Category Archives: Book Review

Nationalism Restored

01 Sat Sep 2018

Posted by in Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 304 pp.

Ever since the cultural turn in academia in the early 1970s, it has become de rigueur to disparage nationalism as a volatile and dangerous sentiment susceptible to extreme violence and prejudice. Nationalism was cast as an imagined community with the implication that it was a simulacrum whose substance came wholly from fabricated myths, rituals, and symbols. In this echo chamber, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism comes as a rare and welcome breath of fresh air that revives the idea and places it in context with other alternatives that have been offered over the ages.

Hazony looks to the Bible, specifically Devarim, to find his definition of nationalism. The scriptures actively promote the feeling of brotherhood among all members of the Jewish nation and Mosaic law would serve as their constitution; the king of the Jewish state, its priests, and prophets would all be drawn from among the brotherhood and each would have a role in preserving the traditions, customs, and laws of the community. Geographically, the boundaries of Israel are set by Moses as he expressly forbids the expansion of the nation-state into the neighbouring lands of Esau, Moav, Lot, and Ammon.

The ambitions of nationalism are clearly limited and not inherently expansionist or committed to world domination as critics are prone to hyperventilate. Hazony does not deny that there has been great violence in the past in the name of nationalism but that is also true of any other theory of mass organisation, ethics, and governance. This is an interesting proposition put forth by the author, that nationalism is not merely a feeling of cultural connectedness between people who do not know each other but properly seen, it also includes a system of ethics.

According to Hazony, the roots of nationalism are to be found in the structure of the family – individuals are biologically related in a family and share a sense of rights and duties, blood and belonging, vis-a-vis one another; the prosperity of one member is the success of them all. As families band together into clans, clans into tribes, and tribes into nations to provide better security and accomplish greater tasks, the loyalty commanded by the heads is transferred upwards towards common characteristics the members share, such as language, faith, or ethnicity.

Using the family as a model of organisation for the state is certainly not peculiar to the Bible – similar notions are found as far apart as China and Greece. Confucius clings to the metaphor a little too closely with the result that the ideal Chinese state tends towards authoritarianism; Aristotle sees the polis – state – as the full flowering of the family life but does not carry the analogy too far as he recognises that there is a difference in the nature of power within states and families, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.

The Virtue of Nationalism juxtaposes a localised nationalism with universalist ideologies such as imperialism, Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism. Nations are inherently anti-imperial and therefore more stable, the argument runs, because its members are connected to each other through bonds not mediated by institutions of state. Nations are particular to geography, language, faith, ethnicity, or some other criterion that defines the community whereas the universalist aspirations of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Liberalism fall to the temptation of conquest and subjugation of the entire world to the one “true” doctrine of choice.

Hazony’s depiction of nationalism as limited may be true in the Jewish tradition but it has had a very different history in Europe and Asia, at least. Halakha distinguishes between milkhemet mitzva – war of obligation – and milkhemet hareshut – optional war. In the first category fall, for example, the wars of Joshua against the seven nations while David’s campaigns of expansion come under the latter classification. In fact, G-d prohibits David from building the Temple because he was “a man of battles and [had] shed blood.”

It is also problematic to portray imperialism as a universalist principle. Although imperialists have no bounds to their geographic ambitions, it is usually also true that the imperial quest is usually carried out in the name of a nation; the various nations that fall to a growing empire are neither treated nor seen as equals. We see this again and again from the Roman Empire to the pink-tainted map of British expansion. Rome expanded its citizen base only in the latter years to stave off a fiscal crisis brought on by decades of decadent emperors but ties by birth or marriage to the Italian peninsula and preferably Rome were favourable traits to possess well into the second century. Similarly, London scoffed at Mohandas Gandhi’s idea that Britain welcome all inhabitants of its dominions as equal citizens of their empire. Hazony accepts this at one point, but not before an unnecessary discourse on the universalist instincts of imperialism.

The difficulty of sustaining nations on abstractions such as liberalism stems from the inability to justify loyalty to the principle. The likelihood of changing our minds as we experience life and are exposed to more information means that any belonging to an ideal remains unstable at best. Hazony takes help from psychology to make the case that humans are social animals who have a need to belong to networks and believe in something greater than than the mere material of life. Here, he brings up a word not often seen in nationalism studies these days – loyalty – which is the crux of the debate. It is not easy, if at all possible, to have loyalty to an idea in the same manner one feels ties to a sibling or parent.

Hazony reworks several historical events to lend support to his hypothesis, in many cases problematically. For example, rather than see the Thirty Years’ War from the traditional perspective of a conflagration between Protestants and Catholics, Hazony casts it as being primarily motivated by universalist impulses against local inclinations. While most historians would agree that the religious element ceased to animate the conflict as the years passed, the war remained an old-fashioned struggle for geopolitical dominance between France and the Habsburgs.

Perhaps the most jarring incongruity in The Virtue of Nationalism is how the second Christian schism is repackaged as a contest between universalism and particularism. At a certain level, it is undeniable that Catholic allegiance to their Pope made way for dual loyalties. However, it is hardly the case that Protestantism was a particularist creed any more than Christianity a sub-sect of Judaism. While the theological reorganisation gave monarchs their independence from Rome, the faith itself still believed it possessed a universal message. The recent Evangelical movement has strongly underscored this conviction.

The largest empire in the modern era was put together by Britain and it was Prussian militarism that sank Europe into the first of its cataclysmic convulsions of the 20th century. The United States began its expansionist project with Manifest Destiny and then eyed territories beyond; none of these countries were Catholic. What is disappointing is that these ill-considered examples are unnecessary and distract from Hazony’s already persuasive defence of nationalism.

These weak digressions may conceal the real import of The Virtue of Nationalism, which is an assault on the cult of the solitary individual. Hazony traces the roots of this ideology to at least one of its origins, John Locke. Hazony finds the English philosopher’s initial assumption that all people are rational and his utilitarian methodology in assessing rationality flawed. Contrary to Locke, Hazony argues that the fundamental unit of existence is not the individual or even the family but the community. Our ethics arise from our communal interactions as does our sense of self; in turn, these inform all our other beliefs and relations, such as liberty or nationalism.

This is at the root of the conservative world view, that the community and family are prior to the individual. Ever since the early Liberals recast society as a collective of individuals, the idea has taken hold and grown to a point where it is not even questioned any more. The few who reject this modern normal have usually done so on theological grounds and have been easy to ignore in an increasingly profane world. By reviving a classical framework, The Virtue of Nationalism fires a broadside at not just the critics of nationalism but the entire Liberal project. Not only are the dangers of a universalist mindset compared against nationalism and found to be as dangerous if not worse, but individual liberty is argued to be mere license if not exercised within the bounds of community and morality. Thus, this is as much a work of political philosophy as it is about nationalism.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not pay much heed to the silly distinction between patriotism and nationalism – Vidura counters this best in the Udyoga Parva in India’s treasured epic, the Mahabharata, when he says, “[t]hose prone to get drunk get drunk on knowledge, wealth, and good birth; but the same are triumphs of the strict.”

The Virtue of Nationalism is a short book and not written in a solemn academic tone despite boasting an impressive bibliography. Hazony would do well to realise, however, that his understanding of nationalism is peculiar to Judaism and not characteristic of all politico-cultural movements. The inadvertent contradistinction, however, should be most interesting to scholars of nationalism. Readers should beware that the chatty affectation of the book belies a profound sociopolitical weltanshauung and a powerful critique of Liberalism in all its guises. There may be some historical quibbles but they do not, oddly, take away from the overall argument and to narrowly focus on those would be to miss the forest for the trees. In an era of Liberal activist academia, Hazony’s efforts to take us back to first principles and rethink our implicit assumptions is a welcome intellectual challenge.

The Death of Civilisation

14 Thu Jun 2018

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Death of Civilisation

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Darkening AgeNixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 2017. 352 pp.

“The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra’s Temple of Athena must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots…had been terrorising the region. Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective.” Utter destruction followed in their wake. “Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues that had stood for half a millennium had their faces mutilated in a moment; temples that had seen the rise of the Roman Empire fell in a single day. This was violent work, but it was by no means solemn. The zealots roared with laughter as they smashed the ‘evil, ‘idolatrous’ statues; the faithful jeered as they tore down temples, stripped roofs and defaced tombs. Chants appeared, immortalizing these glorious moments.”

“When the men entered the temple they took a weapon and smashed the back of Athena’s head with a single blow so hard that it decapitated the goddess. The head fell to the floor, slicing off that nose, crushing the once-smooth cheeks. Athena’s eyes, untouched, looked out over a now-disfigured face. Mere decapitation wasn’t enough. More blows fell, scalping Athena, striking the helmet from the goddess’s head, smashing it into pieces. Further blows followed. The statue fell from its pedestal, then the arms and shoulders were chopped off. The body was left on its front in the dirt; the nearby altar was sliced off just above its base… On the floor, the head of Athena slowly started to be covered by the sands of the Syrian desert.”

You might be thinking that I am describing ISIS’ destruction of classical era structures in Syria in February 2017 but you would be mistaken. This was the destruction wrought by Christians in circa 385. For over half a millennium since the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and the Edict of Milan in 312, Christianity aggressively destroyed all signs of paganism as it spread across Europe. Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World does not quite chronicle the tragedy – that would be too long a book – but gives an excellent glimpse into the tumultuous years of Late Antiquity and the savage birth of Christian Europe.

The Darkening Age jumps back and forth as it weaves its narrative – with each chapter and theme, the historical era is begun afresh. After a historical overview of Late Antiquity, Nixey elaborates on the brutal influence of Christianity on the law, the fine arts, and religion. In doing so, she dispels several powerful myths in the Christian tradition that have survived for centuries and are now cemented in the mainstream historical memory. In doing so, the reputations of several Church leaders are severely tarnished – by 21st century sensitivities, we might call them terrorists and mass murderers. Yet Nixey is too good a scholar to allow such crude, ahistorical judgments to creep in. Instead, she lets the values and mores of the era serve as a template and allows contemporaries of these Christian saints and martyrs evaluate their vandalism and philosophy – or lack thereof.

The rise of Christianity spelled not just the death of pluralism and tolerance around the Mediterranean but also a fundamental reworking of epistemic categories. Before the ascendance of Christianity, despite the long presence of Judaism, few people considered religion to be a marker of identity. The fluidity of primary religions maintained an easy permeability between the various sects and the state did not care to interfere as long as these cults did not upset the law and order. It was Christianity that introduced a rigidity that plagues the world to this day – Christians were correct, and others were not just wrong but sick, insane, evil, damned, disgusting, and inferior.

The new cult observed its difference aggressively: in a letter to one of his faithful, Augustine advised the man that even if a Christian is starving and on the point of death, food that had been contaminated by pagan sacrifice was to be rejected with fortitude. In a pattern that is now all too familiar to those who have observed the effects of exclusivist monotheism on societies, Christians first held themselves apart and then assaulted others.

For a faction with a humble founder, Christians saw themselves as soldiers in an army (of Christ) and applied the word “pagan” – which had originally meant civilian – to the pluralistic religions of the region. To these militants, allowing someone to remain outside the Christian faith was not to show tolerance but to damn them. As Augustine railed, to allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.

Constantine saw the sign of the cross in October 312, and his soldiers, their shields painted with Chi-Ro, defeated Maxentius shortly. One of the new emperor’s first edicts was to give Christianity official recognition as equal to the faiths of Rome. It would prove to be a tipping point in world history: in less than a century, Christianity would ruthlessly root out Rome’s indigenous religions and destroy its temples, libraries, and customs. Before Constantine had come to power, Rome had 28 public libraries and many private ones; by the end of the 4th century, there were none.

In 325, a law was passed to restrict the “pollutions of idolatry” and December 25, until then celebrated the birth of the Mesopotamian god of shepherds, Dumuzid, became the birthday of Jesus. Similarly, other pagan rituals and festivals were either banned or usurped. In 341, Constantine’s son, Constantius, banned sacrifices; by 356, it had become illegal – on pain of death – to worship images. A law passed in 388 forbade any discussion of religion in public, and in 399, pagan temples were all ordered to be torn down.

A law in 407 banned the old merry ceremonies and in 529, the year the Academy finally closed its doors, the Christian State decreed that “every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’. ‘We forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not ‘corrupt the souls of their disciples.’”

Although it was Constantine himself who first and publicly moved against the pagan temples, it was not just the new Christian state that perpetrated this cultural genocide – Christian mobs went about in an orgy of vandalism. Moreover, the men leading these campaigns of violence were not the over-zealous fringe elements of a new faith. St Benedict, St Martin, St John Chrysostom, St Marcellus – these were figures at the very heart of the Church.

The statues in the public parks and temples were the first to go; the beautiful statue of Athena at the Acropolis, for example, was mutilated, beheaded, and finally placed face down in the courtyard to be trampled upon by Christians for eternity. It was clearly not enough to pull down a statue: the tradition it represented had to be humiliated, disgraced, and tortured. The destruction did not stop at public property. Christian mobs began to enter houses to remove any signs of pagan culture from them which, when found, would be publicly burned. As Nixey insightfully comments, today, the destruction of Michelangelo’s Pietà would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism – but it wouldn’t be sacrilege because Christians do not hold the statue to be sacred. Statues in pagan temples, on the other hand, were.

It is not that there were no contemporary critiques of Christianity, and many modern ones echo the same objections. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? many wondered. If so, then who is wrong – Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus, had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses? Celsus, for example, found the new cult stupid, pernicious and vulgar; he worried that it would spread and bring ruin to Rome. Pliny the Elder described Christianity as nothing more than a “degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.” What the philosophers could not understand is how anyone could revel in their own ignorance. “Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good,” taught Corinthians. Critics’ arguments were usually replied with clubs, quietly at first and then more boldly after Constantine.

Priests were frequently attacked and beaten. Christians took to throwing a concoction of caustic lime powder and vinegar – the earliest acid attacks – into the eyes of unsuspecting prominent pagans in the marketplace, thereby blinding them. Judges who dared to uphold the law against Christians were also beaten and killed. So severe was the Christian reign of terror that even the very Christian emperor, Theodosius, had to quietly admit that his monks commit many crimes. The Church, however, defended these acts, comparing them to a gangrene that had to be cut away or cauterised, advising people to turn a deaf ear, like surgeons, to the cries, out of compassion.

People watched in stunned inaction as the culture which they had followed for over a thousand years was dismantled. The Empire suffered far more at the hands of Christians than it did in all the waves of barbarian invasions. Libraries closed, books were severely censored or burned, and the entire edifice of academia was suspect. As Tertullian was fond of saying, What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”” implying that Christians did not need philosophy because they had God. Philosophy went from having different schools of thought to having the wrong view and the correct, Christian view.

Literature suffered similarly – works that praised the old gods or were considered too prurient were destroyed. What little survived was because the iota of civilisation in some of the Church leaders won out and a few works were imaginatively reinterpreted in service of Christ rather than burned. Even then, translations were deliberately timid and their authority accrued the weight of the ages – some poems had to wait until the late 20th century to be accurately translated! It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.

In an attempt to divert attention from their own crimes and justify their actions, Christians have also claimed victimhood at the hands of Romans. Nixey demolishes these claims, arguing that of the three waves of repression in which Christians found themselves caught, not one was directed exclusively at Christians. “we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity,” Nixey claims. “There were simply not that many years of imperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen – in three whole centuries of Roman rule.” Furthermore, The Darkening Age delves into contemporary sources to argue that Rome’s only problem with Christianity was one of law and order. Many of the Christians who found themselves afoul of the law were actively seeking martyrdom rather than being oppressed for their faith.

Again reminiscent of jihadists, tempting celestial terms were offered to martyrs: scripture was supposed to have promised them “multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes.” The emperor Trajan explicitly ordered, conquirendi non sunt – these people must not be hunted out. When Emperor Julian refused to execute Christians for their crimes, he was begrudged by the Church for denying Christian ‘combatants’ martyrdom! Even Origen had to admit, the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable and Christians had died for their faith only occasionally. George Bernard Shaw is said to have acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability! As the author remarks, Rome clearly did not wish to exterminate Christianity; if it did, it would have succeeded without much effort.

Rome wanted obedience, not martyrs. Nixey cites several documents in which Romans are shown pleading with Christians to make just the token gesture to escape punishment. In one tale a Roman prefect named Probus asks the Christian on trial before him no fewer than nine times to even lie to escape execution; the prefect begs the Christian to think of his weeping family, to spare himself pain, to go free. Such grace and liberalism would never be on offer to pagans in Christian courts barely a century later.

Of particular importance in The Darkening Age is Nixey’s argument that the establishment of Christianity in all spheres of Western existence is so complete that Western views cannot help but be biased without even the realisation. For over a millennium and a half, theologians and scholars packaged and repackaged Christian values, smoothing its edges each time, that the Church could eventually speak in a secular accent. Silvio Ferrari, of the University of Milan, has argued that the modern secular state owes its origins to Christianity and is not culturally neutral but rather draws inspiration from Christian theology; Ferrari even warns against its transplantation to cultures with different intellectual development.

The whitewashing of Christianity’s cultural genocide is particularly noticeable in academia. Historians, for example, have recently discarded the term, ‘Dark Ages’ to describe the centuries immediately after the fall of Rome. They argue that there was much development going on if not necessarily of a grand nature. Christopher de Hamel has even gone on to suggest that under pressure from barbarian attack, Rome ‘saved its identity by reinventing itself as a Christian empire’! In what one only hopes was a misjudged sense of humour, the 1965 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints remarks with amusement that Martin of Tours ‘was not averse to the forcible destruction of heathen shrines.’

As Nixey points out, modern histories rarely describe Christian acts violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely zealous, pious, or enthusiastic. John Pollini, from the University of Southern California, agrees that “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”

But these are not just 20th century sensitivities – one 19th century scholar defended the vicious censorship by Basil of Greek and Latin literature by passing it off as the “educational theory of a cultured man” rather than the “anxious admonition of a bigoted ecclesiastic.” Johannes Geffcken, another influential 19th century scholar, considered it absurd that the rise of Christianity and the destruction of paganism were related in any way. Chrysostom’s condemnation of the Jewish canon was eagerly reprinted by the Nazis.

Not only have Christian excesses been dismissed, many have not even made it into the history books. As Eusebius explained the role of history and historians, it was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read. These views were then sustained by institutional support – until 1871 the University of Oxford required that all students were members of the Church of England, while in most cases to be given a fellowship in an Oxford college one had to be ordained.

The Darkening Age is not written in the typical turgid academic prose one is accustomed to from scholars, nor do its end notes run for almost as long as the manuscript itself (though the book is well-documented). In fact, there is the uncommon – and evocative – presence of a strand of emotion in the narrative. The purpose of writing this book, the author tells us, is to make more people aware of the history of early Christianity and the damage it wrought to the pagan world that came before it. Nixey makes a strange claim – that much of what transpired in the remaking of Europe in the Christian mould is not well known. At first glance, this comes as a surprise to any lover of the Classics, yet Nixey may well be correct in that the Classics have gone underappreciated or molested by critical theory since the postmodern turn. That is what makes The Darkening Age an even more important work.

It is not just lovers of the Classical World who might not be surprised by Nixey’s arguments: the author’s focus is on Europe when she claims that there are no true pagans left but there are plenty remaining in other parts of the world such as India. The experience of these pagans is not much different, though separated by over a dozen centuries, from those of their Roman brethren. Whenever it came up against a foreign culture, Christianity has found it disturbingly easy to tap into its reservoir of primordial fervour and zealotry to fight it. The Crusades and the Age of Imperialism are the most obvious examples of this but so is the post-Enlightenment secular world order. Though beaten to it by others, some Christian armies did despoil Indian temples and architecture; moreover, rhetoric of conversion still rhymes with the angry frothing at the mouth of Marcellus or the early 5th century Alexandrian bishop Cyril (the one responsible for the murder of the famous mathematician Hypatia).

The Darkening Age is an informative book for those not well versed in the Classics but it is also a gentle goad to inquire epistemologically at the webs of meaning that bind us. It is this second order of thinking that makes this book invaluable to everyone, even those who could not care less for the city of marble that Agrippa left behind. The internet has made it easy to import ideas from one part of the globe to another but without context and a dab of reckless politics, it could be deeply destabilising and extend the cultural genocide begun circa Constantine. Nixey exposes secularism for a simulacrum though in all fairness, that was probably not her intent; regardless, the easiest way to know whom the simulacrum benefits is to challenge it.

July 05, 2018: An addendum as a result of discussions on Twitter.

Diminishing the Heathens

18 Fri May 2018

Posted by in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Diminishing the Heathens

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ronen Bergman

Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. New York: Random House, 2018. 784 pp.

“If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first,” said the Talmudist Shila of Kefar Tamarta. This spirit has suffused Israeli security policy even since its pre-independence days, argues Ronen Bergman in his latest book that has conveniently – and appropriately – borrowed the amora’s words for its title – Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. In an impressive survey of assassinations from the days of the Bar Giora brigades through the Hashomer, Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and eventually the modern apparatus of state – Mossad, Shin Bet, AMAN, and the Israeli Defence Forces along with the various special operations units associated with it, Bergman argues that the tactical brilliance and spectacular successes of Israel’s security forces has obscured its strategic failure to bring peace to the country. If decades of targeted assassinations have not worked, is it perhaps time for Israel to look to other methods?

Rise and Kill First has admirably steered clear of two pitfalls that ensnare books like this – the first is to get side-tracked into a brief history of the Israeli conflict with the Arabs, and the second is to slip into either a jingoistic, chest-thumping defence of whatever Israel has done or an ingratiating, Muharram-esque mea culpa for the country’s “misdeeds.” Bergman, the senior political and military analyst for Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, has remained a critical yet understanding observer of Israeli security politics over a vagarious century and presented a fair and balanced analysis by any standards.

It is tempting to delve into some of the dozens of missions discussed in Rise and Kill First, the stunning successes, the indomitable courage, the mind-boggling oversights, and the fatigued callousness. Indeed, the book reads like a thriller and is hard to put down despite its heft. What is important, however, is the framework of Israeli security thinking – its assumptions, its resources, and its goals – that Bergman creates for the reader. Naturally, this framework evolves from the pre-state days to through that of the fledgling Jewish republic to the contemporary system challenged as much by religious terror as Arab nationalism.

Although Bergman’s story starts in the first decade of the 20th century, he spends a scant few pages on Zionist activities during the Mandate period. That period is better covered in Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel but Bergman distills a picture of monstrous Arab hatred for the Jews. Operation Atlas, for example, was a joint Nazi-Arab mission to parachute near Tel Aviv and poison the city’s water supply to kill all the Jews. Later, during the War of Independence, the Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, declared before invading Israel, “This will be a war of great destruction and slaughter that will be remembered like the massacres carried out by the Mongols and the Crusaders.” Bergman only briefly alludes to this extreme malevolence with which Arabs held Jews but this dimension is elaborated upon in Klaus Gensicke’s Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten and David Motadel’s Islam and Nazi Germany’s War.

From the outset, it was clear that Jews could expect no quarter from the Arabs. This informed Israeli policy towards its neighbours in the early decades after independence: it did not see itself as committed to the borders laid out in United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947 because it was evident that the Arabs did not accept the partition plan either. Israel’s security agencies were pushed to the limit in performing traditional roles of intelligence gathering on its Arab neighbours and preventing marauding attacks by wandering fedayeen. David Ben Gurion was also pressed by recalcitrant Jews belonging to the Irgun and Lehi unsure of living in a socialistic Israel. One of the ironclad principles Israeli agencies have followed until this day, without exception, was forged in this climate – we don’t kill Jews, Isser Harel, the first director of Shin Bet (Sherut ha-Bitahon haKlali – General Security Service) and later of Mossad (HaMossad leModi’in uleTafkidim Meyuhadim – Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations), declared with finality.

The Mossad, established in 1949, set for itself the role of protecting Jews not just in Israel but all over the world. This may seem like a trivial detail or hubristic overreach to most but as the only Jewish state in the world, so soon after the Shoah, the First Generation decided to take upon themselves the defence of Jewish civilisation. With dozens of Christian and Muslim states whose narratives and interactions form the mainstream, the notion of a civilisational state may seem quaint to many but it held vital importance to the early Israelis.

The early targets of Israel’s “negative treatment,” as the professional lingo goes, were former Nazi scientists continuing their wartime research on advanced weapons for new, Arab masters. Nazis in hiding were also a matter of importance but it was clearly understood that these were symbolic and emotional targets rather than threats to Israel’s security. As a result, the hunt for Nazis petered out and the Mossad, ever pragmatic, was willing to recruit one former Nazi – Otto Skorzeny – to acquire a vital and recurring source of inside information about Egypt’s missile programme; in exchange, Israel promised not to come after him for his crimes during World War II and even attempted – unsuccessfully – to get him off Simon Wiesenthal’s list of most wanted Nazi war criminals.

Like any good thing, Israel was established on the highest moral principles and its security agencies were no different. Revenge is not a Jewish trait and is explicitly forbidden in Vayikra 19:18. Indeed, as Bergman notes about Natan Rotberg, an innovative bomb-maker in the Shayetet 13 (naval commando force), he did not act with hatred in his heart. “You need to know how to forgive,” Rotberg had told the author in an interview in 2015. This principle finds its way also into the legal opinion of the military advocate general written many years later that sets the parameters of an assassination operation as one in which harm is imminent and is not for revenge or punishment for a past act. The IDF’s Human Resources Directorate has even consulted with philosophers in academia to define the scope of some of their policies. Admittedly, like all things human and corruptible, these noble principles and well-intentioned guidelines have not strictly been followed over the years, especially in the heat of battle.

One of Israel’s early methods of assassination, parcel bombs, such as the ones used to eliminate the head of Egyptian intelligence, Col Mustafa Hafez, and Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan stirred up some debate. Although this method presented the least danger for operatives, particularly in hostile territories, it also left to chance the success of the mission – parcels could be intercepted; someone else could open it; the target might only be injured or maimed and killed. Agents refrained from sending parcel bombs to their targets except in the most necessary of conditions; despite the risks and uncertainty involved, the method had quite a high success rate particularly in Gaza. Nevertheless, Mossad and its sister organisations moved away from using parcel bombs as soon as technology allowed them something more accurate and certain.

Bergman’s work also reveals how little counter-terrorism cooperation Israel has received from Europe and the United States. Although Washington entered into an information sharing agreement with Jerusalem after the Suez Crisis in 1956 and began selling military equipment and extending aid after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli intelligence always found their Western counterparts unresponsive to security alerts and generally dismissive of Jewish concerns. For its part, Israel, too, hesitated to operate in friendly countries without the permission of the local authorities: Jerusalem had decided that it might need European help in other arenas and it was not worth antagonising them.

That all changed after the massacre of the Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. German security was criminally negligent and incompetent from the beginning to end and the result was the death of 11 Israelis. Then prime minister Golda Meir rescinded her orders to Mossad not to operate in Europe, though they have always been cautious about doing so. Interestingly, former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir reaffirmed Rotberg’s view in a February 2006 interview to the Israeli daily Haaretz that Mivtza Za’am Ha’el was not motivated by revenge but by the desire to ensure that such a tragedy never repeats itself.

The United States outdid the sluggish Europeans by maintaining close relations to the Palestinian movement through Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief of operations for Black September – the group that had carried out the Munich massacre. Langley frequently helped move Salameh around, tipped him off about Israeli surveillance, and even paid for his honeymoon (to Hawaii and Disneyland). Similar courtesies were extended to Atef Bseiso, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) head of intelligence; both were eventually dispatched by Israel.

When Israeli intelligence did manage to carry out a successful execution, Western nations severely criticised the Jewish state if the operation was carried out on their soil, for even the slightest collateral damage, and a general appeal to abjure from violence. It was blatant hypocrisy but became more apparent when all condemnation fell silent after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001. Israel, long used to being counter-terrorism’s Cassandra, suddenly found itself in large crowds and asked to train foreign services in their methods.

Israeli security agencies have obviously evolved over the years to counter new threats and take into account the latest technologies. One periodisation that Rise and Kill First offers divides the history of independent Israel into four eras. The first was an era of material weakness of the Jewish state and largely inter-state conflict with its neighbours. Even the fedayeen terrorism was strongly controlled by the security services of neighbouring Arab states and dropped off as Israel hit back directly at them.

The Six-Day War marks the beginning of the second period, when Palestinians realised that their dream of creating an Arab state in the remaining 23 percent of Mandatory Palestine – the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan had been created with 77 percent in April 1921 – could not be achieved by relying on Arab strength of arms. Despite its inferiority in numbers, the Jewish state had repeatedly prevailed over Arab armies and irregulars time and again. The second period marks the mushrooming of terrorist groups and an exponential expansion in the scope and range of their activities. Although state support had lessened, it had not vanished entirely. Furthermore, as with any organisation, there had been some institutionalisation of knowledge and a new generation of terrorists had learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. The new profile characteristically led to a greater diversity of targets that were not all strictly restricted to the boundaries of Israel. International airlines were hijacked on routes that carried a greater number of Jews and Israelis were targeted for assassination.

After the initial surprise had worn off, Israeli intelligence quickly adapted and struck harder with the help of in-house special teams such as Caesarea and the military’s commando forces like the Sayeret Matkal, the Shayetet 13, and Shaldag to reach far beyond the Greater Levant and strike terrorist leaders. However, Palestinian groups had developed elaborate funding networks and become better armed over the years that Israel was forced to use increasingly greater force against terrorist targets. Collateral damage and brutality correspondingly increased on both sides and the war in Lebanon saw a particularly dark chapter in the history of Israeli targetted assassinations.

Until Lebanon, Israel’s covert operations had taken exceptional care to avoid collateral damage. Missions were scrubbed repeatedly over the sudden appearance of family and were never planned in crowded public areas. This is not to say that there were no unintended casualties but great efforts were taken to keep them to a minimum. Even Meir Dagan’s innovative methods with the Zikit squads of rooting out terrorists in Gaza in the early 1970s did not ratchet up a civilian body count.

Ariel Sharon had sold Israel’s political leaders a bill of goods on Lebanon and Israel’s increasing frustration at the lack of (mis)anticipated success in the conflict caused the IDF to hit harder. Additionally, Israel’s allies in Lebanon, the Maronite Catholic Phalange led by Pierre Gemayel, were savage barbarians who had their own scores to settle with the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims. On several occasions, Mossad had refused to work with them and some officers had even resigned in protest but the exigencies of war had a momentum of their own. The brutality between the Christians and Muslims dragged the IDF in and after particularly brutal attack in Nahariya in 1979, IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan ordered the setting up of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners.

The FLLF operated without the constraints restricting Israeli intelligence. In other words, no heed was given to collateral damage and hundreds of civilians were killed in operations that targetted PLO assets. To conceal Israel’s role, the group set itself up as another of a dozen terrorist groups and even claimed credit for (but never carried out) attacks on Israeli targets and allies. By all standards of international law, Israel’s FLLF indulged in terrorism. IDF General Avigdor Ben-Gal insists that a key difference between the FLLF and Arab terrorist groups, however little consolation it may be to its victims, was that the former ultimately targetted the PLO rather than sow terror with indiscriminate acts of violence. Regardless, many Israelis have come to see Lebanon as Israel’s Vietnam in that the alliance with an unsavoury local outfit propagated a moral contagion among Israeli security agencies as well.

The third era came with the First Intifada in 1987. Decades of failed promises and corruption had eroded the authority of Palestinian leaders on the street. The uprising was sparked off as a spontaneous groundswell after a minor incident – an IDF truck accidentally crashed into a car killing four Palestinians – became a symbol of Israeli callousness towards Palestinian lives. The entirety of Israel’s security services were unprepared and at a loss as to how to deal with the riots and every use of force was projected to the world as state brutality against unarmed civilians in a reversal of the David and Goliath story. The fact of the matter, however, is that much of the deaths during the Intifada were due to intra-Palestinian settling of scores.

Hamas’ introduction of suicide bombing in 1994 again shocked Israel. The very willingness of the suicide bomber to die changed the equation and made the fear of Israeli counter-terrorism less effective in that the terrorists were already prepared to die.

Bergman’s research reveals that Israeli intelligence was not outdone merely by the terrorists’ tactics and technological acquisitions (mainly from Iran and Syria) in the turbulent period between the outbreak of the First Intifada and the end of the Second Intifada in 2005 but were intellectually in the wrong place to understand the evolving threat from their neighbourhood. The head of Shin Bet, Amichay Ayalon, for example, was initially quite pleased with the enervation of the PLO and the rise of Hamas in the early 1990s. In a surprising misreading from a sabra, Bergman relays that Ayalon believed that the Islamism of Hamas was preferable to the nationalism of the PLO. Similarly, the Israelis could not process Hamas co-founder Ahmed Yassin’s quiet admission to Barak Ben-Zur, head of AMAN’s terrorism branch, that “[t]here will never be peace. We will take what you give but we will never give up our armed struggle.” It took much blood to be spilled before Israeli intelligence gained its bearings again.

Early failures against the Intifada had begun a revolution inside the Israeli security establishment. The agencies were relying more and more on modern technology to identify relevant data and collate it in a manner meaningful to operatives on the ground. Israel was among the first countries to track terrorists using their mobile phones and also the first to introduce drones in targetted killings. Computers had also been brought in during the leadership of Ayalon to look for patterns and put everything together. Moshe Yaalon, when made chief of the IDF’s Central Command, together with the head of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, created a Joint War Room where information from all sources would be pooled to be analysed. The JWR quickly bore fruit and the intelligence agencies were able to interdict terror operations into Israel. Combined with a high-tech border security fence, access to Israel became much harder for would-be terrorists.

Bergman’s periodisation fits snugly with political and technological developments readers would already be aware of. The unique contribution of Rise and Kill First is the psychological and emotional cost of a grinding war of attrition and its effects on jus in bello. Israeli intelligence had strict guidelines regarding the rules of engagement but the more numerous and bloody terrorist attacks became, the more lax Israeli commandos seemed to be about the rules in return. “Shudder under the wing” was the phrase one commander used to describe how his pilots were supposed to feel about bombing a terrorist target.

Interestingly, the Israeli public at large would not have any of this callous attitude. Errors in Israeli counter-terrorism brought sharp cries from common Israelis, demanding that their government maintain a civility in its response to terrorism. The outrage over extra-judicial killings by the Shin Bet in the Parashat Kav 300 in 1984 nearly toppled a government and ended the career of Avraham Shalom, then head of Shin Bet. Yet while insisting on high moral standards from its armed forces, Israelis were equally unforgiving on their leaders for allowing terrorism to continue unabated. The terms were clear – kill those terrorists without mercy but do so in keeping with civil and moral standards; do not become them.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in Rise and Kill First is the enormous number of mistakes Israel’s intelligence services made in their operations that either failed to kill their prey, allowed him to escape, caused unmanageable collateral damage, or simply was a mess from beginning to end. This is certainly not the Mossad of legend, and Bergman’s telling of the story pulls the most feared and admired intelligence service in the world back down into the realm of ordinary mortals.

There is a scene in the 2005 movie, The Constant Gardener, in which an Amnesty International activist, Tessa Quayle, says to the resident MI-6 agent in Kenya, “I thought you spies knew everything.” Tim Donohue, the agent, replies, “Only God knows everything and He works for the Mossad.”

Bergman’s work suggests that the Mossad, after a few spectacular successes in the early years, settled back and became an organisation of pencil-pushing bureaucrats whose non-performance was protected by secrecy laws. For many years, most of the counter-terrorism workload had been borne by Shin Bet and AMAN (Agaf HaModi’in – Directorate of Military Intelligence) with firepower assistance from the IDF. It was during the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon that Meir Dagan was appointed the head of Mossad to reconvert the “effete” outfit back into one of spies with “daggers between their teeth.”

By the very nature of the conflicts Israel has found itself in, the legends of its intelligence community are mostly from counter-terrorism operations. Bergman reminds us of the few stunning successes they have had in more conventional activities against their neighbours as well. The exploits of Wolfgang Lotz and Eliyahu Cohen are well-known as are the bombing of the nuclear reactors in Iraq (Osirak, 1981) and Syria (Al-Kibar, 2007) but less known are exploits such as the elimination of Egypt’s entire military supreme command hours before the Suez Crisis began or the assassination of Muhammad Suleimani, the National Security Advisor to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in his house in Tartus. Such missions not only set enemy ambitions back but also paralysed them with fear that Israel was listening in at every moment and they might be the next targets.

Of course, some of Israeli intelligence operations contributed to the Jewish state’s resounding successes in its wars with its Arab neighbours. Just days before the Suez Crisis in 1956, for example, the precursor of AMAN’s (Agaf HaModi’in – Directorate of Military Intelligence) Unit 8200, responsible for signals intelligence, picked up information that placed the entire Egyptian military supreme command on a plane from Damascus to Cairo. On the afternoon of October 28, hours before land operations were to commence, the Israeli Air Force shot down one of the two Ilyushin Il-14s ferrying Egypt’s military leaders and wiped out its senior command. In the capture of Gaza in the subsequent war, Israel uncovered secret files that contained a long list of Palestinian terrorists conducting hit-and-run missions into Israel; over the next year, each of them received a parcel in the mail.

Bergman’s argument that Israel has for long succeeded and brilliantly at the tactical level against her enemies but has not achieved her strategic goals despite a body count that keeps steadily creeping upwards is not a new one. Daniel Byman’s A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism makes a similar point. The author suggests that the only solution is peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and he offers the change in thinking of two fiercely hawkish leaders – Sharon and Dagan – as food for thought in his study. These are not the only warriors turned peacemakers – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and several other Israeli prime ministers and leaders who have had a distinguished military record have come to feel the nihilism of conflict without end.

Well-intentioned though this position may be, the operational benefits of wearing down experience through assassinations cannot be denied, and the statements of Yassin and dozens like him cannot be dismissed. How do you fight an enemy that will not stop attacking you until you or he is dead?

Rise and Kill First does not try to judge or solve Israel’s imbroglio with the Arabs. Rather, it seeks to focus on the consequences of Israel’s preferred policy of targetted assassinations. Several times, the figure eliminated was replaced by someone far more capable and worse. Even if this were not the case and terror groups have dissolved owing to Israeli strikes, others have sprung up in its place. Bergman sensitively discusses the psychological toll of such never-ending operations in a book packed with detail for the trivia aficionado and historian as well as ethicist and policy wonk.

Despite being trained as a lawyer – with an M.Phil in international relations and a doctorate in history from Cambridge as well – there is little legal analysis in Rise and Kill First. Rather, Bergman leaves as much of the story as possible to participants because it is also a story of a clash of personalities and philosophies – Menachem Begin’s Biblical nostalgia, Efraim Halevy’s concern for diplomatic fallout, Sharon’s Joshua complex (the Israelite commissioned by G-d to conquer the land of Canaan in a milchemet mitzvah – obligatory war), Dagan the scalpel.

Bergman’s seven years of research and over one thousand interviews conducted shines through in the magisterial Rise and Kill First. This book is an invaluable contribution to several fields of study – security studies, ethics, foreign policy, and the history of Israel. Pace the seriousness and complexity of its topic, Rise and Kill First is a captivating read with even a slight emotional roller coaster of a novel.

Violence is a serious affair in Judaism and not something to be taken up lightly. Over their history, Jews have seldom been in a position to engage in wars and hence their thoughts on jus ad bellum and jus in bello – just war and just conduct in war – have not been highly developed. However, the Talmud lays down several conditions that makes it very difficult to go to war. As Bergman quotes in his opening, the scriptures say of defensive wars to rise and kill first. And of preemptive defensive war, the Sages say (Sotah 44b) to diminish the heathen before he comes and wages war against you.