Over the course of the nation’s brief history, Israeli authorities have faced the “violent and sometimes irreconcilable clash between the fundamental principles of democracy and the nation’s instinct to defend itself” many times, writes The New York Times. Since World War II, Israel has used assassination and targeted-killing more than any other country in the West, in many cases endangering the lives of civilians, according to The Times. But they also have a long history of profound internal debates about how the state should be preserved. No target avoided and confused the Israeli assassinations apparatus more than Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He died in 2004. Sometimes he simply escaped, other times the officials who were overseeing the assassination would call it off because the target was not confirmed as Arafat, other times the civilian risk was too high. But time and time again, the plans and the straight desire to kill Arafat put Israel into the center of the ongoing debate about what a nation can — and should — do to survive. When Arafat first started Fatah, a forerunner of the P.L.O. in 1959, it was dismissed. But by 1965, the group was carrying out its first guerrilla and terror operations against Israel. So Rafi Eitan, the chief of Mossad operations in Europe asked Meir Amit, the Mossad director, to have someone break into the apartment Arafat was using as a base and kill him. The belief that killing the P.L.O. leader would solve the entire Palestinian problem was the main idea for Israeli intelligence for years to come.
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