It’s been a busy last half-week in the Middle East. Israel—well, allegedly Israel—has been busy knockin’ ‘em down. Let’s review: First, on Tuesday, Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah military commander, was caught on the pointy end of a precision airstrike in a Beirut neighborhood. Not just any ‘hood, but Hezbollah’s stronghold in the city. Less then ten hours later, something took out Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in his regular guest residence in Tehran, Iran. I write “something” because there is some question whether what blew him up dropped from the sky or whether a bomb had been smuggled into his apartment. Finally, yesterday morning it was announced that Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigade in Gaza, ceased to be the commander of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigade in Gaza in the wake of an IDF missile strike. Technically, because this last hit apparently took place last month it arguably doesn’t belong in this week’s assassination tally. But, for whatever reason, Israeli intelligence confirmed the kill only yesterday, so we’ll give them the hattrick. I know we ought not to delight in the death of the wicked but, cry me a river, these dudes had it coming.
Any one of these kills would represent the most high-profile Israeli strike against an enemy of Israel since the October 7th attacks. Taken together, they are a strategic boon. Not only does each killing have direct military value—indeed, the deaths of Haniyeh and, most especially, Deif, represent significant advances in Israel’s war aim of destroying Hamas’ military and political capabilities—but they also both punish past aggressions as well as help deter future aggression. Helpfully, and not unrelated to the deterrent-value, the strikes also signal to their adversaries that Israel can hit its enemies wherever and whenever it wants—whether they’re in their own stronghold or in the capital of a regional power—and that Israel has ample resources to track their enemies down. Shukr, for instance, was apparently taken out while enjoying his weekly tryst with his mistress. Haniyeh was taken in the heart of the Iranian capital and, more brazenly, there is reason to believe that the device that killed him might have been planted in his apartment weeks or months earlier and detonated remotely. Dief was taken while shielding himself among the refugees in Mouasi, along the Gaza coast. The intelligence, capability, reach, tradecraft, and precision that made these strikes so successful ought to give second thoughts to anyone contemplating getting Israeli blood on their hands.
The hit on Haniyeh is the most controversial of the kills. To my knowledge, no political leader outside Israel—who has not claimed responsibility for the attack—has spoken approvingly of it. Most Western nations call for restraint and worry aloud about escalation in the immediate fight and wider violence throughout the region. Other political leaders, mostly, though not exclusively, from non-Western nations have outright condemned it. A short sampling of some of the usual suspects is unsurprising. Iran, of course, has vowed to avenge the killing and protests the violation of their sovereign territory. Qatar, who gave Haniyeh refuge—or a base—and who been a mediator in the Gaza conflict, condemned the assassination, calling it “a heinous crime,” “dangerous escalation,” and “major violation of international and humanitarian laws [sic!].” The Deputy Russian Foreign Minister called it “an absolutely unacceptable political murder.” And, just for fun, Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi who, one of Yemen’s Houthi Supreme Revolutionary Committee members, opines that targeting Haniyeh is “a heinous terrorist crime and flagrant violation of laws and ideal value.” Being who he is it’s clear Al-Houthi knows a thing or two about terrorist crimes, but I’m less sure what he means by “ideal values.”
Some of the controversy has to do with definitions of terms and what those terms evoke. For instance, it’s not necessarily clear, in a strictly technical sense, that what happened to Haniyeh is rightly called an assassination. A part of the problem is that assassinations are closely related to things that aren’t assassinations—like targeted killings. While these two terms overlap in important ways, they are not identical, and the differences can carry important implications. Identifying those differences is made harder by the fact that neither has a precise nor widely accepted definition. Assassination, by a rough consensus, has to do with something like the deliberate, extra-judicial—or at least done without trial—killing of a political figure. And, probably, for political reasons. But that’s vague to the point of being not much good. Of course, classic examples are obvious when we see them, such as Cesare Borgia’s killing of political rivals—immortalized in The Prince, or the killing of US President’s Mckinley or JFK. With these killings in mind, the moral problems with assassination tend to become rather obvious. The assassination of political rivals within a (otherwise) well-ordered, liberal democratic state is simply murder. Or, given its ability to destabilize that well-ordered state, domestic assassinations can be justifiably viewed as a particularly dangerous species of murder. Moving abroad, the peacetime assassination of political leaders of foreign states is unlawful under any number of treaties and conventions. And rightly so: one cannot go about simply whacking adversary nation’s leadership if they carry no current or imminent threat against you. Among much else, the dangers of destabilizing the international order would be similar to the dangers of domestic assassinations harming the local polity–just on a grander scale.
While this is only a summary look at assassination, it might already be becoming clear that, ultimately, what we’ve said here of assassination has little to do with the killing of Haniyeh. First, the prohibition against assassination of political leaders in peacetime is intended to protect heads of states—and not the leaders of terrorist organizations. Hamas may be the once-elected political authority in Gaza, but—because of their refusal to provide for the order, justice, and peace of the Palestinian people over whom they rule—they are hardly legitimate and, arguably—really, inarguably after October 7—they have by their misbehaviors waived any rights to the privileges of being sovereigns. Second, the qualification of “peacetime killing” is essential, if not entirely decisive. Haniyeh, as a key leader of Hamas, is obviously not at peace with Israel. He and his people started a war. He has waived any right not to be harmed. As an enemy combatant, his killing ought to move us away from the language of assassination—with all its baggage—and more appropriately toward the language of targeted killing.
While also without a strict definition, one distinction between targeted killing and assassination is that the former can be restricted to armed conflicts or, more generally, states of war–whether conventional, non-conventional, or, I would argue, sometimes even cold—though this would admittedly be likely to raise the temperature to at least lukewarm. A second restriction would be to designate the killing of a political leader a targeted killing rather than an assassination only when the political leader in question was within the chain of command of the armed force involved in the fight. While Haniyeh possibly falls into a grey area on this last point, the third distinction regarding targeted killings vis-a-vis assassination is that targeted killing is also typically used when whacking even known, low echelon terrorists who don’t happen to be leaders within their group. Such a kill falls somewhere between the more randomized killing of, say, the firefights on Omaha Beach and the taking of Haniyeh. In any case, the point isn’t to be overly obnoxiously dogmatic about semantics and colloquial expressions, but only to stress that the conceptual differences—and their ramifications—are important. However we use language we need to be careful not to confuse our thinking.
But what of the fact that Haniyeh was killed in Iran? BLUF: Iran’s claim that Israel criminally violated their territorial integrity is ludicrous. Iran is Hamas’ sugar daddy. While Hamas certainly has claim to a fight of its own, through Iran’s financial backing, Hamas also serves as Iran’s proxy in Iran’s fight against Israel. Indeed, sometimes the “proxy” bit of that falls away—as it did a couple months ago when Iran launched a massive and direct missile barrage against Israel. On top of it all, by giving refuge and protection to a senior leader of a terrorist organization in a direct fight against Israel, Iran has zero claim to protection against attack. It is only Israeli prudence—and not questions of justice—that prevents Israel from rightly bringing the fight more directly to Iran. Israel’s attack against Haniyeh in Iran was provocative, to be sure. But it was also tremendously limited and discriminate. Only Haniyeh and a bodyguard were killed. The precision of the strike must not be missed, and their restraint ought to be appreciated.
All this said, of course, I’m not an international lawyer and I do not know if, despite all of the above, whether Israel’s hit on Haniyeh in Iran —if it was Israel’s hit—was, strictly speaking, legal. But, of course, because I’m not an international lawyer but an ethicist, the attack’s legality is not really the point. I’m far more interested in the moral questions than the legal ones.
There’s much to say about these moral issues, but I’ll reserve my reflection to two questions. First, much has been made of the fact that Haniyeh is not directly involved in the fighting but is merely a political figure. This is clearly not the case with this week’s other two hits. Deif, as it was put over at The Free Press, is credited with transforming Hamas “from a tactical annoyance into a terror group that has pushed the Middle East to the brink of regional war.” He is also known to be the chief architect of the October attack. There can be no reasonable objection to his killing. Shukr is tied directly to the recent artillery strike that killed twelve Druze children and teenagers inside Israel. But what about Haniyeh? Has he waived his rights not to be harmed when, instead of guns or bombs, all he has brought to the war against Israel is words?
One might think here about the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators in the summer of 1944. Certainly, the attempt was, in any technical sense, illegal. Or, at least, illegal under the Nazi political regime. For Stauffenberg, his actions were also treason—a rather clear violation of his pledge of personal loyalty to Hitler made under the Führereid—the so-called Soldier’s Oath sworn by all officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht and other security and intelligence personnel. Of course, there is a higher law—and even a higher conception of Germany and what it means to be a German—to which both Nazi jurisprudence and Stauffenberg owed primary fidelity. We admire Stauffenberg partly because he recognized his truer loyalties. [note to editor: do we need an article on the Just Treason Tradition?]
But beyond Stauffenberg’s legal or moral responsibilities, the important thing here is the question of Hitler’s legal or moral liability. Hitler ushered no one into a gas chamber. He did not follow behind the front lines in the east and round up villagers for slaughter. But, of course, political leaders who direct the combatants under their command to commit such war crimes are morally responsible for those crimes—no matter how removed from the battlefield and direct killing they might be. Their responsibility for such crimes leaves them liable—legally and morally—for harms deemed necessary to stop them from further committing these crimes or to punish them post-facto.
Haniyeh was the international face of Hamas and a self-imposed leader-in-exile. There’s some question regarding the extent of his direct involvement in the October 7th attack against Israel, but that ought never to have got him out of the crosshairs. He was responsible for propaganda and for maintaining diplomatic and organizational ties between Hamas and its allies and financiers. And regardless of what he knew about the build up to October 7th, within hours of the attack he was thanking God for the attack’s success and leveraging it in promotional speeches. Keeping to the Nazi analogies, this might call to memory Julius Streicher, the vile antisemite and editor of the tabloid Der Stürmer, a primary mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda. More horrifically, Streicher was also the publisher of antisemitic books for children; including Der Giftpilz—or, The Poison Mushroom, which harnessed the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly fungus to warn good German children of the dangers posed by Jews. Streicher was well aware that his work helped fuel the murder of European Jewry. That was the point. Despite never directly killing a single Jew, Streicher was the first member of the Nazi regime to be held accountable for inciting genocide at the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was hanged.
Streicher and Haniyeh, whatever their role in direct killing may or may not have been, nevertheless had ample amounts of Jewish blood on their hands. Their killings were appropriate acts of justice. Indeed, Haniyeh’s killing is even more easily defended given that he was not in custody and that there was no real way of getting him into custody.
The second moral question about which I’m interested is this: how should we think about the death of the wicked? For this, I’ll persist with reference to Hitler’s War Against the Jews. This time, I’ll recall my attendance at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. On a cold, grey, January afternoon, Elie Wiesel, the late Romanian-born American professor and Holocaust survivor, addressed a congregation of us that had gathered for prayers and remembrance near the ruins of one of the Birkenau crematoria. Let me set the scene, drawing from a piece I wrote before I departed for the observation of the 75th anniversary.
In a voice quivering with emotion yet unbreaking, Wiesel implored us to never forget the lost. “Remember the nocturnal procession of children, of more children, and more children, so frightened, so quiet, so beautiful,” he said, gazing to the near distance as if looking upon apparitions. “If we could simply look at one, our heart would break.” His voice, then, dropped a register, “But it did not break the hearts of the murderers.” And with that in mind, Wiesel then addressed the Holy One:
Oh, we know that God is merciful, but please, God, do not have mercy on those who created this place. God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here. Do not forgive the murderers and their accomplices.
What Wiesel invoked there in the shadow of the crematoria is something much more than mere righteous anger. As I understand it, in Hebrew there is a curse—the curse of curses: yimakh shemo. The phrase originated with Haman—the attempted destroyer of Jews—from the biblical book of Esther, though it hearkens in spirit back at least to Amalek. It translates, “May his name be obliterated.” It is the awful antithesis of the joyous invocation offered after the loss of a righteous person: “May his memory be for a blessing!” Instead, yimakh shemo is a killing phrase. It asks that the rasha—the evil one in view—be forgotten, blotted from the book of life, erased forever. It is used more generically throughout the Hebrew scriptures to signify the wicked, but as a curse it is used for the Jewish people’s worst enemies. In the context of the holocaust, we think of Adolf Hitler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss, Julius Streicher, and near-countless goose-stepping others. In the context of this week, the three that are recently gone will do.
But what do we, especially those of us who stand in the Hebraic tradition, make of the curse itself? Surely, the desire we have to see the wicked punished is not inherently wrong. Certainly, it mirrors the Divine demand for justice, even as He does not desire the death of the wicked. These are not contradictions. Human emotions, of course, unlike Divine, can become confused. Our sense of relief that the wrongdoer has been stopped, that the innocent are now safe, that the injustices of victimizers will be retributed, that evil will be deterred, and that some approximate measure of justice, order, and peace might be rekindled can sometimes mutate into a desire to see the wicked suffer, per se. In such cases, such desires must be mortified. But the spark that ignites them must never be quenched. Nor ought we to quench the spiritedness with which some go about the business of justice. Those who wear the cloth of our own nation, for instance, or stand for the people of Israel, ought not to be ushered off to just fights with slumped shoulders. When the cause is just and their motives true, they should fight with happy hearts. Not for the sake of the fight itself, but because they are willing and able to fight it. We should bid them happy hunting and celebrate when their aim is true.
War and fighting and killing are sources of grief, to be sure. The location of our joy at the deaths of the wicked ought not to be the deaths themselves, even the deaths of those whose deaths yield a net good for the world. We ought rather to have seen them turn from the evil of their ways, repent, make amends, and either return to human fellowship or simply go away. But as proved time and time again, our enemies always have a say. And some will not stand down from their evils, so they must be knocked down.
My prayer remains that there will someday be genuine peace in the Middle East. I wish my Palestinian friends could live in a flourishing society and live flourishing lives. But until there is and until they do, my prayer is that so long as there remain those hellbent on the destruction of the people of Israel that the people of Israel would be great at war, discriminate and proportionate in waging it only when it is necessary, and decisive when they do.