Israel’s war with Iran has made something brutally clear: assassination is one of the ways the Israeli state now projects power. In June 2025, Reuters reported that Israeli officials said their 12-day air war had killed more than 30 senior Iranian security chiefs and 11 nuclear scientists. In March 2026, additional killings of senior Iranian figures, including Ali Larijani, Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani, were conducted. Targeted assassinations are not new for Israel. Before that, various Palestinian operatives, as well as Arab, European, and Iranian scientists and engineers, were targeted. No other state, be it  Russia, North Korea, or Gaddafi’s Libya, can demonstrate a comparable record. This is terror of a specific kind: the systematic, deliberate elimination of named individuals for political effect, conducted across sovereign borders and now largely in the open.

The preferred Western vocabulary obscures that reality. “Targeted killing” sounds clinical, constrained, even regrettably technical. It belongs to the language of management, of a hunting party in which the hunter enjoys an overwhelming advantage over the hunted. Yet the selective killing of senior military, scientific, and political figures on foreign soil is never merely technical. It is communicative violence. It tells an adversary’s elites that they will be hunted down and killed regardless, and that only total capitulation can save them from obliteration. It demonstrates reach and evokes dread.

The international legal framework on terrorism is not a settled field. It is a politically contested terrain, and the contest is instructive. No universally agreed definition of terrorism exists in international law, and the failure to achieve one is not accidental. A central reason is that many states, particularly powerful ones, have resisted definitions capacious enough to encompass state conduct. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 1566 (2004), often cited as a working definition, limits its scope to acts committed by persons and groups, implicitly placing states outside the frame. The UN General Assembly’s decades-long attempt to draft a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has stalled precisely on the question of whether state military actions should be excluded from the definition. That exclusion, in other words, is not a conceptual conclusion; it is a political outcome. States have written themselves out of the category they created.

If we accept the dominant legal framework at face value, then by definitional fiat, no state can commit terrorism, which is a tautology, and a politically convenient one. Another approach is to ask what terrorism does, rather than simply who performs it. Functionally, terrorism involves the deliberate use of violence not only to eliminate a specific threat but to produce fear, to paralyze decision-making, and to demonstrate to a targeted population or institution that it is permanently vulnerable. The intimidatory and demonstrative dimensions of the act are constitutive, not incidental.

Evaluated on those functional terms, the structure of Israel’s assassination policy fits the pattern. To kill a scientist or a political or military leader on foreign soil is not simply to remove a threat. It is to tell the adversary state that its hierarchy is transparent to foreign violence, that its institutions can be reduced to targets, and that no position of authority confers safety. This is a “new old” terror: domination through personalized vulnerability and the paralysis of individual will. The purpose is to reorganize the enemy’s sense of security, to hollow it out by making its elite strata permanently killable. It is a pedagogy of fear addressed upward, to the command structure, and outward, to society at large.

This does not require one to assert that Israel is unique. Other states have used assassination, covert elimination, and decapitation strikes. The stronger claim is narrower: Israel is among the clearest modern examples of a state that has normalized assassination as an ordinary instrument of regional policy and political management and has done so openly enough that this normalization has become a message on its own.

Israel’s legal system has participated in this normalization. The 2006 targeted-killings case (HCJ 769/02, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel) did not ban the practice outright; it treated assassination as a regulable instrument within armed conflict. Once assassination becomes something a court administers rather than something a state denies, it has already crossed a threshold: it has moved from aberration to doctrine.

To understand how that doctrine became possible, one must look at political genealogy. It begins in the political world from which the modern Zionist movement largely emerged: the Russian Empire in its final decades, a world in which clandestine organization and political assassination were already established forms of radical struggle. Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) treated terrorist violence as a preferred means of forcing political change and succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Other revolutionary milieus — particularly currents in the Socialist Revolutionary tradition — used terrorism systematically into the early twentieth century. Pinhas Ruthenberg, who built Palestine’s electric grid in the 1920s and was one of the Haganah’s founders, had been a member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1906, he was responsible for the killing of Father Georgy Gapon, a Russian Orthodox priest accused of collaborating with the police.

The point is that Zionism evolved in an age in which exemplary violence, conspiracy, and underground discipline were already woven into the fabric of political struggle. Assassination was not invented anew in Palestine; it entered a new historical setting and eventually found a new state form. Clandestine methods traveled with the movement. That inheritance was then reproduced within Zionist politics. The killing of Jacob de Haan in Jerusalem in 1924, widely regarded as the first political assassination in Mandate Palestine, was claimed by Avraham Tehomi of the Haganah, reportedly on the authority of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would later become the second President of Israel. Ben-Zvi also gained notoriety for pardoning Israeli soldiers convicted in connection with the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956. Haim Arlosoroff was murdered on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933; the appellate court acquitted the accused far-right Zionist activists despite their identification by Arlosoroff’s widow. Then there was the Irgun, engaged in mass terror attacks including the bombing of the King David Hotel, and Lehi — the Stern Gang — which carried out systematic terrorist activities and assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944 and UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948.

These organizations were not merely forgotten extremist margins. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, became Prime Minister. Yitzhak Shamir, a leader of Lehi, also became Prime Minister. David Ben-Gurion maintained a close personal friendship with Yehoshua Cohen, the man who shot Bernadotte. These are not trivial biographical details. They indicate that the underground was not repudiated by the state. In important respects, it rose into the state.

This does not mean one should claim that all founders of Israel were terrorists. But it is reasonable to argue that part of Zionist state formation was shaped by men and organizations forged in clandestinity, conspiratorial discipline, and the ideology of exemplary violence. And here, a more general political principle applies: means do not simply disappear into ends. They harden into reflexes, strategic habits, and institutional cultures. The violence, secrecy, vanguardism, and authoritarian discipline that characterize liberation struggles do not dissolve at the moment of victory; they crystallize into institutions and political culture, shaping the new order from within. Power produces subjectivity: the way a movement organizes its struggle determines how leaders, cadres, and citizens subsequently understand authority, obedience, dissent, and truth. A movement that internalizes violence as its method will inevitably reproduce violent sovereignty — for liberation cannot be born from terror. What begins as an insurgent exception reappears as raison d’état.

Israel’s defenders want to portray its killings as purely responsive: regrettable acts compelled by hostile surroundings. But that description is too passive. This is not simply a state responding to threats, but a state whose strategic culture has come to treat exemplary killing as an ordinary medium of politics. The exception becomes the rule of what may be termed “limitless sovereignty,” in which power operates through the demonstration that nothing, including the bodies of a rival state’s leadership, lies beyond its reach. A sovereignty in which everything is permitted and nothing is accountable.

The sanitized phrase “targeted killing” is so politically useful precisely because it suppresses the demonstrative and intimidatory dimensions of the act. It strips violence of its theatrical purpose and presents murder as administration. But the intimidatory structure remains regardless of vocabulary. If the essence of terrorism, understood functionally rather than legally, lies in the use of violence to coerce and paralyze for political ends, then states can engage in it as surely as non-state actors can. The fact that the perpetrator has embassies, courts, and fighter jets does not alter its function; it only bureaucratizes fear. If Islamic State terror is decided by poorly dressed individuals in a basement in Raqqa, state terror is decided by the national leadership in expensive Brooks Brothers suits in the Ministry of Defense and the Prime Minister’s office. The form differs; the logic is the same.

This has consequences far beyond Israel and Iran. A state that normalizes assassination on foreign soil weakens the sovereignty principle it claims to uphold. It teaches the international system that formal borders don’t matter, that political officeholders are target sets, and that the distinction between war and murder is increasingly administrative. It also invites imitation. If allies are permitted to present transnational killing as a routine security instrument, rivals will do the same, and the thin moral-legal barrier against reciprocal elite targeting erodes further. Assassination is both a symptom of disorder and a school for it.

Whether any given target was guilty of something is a question for courts, and Israel is not acting as a court. The deeper question is what sort of state accepts murdering individuals as a normal way of exercising power. In Israel’s case, the answer points back to its own political genealogy: a state partly shaped by terrorist violence has not entirely transcended that inheritance. What was once the weapon of clandestine movements has become an instrument of foreign policy. The terror underground did not disappear into the state; it was not peacefully dissolved into civil society, becoming a museum exhibit of a heroic and superseded past. Through decades of institutional sedimentation, it became one of the state’s governing logics — the DNA of a regime that keeps replicating what it was partly built upon.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)