Targeted Assassinations

 A further revelation resulting from the expose of torture was that the American empire was operating with a highly organized network of assassins throughout the world, killing, kidnapping and torturing "suspects" and sympathizers of resistance movements. This 'Murder Incorporated' operates under the name of the Special Agency Program (SAP) and is composed of highly trained Special Forces (Army), SEALS (Navy), and DELTA Force. The SAP violates the sovereignty of every country in the world, and engages in criminal behavior conducive to capital crimes including frequent arbitrary extra-judicial murder of suspected "terrorists" or sympathizers. Their model is the Mossad policy of "selective assassinations" of suspects. As the empire expands and the anti-imperialist resistance grows worldwide, the SAP acts as an international death squad of the US imperial terror network. Israeli patented assassinations occur throughout the world and are openly supported by the Jewish state: in that sense they differ from the US covert assassination program (Phoenix program) in Vietnam, and the Pentagon-backed paramilitary death squads in Latin America.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has just revealed, the Israelis' assassinations policy accompanied the very birth of the Israeli state.

On December 27, 1947, about a month after the decision by the UN General Assembly to establish two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, and before the bloody clashes between the two nations turned into a war—Israel's War of Independence—the Haganah (the pre-state army) issued an order for what was called Operation Zarzir (Starling). In this order one can see the first comprehensive, operational plan for what would several decades later be called "targeted assassinations."1

 The assassinations undertaken by Operation Zarzir were part of a nationally orchestrated campaign of violence against the Palestinian people—a violence that was initiated by Israel, unprovoked by any Palestinian actions. As Haaretz put it:

Although assassinations of Palestinian murderers have existed since the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Operation Zarzir was exceptional. For the first time, a nationwide program involving such assassinations was planned, with operational rules. Targeted assassinations are not, therefore, as we tend to believe, a result of the intifadas or of the suicide attacks...2

 The violence was covert and duplicitous, seeking to shift the blame onto the Arabs.

The orders emphasized the need to act cautiously so as not to arouse an extreme Arab reaction. In addition, there was a directive not to carry out the assassination near "weak Jewish settlements." ...There was also a piece of advice from headquarters, to the effect that "the operation should look like an Arab action"—in other words, as though it was an Arab who had murdered an Arab...

And it was directed against a broad swath of the Palestinian leadership:

...The original list of candidates for assassination included 23 Arab leaders and high-ranking officers from all over the country. The largest group was in the Jerusalem area; the second largest was in Jaffa. Several of them, like Emile Ghouri, were political leaders.

Others were prominent military leaders...3 While initiated by the Haganah, Operation Zarzir carried on through what Haaretz calls the "Israeli War of Independence", to terminate after the Sinai campaign of 1956, where it had been employed against Egyptian intelligence deploying Palestinian commandos. But Operation Zarzir was nothing on the scale of the Israeli targeted assassination policy of today, Schiff muses.

The means for assassination were primitive. The commandos did not even dream of firing missiles or using helicopters or unmanned aerial vehicles.4

Clearly, targeted assassinations has been an Israeli policy since its inception, which overtime has not terminated, but only found better technology to implement its modus operandi. In so doing, Israel has become the instrument for the creation of one quarter of the world's refugees,5 with that percentage likely to be augmented due to its current assault on the civilian populations and infrastructure of Lebanon.

James Petras
The Power of Israel in United States

footnotes

1 Ze'ev Schiff, "On the origins of targeted assassinations", Haaretz, June 6, 2006.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Emad Mekay, "Iraq Conflict Fuels Rise in Global Refugees to 12 Million: Survey", Agence France Presse, June 15, 2006. According to the US Committee for Immigrants and Refugees (USCRI) "There are almost three million Palestinian refugees in 2005" while USCRI puts the global figure for refugees for 2005 at 12 million.