If any lesson is to be drawn from the assassination of a senior Hamas commander in Beirut this week, it is that Israel never wavers in its quest to hunt down and destroy its foes.
The Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust, no doubt believed that he would never be held to account for his crimes after he fled to Argentina and made a new life for himself. That was until his whereabouts were finally identified by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, leading to his eventual capture by an elite unit of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. Eichmann was smuggled back to Israel, where in 1962 he was convicted of war crimes and hanged.
Israel adopted a similarly uncompromising approach to the Palestinian terrorists responsible for carrying out the massacre of Israeli athletes participating in the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. While the PLO faction responsible for the atrocity quickly dispersed, they were eventually hunted down by Israeli spymaster Zvi Zamir, the mastermind behind Operation Wrath of God, the mission to target those responsible for the Munich attack.