Rise and Kill First book cover

SOTT – Ronen Bergman’s new book, “Rise and Kill First”. Rise and Kill First is a staggering, investigative account of dozens of Israeli killings over many decades by Ronen Bergman, a leading Israeli journalist who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Bergman has cultivated sources throughout the Israeli security establishment, and in creating what is often a page-turner that relates the details of one lethal operation after another, he tells his story entirely from the Israeli perspective.

As a result the book’s tone is set by the black humor of Bergman’s sources: the Israeli government killers. The author revels in their jargon – Red Page is the name for a “kill order” – and in their snuff jokes, the grisly humor that Israeli operatives employ when they describe killing Palestinians and other Arabs in their interviews with Bergman.

Here is a (long) list of those cracks. CONTINUE READING

One thought on “'Rise and Kill First': NYT reporter's book on Israeli assassinations brims with jokes about killing Arabs”
  1. While all amusing and endearing in their own way, I think for concision and richness of wit, I prefer…
    “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” – Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
    Raphael deserves a medal of honor for the sheer brilliance of his oratory, let alone his military leadership.
    And yet can Ronen Bergman’s citations from the fearless killers of the Israeli security establishment be totally trusted? Ronen may be “a leading Israeli journalist who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine”, and an unabashed admirer of Israel’s “dozens of killings over many decades” … but can his reportage be truly believed when put beside the forensic research of Ricki Hollander, senior media analyst at CAMERA, who as far back as October 4, 2004 comprehensively debunked the Eitan quote…
    Exposing False Zionist Quotes II (Quote Busters II)
    https://www.camera.org/article/exposing-false-zionist-quotes-ii-quote-busters-ii/
    I don’t know who’s more brilliant … Ricki Hollander … Ronen Bergman … or Raphael Eitan himself!
    Any way you look at it, Philip Weiss of SOTT appears to be onto something when he says… “Along the way, he [Bergman] lauds these Israeli operations for restoring Jewish prestige in the wake of the Holocaust, when Jews were passive victims. Published by Random House in English, his book surely provides vicarious pleasure to many American Jewish readers who have never picked up a gun.”
    Indeedy weedy. The Jewes seem to have a bottomless appetite for Schadenfreude.
    And an inexhaustible belief in their holy purpose … to rid the world of chockroaches.
    God bless ‘em.
    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats’ feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
    Remember us—if at all—not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.
    – T.S. Eliot

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