In 1996, Mr. Dagan created a task force code-named Harpoon that mobilized government agencies to focus on the money reaching terror cells from state sponsors and international charities. When Mr. Dagan became head of the Mossad, in 2002, Harpoon became an operational unit inside Israeli intelligence. His spies used the same aggressive action and imaginative chutzpah that had made the Mossad a storied force to follow those funds and to go after Mr. Arafat’s millions and the charities around the world that funneled cash into Hamas’s coffers.

Harpoon targeted the banks that held accounts belonging to Palestinian terrorist commanders, and the unit encouraged lawyers — including me — to launch suits in United States federal court seeking monetary damages for victims of state sponsors of terror so that countries like Syria, Iran and even North Korea would realize that the costs of blowing up buses outweighed the political ends the carnage hoped to achieve.

The combined espionage, military and legal offensive helped end the intifada by making it too expensive to continue.

The unit’s greatest success came several years after the intifada, during the Second Lebanon War, when Mr. Dagan urged the Israeli Air Force to destroy the banks where Hezbollah kept its cash. Although Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Lebanese terrorist group, received hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Tehran, it was a global criminal enterprise involved in everything from cocaine trafficking to stealing cars and money laundering. These activities funded its operations against Israel and against American forces in Iraq.

With the assistance of branches of the United States government, including the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department, Harpoon went after Hezbollah’s cocaine business in Venezuela and in Lebanon, as well as its money-laundering activities in West Africa and America. Brilliant operations and cons were carried out against Hezbollah’s captains — operations that ultimately stripped them of the vast fortunes they had assembled over the years. And when the Hezbollah hierarchy was cash strapped, Harpoon targeted the financial institutions that allowed the terrorists to move their cash across continents, ultimately shutting down the Lebanese Canadian Bank, one of the largest banks in the Middle East. It took the Syrian Civil War, and Hezbollah’s enormous military involvement on behalf of the Assad regime on Tehran’s tab, to provide the Party of God with a financial lifeline. But the fact remains that one of the results of Israel’s financial war against Hezbollah has been that Israel’s northern border has remained relatively quiet for more than 11 years.

Most military commanders acknowledge that there are very few, if any, feasible solutions to today’s standoff with Pyongyang. The only effective path is to unleash an offensive press against Kim’s inner circle.