(Jerusalem Post) Hirsh Goodman - In the early 1970s, a spate of attacks hit Israeli targets around the world, with the 1972 attack on the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics being only one of many examples. Prime minister Golda Meir entrusted Aaron Yariv, a former head of Military Intelligence, to deal with the issue. Her orders to Yariv, as he later recounted, were simple: Cut off the head of the snake, she said, and the body will die soon after, and with that gave him a mandate to go after the terrorist leadership wherever they may be. With systematic efficiency and in silence, Yariv's team surgically removed dozens of key international terror operatives, often on the soil of countries friendly to Israel. Boats sank, cars exploded, rifles fired backwards, grenades went off unexpectedly early, supposed businessmen died getting into their limousines on the streets of Paris and others fell onto the rails of oncoming subways. Now we have yet another cycle of international terror being directed against Israelis. So it's time for more surgery. Terror, unfortunately, is something we know a lot about. Let the professionals deal with the problem and the surgeons do their work. The writer is a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
2012-07-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive