Vengeance [antikvár]

Foreword to the 2005 Edition It has been a little more than thirty-three years since Palestinian terrorists slipped into the Olympic Village and, in what later became known as the Munich Massacre, killed eleven innocent Israeli athletes competing in the 1972 Games. In the decades since that awful event, I have often reflected on whether Israel's response—dispatching me and four others on a mission to Europe to hunt down and kill the eleven individuals who we were told had planned the massaae—was the right one. Unfortunately, like our mission, this is a knotty problem with no easy answers. So much of what consumes us today in the Middle East is rooted not just in history but in ancient history. In the case of our mission, that history goes back nearly four thousand years, to the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known expression of what the Romans later called the ex talionis or law of retribution. The Code of Hammurabi doesn't actually use the phrase "an eye for an eye" (the closest it gets is the rather straightforward prescription "If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out"), but it is imbued with the spirit of what the philosophers call equal retaliation—the idea that the proper way to punish evildoers is to visit on them the very evil they've done to others. Moses imposed such a law in Israel, and the phrase "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is repeated three times in the Torah. In a very real sense, this is the flip side of the Golden Rule. Rather than "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," we have "If you do it to me, I'll do it right back to you." In modern times, Israel has embraced, implemented and perfected this principle—not merely for the sake of vengeance, but as a means of survival. 'An eye for an eye" has been Israel's guiding strategy in response to terrorism, and an unbroken succession of Israeli governments has endorsed the notion that it is the only