When Ronen Bergman published his eight-year investigation into Israel’s intelligence services, he gave the practice of state assassination something it had never possessed before: a name borrowed from scripture and a documented institutional logic. The Babylonian Talmud advises that if a man comes to kill you, rise and kill him first, and Bergman took that injunction as the title for a book that traced more than two thousand seven hundred Israeli assassination operations across seven decades. The book argued that Israel had killed more people in targeted operations than any other Western state since the Second World War, and it did so not through improvisation but through a doctrine, a repeatable set of decisions that an operative could pitch to a prime minister and a prime minister could authorize within a structured framework. The question this analysis pursues is narrower and more uncomfortable than the book’s sweep. If a doctrine for killing enemies on foreign soil has been written down, examined, and published, and if a second democracy has begun running an extraordinarily similar campaign in the years since, then what does placing the documented Israeli model against the undocumented Indian one reveal about how states learn to kill, and about the price each model exacts in exchange for what it delivers?

India has never published anything resembling Bergman’s account. There is no Indian equivalent of the hundreds of on-the-record interviews with serving operatives, no Indian Supreme Court ruling that adjudicates the legality of a targeted strike, no parliamentary committee transcript debating whether a particular elimination served the national interest. What India has instead is a pattern, reconstructed by journalists and Pakistani investigators rather than confessed by the Indian state, of close-range shootings of wanted men in Pakistani cities that began appearing with regularity after 2019. The Indian government calls every report of this pattern false and malicious propaganda. Israel, by contrast, has spent decades arguing in its own courts and to its own public that targeted killing is a lawful instrument of self-defense, losing some of those arguments and winning others, but never pretending the practice did not exist. The comparison between the two doctrines is therefore a comparison between a thing that has been written down and a thing that has been denied, and the most important finding of the comparison is what that single difference costs and buys.

The Cases: A Documented Doctrine and a Denied Pattern

The Israeli case begins in 1907, before there was an Israel. Bergman traces the lineage of the practice to Bar Giora, a small Jewish self-defense organization founded in Ottoman Palestine, which evolved into Hashomer, then the Haganah, and finally into the institutional core of the Israel Defense Forces. The through-line Bergman draws is not organizational but psychological. The Holocaust convinced the founders of the Israeli state that physical survival could never be entrusted to anyone else, that the world would not intervene to prevent the destruction of Jews, and that a small nation surrounded by hostile neighbors had to be willing to reach beyond its borders to neutralize threats before those threats matured. From the 1940s, the practice targeted British colonial officials and suspected Nazi collaborators. After statehood in 1948, it expanded to Egyptian intelligence officers running fedayeen raids, then to the Palestinian leadership of the 1970s, then to Hezbollah and Hamas commanders, and most recently to the Iranian nuclear scientists whose deaths Bergman documents as part of a campaign that substituted assassination for the air strike Israel was not yet willing to launch.

What makes Israel a usable case for comparison is not the body count but the institutional architecture Bergman exposed. He described a chain of decision that ran from a young case officer through unit commanders to the Mossad chief and finally to the prime minister, with the elite Caesarea unit, sometimes called the Mossad within the Mossad, reserved for the highest-value targets. He described prime ministers as varied as Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu personally weighing kill orders, and he described the internal arguments, the dissents, the operations that were proposed and rejected. He recorded the failures alongside the successes, including the 1973 killing in Lillehammer, Norway, of Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter mistaken for the Black September planner Ali Hassan Salameh, and the botched 1997 attempt on the Hamas political figure Khaled Mashal in Amman, which nearly ruptured Israel’s peace with Jordan. A doctrine, in the sense this analysis uses the word, is precisely this combination of repeatable procedure and recorded error. Israel has one because Bergman, after a legal battle for archival access, was able to write it down.

The Indian case begins, for the purpose of any honest comparison, in 2019, though its roots run deeper. In February of that year a suicide bomber killed forty Indian paramilitary personnel at Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir, and Indian intelligence officers who later spoke to journalists described that attack as the hinge on which a doctrine turned. One officer told a British newspaper that the logic after Pulwama became a logic of reaching the source, of targeting hostile elements outside India before they could organize an attack, because the safe havens that produced the attackers lay across the border in Pakistan and could not be reached by any other means. From roughly 2020 onward, Pakistani investigators and journalists began tracking a series of killings of men India had formally designated as terrorists. Pakistani security officials, speaking anonymously, acknowledged at least six such killings in 2023 and two in the year before. In January 2024 Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, told reporters in Islamabad that Pakistan possessed credible evidence of Indian involvement, naming among the cases the killing of Muhammad Riaz in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in September 2023 and the killing of the Jaish-e-Mohammed figure Shahid Latif in Sialkot a month later. In April 2024 a Guardian investigation, citing intelligence operatives from both countries and documents shared by Pakistani investigators, attributed roughly twenty killings since 2020 to Indian sleeper cells allegedly operating out of the United Arab Emirates.

Israeli scale deserves emphasis before the comparison proceeds, because the numbers Bergman assembled are not incidental. His figure of more than two thousand seven hundred operations across the seven decades since 1948 is larger than the assassination totals of any other Western democracy in the same period, and the methods spanned the entire spectrum of lethal tradecraft. The early operations of the 1950s targeted Egyptian intelligence officers running fedayeen raids out of Gaza. The 1960s saw Israeli agents pursue German rocket scientists working for Egypt’s missile program, a campaign that relied on threats and parcel bombs. The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, in which the Palestinian group Black September killed eleven Israeli athletes, triggered the most famous phase, the long hunt across European capitals that Israel pursued for years. The 1990s brought the targeting of Hamas bomb-makers during the suicide-bombing campaign, including the 1996 killing of Yahya Ayyash, known as the Engineer, with an explosive concealed in a mobile phone. The 2010 killing of the Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room, captured extensively on closed-circuit television, demonstrated both the reach of the program and its vulnerability to exposure in an age of ubiquitous cameras. The campaign against Iran’s nuclear scientists, stretching from the killing of Masoud Ali-Mohammadi in 2010 to the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, marked the most recent phase. This is the documented institutional record against which India’s denied pattern must be set.

The Indian pattern, by contrast, has to be assembled from fragments, and the fragments are themselves contested. Pakistani investigators told the Guardian that they had examined previously undisclosed inquiries into seven specific cases, pointing to witness testimonies, arrest records, financial statements, mobile-phone messages, and passport documents, though the newspaper noted that it had seen these documents but could not independently verify them. The Pakistani intelligence sources alleged Indian involvement in roughly twenty killings since 2020, with a marked acceleration in 2023, when they attributed about fifteen deaths to the pattern, most of them close-range shootings by unidentified gunmen. The Khalistan dimension ran alongside the anti-militant one: the Guardian’s account and parallel allegations from Canada and the United States described Sikh separatist figures as targets of the same broader posture, both inside Pakistan and in Western countries. Where Israel’s record is a library, India’s is a set of investigators’ files in another country’s hands, denied by the state they implicate. The asymmetry of evidence is not a flaw in the comparison. It is one of the comparison’s central subjects.

These two cases sit in the same analytical frame because the Indian operatives who described their own logic to journalists named the Israeli model directly. According to the Guardian’s account, Indian intelligence officers said India had drawn inspiration from agencies including Israel’s Mossad and Russia’s intelligence services, and they cited the 2018 killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi as a reference point that Indian officials discussed internally. The Indian doctrine, in other words, is not merely similar to the Israeli one by coincidence. The men who allegedly run it studied the Israeli precedent and the broader history of Mossad’s targeted killings the way a military planner studies a campaign that worked. The comparison is therefore not an academic exercise imposed from outside. It is a comparison the Indian practitioners themselves invited by choosing their teacher. What follows treats the Israeli doctrine as the reference text and the Indian campaign as the case to be read against it, principle by principle, because that is the relationship the practitioners established and the only relationship the available evidence can support.

The Talmudic Origin and the Logic of Preemption

The phrase that gives Bergman’s book its title is not a modern slogan but an ancient legal principle, and the distance between its original meaning and its modern application is itself a finding. In the Talmudic context the injunction concerned a specific, imminent, individual threat: a man physically advancing on you with intent to kill, against whom preemptive force was permitted because waiting meant dying. The Israeli intelligence community took that principle of individual self-defense and scaled it into a doctrine of national policy, applied not to an attacker already in the room but to an enemy planner sitting in an office in Beirut or Tehran, a planner whose threat was real but neither imminent in the legal sense nor individual in the original sense. The scaling is the doctrine. Everything difficult about targeted killing as a state practice flows from the gap between a man with a knife at your throat and a bomb-maker three countries away whose device will not be assembled for months.

India’s stated logic, as its officers described it after Pulwama, performs exactly the same scaling. The officer who spoke of getting to the source was articulating preemption: the targets of the alleged shadow war are not men in the act of attacking India but men whom Indian intelligence assesses will organize, finance, or inspire future attacks if left alive. This is the Talmudic principle stretched across an international border and a span of years. The intellectual move is identical in both cases, and recognizing that identity matters, because it means the Indian campaign is not a lawless aberration but the application of a logic that a sophisticated democracy spent six decades refining and a respected journalist spent eight years documenting. India did not invent the idea that a state may kill the planner before the plan matures. India inherited it.

What the inheritance does not settle is whether the logic is sound, and here Bergman’s own ambivalence becomes instructive. The former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Kenneth Pollack, reviewing the book, described its conclusion as a portrait of targeted killing functioning like an addictive drug, a treatment that relieves the worst symptom of a disease without curing the disease itself. Bergman did not write a brief for assassination. He wrote a history that records, again and again, that the killing of a commander bought time and tactical relief but rarely produced a strategic settlement, that each generation of eliminated leaders was replaced by a younger and often more radical successor, and that the operations frequently generated the very vengeance they were meant to deter. The preemptive logic, in other words, is internally coherent and externally inconclusive. It makes sense as a response to an immediate threat and remains unproven as a path to lasting security. Any analysis that places India’s campaign within this doctrine must carry that ambivalence forward rather than resolve it artificially in either direction.

The preemptive frame also explains why both states gravitated toward assassination rather than other instruments. Israel killed Iranian nuclear scientists, in Bergman’s account, partly because the alternative, a conventional air strike on hardened enrichment facilities, carried a far higher risk of regional war. India’s officers described targeting individuals in Pakistan precisely because the conventional alternatives, a diplomatic demand that Pakistan act on its own soil or a military strike that risked escalation between nuclear-armed states, had repeatedly failed or threatened catastrophe. Assassination, in both doctrines, occupies a deliberate middle position. It is more than a diplomatic protest and less than a war. It is chosen not because it is clean but because the instruments on either side of it are, respectively, ineffective and ruinous. The shape of India’s covert operations doctrine reflects that same search for a usable middle, a way to impose costs without crossing the threshold that the presence of nuclear weapons makes unthinkable.

There is a further dimension to the preemptive logic that the comparison must surface, because it bears directly on how each doctrine selects its targets. Israel’s doctrine, as it matured, came to distinguish between a foot soldier who plants a bomb and the figure who plans, finances, or inspires the campaign that produces the bomb. The 1996 killing of Yahya Ayyash reflected a judgment that the Engineer’s irreplaceable technical skill made him worth more dead than a dozen ordinary fighters, and the campaign against Iran’s scientists rested on the same calculation, that a nuclear program is, at a critical stage, a small number of specific human minds. India’s apparent target selection follows an identical hierarchy. The men named in the Pakistani investigations were not foot soldiers but figures India assessed as organizers, financiers, or commanders, individuals whose removal would degrade a network’s capacity rather than merely reduce its headcount. Both doctrines, in other words, treat the enemy as a structure with load-bearing individuals, and both treat the identification and removal of those load-bearing individuals as the point of the exercise. The Talmudic injunction, scaled into doctrine, becomes a theory of how networks are built and how, by subtraction, they can be made to fail.

Principle One and Two: Target Identification and the Intelligence Threshold

Reading Bergman’s documented history closely, it is possible to distill the Israeli practice into eight operational principles, and the first two concern who may be killed and on what evidentiary basis. The first principle is target identification: the doctrine requires that a target be a specific, named individual whose role in an active threat network has been established, not a category of person and not a guess. The second principle is the intelligence threshold: the doctrine requires that the identification rest on information solid enough to justify an irreversible act, because a targeted killing, unlike an arrest, cannot be undone if the identification proves wrong.

Israel’s own institutions have articulated these two principles with unusual precision because they were forced to. When the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel petitioned the Supreme Court to declare targeted killing illegal, the court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, delivered its ruling in December 2006 in case 769/02. It declined to outlaw the practice, but it refused to bless it in the abstract either, holding instead that the legality of each individual killing must be assessed case by case. The court laid down conditions. There had to be strong and persuasive information regarding the identity of the target and the target’s role in hostilities. Innocent civilians were not to be targeted. The intelligence on the person’s identity, the court said, had to be carefully and thoroughly verified. The 2006 ruling is, in effect, an Israeli state document setting out principles one and two in language a court was willing to defend. It is the closest thing any democracy has produced to a written standard for whom a targeted killing may lawfully reach.

India has produced no comparable document, and the absence is the central data point of this comparison. There is no Indian court ruling on the verification standard for an extraterritorial elimination, because India denies that any such eliminations occur, and a state cannot litigate the standards governing a practice it insists is fictional. What can be reconstructed instead is the apparent operating standard inferred from the pattern itself. The men named in the Pakistani investigations and the Guardian account were not random. Muhammad Riaz, Shahid Latif, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Riyaz Ahmed reportedly killed in September 2023, and Saleem Rehmani, shot in January 2022, were figures India had publicly designated. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs had issued a notification in 2020 declaring Panjwar an individual terrorist, accusing him of arranging arms training and supplying weapons for attacks inside India. The targets, in other words, appear to have been drawn from India’s own formal designation lists, the National Investigation Agency charge sheets and the home ministry notifications that name individuals as terrorists under Indian law.

This produces a striking partial convergence. India’s apparent target-identification standard, judged by the pattern, is in fact quite specific. It does not appear to kill categories of people or to strike at random; it appears to work from a list of named, legally designated individuals. On principle one, target identification, the inferred Indian practice tracks the Israeli doctrine closely. On principle two, the intelligence threshold, the comparison breaks down, not because India’s threshold is necessarily lower but because no one outside RAW can know what it is. Israel’s threshold was tested in open court and partially disclosed. India’s threshold exists, if it exists, only inside an agency that answers, through the National Security Adviser, to the prime minister’s office and to no public body. The convergence on principle one and the opacity on principle two together define the Indian model. It may identify targets as carefully as Israel does. It has built no mechanism by which anyone could ever confirm that it does.

The opacity of principle two carries a specific danger that the Israeli case makes vivid. Israel’s 2006 ruling did not merely state that intelligence had to be persuasive; it grew out of the recognition that the executors of a targeted killing should not be the sole judges of whether the evidentiary bar had been met. Critics of the ruling, including the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, argued that leaving the verification judgment to intelligence officers themselves made the standard a near-formality, since the people gathering the intelligence were also the people deciding whether the intelligence sufficed. The court’s answer was the demand for ex-post review, an external check that would, in principle, catch the cases where the threshold had been crossed too easily. India’s denied campaign has no such check, not a weak one but none, because the existence of any review body would constitute an admission. Whatever India’s actual internal threshold may be, the structural point stands: a campaign that denies its own existence cannot construct the institutional skepticism that the Israeli court considered essential precisely because intelligence services, left to themselves, tend to find their own evidence convincing.

There is also a question of what a designation actually establishes, and the comparison should not pass over it. When the Indian home ministry declares a man an individual terrorist, it is making an administrative determination under domestic law, a determination that can rest on intelligence assessments, charge sheets, and the judgment of officials, but that is not the same as a finding by a court that the individual is directly participating in hostilities in the sense the Israeli ruling required. The designation is an input to target identification, and a serious one, but it is an input generated by the same executive branch that would, in the alleged campaign, carry out the killing. Israel’s doctrine, however imperfectly, inserted a judicial body between the definition of a legitimate target and the lethal act. India’s designation process keeps both functions inside the executive. On principle one the Indian campaign looks disciplined; on the deeper question of who is entitled to decide that a named man may be killed, the discipline is the executive grading its own paper.

Principle Three and Four: Operational Security and the Limits on Collateral Harm

The third principle of the doctrine concerns operational security: the method chosen must protect the operatives, preserve the possibility of denial, and survive the inevitable investigation. The fourth principle concerns collateral harm: the doctrine, at least in its mature form, requires that the killing be precise enough to reach the target without killing the people around the target, both because civilian deaths are a moral and legal cost and because they are a strategic liability that generates exactly the vengeance the operation was meant to prevent.

Israel’s history on principle three is a history of innovation under pressure. Bergman catalogued an inventory of methods that reads like a technological history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: poisoned toothpaste calibrated to take a month to kill, a spare tire packed with a remote-detonated charge, an exploding mobile phone, a booby-trapped door, and the close-range pistol work that became a Mossad signature, often a .22 caliber round fired from a suppressed Beretta. The variety was not aesthetic. Each method was a solution to a specific operational-security problem: how to reach a man without exposing the operatives, how to make a death look ambiguous, how to leave a scene before the response arrived. On principle four, collateral harm, Israel’s record is uneven and well documented. The Israeli military journalist Amos Harel surveyed the ratio of civilian to target deaths in the air-strike phase of the campaign and found that in 2002 and 2003 the ratio ran at roughly one civilian killed for every target, a period Harel called the dark days, before tighter rules and better intelligence drove the ratio down sharply in later years. The 2006 Supreme Court ruling made the limit explicit by importing the law of proportionality, holding that the harm to civilians had to be weighed against the military value of the strike and that disproportionate harm rendered a killing unlawful.

The alleged Indian method represents a different solution to the same principle-three problem, and the difference is instructive. Where Israel built drones and exploding phones, India, according to the Guardian’s reconstruction, allegedly built a layered network of intermediaries. The killings were carried out, in this account, by local Pakistani criminals or impoverished men paid large sums to pull the trigger, recruited and handled by sleeper cells based outside Pakistan, with payments routed through Dubai and handler meetings reported to have taken place in Nepal, the Maldives, and Mauritius. The most striking detail in the account is the alleged use of deception against the killers themselves: in some cases the men recruited to shoot were reportedly told they were killing infidels, made to believe they were serving a jihadist cause rather than an Indian intelligence objective. The man accused of killing Panjwar reportedly believed he was acting on the instructions of a Pakistani Taliban affiliate and had to prove himself by killing an enemy of Islam. If accurate, this is operational security taken to an extreme that Israel’s documented methods do not match. The killer, not knowing who he serves, cannot betray the service even under interrogation, because he does not possess the truth.

On principle four, collateral harm, the inferred Indian record again favors the campaign in a way that complicates easy moral judgment. The pattern that emerges from the Pakistani investigations and the analyst tracking that the Guardian cross-checked is overwhelmingly a pattern of close-range shootings of the specific designated individual, not of bombings or strikes that killed bystanders in numbers. The motorcycle-borne or close-approach shooting, whatever else it is, is a precise instrument; it reaches one man at a doorway or a mosque gate. Measured purely by collateral harm, the alleged Indian method may be more discriminating than the air-strike phase of Israel’s campaign that Harel called the dark days. The convergence here is real and it is uncomfortable. The Indian model appears to satisfy principle four better than Israel’s worst period did, while satisfying principle three through a layer of deception that Israel’s documented history does not include. Precision and deniability, in the Indian case, were purchased together, and they were purchased by treating the trigger-puller as a disposable instrument who never learns what he is part of.

The deception element deserves closer examination, because it represents a genuine doctrinal innovation rather than merely a tactical choice, and innovations carry consequences. Israel’s documented operational security relied on professional operatives whose loyalty was institutional: a Mossad team knew exactly what it was doing and for whom, and the security of the operation rested on training, discipline, and exfiltration planning. The alleged Indian model substitutes a different logic. By recruiting men who believe they are serving a jihadist cause, the architecture achieves a form of compartmentalization so complete that the executor cannot betray the principal because the executor does not know the principal exists. This is, in narrow operational terms, more secure than the Israeli approach. It is also, in moral terms, a darker instrument, because it does not merely use a hired killer; it deceives him about the meaning of his own act, conscripting a man into a state operation under a false account of what that operation is. The comparison should name this plainly. The Indian method, if the reconstruction is accurate, did not simply match Israeli operational security. It exceeded it by adding a deception that Israel’s professional model never required, and the excess is purchased at a moral cost the doctrine’s defenders rarely acknowledge.

There is a second consequence of the intermediary model that bears on principle three over time. Israel’s professional operatives, however exposed an individual operation might become, were not themselves a source of independent evidence about the program, because they did not talk. The alleged Indian network of recruited criminals and deceived radicals is structurally leakier. The very Pakistani investigations that produced the witness testimonies, arrest records, and financial documents the Guardian examined were possible precisely because some of the men in the chain were arrested and could be questioned. A network built from disposable local recruits is highly secure against exposure of the principal in any single operation and, at the same time, highly productive of fragmentary evidence once the local recruits are caught. The Indian model’s principle-three solution is therefore double-edged in a way the Israeli model’s was not: it protects the chain of command absolutely while generating, through its own arrested intermediaries, the raw material of the investigations that allow the pattern to be reconstructed at all. The campaign’s operational security and the campaign’s eventual exposure flow from the same design choice.

Principle Five and Six: Attribution Management and the Domestic Legal Framework

The fifth and sixth principles are where the two doctrines diverge most sharply, and where the comparison delivers its central finding. The fifth principle concerns attribution management: how the state handles the question of whether it did the killing. The sixth concerns the domestic legal framework: whether the practice operates inside a structure of law and oversight that the state’s own citizens and courts can see and contest.

Israel’s attribution posture is best described as strategic ambiguity rather than denial. Israel rarely confirms an individual operation in real time, and its military censorship regime, which Bergman repeatedly ran up against, prevents even Israeli journalists from stating certain things outright. Bergman has noted that the censor would not permit him to say whether he knew, as a fact, that Israel killed Yasser Arafat. Yet at the level of the practice as a whole, Israel has never pretended that targeted killing is not a thing it does. Prime ministers have referred to it. The Supreme Court adjudicated it in open proceedings. The state defended the practice on the record, in front of its own judges, against its own human rights petitioners. This is a posture of acknowledged practice with operation-by-operation discretion. The world knows Israel has a targeted killing program; what it does not always know is which specific death belongs to it.

India’s posture is categorical denial of the practice itself. The Ministry of External Affairs has characterized reports of an Indian targeted-killing campaign as false and malicious anti-India propaganda. The external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, has stated that targeted killing in other countries is not the policy of the government of India. There is no Indian official acknowledgment, no Indian court proceeding, no Indian legislative debate, because each of those would require admitting that the practice exists. This is the difference Bergman’s title invites us to name. Israel rose and killed first, and then, in its courts and its press and its political life, it argued about what it had done. India, on the available evidence, has risen and killed first and then declined to say so at all. The doctrine, in the Indian case, has been adopted in operation and refused in public. It is, to put the matter as the comparison demands, rise and kill first without the rise and tell.

On principle six, the domestic legal framework, the divergence is the same divergence viewed from the inside. Israel’s framework is imperfect and contested. The Carnegie Endowment scholar George Perkovich and others have argued that the 2006 ruling created standards that are difficult to enforce, and the legal scholars Shahaf Rabi and Avery Plaw, examining post-2006 Israeli practice, found strong evidence that Israel complied with the court’s four substantive criteria but serious doubt about whether it had implemented the two procedural safeguards the court demanded, in particular an independent ex-post-facto committee to investigate operations that caused civilian harm. Israel’s legal framework, in short, exists, binds the state at least partially, and can be audited by scholars and criticized by its own citizens. India’s framework, for the practice under discussion, is not imperfect. It is absent. There is no Indian statute authorizing extraterritorial elimination, no judicial test, no oversight body, because the Indian state’s position is that there is nothing to authorize, test, or oversee. The argument over the legality of targeted killing that Israel has conducted in the open for two decades has no Indian counterpart, and cannot have one, as long as denial remains the policy.

The Rabi and Plaw findings cut against any reading of Israel’s framework as a clean success, and they deserve a closer look. The two scholars concluded that even Israel, the democracy that submitted its targeted-killing practice to judicial review, appeared to comply fully with only part of what its own court demanded. The substantive criteria, who may be killed and on what evidence, were largely honored. The procedural safeguards, the mechanisms designed to catch and correct error, were doubtful, and the independent investigative committee in particular could not be confirmed to function as the court intended. Israel’s framework, then, is best described not as a working system of accountability but as a partial one, strong on the rules and weak on the enforcement. The significance for the comparison is double. It means India, in declining to build any framework, has rejected something that even in its best democratic form proved hard to make fully real. And it means the gap between the two countries is not the gap between a perfect Israeli model and an Indian void; it is the gap between a flawed-but-reformable structure and no structure at all. A flawed framework at least supplies the language, the institutions, and the precedents through which reform can be argued. A denied practice supplies none of these, and the citizen who wishes to demand better has, in the Indian case, no door to knock on.

Authorization chains form the final element of principle six, and here the contrast is institutional. Bergman’s account of Israel rests on a documented chain: an operation pitched upward through named units to a prime minister who personally authorized it, a chain whose existence the Israeli political class has never seriously denied and whose decisions could, in extreme cases, be reconstructed. The Indian campaign’s authorization chain, by the account the Guardian’s sources gave, also runs to the top; one Indian operative said such operations needed approval from the highest level of government. But the Indian chain exists only as the unattributed claim of anonymous officers, denied by the state, undocumented in any record a court or parliament could examine. The doctrine, in both countries, places the decision to kill in the hands of the elected head of government. In Israel that placement is, however imperfectly, a matter of public knowledge and therefore of public responsibility. In India the same placement, if it exists, is a secret, which means the responsibility for a lethal foreign policy rests with an office that cannot be held to account for it because it has never admitted to holding it.

Principle Seven and Eight: International Consequence and Strategic Effectiveness

The seventh principle of the doctrine concerns international consequence management: how the state absorbs the diplomatic damage when an operation is exposed, mishandled, or mistaken. The eighth concerns strategic effectiveness: whether the campaign, taken as a whole, actually delivers the security it promises, or merely the appearance of action.

Israel’s history offers two textbook lessons in principle seven, and both are failures rather than successes. The 1973 Lillehammer operation, in which a Mossad team killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter who was not the man they sought, produced arrests, trials, and lasting damage to Israel’s standing in Norway. The 1997 Mashal operation in Amman, in which Israeli agents tried to kill the Hamas figure with a poison and were captured, forced Israel to deliver the antidote and release the imprisoned Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to repair relations with Jordan. These episodes are in Bergman’s book precisely because Israel could not keep them out of the public record, and their presence in the doctrine is itself a principle: a state running this practice must plan for the operation that goes wrong in a foreign country, because over a long enough campaign, one will. India’s principle-seven test arrived in a different form. It came not from a botched operation but from the convergence of allegations across multiple countries: Pakistan’s formal accusations, the Guardian’s investigation, and, most damaging because it came from a close partner, the United States, which charged that an Indian official had directed a plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on American soil, alongside Canada’s allegations regarding the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. The Indian model’s consequence-management strategy, total denial, works against a hostile accuser like Pakistan and works far less well against an allied one like the United States, whose own justice system produced an indictment that denial cannot easily dissolve. The international response to the targeted killings has been the real stress test of the Indian doctrine’s seventh principle, and the test is ongoing.

On principle eight, strategic effectiveness, the honest finding is that neither doctrine has proven itself, and that the Israeli case, being older, is the more sobering of the two. Bergman’s seven decades of evidence do not show targeted killing winning a war. They show it buying time, degrading specific networks, and forcing adversaries into defensive postures, while the underlying conflicts continued and in some cases intensified. The killing of Black September operatives after the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the campaign known as Operation Wrath of God and reconstructed at length in the account of Mossad’s founding assassination campaign, did degrade that particular organization, but Palestinian armed resistance did not end. The killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, examined as a campaign in its own right in the record of Mossad’s operations against Iran’s program, slowed but did not stop Iran’s enrichment work. The Israeli evidence, taken as a body, supports the Pollack reading: the doctrine treats a symptom. India’s campaign is too young to judge on principle eight, but the Israeli precedent is a warning the Indian planners cannot have missed and apparently chose to accept. They studied a doctrine whose own documentation shows it does not end wars, and they adopted it anyway, because the instruments on either side of it, ineffective diplomacy and ruinous escalation, were worse.

The Khashoggi reference deserves its own treatment under principle seven, because the Indian operatives reportedly cited it directly, and what they cited it for is revealing. The 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul was, by almost any operational measure, a catastrophe: it was exposed within days, it was attributed conclusively, it produced a global diplomatic crisis, and it left Saudi Arabia’s leadership permanently associated with the act. If Indian officials discussed Khashoggi internally, the lesson they would rationally have drawn was not how to imitate the operation but how to avoid becoming it. The Khashoggi case is the anti-model, the demonstration of what principle seven looks like when it fails completely: a killing too clumsy to deny, conducted on territory and in a manner that made attribution inevitable. The alleged Indian method, with its layered intermediaries, its third-country handler meetings, and its deceived executors, can be read as a deliberate engineering of the opposite outcome, an architecture designed so that no Khashoggi-style smoking consulate could ever exist. The Indian doctrine, in this reading, did not just learn from Israel’s successes. It studied the most spectacular recent failure of state assassination and built its operational security as a negative image of that failure.

The strategic-effectiveness question also has a specifically South Asian edge that the Israeli precedent does not capture. Israel’s adversaries, for all the danger they posed, did not control a state with a nuclear arsenal, and the failure of an Israeli operation, however damaging, did not carry the risk of escalation toward nuclear exchange. India’s campaign is conducted against the territory of a nuclear-armed state, and the strategic calculus therefore includes a tail risk that has no equivalent in Bergman’s account. A campaign of close-range deniable shootings is, in one sense, calibrated precisely to stay below the escalation threshold; it imposes cost without the overt, attributable use of force that could trigger a conventional or nuclear response. In another sense, the same campaign introduces a permanent low-level provocation into the most dangerous bilateral relationship in the world, and the question of whether that provocation is sustainable, or whether it will eventually combine with some other crisis to produce escalation, is genuinely open. Principle eight, for India, is therefore not only the question of whether the doctrine degrades terror networks. It is the question of whether a permanent shadow war between nuclear neighbors can run indefinitely without one of its operations becoming the spark for something far larger.

Rating India’s Shadow War Against the Eight Principles

Holding the eight principles together produces a scorecard, and the scorecard is the findable core of this analysis. Against principle one, target identification, the Indian campaign appears to score well: the pattern of killings tracks India’s own formal designation lists, suggesting a disciplined practice of striking named, legally identified individuals rather than categories. Against principle two, the intelligence threshold, the campaign cannot be scored at all, not because the threshold is demonstrably low but because the denial posture makes the threshold permanently invisible to anyone outside the agency. Against principle three, operational security, the campaign scores extraordinarily high, arguably higher than the Israeli model, through a layered intermediary structure and the alleged deception of the trigger-pullers themselves. Against principle four, collateral harm, the inferred record favors the campaign: the close-range shooting of a designated individual is a discriminating method that appears to have produced few bystander deaths.

The scorecard inverts when it reaches principles five and six. Against principle five, attribution management, the Indian campaign has chosen the most absolute posture available, categorical denial, which is operationally powerful and democratically corrosive in equal measure. Against principle six, the domestic legal framework, the campaign scores at zero, not as a failure of execution but as a matter of design: a denied practice cannot be governed by visible law. Against principle seven, international consequence management, the campaign has performed adequately against adversarial accusers and poorly against allied ones, and its score here is unsettled and worsening. Against principle eight, strategic effectiveness, the campaign cannot yet be judged, and the Israeli precedent suggests the eventual judgment will be mixed at best.

What the scorecard reveals is the analysis itself. The Indian campaign scores highest on the principles that govern the operation itself, target discipline, operational security, precision, and lowest on the principles that govern the operation’s relationship to law, accountability, and the state’s own democratic order. This is not an accidental distribution. It is the signature of a campaign optimized for one variable above all others: deniability. Every high score and every low score traces back to the same root decision. India chose to run the practice without admitting it, and that single choice produced both the formidable operational security and the total absence of legal framework. The Israeli doctrine, by contrast, accepted a measure of exposure, a censored but real public presence, in exchange for a measure of legitimacy, a contested but real legal framework. The two democracies made opposite trades. The comparison’s central finding is that the trade is the doctrine, and that India’s version of the shadow war is best understood not as Israel’s doctrine copied but as Israel’s doctrine with the acknowledgment surgically removed.

The scorecard also exposes a tension that the Indian model cannot resolve and the Israeli model at least confronts. A targeted-killing doctrine has, in the end, two masters: operational success and democratic legitimacy. The first asks the campaign to be effective, secure, and deniable. The second asks the campaign to be lawful, accountable, and answerable to the public in whose name it is conducted. These two masters pull in opposite directions, because every increase in deniability is a decrease in accountability, and every increase in public oversight is a decrease in operational security. Israel’s doctrine, by accepting partial acknowledgment, tried to serve both masters imperfectly, and the Rabi and Plaw findings show how imperfectly. India’s doctrine, by choosing total denial, has effectively decided to serve only the first master and to treat the second as a cost it will not pay. The scorecard is a portrait of that decision. A reader who values operational effectiveness above all will read the Indian scorecard as a success. A reader who believes a democracy’s lethal power must remain answerable to the democracy will read the same scorecard as a warning. The scorecard itself does not choose between these readings. It only makes clear that the choice was made, deliberately, and that it was made in a direction Israel, for all its compromises, did not take.

The Acknowledgment Question: Deniability Versus Accountability

This is the disagreement the comparison exists to adjudicate. Does India’s refusal to acknowledge its doctrine, set against Israel’s partial acknowledgment, make the Indian model more effective because the deniability is genuine, or more dangerous because the accountability is absent? The question has two serious answers, and an honest analysis must state both before choosing.

The case for deniability as a strength is concrete and should not be dismissed. A state that never confirms an operation gives its adversary nothing to retaliate against with legitimacy, nothing to take to an international tribunal as an admission, and nothing to use as a recruiting narrative built on a named enemy. Pakistan has accused India for years; the accusations have produced diplomatic friction but no binding consequence, in part because India’s refusal to confirm means every accusation remains, formally, unproven. Deniability also protects the operatives and the chain of command in a direct physical sense: a campaign that is never admitted is a campaign whose participants are never officially identifiable. And deniability preserves strategic flexibility. Israel, having acknowledged its practice, is permanently answerable for it; India, having denied it, can adjust, pause, or escalate without ever having to explain a change in a policy it maintains does not exist. By the cold logic of operational effectiveness, the denial is not a weakness. It is the single most effective component of the entire Indian model.

Set against that, the case for deniability as a danger is equally concrete and, in the longer frame, more serious. A practice that the state denies is a practice the state’s own institutions cannot govern. There is no Indian parliamentary committee reviewing the target list, because officially there is no list. There is no Indian court testing the intelligence threshold, because officially there is no killing. There is no mechanism by which a wrongful death, an operation that kills the wrong man as Lillehammer killed the wrong man, could ever be investigated, acknowledged, or corrected, because the apparatus that would investigate it would first have to admit the apparatus exists. Israel’s framework is flawed, and the Rabi and Plaw study showed it is flawed in exactly its oversight mechanisms, but a flawed framework can be criticized, litigated, and reformed. An absent framework cannot. The danger is not only to the foreign individuals who might be wrongly killed. The danger is to the Indian democratic order itself, which is, by the design of the denial, prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and therefore prevented from consenting to it or withdrawing consent. Perkovich’s critique of the accountability gap applies with greater force to India than to Israel, because India’s gap is not a weakness in the framework but the absence of any framework at all.

The adjudication this analysis offers is that both answers are correct and that they describe different time horizons. In the short and operational horizon, the horizon of the next elimination, deniability is a genuine strength, and the comparison should say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. In the long and institutional horizon, the horizon of what kind of state India is becoming, deniability is a genuine danger, because a democracy that conducts a lethal program its own citizens cannot see has carved out a zone of executive action that no election can reach. Israel’s bargain, exposure for legitimacy, looks costly in any single operation and defensible across decades. India’s bargain, denial for flexibility, looks brilliant in any single operation and corrosive across decades. The comparison cannot tell India which horizon matters more. It can only insist that the choice between them is real, that it has already been made, and that it was made without the public debate that, in Israel, the acknowledgment at least made possible.

One further observation sharpens the adjudication. Israel’s acknowledgment was not a gift the security establishment offered; it was extracted, largely through litigation, by human rights petitioners who forced the practice into court. The 2006 ruling exists because the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel sued, and the state was compelled to defend itself. The acknowledgment, in other words, was the product of friction between an executive that would have preferred secrecy and a civil society and judiciary that refused to permit it. India’s denial holds, in part, because that friction has not occurred, or has not yet occurred. No Indian petitioner has forced the alleged campaign into a courtroom, because the campaign’s deniability deprives any petitioner of the documented operation a court case would require. This means the Indian situation is not simply a darker version of the Israeli one; it is an earlier stage of a process that, in Israel, eventually produced contestation. Whether India’s campaign will ever face its own version of that friction is unknown. The comparison can say only that the friction is the mechanism by which a democracy claws a secret lethal practice back into the realm of law, and that India, so far, has experienced none of it.

How the Doctrine Crossed Borders: The Israel-India Channel

A doctrine is not transmitted by reading a book. If India’s intelligence establishment adopted the operational logic Bergman documented, the adoption happened through a relationship, and the relationship between Israeli and Indian intelligence is the channel through which the comparison’s central claim becomes concrete rather than speculative. India and Israel established full diplomatic relations only in 1992, but the security relationship deepened rapidly thereafter, moving from arms purchases into the harder-to-document territory of intelligence cooperation. By the time the alleged shadow war began producing its pattern of killings, India had become one of the largest buyers of Israeli defense technology in the world, acquiring surveillance systems, drones, missile defense, and the kind of signals-intelligence and tracking capability that any targeted-killing campaign requires before it can find a man in a foreign city. The hardware is the visible part of the relationship. The doctrinal part, the transfer of method and judgment, is by its nature invisible, but the visible part makes the invisible part plausible in a way that no coincidence of approach could.

The intelligence partnership between Israel and India supplies the comparison with its mechanism. A campaign of targeted killing on foreign soil depends on a chain of capabilities: the ability to locate and confirm a target, to surveil a daily routine, to identify the moment and place of vulnerability, to position an executor, and to extract that executor or insulate the principal from the executor’s capture. Israel had spent decades building each link of that chain and, crucially, had built the doctrine that connected the links into a repeatable process. India, modernizing its own intelligence apparatus after the catastrophic failure of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was acquiring the hardware from Israeli suppliers and, the comparison suggests, absorbing more than hardware. The Guardian’s sources said India drew inspiration from Mossad. The defense relationship is the documented structure within which that inspiration could become operational knowledge. It is one thing to admire a doctrine from a distance. It is another to buy your surveillance drones from the country that wrote the doctrine, to train alongside its services, and to share, as counter-terror partners do, assessments of common threats. The channel was open, and a doctrine that travels needs an open channel.

What the channel does not settle is the depth of the operational relationship, and the comparison should be careful here rather than overreaching. India-Israel defense cooperation is publicly documented; the intelligence dimension is largely inferred. There is no public evidence that Mossad officers planned a single Indian operation in Pakistan, and it would be irresponsible to assert one. The honest formulation is narrower and still significant. India had access, through a deepening security partnership, to the country whose targeted-killing doctrine is the most developed in the democratic world. India’s own officers told journalists they drew on that model. And India’s subsequent campaign exhibits, principle by principle, the structure of that model, adapted to Indian circumstances and stripped of the acknowledgment. The channel explains how the doctrine could have crossed the border. The pattern of the campaign explains why the comparison concludes that it did. Neither, on its own, would be enough; together they make the inheritance the most economical explanation of what the evidence shows.

There is a final irony in the channel that the comparison should name. The relationship transferred a doctrine, but it did not, evidently, transfer the part of the Israeli model that the Israelis themselves consider hardest-won: the legal framework, the judicial review, the public argument. India acquired the operational doctrine and declined the accountability architecture. This is a choice, not an oversight. The accountability architecture is the most visible, most documented, most discussed component of the Israeli model; it is impossible to study Israel’s targeted killing without encountering the 2006 ruling. India’s planners cannot have been unaware of it. They adopted the sword and left the scabbard, and the comparison’s recurring finding, that India runs the doctrine without the acknowledgment, is in the end a statement about what India chose to take from the channel and what India chose to leave behind.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

A comparison this close risks flattening real differences, and intellectual honesty requires naming the points where the two cases are not parallel and the doctrine does not transfer cleanly. The most important divergence is the strategic environment. Israel’s targeted-killing doctrine developed against adversaries, the Palestinian factions, Hezbollah, and for a long period the Arab states, that posed what Israelis genuinely experienced as an existential threat to national survival, and that did not possess nuclear weapons. India’s campaign is conducted against a single adversary state, Pakistan, that does possess nuclear weapons and that India does not face as an existential threat to its survival in the way Israel’s founders understood their position. This difference cuts in two directions at once. The nuclear dimension makes India’s campaign in one sense more cautious, because the close-range deniable shooting is in part a way of imposing cost while staying far below the threshold that could trigger escalation between nuclear states. The same nuclear dimension makes the campaign in another sense more dangerous, because a misattributed killing or a botched operation in a nuclear-armed neighbor carries a tail risk that Israel’s operations against non-nuclear adversaries did not carry.

A second point of divergence is institutional age and depth. Israel’s doctrine is the product of more than seventy years of accumulated practice, error, correction, and, eventually, judicial and journalistic scrutiny. The institution learned in public, or at least in semi-public, and the learning is recorded. India’s campaign, dated honestly, is a matter of years rather than decades. It has not yet had its Lillehammer in the sense of a publicly undeniable catastrophic error, and it has not yet been tested by the kind of generational adversary adaptation that Bergman documents wearing down the Israeli program over time. To rate India against an eight-principle doctrine distilled from seventy years of Israeli history is to hold a young campaign against a mature one, and the rating should be read with that asymmetry in mind. Some of the Indian campaign’s apparent high scores may simply reflect the fact that it has not yet operated long enough to accumulate the failures that any long campaign accumulates.

Target legitimacy is a third divergence, concerning the nature of the targets and the question of who counts as a legitimate one. Israel’s 2006 Supreme Court ruling wrestled explicitly with the status of its targets, concluding that Palestinian militants were civilians who lost their protection from attack only for such time as they directly participated in hostilities, a narrow and conduct-based test. India’s apparent targets are men on its own designation lists, but a designation issued by the executive of one state is not the same legal object as a court-tested finding of direct participation in hostilities. The Indian campaign’s target discipline, real as it appears, rests on a self-issued list rather than on any externally testable standard, and the comparison should not let the apparent rigor of the list obscure the fact that India is both the author of the list and the executor of the sentence. Where Israel built, however imperfectly, a separation between the body that defines the target and the body that reviews the killing, India’s denial collapses that separation entirely. The comparison breaks down, in the end, at precisely the point the whole analysis has been circling: Israel’s doctrine, for all its flaws, contains an internal argument, and India’s, by the logic of denial, contains none.

A fourth divergence is geographic and concerns the relationship between the targeting state and the territory where the killing occurs. Many of Israel’s operations took place either in territory Israel occupied or controlled or in third countries that were not the home of the adversary, European capitals, Dubai, Tunis. India’s alleged campaign concentrates its operations inside the territory of the single adversary state itself, in Pakistani cities, which changes the operational and political character of the practice. Conducting a killing inside the adversary’s own country is a more direct affront to that country’s sovereignty than conducting one in a neutral third state, and it places the operation inside the security environment most hostile to it. The Indian model’s intermediary architecture, the use of local recruits, is partly a response to this geographic fact: a campaign run inside the adversary’s home territory cannot rely on inserting and extracting professional operatives the way Israel’s third-country operations sometimes could. The comparison should therefore resist treating the two campaigns as geographically interchangeable. India is not running operations in a neutral elsewhere. It is, on the allegations, running them in the heart of the state it is contesting, and that fact shapes both the method and the diplomatic stakes.

A fifth and final point of divergence is the evidentiary asymmetry that has shadowed this entire analysis. The Israeli doctrine can be examined because an Israeli journalist, after a legal struggle, was permitted to examine it and publish what he found. The Indian campaign can only be inferred, from the accounts of anonymous officers, the files of a hostile state’s investigators, and the cross-checking of independent analysts tracking unclaimed killings. Every score assigned to the Indian campaign in this comparison is therefore a score assigned to a reconstruction, not to a documented record, and intellectual honesty requires holding that uncertainty in view. It is possible that the reconstruction overstates the campaign’s coherence, attributing to a doctrine what is in fact a looser pattern. It is equally possible that the reconstruction understates the campaign’s scale, capturing only the operations that happened to be investigated. The comparison’s findings are as reliable as the available evidence, and the available evidence on the Indian side is, by the deliberate design of the denial, thinner than the evidence on the Israeli side. That asymmetry is not merely a limitation of the analysis. It is, once again, the analysis: the thinness of the Indian record is itself the product of the denial that the comparison identifies as the decisive Indian choice.

Whether a Democracy Can Sustain This Indefinitely

The final question the comparison forces is the one that troubled Bergman himself and that Pollack named in his review: can a democracy run a permanent targeted-killing doctrine without the doctrine changing what the democracy is? Israel’s seven decades are the only long-run evidence available, and the evidence is genuinely ambiguous rather than conveniently clear.

On one reading, Israel is proof that a democracy can sustain the practice indefinitely, because Israel has done so for more than seventy years while remaining a functioning democracy with contested elections, an independent press, and a Supreme Court willing, in 2006, to impose at least some limits on the security establishment. The practice did not destroy Israeli democracy. On a darker reading, the same seventy years show a slower kind of cost: a security establishment that, as the Rabi and Plaw study suggested, learned to marginalize the very judicial restraints imposed on it, a censorship regime that prevents the public from knowing key facts, and a national political culture in which the legitimacy of killing enemies abroad became so settled that it ceased to be a live question. The democracy survived, but the zone of unaccountable executive action did not shrink; it normalized. Bergman’s book is, among other things, an argument that the normalization is itself the danger, that a state which kills routinely and effectively can lose the capacity to ask whether it should.

For India the question is sharper because India started from the denial. Israel’s normalization happened in the open, contested at every stage by petitioners and journalists and judges, and the contestation, even when it lost, kept the question alive. India’s denial forecloses the contestation before it can begin. A practice that is never admitted can never be debated, and a practice that is never debated cannot be the subject of the democratic deliberation that would, in principle, decide whether the nation wishes to sustain it. The risk is not that India will become less democratic in any dramatic, visible sense. The risk is the quieter one the Israeli case illustrates: that an effective, deniable, unaccountable lethal program becomes a permanent and invisible feature of the state, sustained not because the public chose it but because the public was never given the chance to choose. Whether a democracy can sustain the doctrine indefinitely may be the wrong question. The Israeli evidence suggests the doctrine sustains itself, and that the harder question is whether a democracy can ever decide to stop.

The self-sustaining quality of the doctrine deserves a closer look, because it is the feature that should most concern anyone weighing the Indian model’s future. A targeted-killing program, once it functions well, generates its own constituency. It produces visible results, the elimination of named enemies, that political leaders can value even when they cannot announce them. It builds institutional capacity, trained handlers and established networks, that an organization is reluctant to let atrophy. And it shifts the burden of proof: once the doctrine is operating, the question is no longer whether to start killing but whether to stop, and stopping requires an affirmative decision that someone must take and defend. Bergman’s seven decades show an Israeli program that no government seriously attempted to wind down, not because every government independently re-chose it but because the program, having proven useful and having become embedded, was simply never up for that kind of review. India’s denial accelerates this dynamic, because a program that officially does not exist cannot be officially reviewed, paused, or ended; there is no agenda item, no committee, no moment of decision. The danger the comparison identifies is therefore not a sudden collapse of Indian democracy but a slow setting of concrete: a lethal instrument, effective and hidden, becoming a fixed and unexamined part of how the Indian state operates, present in its conduct and absent from its public life.

Israel’s experience offers one last cautionary note on this point. The country that submitted its doctrine to a court still found, decades on, that the security establishment had learned to work around the court’s procedural demands, that the independent review the judges required could not be confirmed to function, and that the legitimacy of the practice had hardened into something close to consensus. If that is what becomes of a targeted-killing doctrine in a democracy that acknowledged it, litigated it, and bound it with judicial standards, then the trajectory of a doctrine that was never acknowledged, never litigated, and never bound is a matter of reasonable concern. The comparison does not predict that India will follow Israel’s path; the two states, their adversaries, and their institutions differ in ways this analysis has been at pains to specify. The comparison observes only that the doctrine, by its nature, resists being stopped, that acknowledgment is the precondition of the public decision that stopping would require, and that India has, so far, declined the acknowledgment.

What the Comparison Teaches

Placing Bergman’s documented Israeli doctrine against India’s denied pattern of killings yields three findings that neither case produces alone. The first is that India did not stumble into a shadow war. The campaign is the application of a coherent, studied doctrine whose logic runs back to a Talmudic principle of preemption and whose modern form was refined by Israel across seven decades and recorded by a journalist across eight years. India’s intelligence officers told reporters they drew on the Israeli model, and the eight-principle structure of the campaign confirms it. To treat the killings as lawless improvisation is to misunderstand them. They are doctrine, executed.

The second finding is that the decisive variable separating the two democracies is not capability, method, or even morality, but acknowledgment. Israel and India made opposite trades at the same crossroads. Israel accepted partial exposure and gained, in return, a contested but real legal framework and a public record. India chose total denial and gained, in return, formidable operational deniability and a complete absence of legal framework. Every other difference between the two campaigns, the high Indian scores on operational security and the zero Indian score on domestic law, flows from that single divergent choice. The comparison’s sharpest lesson is that in a state targeted-killing program, the decision about whether to admit the program is not a public-relations afterthought. It is the most consequential strategic decision in the entire doctrine, because it determines whether the practice will be governed by visible law or by nothing at all.

A third finding is the one Bergman’s own ambivalence insists upon and that the parallel histories of India’s evolving covert doctrine and Israel’s older one both confirm. The doctrine works as a tactic and remains unproven as a strategy. It degrades networks, buys time, and forces adversaries into defensive crouches, and the deeper analysis of how India’s program compares to Israel’s across operational dimensions shows that India has executed the tactic with real skill. What seven decades of Israeli experience also show is that the tactic does not, on its own, end the conflict that produced the targets, and that each eliminated commander tends to be replaced. Rise and kill first is a usable instinct when a man is at your door. Scaled into a permanent doctrine of state, it becomes, in Pollack’s phrase, a treatment for the worst symptom of a disease it cannot cure. India has adopted that doctrine, executed it with discipline, and, by choosing denial, deprived itself of the one mechanism, public acknowledgment and the debate that follows, by which a democracy might one day decide the treatment had run long enough.

The comparison ends where Bergman’s book ends, on a question rather than a verdict. Bergman did not write a condemnation of Israel’s program, and this analysis is not a condemnation of India’s. Both states face real adversaries, both confronted the genuine failure of gentler instruments, and both arrived at targeted killing not out of bloodlust but out of a calculation that the alternatives were worse. The doctrine has a logic, and the logic is not contemptible. What the comparison establishes is narrower and more durable than a verdict. It establishes that the doctrine exists, that it has a documented form, that India has adopted that form, and that the single most important decision within the doctrine, the decision about acknowledgment, separates the two democracies and determines whether the practice will ever be governed by anything a citizen can see. Israel made that decision the hard way, through courts and journalism and public argument, and lives with the imperfect framework that resulted. India has made the opposite decision, and lives, for now, with the operational freedom and the accountability void that the denial produces together. The comparison cannot resolve the question of which democracy chose better. It can only make certain that the question is asked, in the one place, finally, where asking it might matter, which is in public, by the people in whose name the doctrine is carried out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the Rise and Kill First doctrine?

Rise and Kill First is the name the Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman gave to Israel’s systematized practice of targeted assassination, drawn from a Talmudic injunction that if someone comes to kill you, you should rise and kill him first. In Bergman’s 2018 book of the same title, the phrase describes not a single policy document but an institutional logic: a chain of decision running from intelligence officers up to the prime minister, a set of repeatable procedures for identifying, locating, and killing enemies on foreign soil, and a body of accumulated experience covering more than two thousand seven hundred operations across seven decades. The doctrine treats targeted killing as a legitimate instrument of national defense, occupying a deliberate middle ground between diplomacy and open war. It is best understood as a preemptive doctrine, aimed at neutralizing a threat before it matures, rather than as a doctrine of punishment for attacks already carried out.

Q: How does Israel’s targeted killing doctrine work?

Israel’s doctrine operates through a structured authorization chain and a flexible set of methods. According to Bergman’s reconstruction, a proposed operation moves from a case officer through unit and agency leadership to the prime minister, with the elite Caesarea unit reserved for the highest-value targets. The methods documented range from close-range pistol work to remote-detonated devices, poisons, and drone strikes, each chosen to fit a specific operational-security problem. Crucially, the doctrine operates within a partial legal structure. In December 2006 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in case 769/02 that targeted killing was not categorically illegal but had to be judged case by case, requiring strong and persuasive intelligence on a target’s identity, the careful avoidance of civilian harm, and proportionality between military value and collateral cost. The doctrine therefore combines operational flexibility with judicially imposed, if imperfectly enforced, limits.

Q: Does India follow the Rise and Kill First doctrine?

India follows the doctrine in practice while declining to acknowledge that it does. Indian intelligence officers who spoke to journalists, including in the 2024 Guardian investigation, described drawing inspiration from the Israeli model and reorienting toward eliminating threats abroad after the 2019 Pulwama attack. The pattern of killings of India-designated terrorists in Pakistan since roughly 2020 closely tracks the operational logic Bergman documented for Israel. The decisive difference is acknowledgment. Israel partially admits and defends the practice in its courts and press; the Indian government categorically denies that any targeted-killing campaign exists, with the Ministry of External Affairs calling such reports false and malicious propaganda. India, on the available evidence, has adopted the operational doctrine and rejected the public posture that, in Israel, accompanies it.

Q: What are the eight principles of the Rise and Kill First doctrine?

Distilled from Bergman’s documented history, the doctrine can be read as eight operational principles. The first is target identification, requiring a specific, named individual rather than a category. The second is the intelligence threshold, requiring evidence solid enough to justify an irreversible act. The third is operational security, protecting operatives and preserving deniability. The fourth is the limit on collateral harm, demanding precision that spares bystanders. The fifth is attribution management, governing whether and how the state addresses its responsibility. The sixth is the domestic legal framework, the structure of law and oversight visible to the state’s own citizens. The seventh is international consequence management, absorbing diplomatic damage when operations are exposed or go wrong. The eighth is strategic effectiveness, the question of whether the campaign delivers lasting security. India’s campaign scores highly on the first four, opaquely or poorly on the fifth through seventh, and remains unproven on the eighth.

Q: How does India’s version differ from Israel’s?

The core difference is acknowledgment, and almost every other difference flows from it. Israel accepts partial exposure of its program and has gained, in exchange, a contested but real legal framework, including the 2006 Supreme Court ruling, and a public record that journalists and scholars can examine. India has chosen total denial and has gained, in exchange, formidable operational deniability and a complete absence of any visible legal or oversight framework. Operationally, Israel’s documented methods favored technological innovation, while India’s alleged method relies on a layered network of paid intermediaries and, reportedly, the deception of trigger-pullers who are told they are killing for a jihadist cause. India’s campaign is also far younger, conducted against a nuclear-armed adversary, and built on executive designation lists rather than the conduct-based legal test Israel’s court articulated.

Q: Is the deniability approach more or less dangerous than acknowledgment?

The answer depends on the time horizon. In the short, operational horizon, deniability is a genuine strength: it gives adversaries nothing concrete to retaliate against or take to a tribunal, protects operatives, and preserves strategic flexibility. In the long, institutional horizon, deniability is a genuine danger, because a practice the state denies is a practice the state’s own parliament and courts cannot govern, audit, or correct. A wrongful killing under a denied program can never be officially investigated, because the investigating body would first have to admit the program exists. Israel’s framework is flawed but reformable; an absent framework cannot be reformed. The deniability approach is therefore more effective for any single operation and more corrosive for the democratic order over decades.

Q: What legal framework does the doctrine require?

Israel’s experience suggests the doctrine, to remain compatible with democratic governance, requires at minimum a judicial test for the legality of operations, a defined evidentiary standard for target identification, an enforced proportionality limit on civilian harm, and an independent mechanism to review operations after the fact. The 2006 Supreme Court ruling articulated the first three of these and demanded the fourth, an independent ex-post-facto investigative committee. Scholars examining Israel’s compliance found the substantive criteria largely met but the procedural safeguards doubtful. India has built none of this framework, because doing so would require acknowledging the practice. A targeted-killing doctrine without such a framework operates entirely within executive discretion, beyond the reach of courts, legislatures, or the electorate.

Q: Can a democracy sustain a targeted killing doctrine indefinitely?

Israel’s more than seventy years of practice show that a democracy can sustain the doctrine without collapsing, while also illustrating a quieter cost. The Israeli security establishment, over time, learned to marginalize some of the judicial restraints placed on it, and the legitimacy of killing enemies abroad became so settled that it largely ceased to be a contested public question. The democracy survived, but the zone of unaccountable executive action normalized rather than shrank. For India the risk is sharper, because the denial forecloses public debate before it can begin. The harder question may not be whether a democracy can sustain the doctrine, but whether, once the doctrine becomes effective and invisible, the democracy retains any mechanism by which it could ever choose to stop.

Q: Who is Ronen Bergman and why does his book matter?

Ronen Bergman is an Israeli investigative journalist, the senior military and intelligence correspondent for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His 2018 book Rise and Kill First was the product of roughly eight years of research, including over a thousand interviews with Israeli prime ministers, intelligence officials, and operatives, and access to thousands of classified documents secured partly through a legal battle for archival material. The book matters to any analysis of India’s shadow war because it is the single most detailed public account of how a democratic state builds and runs a targeted-killing program. Without a comparable account of the Indian campaign, Bergman’s documentation of the Israeli model is the closest available reference for understanding the doctrine India appears to have adopted.

Q: Why does the doctrine trace back to the Talmud?

The book’s title comes from a passage in the Babylonian Talmud advising that if a man comes to kill you, you should rise and kill him first. In its original context the principle concerned individual self-defense against an imminent, specific threat, a man physically advancing with intent to kill. Bergman uses the phrase to capture how the Israeli state scaled that principle of personal self-defense into a doctrine of national policy, applying it not to an attacker in the room but to enemy planners abroad whose threat was real yet neither imminent in the legal sense nor individual in the original sense. The gap between the ancient principle and its modern application is itself significant: everything difficult about targeted killing as a state practice lies in the distance between a knife at the throat and a bomb-maker three countries away.

Q: How did the 2019 Pulwama attack change India’s approach?

The February 2019 Pulwama attack, in which a suicide bomber killed forty Indian paramilitary personnel in Jammu and Kashmir, is described by Indian intelligence officers as the hinge point for a doctrinal shift. According to accounts those officers gave to journalists, the logic after Pulwama became one of reaching the source, targeting hostile individuals outside India before they could organize attacks, because the safe havens that produced attackers lay across the border and could not be addressed through diplomacy or conventional pressure. The pattern of killings of designated terrorists in Pakistan that journalists and Pakistani investigators began tracking from roughly 2020 onward is consistent with this described reorientation. Pulwama, in this telling, did not create India’s intelligence capability but changed the doctrine governing how that capability would be used.

Q: What did the Israeli Supreme Court rule about targeted killings?

In December 2006 the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, delivered its ruling in case 769/02, often called the Targeted Killing case, brought by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. The court declined to declare targeted killing categorically illegal but also refused to bless it in the abstract, holding that the legality of each operation must be assessed individually. It ruled that Palestinian militants were civilians who lost their protection from attack only while directly participating in hostilities, and it required strong and persuasive intelligence on a target’s identity, the avoidance of harm to innocent civilians, and adherence to the principle of proportionality. The ruling stands as the most developed example of a democracy subjecting its own targeted-killing practice to judicial standards, and its existence underscores how completely India’s denial forecloses any comparable Indian process.

Q: What is the Lillehammer affair and why does it matter to the comparison?

The Lillehammer affair refers to a 1973 Mossad operation in Lillehammer, Norway, in which an Israeli team killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter, after mistaking him for Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior Black September figure. Several operatives were arrested and tried, and the episode caused lasting damage to Israel’s standing. It matters to the comparison because it represents the catastrophic failure mode of any targeted-killing doctrine, the killing of the wrong person, and because Israel’s framework, however imperfect, allowed the error to be investigated, recorded, and absorbed into the doctrine as a lesson. Under India’s denial posture, an equivalent error could never be officially acknowledged or corrected, because doing so would require admitting the program exists. Lillehammer is therefore a warning about both the inevitability of error in a long campaign and the importance of a framework capable of registering it.

Q: How does India’s alleged method differ operationally from Israel’s?

Israel’s documented methods, as catalogued by Bergman, favored technological and tradecraft innovation: drones, remote-detonated devices, poisons, exploding phones, and signature close-range pistol work by trained Mossad operatives. India’s alleged method, as reconstructed in the Guardian investigation, relies instead on a layered human network. Sleeper cells reportedly based outside Pakistan recruited and handled local criminals or impoverished men, paid through routes involving Dubai, to carry out close-range shootings, with handler meetings reported in third countries. The most distinctive element is the alleged deception of the killers themselves, some of whom were reportedly led to believe they were killing infidels for a jihadist cause rather than acting for Indian intelligence. This produces extreme operational security, since a trigger-puller who does not know who he serves cannot expose the service.

Q: Why does the United States allegation matter more than Pakistan’s?

Pakistan has accused India of orchestrating killings on its soil for years, but as an adversary state its accusations carry limited weight in international forums and produce diplomatic friction rather than binding consequence. The United States allegation is different because it came from a close partner and emerged through an American legal process: US prosecutors charged that an Indian official had directed a plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on American soil. An indictment produced by an allied country’s own justice system is far harder for a denial posture to dissolve than an adversary’s accusation. Together with Canada’s allegations regarding the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the American case represents the real stress test of the Indian doctrine’s ability to manage international consequences, because denial works least well precisely when the accuser is a friend.

Q: Is targeted killing effective at ending conflicts?

The longest available body of evidence, Israel’s seven decades of practice as documented by Bergman, suggests that targeted killing is effective as a tactic and unproven as a strategy. It degrades specific networks, removes experienced commanders, buys time, and forces adversaries into defensive postures. What it has not been shown to do, in the Israeli record, is end the underlying conflicts that produce the targets. Eliminated leaders are typically replaced, sometimes by younger and more radical successors, and the operations have at times generated the very vengeance they sought to deter. The former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack described the doctrine, in his review of Bergman’s book, as a treatment for the worst symptom of a disease rather than a cure. India’s campaign is too young to judge, but the Israeli precedent offers no basis for expecting strategic resolution from the tactic alone.

Q: How does the Rise and Kill First doctrine relate to India’s broader covert evolution?

Israeli doctrine represents the intellectual model that India’s intelligence establishment appears to have studied as it shifted from a defensive to an offensive posture. India’s covert evolution is often described as moving through phases, from intelligence gathering and diplomatic leverage toward, after 2019, alleged offensive operations against individuals abroad. The Israeli doctrine supplied a worked example of how a democracy could conduct such operations as systematized practice rather than improvisation. The relationship is not abstract; Indian officers cited the Israeli model directly. Understanding the Rise and Kill First doctrine therefore clarifies not only what India is alleged to be doing but the specific intellectual lineage of the choice, a lineage that runs from a Talmudic principle through seven decades of Israeli practice into the contemporary India-Pakistan contest.

Q: What is the single most important lesson of comparing the two doctrines?

The most important lesson is that the decisive variable in a state targeted-killing program is not capability, method, or even the morality of individual operations, but the decision about acknowledgment. Israel and India arrived at the same crossroads and made opposite choices. Israel accepted partial public exposure and gained a contested but functioning legal framework that its courts and citizens can see and challenge. India chose categorical denial and gained powerful operational deniability while building no legal framework at all. Every other difference between the two campaigns traces back to that one divergence. The comparison teaches that whether to admit such a program is not a presentational afterthought but the most consequential strategic decision in the entire doctrine, because it alone determines whether the practice will be governed by visible law or by nothing the public can reach.

Q: Why does the comparison rely so heavily on Bergman’s account?

The comparison relies on Bergman’s account because it is, quite simply, the only comprehensive public documentation of how a democratic state operates a targeted-killing program over the long run. No equivalent exists for India, for the obvious reason that India denies the program’s existence. This creates an evidentiary asymmetry that the analysis treats as a subject rather than a flaw: the Israeli side can be examined in detail because a journalist won the right to examine it, while the Indian side must be inferred from anonymous sources, a hostile state’s investigative files, and independent analyst tracking. A fair reading should note that Bergman’s account, authoritative as it is, remains one journalist’s reconstruction, shaped by Israeli military censorship and by the access he was granted. The comparison uses Bergman’s eight principles as a reference framework, not as an infallible scripture, and it holds the uncertainty of the Indian reconstruction openly in view rather than papering over it.

Q: Does denying a targeted killing program make it more legitimate or less?

Denial and legitimacy pull against each other. A state that denies a lethal program gains deniability, which is operationally valuable, but forfeits the possibility of legitimacy in the formal sense, because legitimacy requires that a practice be acknowledged, justified, and subjected to law. Israel’s partial acknowledgment allowed it to argue, in its own courts and to its own public, that targeted killing was a lawful act of self-defense, an argument that produced a contested but real claim to legitimacy. India’s denial forecloses that argument entirely; a government cannot defend the lawfulness of a practice it insists does not occur. The paradox is that denial may make a program more sustainable in the short term, by removing the friction of public scrutiny, while making it permanently illegitimate in the constitutional sense, because the citizens in whose name it is conducted are never asked to consent to it.

This is a sensitive subject, and the analysis here treats targeted killing as a matter of state doctrine and public policy. If aspects of this material affect you personally, support and resources are available, and reaching out to someone you trust is always a reasonable step.