Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that may be played by assassination witihin the framework of fighting terror. Since the term "assassination" has had various usages in both professional and public discourses, the first part of the paper will be devoted to an elucidation of that term. The second part of the paper will briefly outline several principles of the military ethics for fighting terror, which are meant to govern acts of targeted pre-emptive or preventive killing, as developed by a team of the IDF College of National Defense. In the final part of the paper, we will show that those ethical principles do not sanction a strategy of assassination but do allow its use as a morally justified tactic under certain conditions. The conclusion we will reach is that, strictly speaking, unlike preventative killing assassination has not been prevalent in the context of the current conflict between Israel and Palestinian terror organizations.

pdf

Share