Assassinating Iran's nuclear scientist a preemptive strike - opinion
Assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists is a form of Israeli self-defense. Assassinating the father of the Iranian nuclear weapons program was an ethical act.
By MICAH HALPERNMEMBERS OF Iranian forces carry the coffin of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during a funeral ceremony in Tehran, last month.(photo credit: IRANIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY/REUTERS)
Movies are not real. James Bond, 007, may have had a License to Kill, but nobody in the real world does. Movies about secret agents and assassins and good fighting evil are tantalizing and fun to watch. We sit on the edge of our seats biting our nails and crunching our popcorn, but we know that what we are watching is fantasy and far, far removed from reality.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 assassinate him. But Israel did not let that happen, they placed him behind bulletproof glass.At the time of his arrest and trial, Eichmann was no longer a senior Nazi operative. The war was over. His role had ended. He could do no more harm. But stopping someone or a system or government from attacking the target when it is known that is what is planned is ethical. It is called a preemptive strike.
The Talmud in the Gemara of Sanhedrin describes a situation where someone is coming to kill you. The Gemara asserts that you can “get up earlier and kill him.” That is the preemptive strike. Preemptive strikes are a form of self-defense. And self-defense is ethical.Assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists is a form of Israeli self-defense. Assassinating the father of the Iranian nuclear weapons program was an ethical act. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was not a political leader, he was a scientist who was building weapons to attack Israel and by extension, the Western world. His ultimate goal, his dream, was to destroy the entire Western world, beginning with Israel.In 1976, then-US president Gerald Ford stopped a policy of political assassination by signing into law Executive Order #11905. The law was strengthened two years later when, in 1978, Ford issued Executive Order 12036. It reads: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In 1981, then-US president Ronald Reagan followed in Ford’s footsteps by issuing Executive Order 12333 which reiterated the policy of saying no to political assassinations.Israel is fighting a war against those that are threatening to wipe the Jewish State off the map. Israel’s enemies are developing weapons that can do just that. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s role was to create those weapons and to teach others to create those weapons. The best defense is to prevent your enemies from procuring those weapons. In practical terms, once Iran or any other enemy of Israel developed those weapons, it would be much harder to stop them from being used. The death of Fakhrizadeh put a big chink in the development process of those weapons. It was a devastating set back for Iran.That is why so much Israeli energy was spent getting the US to clamp down on Iran.The writer is a columnist and a social and political commentator. Watch his new TV show Thinking Out Loud on JBS and read his latest book THUGS. He maintains The Micah Report.
