A number of Bergman’s sources express a version of this sentiment. So pronounced is this line of thinking that others have gone so far as to propose that cowardice kept the Jews from revolting — a statement Primo Levi found “absurd and insulting.” Still, Levi recognized that this premise provided a sense of agency and a way out of despair. What it also did, and what Bergman is especially attuned to, is mark the country’s political life from the beginning in terms of existential threats. The hostile regimes surrounding Israel have continually stoked such fears; just hours after Israel declared independence in 1948, seven armies from neighboring countries attacked, and opportunistic despots have encouraged terrorism against Israel and its citizens ever since. Extreme measures seem less extreme when it’s a matter of survival.

Despite this historical context, “Rise and Kill First,” parts of which appeared in The New York Times Magazine, is far from an apologia. If anything, Bergman suggests that Israel’s honed aptitude for clandestine assassinations led the country to rely on them to a fault, approaching some complex strategic and political concerns as problems that an extrajudicial killing could fix. Bergman argues that the assassination of certain militants — chief among them Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, in 1988 — emboldened ever more radical upstarts, and pushed a sustainable resolution with the Palestinians even further out of reach. “As Israel would learn repeatedly,” Bergman writes, “it is very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.”

It’s also hard to predict how an operation will unfold. Bergman recounts a number of missions gone very wrong, including one with a booby-trapped dog that ran away (only to be discovered later by Hezbollah), and a harebrained “Manchurian Candidate” scheme to hypnotize a Palestinian prisoner into becoming an assassin for the Mossad. (After he was armed with a pistol and sent on his mission, the man promptly turned himself in to the Palestinian police and said the Israelis tried to brainwash him.)

Another wild card is a belligerent Ariel Sharon, who keeps turning up in this book — first as an army commander, then as minister of defense and eventually as prime minister. Bergman describes Sharon as a “pyromaniac,” and his obsession with killing Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as verging on monomaniacal. In his hunt for Arafat, Sharon almost had the Mossad shoot down a plane of 30 wounded Palestinian children by mistake; he even countenanced the downing of a commercial airliner if Arafat were on it. As Bergman bluntly states, this would have amounted to “an intentional war crime.”

But Sharon was just one man, and today there is a bigger institutional problem that Bergman traces, having to do with Israel’s security apparatus getting more technologically savvy and ruthlessly efficient. Instead of taking months or years to plan a single killing, the Mossad and its domestic counterpart, Shin Bet, are now capable of planning four or five “interceptions” a day. “You get used to killing. Human life becomes something plain, easy to dispose of. You spend a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes, on who to kill.” This quote is from Ami Ayalon, who as the head of Shin Bet in the late ’90s helped shepherd the organization into the digital age. He also told Bergman: “I call it the banality of evil.”

The irony of Ayalon’s inflammatory language — an echo of Hannah Arendt’s line about Nazi functionaries — is as pointed as it is jarring. This book is full of shocking moments, surprising disturbances in a narrative full of fateful twists and unintended consequences. As one naval commander says, “Listen, history plays strange games.”