Five days into joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the supreme leader is confirmed dead and Tehran is launching retaliatory waves against Israeli cities and Gulf energy infrastructure. Somewhere in a planning cell inside the Kirya, Israel's military headquarters in Tel Aviv, an analyst is pulling up the next name on a target list. That list did not get written this week. The decision architecture behind it, who gets targeted, under what legal rationale, with what expected blowback, was built across seventy-plus years of institutional practice. The people making those calls inherited operational playbooks and moral arguments refined since 1948. If you want to evaluate what happens next, you need to understand the system that produced this moment.
Live coverage treats each strike as a discrete event: a pin on a satellite map, a damage report, a diplomatic statement. That framing hides the machinery. Israel's security apparatus, Mossad, Shin Bet, IDF intelligence, operates through a doctrine of preemptive killing that predates the current conflict by generations. The institutional memory inside those agencies determines which options land on a prime minister's desk and which die in a planning cell. Without access to that history, you are evaluating a chess game by staring at the last move. News cycles optimize for what just happened. The logic driving this week's operations was locked in decades ago.
Ronen Bergman's *Rise and Kill First* is the most comprehensive account of Israel's targeted killing programs ever assembled. Bergman, an investigative reporter with deep sourcing across Israel's intelligence community, conducted over a thousand interviews and gained access to classified documents to trace the thread from 1948 to the near-present. The title comes from the Talmud: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." Bergman tracks how that dictum migrated from scripture into state policy. The book is organized chronologically, but its real engine is the decision loop.
You watch individual operatives, analysts, and political leaders weigh specific kills, sometimes over weeks, sometimes in minutes. An early chapter details how the young Israeli state improvised assassinations of former Nazi scientists working on Egypt's missile program, operating with almost no oversight and, in one case, mailing a letter bomb to the wrong address. Later sections follow those same instincts as they harden into bureaucratic process: target lists with codenames, legal review committees that meet on encrypted conference lines, surveillance technology that can track a phone through three countries.
That arc from improvisation to institution is the book's central contribution. Bergman has a real talent for the human texture inside these decisions. He gives you the Shin Bet agent who argued against a particular strike and was overruled, then watched the aftermath on a monitor. He gives you the drone operator's perspective, the politician running electoral math alongside casualty estimates, the intelligence analyst who flagged bad sourcing too late. These portraits function as windows into how a system processes the choice to kill a specific person on a specific day. The book documents unintended consequences with uncomfortable specificity: collateral deaths that radicalized the next generation of adversaries, operations that compounded rather than resolved threats. Bergman presents this evidence with journalistic discipline. Yet here is where the book shows its limits. Its narrative momentum, six hundred pages of operational detail propelling you from one mission to the next, occasionally carries it past the hardest question: has the entire framework of targeted killing produced the strategic outcomes Israel actually wanted? The evidence Bergman himself surfaces often argues against the doctrine more forcefully than his own analysis admits. He is a better reporter than he is a structural thinker, and the book is stronger for its scenes than for its conclusions. For this week specifically, the operational grammar Bergman describes maps directly onto the emerging picture. The decision to target Iran's supreme leader, if reporting holds, fits a pattern the book traces to the 1970s: the conviction that decapitating enemy leadership reshapes the strategic landscape. Bergman's history records cases where that conviction was vindicated and cases where it produced chaos that took decades to untangle. His account of Israel's assassination of Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi in 1992, which cleared the path for the far more capable Hassan Nasrallah, is the kind of episode that should give any planner pause. The book provides enough concrete material for you to form your own judgment about which outcome is more likely this time.
Practically, what does this give you over the next week? When officials describe a strike as "targeted" or "precise," you will know the institutional history behind those words, including the specific operations where precision failed and the fallout lasted years. When analysts debate whether killing the supreme leader will deter further escalation or accelerate it, you can weigh their claims against decades of case studies where Israel made the same bet. And when someone on a cable panel says "this changes everything," you will have a catalog of moments where that phrase turned out to be exactly wrong. The information environment around this conflict is loud and moving fast. Having the structural context to sort signal from noise is a concrete advantage, especially when the decisions being reported on were shaped by a logic most coverage never surfaces.
Bergman's book runs over six hundred pages and asks you to sit with ambiguity about operations that resist clean moral conclusions. That is precisely what makes it useful right now. The conflict unfolding this week will generate thousands of takes, most with a shelf life measured in hours. *Rise and Kill First* offers the institutional memory that explains why certain choices keep getting made, and a clear-eyed record of what has followed when they were.