This is a real story, a dark and bloody story, that happened 50 years ago Monday.
At the Munich Olympic
Games in 1972, a group of Palestinian Terrorists broke into the Athletes
Village, took members of the Israeli Olympic delegation hostage and killed
them. Well, two were killed immediately and the other nine were killed having
been marched from the village to waiting helicopters as part of a supposed
negotiation for the release of over 200 Palestinian terrorists.
It now looks as though the
Germans had a tip-off that an attack was planned, failed to protect the athletes
in the village, and bungled a rescue attempt by failing to have anyone with experience
in hostage negotiation or extraction involved. Mossad’s head of interrogation at
the time, Victor Cohen, discovered later on that ‘some of the policemen who
were supposed to take part in the rescue operation made a decision before it
started that they were not ready to risk their lives for the sake of the
Israelis.’[1]
And what about the Palestinians?
On the one hand the murder was by a splinter group – which called itself Black
September, on the other hand, there was delight across the Palestinian political
spectrum. The bodies of the terrorists who died received hero’s funerals
And the Palestinian newspaper,
Al-Sayyid, wrote, in pride,
[Nothing] could have had greater resonance with every
person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in
Munich.[2]
So today, I want to do two
things. I want to honour the lives of those murdered by those terrorists, then.
And I want to ask the
question – what does it mean to say ‘Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof’ – justice justice
pursue in the aftermath of an appalling act of murderous terrorism?
The response of the
Israeli government is well known.
On September 11 1972, the
cabinet authorized prime minister, Golda Meir, to approve the assassination of targets
even in friendly countries, without notifying local authorities. “Retaliation
or no retaliation,” Meir told the Knesset on September 12, “at any place where
a plot is being laid, where they are preparing people to murder Jews,
Israelis—Jews anywhere—it is there that we are committed to striking them.”[3]
And so it began. You may
have seen the movie, or read the book, a systematic attempt to assassinate those
responsible for the attack.
First up – Wael Zwaiter
who was shot in the stairwell of his Rome apartment. Next Mahmoud Hamshari was
blown up by a telephone bomb, and so operation Wrath of God continued.
I’ve been re-reading the
remarkable Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman which tells the story with astounding
precision and insight. Bergman writes,
Whenever [Zvi Zamir, Mossad
Chief], asked [Prime Minister Meir] to sign a “Red Page,” as the kill order was
called because of the color of the paper it was typed on, she would convene a
select group of her cabinet ministers to deliberate with her—including her
minister for religious affairs, Zerach Warhaftig, who would anoint each mission
with a religious stamp of approval.
A religious seal of approval.
I looked up the biography of the minister for religious affairs, Rabbi
Warhaftig – one of the signatories of Israel’s declaration of Independence. He
was a holocaust survivor who came to fame having negotiated thousands of visas
from Japan and Holland to allow Polish Jews to escape the Nazis. I wonder what
was on his mind as, in Bergman’s phrase, he ‘anointed each mission with a
religious seal of approval.’
It's not that Judaism is
pacifistic. There are plenty of death sentences meted out in the Torah. One
that I often think about is
Leviticus 20:9 – anyone who
curses his father and mother should be put to death.
Parents here, you can
thank me later for sharing that one.
There’s also a Biblical command
to defend oneself from criminal threats. In Exodus the Bible says that if you
discover a thief breaking into your house in the middle of the night, you are
not to be considered guilty for killing them – the understanding of the Rabbis
is that if a thief is breaking in at night they have to expect someone is in,
which means they can be assumed to strike you if you disturb them.
But there are Biblical
verses that lean in a different direction – in a number of places the Torah
instructs the construction of Cities of Refuge. If one person kills another,
and it was an accident, and the person – in the lang of the Torah ‘didn’t hate
the person from their past,’ they can run to one of these cities and stay there
safe from retribution. Not that the doctrine of the Cities of Refuge applies to the terrorists behind the
attacks in Munich.
And hovering over all the
legal back and forth is this most stunning Biblical idea – that every human
being, even the cruelest and wicked, is created in the image of the Divine,
and any life taken destroys that spark of divinity and worlds of possibility.
And while, of course, that applies to the descendants and the descendants of
the descendants of those murdered so cruelly, it also, radically applies to terrorists
and murderers. All life is quite literally sacred.
But when it came to the
killers of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich what do you do? Turn politely to the
Libyans and ask for them to be extradited, or put on trial in a foreign
jurisdiction.
I don’t want to suggest
that these are easy decisions, particularly for those who are placed in positions
of great national responsibility, particularly for a country like Israel, up
against so much, with memories of Nazi genocide so alive.
But the problems of a
violent response to violence are many.
The most quoted verse in
this week’s reading reads ‘Justice, Justice you shall pursue.’ My favourite
explanation of the importance of repeating the word ‘justice’ comes from
Martin Buber. The only way to pursue just ends, Buber argues in Ten Rungs, is
to pursue just means. Creeping up in the middle of the night, and shooting a
man to death in the stairwell of their building isn’t a just means.
And maybe, that particular
killing is problematic for another reason. The man shot in his stairwell might just have been a Palestinian with no direct connection to the Munich atrocities.
One former Israeli agent told Bergman,
“Zwaiter had nothing to do
with the killing of the athletes.’ Another called the assassination of Zwaiter “a
terrible mistake.”[4]
Back in the days of the Sanhedrin
70 judges would be called to decide on any capital case, and if only one felt
there was a shadow of a doubt, judicial killing would be out of the question. And
in the end, the entire apparatus of judicial killing fell away. Rabbi Akiva
famously said that any Court that sentenced one person to death every 70 years should
be considered a Bloody Court.
To add to the danger of
mistakes comes this powerful truth about violence. Violence doesn’t build peace.
If the goal is a world in which Israeli athletes, none of us, has to worry
about terror and violence, how do we get from here, or then, to where we want
to be? If they kill eleven of ours, we can, perhaps, strike back and kill 22 of
theirs, but … Gandhi wasn’t wrong when he argued ‘an eye of an eye only ends up
making the whole world blind.’
Bergman’s book – Rise and
Kill First is more than a telling of the Munich story, it’s the story of a very
Israeli attitude to the appalling violence, terror and threat the country has
experienced in its short life – from British officers in the mid-40s, to
Iranian nuclear scientists in this century, Israel has held firm to a line that
you mess with us, we will come for you with a greater force than you came for
us.
So many of the great
political leaders of Israel are men – largely men – for whom this has been their
life. Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister, was one of the crack assassins sent
into Beirut to take out four of those Israel believed were responsible for the Munich
murders, as was Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of another former Prime Minister,
Bibi. Being tough, and uncompromising in the hard line that promises death will
come to anyone messing with Israel has long been a vital strategy for anyone who wanted political power in Israel.
But Bergman’s book
contains another voice. Time and time again, leaders of Mossad and similar
crack teams – the Caesarea Operatives, Shin Bet, Sayeret Matkal, at the end of
their careers and, in some cases, at the end of their lives, have come to argue
again this policy.
Most dramatically there is
the case of the former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, a man who authorised any number
of targeted killings, who at the end of his career, turned against then Prime
Minister Bibi Netanyahu for misapplying the tactic of targeted killing, for not
doing enough to find other tactics – pathways towards building peace. What, Dagan
wonders, if all the energy, the bravery, the courage and the incredible
resources that Israel has invested in the targeted killing of her enemies, what
if all that had been invested in changing hearts, not stilling hearts.
That’s not the view of
a wishy-washy liberal armchair liberal that’s the view of a Mossad Director, a
man who had, in Bergman’s line, ‘a knife between their teeth.’
Justice, justice you shall
pursue, tricky.
Justice, especially in the
threat of terror is tremendously difficult, only a fool looks at a complex
situation and sees simple solutions.
Meeting violence with
violence will always tempt us, especially if we feel we are physically stronger,
but violence cannot build towards peace, and somehow we need to keep a space
for our dreams for peace, we need to pursue peace and build toward it, even if
other avenues tempt.
And maybe that’s the
greatest lesson for us all – for those of us who have the fortune not to be at
the very sharp end of these impossible decisions – when someone or something
does something bad to us, there will always be a temptation to respond with a simple
response, perhaps a forceful or an aggressive response. It might even be fair
to so do, but it will always behove us to check those temptations – how are we
building for a better future? How can we respond to the bad done to us in such
a way as to lessen the chance that someone else will even want to do bad to us
again?
It was the great 1st
Century Rabbi, Hillel, who called on us all
הֱוֵי מִתַּלְמִידָיו שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן,
אוֹהֵב שָׁלוֹם וְרוֹדֵף שָׁלוֹם, אוֹהֵב אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת וּמְקָרְבָן לַתּוֹרָה:
be like the students of Aharon,
brother of Moses, who love peace and pursued peace, who loved creation and drew
them closer to the correct instruction.
Shabbat Shalom
[1] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First:
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 151). John Murray
Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First:
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 152). John Murray
Press. Kindle Edition.
[3] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First:
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (pp. 152-153). John
Murray Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First:
The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 161). John Murray
Press. Kindle Edition.
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