Description:
While Mossad is known as one of the world's most successful terrorist-fighting organizations, the state of Israel has, more than once and on many levels, risked the lives of its agents and soldiers through unwise intelligence-based intervention. An expert on terror and political extremism, Ami Pedahzur argues that Israel's strict reliance on the elite units of its intelligence community is fundamentally flawed. A unique synthesis of memoir, academic research, and information gathered from print and online sources, Pedahzur's complex study explores this issue through Israel's past encounters with terrorists, specifically, hostage rescue missions, the first and second wars in Lebanon, the challenges of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian terrorist groups, and Hezbollah. He brings a rare transparency to Israel's counterterrorist activities, highlighting their successes and failures and the factors that have contributed to these results. From the foundations of this analysis, Pedahzur ultimately builds a strategy for future confrontation that has relevance not only for Israel but also for other countries that have adopted Israel's intelligence-based model.
Brief description: Ami Pedahzur is the Arnold Chaplik Professor in Israel and Diaspora Studies and a professor at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2009) and Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2009, with Arie Perliger).
Review Quotes: the book sheds a great deal of light on the activities of counterterrorism organizations that mostly operate in the shadows and on the seemingly haphazard ways counterterrorism policy is formulated in times of crisis.--Aaron M. Hoffman "Shofar"