect Israeli citizens, or as retaliations in a bloody vendetta between two equal adversaries, never as calculated operations with a broader political aim. For example, he begins the chapter describing the car bombing campaign in Lebanon with the killing of American nature photographer Gail Rubin, the Coastal Road massacre in Haifa in 1978, and the shocking murder of three members of the Haran family in Nahariya in 1979, which inspire Raful Eitan to give Ben-Gal the order to “kill them all.” The title of the book refers to the Talmudic prescription to “rise and kill first” those who come to kill you, setting the tones for Bergman’s “hasbara”.
But the interviews Bergman conducted undermine any possible attempt to excuse the crimes that he documents. One former officer of the Mossad describes the program as mass killing for killing’s sake, intended to sow chaos and alarm. “Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?” he laments. Another is quoted as saying: “I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.”
Despite the involvement of the IDF Chief of Staff, Bergman asserts that these operations were executed “almost entirely without the authorization or knowledge of the rest of the military, the defense ministry, the intelligence agencies or the government.” However, this attempt to distance Israel from what were intended to be deniable operations ironically places them even more firmly within the official US definition of terrorism. Since politically motivated attacks against civilian targets are routinely committed by western governments, including the United States, Title 22 of the US Code specifies that its definition of terrorism applies to “politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”
Therefore, had Israel openly bombed West Beirut on those same days in 1981 it would not constitute terrorism. But the operations in question, which were “not officially sanctioned by the IDF”, involved explosives secretly prepared and concealed in cans of oil and preserves by Ben-Gal, Dagan and their accomplices at a workshop in Kibbutz Mahanayim in the Galilee. These were then transported to their targets by local agents in backpacks, on bikes, and on donkeys. Car bombs were prepared by the IDF’s Special Operations Executive (apparently not part of “the rest of the military” which Bergman says was completely unaware of these operations). Once in place the car bombs were detonated remotely with the use of aerial drones.
One exploded near a PLO clothing factory in the Fakhani district of Beirut in September of 1981, killing 83 people, mostly women workers trapped inside the burning factory. Another mass casualty attack, originally attributed to The Muslim Brotherhood but now known to have been the work of the FLLF, took place on a crowded street in the Al Azbakiyah district of Aleppo, Syria on September 17, 1981. A car bomb was detonated in front of a school and destroyed three apartment buildings, killing 90 people. Naturally, most of the victims were small children.
Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanon and Syria, however, were not “killing for killing’s sake”. Despite his apologetics, Bergman clearly spells out their strategic aim: “(Defense Minister Ariel) Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians.” And also “to sow such chaos in the Palestinian areas of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut that there would be a genuine and cast-iron reason for an Israeli invasion.”
Israel’s objective was the destruction of the Palestinian national movement, specifically the PLO. Yasser Arafat, however, quickly realized that the FLLF was nothing but a front for Israeli intelligence, and that Ariel Sharon “was trying to goad the Palestinians into breaching the ceasefire so that he could launch his invasion.” Arafat ordered his men to keep the peace both in Lebanon and the occupied territories.
Refusing to allow the Palestinians even a limited form of sovereignty, Israel rejected the Reagan Plan, the first US recognition that the Palestinians have the right to govern themselves, and chose instead to expand Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. An Arab peace offer, tacitly supported by the PLO, was likewise rejected by Israel (and vetoed by the US) in 1976. And earlier in 1975, Israel responded to UN Security Council discussions of a diplomatic settlement to the conflict by launching a “preventive, not punitive” bombing raid against Lebanon that killed over 50 people. Arafat himself was removed from the wanted list as early as 1974, when the Mossad determined that he had become a political leader. “In the face of this Palestinian restraint,” Bergman explains, “the leaders of the front (Ben-Gal and Dagan) decided to move up a level,” which gave birth to a truly diabolical plot.
Sharon put Arafat back on the kill list, and even ordered the air force to shoot down any passenger plane if there was reason to believe that Yasser Arafat was on board. The new plan, called Operation Olympia, was to detonate a truck loaded with two tons of explosives near a theatre in east Beirut where the PLO leadership was set to hold a festive dinner in December of 1981. This plan was abandoned in favor of one even more barbarous: planting bombs under the VIP dais of a stadium where the PLO would hold celebrations on January 1, 1982, and detonating a truck and two cars outside the stadium “about a minute after the explosives under the dais, when the panic was at its height and the people who had survived were trying to get away.” General Raful Eitan spelled out the mission’s objectives in a note to Efraim Sneh, a senior IDF officer: “Those PLO leaders who weren’t killed by the blast in the stadium would know right away what they had to do: to attack Israel, to breach the ceasefire, and to give Sharon, who was desperate to invade Lebanon, the pretext to do that.”
The lives of the hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who would have died in the attack were of no concern. The only thing that saved them from death was Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to cancel the operation out of fear that the Soviet ambassador would also be present at the stadium.
The bombs were already in place under the dais, and had to be removed. “What would have happened if Begin had allowed Dagan to go ahead with Olympia?” Bergman asks, and Dagan, with his typical mendacity and convoluted rationalization, laments that eliminating the PLO leadership could have prevented the bloody invasion of Lebanon which began six months later. As already mentioned, the entire purpose of these bombings was to provoke the Palestinians to react, thereby giving the Israeli leadership a casus belli to invade Lebanon, after the US made it clear that it would not allow a ground invasion absent a serious breach of the ceasefire by the Palestinians.
Israel’s leadership was determined to assassinate the leaders of the PLO and prevent a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. In July of 1982, Yasser Arafat met with Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, a well-known Leftist peacenik who had been a member of Begin’s terrorist group the Irgun before 1948 and expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause despite the PLO’s use of terrorism. This was the beginning of a dialogue that would lead to the Oslo Accords and the PLO’s eventual transformation into the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s corrupt subcontractor in the occupied territories. As revealed for the first time in Rise and Kill First, Ariel Sharon ordered the Mossad to tail Avnery and two other Israelis accompanying him, and to use the meeting to assassinate Arafat. In internal discussions the Mossad concluded that their plan would likely result in the death of Avnery and his companions, a price it was willing to pay. Fortunately for them, the PLO’s operational security was effective enough, and the Mossad hitmen lost their trail.
Rise and Kill First spans a period of one hundred years. In it, Bergman makes the case that since World War Two Israel has assassinated more people than any other country. Countering accusations that this is a work of propaganda designed to justify targeted killings, he explains that his purpose in writing it was simply “getting the facts right on Israeli intelligence”. He wanted to show “that Israeli intelligence is the best in the world. And that it can come to any challenge posed to it by the political arena,” but that assassinations are no replacement for diplomacy.
Alternatively, it can be viewed as part of the Israeli practice of projecting a ruthless image, both to its internal and external audiences, while simultaneously trying to maintain a Liberal persona. The assassination program is portrayed as the work mavericks and rogue commanders, not state policy. Some noble Israeli official who raises moral and legal objections is present in every chapter. Bergman writes:
“Nowadays, when the same kind of extrajudicial killing that Israel has used for decades is being used daily by America against its enemies, it is appropriate not only to admire the impressive operational capabilities that Israel has built, but also to study the high moral price that has been paid, and still is being paid, for the use of such power.”
With this balancing act, Israelis can portray themselves as both morally superior to the other peoples of the Middle East and, when the situation calls for it, equal to them in savagery. But whatever Bergman’s motives may be, we owe him a debt for writing this book, which he researched over the course of eight years, conducting, according to him, a thousand interviews. Ariel Sharon, Raful Eitan, Menachem Begin, Avigdor Ben-Gal and Meir Dagan have all since passed away. Without Bergman’s work some of their greatest sins would be buried with them.
Reviewing the book for The Intercept, Charles Glass writes that “Israel is a rarity among nations: Rather than confine its assassins to the shadows, it promotes them to prime minister.” He was referring of course to Menachem Begin, under whose leadership the Irgun assassinated British soldiers and British, Arab and Jewish civilians, and, with the aid of both the Palmach and the Haganah (which became the core of the IDF), perpetrated the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 90 people, as well as the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, one of several attacks designed to drive away the Palestinians from what was formerly Palestine, giving birth to an intractable conflict. Begin served as Prime Minister of Israel between 1977 and 1983, overseeing the aforementioned terror campaign and two invasions of Lebanon, which completed his evolution from terrorist to prime minister and again to terrorist.
Ariel Sharon, remembered in Israel as one of its greatest generals and “a man without principles, without human feelings, and without any moral norms whatsoever,” topped his achievements in Lebanon with the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Perhaps his most enduring contribution is the Disengagement, which transformed Gaza into “an imprisoned enclave”, also known as a concentration camp. For this he was eulogized as “Israel’s greatest hope”, a ruthless protector of his nation who finally saw the light and in his old age became “a respected statesman”. He was embraced by many Israeli Leftists who saw the Disengagement as a step towards peace, and not the culmination of a plan outlined by Professor Dan Schueftan in his 1999 book Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity. Its goal was to defeat the “demographic threat” of the growing Israeli-Arab population, which one day might use its voting power to transform Israel into a liberal democracy (thereby “destroying the Jewish state”). Schueftan and Sharon sought to achieve this goal by permanently separating the Palestinians of the occupied territories from Israel and from Israel’s Palestinian citizens, “the enemy within”.
The man who helped Sharon decimate Lebanon, Raful Eitan, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2004, before Bergman could interview him about his involvement in the FLLF terror campaign. Like Sharon, Eitan began his life as a socialist, and gradually moved to the far-Right, but unlike Sharon, he never took the mantle of “a man of peace”, remaining an honest hardliner and racist to the very end.
Avigdor Ben-Gal, who led Northern Command and personally helped Dagan prepare explosives for the FLLF until he was dismissed by Sharon for being “soft hearted”, is celebrated in Israel as the general who stopped the Syrian army from retaking the occupied Golan Heights. After retiring from the military he served on the board of a think tank called the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism. And in a final embarrassing chapter in a long tale of deception he was accused of committing perjury to help Sharon in a libel suit against Haaretz, which revealed that Sharon had deceived Begin in 1982 and turned a limited invasion plan into a full-scale war to overthrow the Lebanese government without the Prime Minister’s approval.
No person in this story, however, has done more to develop Israel’s program of extrajudicial killings than Meir Dagan, who began his career leading an undercover death squad called Sayeret Rimon which killed many Palestinian suspects and prisoners in Gaza during the early 70s. Despite his Polish origins, Dagan had a swarthy appearance that allowed him to blend in with the Arab population. He was renowned for his courage. One of his former soldiers said that he “had a serious malfunction in his fear mechanism,” a common trait among psychopaths. And Ariel Sharon once said of him: “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.” When Israel’s Channel 2 made him its Man of the Year in 2008, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, one of the last Leftist dissidents in Israeli media, published a piece titled “Killer of Year”, writing: “Whether by box-cutter or car bomb, his craft is killing. His killer instincts are our source of pride, the peak of our creativity.”
Bergman argues that Dagan’s operations with Sayeret Rimon were “the beginning of an extrajudicial legal system parallel to criminal law in Israel, a system that developed quietly and in total secrecy”, and, needless to say, applies only to Palestinians. “Dagan’s unit was, for the first time, eliminating people in territory controlled by Israel, instead of arresting and prosecuting them.” It developed the clandestine tactics later perfected by Israel’s current undercover death squad, Sayeret Duvdevan. Dagan would continue this bloody work as head of the Liaison Unit in Lebanon, waging a secret war, and as head of the Mossad between 2002 and 2010 he would divert much of the agency’s budget from intelligence gathering to assassinations.
Ben-Gal tells Bergman that the covert bombing operations in Lebanon were a kind of game for Dagan: “Just as he has a hobby of painting—and he paints very nicely— that’s the way it was with these ops. They were Meir’s hobby.” A reporter for the New Yorker who visited Dagan in 2012 described his paintings as “naive, sentimental, Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of Tabriz”. The same piece also mentions a report, suppressed by Israel’s military censorship, that Dagan had been involved in terrorism in Lebanon.
Meir Dagan’s parents had fled the Nazis to Siberia, and it was on a cold freight train crammed with Jewish refugees returning to Poland that he was born in 1945. In his office at the Mossad he displayed a photograph of his grandfather, draped in a prayer shawl, kneeling in front of German troops with an expression of fear on his face shortly before he was killed and thrown into a mass grave. One of his formative memories was of the contempt shown towards Holocaust survivors by their Israeli brethren, who called them “human dust” for having gone “like sheep to the slaughter.” The photograph was a daily reminder to him that “we must never reach that situation again, kneeling, without the ability to fight for our lives.” Henceforth, Jews must be the perpetrators, not the victims, of violence.
Another lesson that he brought with him from the killing fields of Eastern Europe was that the soldiers who massacred his relatives were not extreme fascists but ordinary people. “The conclusion is terrible,” he said, “you can take anyone and turn him into a murderer.” He would apply this wisdom throughout his career. Thanks to his work many young boys in the refugee camps of Palestine and Lebanon have learned these lessons as well.
Dagan’s guiding principle was that Israel should avoid large-scale wars, because “the great speedy victory of the Six-Day War will never happen again”. It was this philosophy that led him to oppose Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak’s reckless push for an attack on Iran. While still head of the Mossad, and later more vocally as a private citizen, he warned that an attack on the Islamic Republic would only accelerate its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons and may lead to a disastrous regional war. Hailed by Gideon Levy as “a responsible and courageous act”, it rehabilitated Dagan’s image in the eyes of Israel’s liberals. When Netanyahu gave his cartoonish presentation about the “Iranian bomb” before Congress, Dagan ridiculed it, calling the Prime Minister’s assertions “bullshit”. Journalist Anshel Pfeffer wrote that by helping prevent a war Dagan had “redeemed his controversial military past.”
Speaking to the New Yorker about his opposition to striking Iran, Dagan said:
“After thirty-three years in the military and intelligence, you discover not only the nice side of human nature. You discover it is possible to get dragged into something and then it is hard to explain why it all happened. It’s easy to go from being a victim to being an oppressor. You always have to pay attention to your internal moral compass and ask the right questions.”
On March 17th, 2015, Dagan gave an impassioned speech before tens of thousands of people gathered at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. Formerly known as Kings of Israel Square, it was there that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Right-wing member of the settler movement. The rally, held under the banner “Israel wants change”, was organized by the “Million Hands” grassroots campaign, whose stated goal was “the preservation of Israel as a Jewish democratic homeland” through “a two state agreement with the Palestinians and a narrowing of the social divide within Israel”. With tears in his eyes, Dagan said to the crowd: “We deserve better. We must choose a different leadership.”
Around the same time, Dagan warned that Netanyahu’s support for Jewish settlements in the West Bank would bring about a binational state. “I think that would be a disaster,” he said. Like his mentor Ariel Sharon, Dagan’s support for the Disengagement Plan did not come from a change of heart regarding the Palestinians, but from the fear that if Israel continues to rule directly over the occupied territories, rather than through its client the Palestinian Authority, it would eventually be forced to grant its Arab subjects equal rights. Many on the Left hoped that he would take on the leadership of the opposition, but one year after his Tel Aviv speech Dagan succumbed to cancer.
Earlier this month HBO and Keshet, the production company behind the original, Israeli version of “Homeland”, announced a deal to turn Rise and Kill First into a television series. The masterminds of Israel's terror and assassination program may soon be enshrined in popular culture alongside other anti-heroes such as Walter White and Tony Soprano.
