In April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he unveiled 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of hard evidence of Iran’s secret nuclear program. During his presentation, Netanyahu mentioned one man—Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh—as a name not to forget. According to Western and Israeli security services, the physics professor headed Iran’s clandestine nuclear program, Project Amad. On 27 November 2020, Fakhrizadeh was killed in a convoy on the outskirts of Tehran. He became the sixth Iranian nuclear scientist to be assassinated in the past decade.

While it is official Israeli policy to neither confirm or deny involvement in extrajudicial killings, the country is widely suspected to be behind the attack. Most reports suggest there was a gunfight between Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and Israeli agents, culminating in the scientist being dragged from his car and shot at point blank range. The deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, however, has claimed that a satellite-controlled machine-gun with artificial intelligence mounted on the back of a Nissan pick-up truck was used to kill Fakhrizadeh.

Fakhrizadeh was one of Iran’s most protected individuals. He would only travel with an armed escort in several bullet-proof cars, as he did the day of his death. Yet Israeli agents managed to slip into Iran’s backyard, launch a sophisticated attack that involved disabling the area’s electricity half an hour before the ambush, and kill a highly valuable asset. How did this happen? And how has Israel’s international reputation for such lethal operations come to be?

One explanation for Israel’s military effectiveness is technological preeminence. Liberal economic reforms in recent decades have not only propelled Israel’s tech industry to international notoriety but also allowed for the weaponisation of the sector. Israel’s belief that it needs to defend itself in a hostile region has led to a close linkage between its technology and security sectors, prompting the production of advanced military hardware. The first killer drones, the Iron Dome missile interception system, and a device that can detect humans through walls were all developed in Israel. Add to the fold its close security information-sharing partnership with the United States and Israel’s technological edge puts it far ahead of its regional competitors.

Operational inventiveness has been elemental to creating the mythology around Israel’s secret service. In the 1970s, Israeli intelligence officials discovered that Wadie Haddad, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had a penchant for Belgian chocolate. In retaliation for his role in orchestrating several airline hijackings, Israeli agents managed to coat his chocolates with a flavourless, slow-acting poison substance that deteriorates the body over several months. After ingesting the sweets, Haddad succumbed to its effects in East Germany in 1978.

Perhaps the strongest weapon in Israel’s arsenal is its ethnic diversity. The contemporary migration of Jews from the diaspora to Israel has given the country an assorted ethnic makeup, thereby allowing Israeli agents to blend in with foreign peoples to great effect and providing a level of concealment largely unattainable to ethnically uniform countries like China and Russia. Migrant knowledge of their former countries also gives Israeli intelligence agencies a local understanding of the internal affairs of other societies.

The story of Eli Cohen, the undercover businessman who infiltrated the upper reaches of the Syrian Ba’ath Party, epitomises this advantage. Born in Egypt, Cohen, under the pseudonym Kamel Amin Thaabet, established himself in the Buenos Aires Arab community in the early 1960s. After moving to Damascus, he rose to become the chief advisor to the Syrian Minister of Defence. For almost five years, he funnelled top-secret intelligence to Mossad, including information some scholars believe was vital to Israel’s victory in the Six Day War.

Last but not least, Israeli operatives are probably more willing to engage risk-taking behaviour in comparison to other nationals—and Jerusalem more willing to authorise it—because of Israel’s tenuous geopolitical position. A small state situated in a politically volatile part of the world, Israel believes it has little geographic leeway to allow threats to manifest. It therefore considers preemptive action crucial to its survival, as demonstrated during the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Add the Zionist movement’s cultivation of a siege mentality through its emphasisation of historic Jewish persecution to the fray and these forces likely play a role in inspiring high-risk operations.

While Israel’s extrajudicial killings violate fundamental notions of state sovereignty and arguably international law, proponents say they’re necessary for the survival of the Jewish state. Many Israeli officials, the Prime Minister foremost among them, believe that the horrors of the Second World War were in large part a result of Western inertia in the face of a rising threat. Preemptive action is therefore considered not only a rudimentary tool of Israeli foreign policy but in many ways the answer to Israel’s existential angst.

As the Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow once put it, Israel must be careful not to slip into thinking of itself as a holocaust museum equipped with an air force. This concern is most pressing in the case of the Palestinians and their continued pursuit of self-determination. It is sometimes those who feel the most aggrieved that can end up inflicting great harm.

Nonetheless, one thing in the contemporary Middle East appears certain. You would have to be on a handsome salary to be an Iranian nuclear scientist.