Assassinating Iran's nuclear scientist a preemptive strike - opinion

• Author: MICAH HALPERN
• Date: 06 December 2020
• Published date: 06 December 2020
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

And then we wake up in the morning and hear the news and read the headlines about an enemy of Israel that was assassinated. And we wonder. Can it be that sometimes, that every so often, good needs to use excessive means to defeat evil? Can it be that sometimes Israel determines that it is necessary to "take out," to assassinate an enemy – a man who is evil incarnate – for the State of Israel?.

When news of the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, was released, all fingers – from all corners of the world, pointed towards Israel.

Assassinations and programs of assassinations are never simple. Not simple, certainly, to accomplish and not simple to comprehend. In societies founded on law, someone who has broken the law should be arrested, charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. Assassinating that person raises serious ethical questions.

An assassination for revenge is not ethical. Creating a hit list and then going down that list ticking off the names and "offing" those people is not done in lawful societies. That's the stuff of mafias and B-Movies. But, if someone or some people whom we know to be murderers are plotting new acts of murder, then eliminating that person or persons falls not into the category of murder, it falls into the category of self-defense.

It happens in the military, in every military. It even happened during the Holocaust. We don't talk about it much, but there are examples of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis who were found dead in mikvaot (ritual baths, of all places) in Europe during the Holocaust. The argument was that these Jews were killed to save other Jewish lives. Who made the decision to kill the collaborators and who carried out the decision become important questions for historians and ethicists, alike.

Adolph Eichmann was the architect of transportation during Hitler's Final Solution. Eichmann was responsible for moving Jews throughout Europe to ghettos and from ghettos to camps and ultimately, to their deaths. By his own admission, Eichmann was responsible for enabling the murder of the Jews of Europe.

But Israel did not assassinate Eichmann. They arrested him, brought him to Israel and had him stand trial in public. They even provided him with a defense attorney. And then, they convicted and executed him.

Not assassinated – executed. Execution is very different from assassination. Adolph Eichmann was called "the man in the glass booth" for fear that people would try to...