Final_Judgment

[420] Final Judgment 517
"Strikingly absent from the debate, however, is a question that might be
expected elsewhere: Should the government be in the business of
dispatching assassins to kill its enemies abroad? For Israeli Jews,
profoundly insecure still in their 50th year of statehood, the answer appears
to be self-evident."'
1071 Rather than debating the morality of political
assassination, according to the Post, "what Israelis are debating instead are
the mechanics of the assassination attempt and the calibration of political
risk. Among Israelis, the only fundamental critics of assassination as policy
are its Arab citizens." 1072
According to the Post, a spokesman for current Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu said that, in ordering the Mossad assassination attempt
in Jordan, Netanyahu "did what every other prime minister would have done."
1073 The Post said that "Israelis argue that they are locked in a life or death
struggle and have no practical choice of tools.
What is interesting is something else that the Post reported: that Israeli
officials have said that when faced with hostile governments—as opposed
to terrorists—the Israelis "have other means of pressure and do not resort to
assassination. But terrorists . . . can be combated only in kind." 1074
Israel does indeed have what the Baltimore Sun has described as an
"unacknowledged but widely documented history of assassinating its
enemies," 1075 and now Final Judgment has come along as the first book
ever to document not only why Israel perceived John F. Kennedy as an
enemy, but precisely how Israel played a part in his assassination in 1963.
Although the pro-Israel lobby in America has reacted quite hysterically
to the allegations made in Final Judgment, we have seen that not only do
many Israelis actually believe it's possible that their own domestic
intelligence agency played a hand in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, but
also that many Israelis endorsed that assassination, perceiving their own
prime minister as a threat to Israel's survival.
Israelis, in general, do believe in the use of assassination as a force for
political change and as a means whereby which to ensure the survival of
their beloved country. As many American conservatives say: "Those
Israelis sure are tough. They won't take any nonsense from anybody."
With all of this in mind, is it really so "beyond the pale" to suggest that
in 1963—when Israel's Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, perceived John
F. Kennedy to be a threat to Israel's survival—that the Mossad then
participated in a conspiracy to assassinate the American president?
If, as polls have suggested, many Israelis truly put so little value on the
life of their own prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin (viewed by many in Israel
as a "traitor") and actually would "pull the trigger" themselves, is it really
so "ridiculous" to suggest that the Mossad did indeed play a part in the
assassination of John F. Kennedy? What do you think?