The policemen claimed they were obeying an order to shoot curfew breakers, but judge Bejamin Halevy, in one of Israel's most important judicial rulings, said that soldiers must not obey an order that is clearly illegal. "The distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order," Halevy wrote, "is that above such an order should fly, like a black flag, a warning saying: 'Prohibited!' Not merely formally illegal, not covered up or partly covered...but an illegality that stabs the eye and infuriates the heart, if the eye is not blind and the heart is not obtuse or corrupt."

The pilot started to close the canopy. His base commander came running up to his plane and climbed the ladder to his cockpit. "Do you want to know who it is?" he asked the pilot and the navigator. Who they were going to kill, he meant.
"Get off my plane," the pilot said. "We don't want to know. It means nothing."
In a way, it didn't. The men who did the actual killing, who flew the missions and released the bombs, often knew the least. At altitude, all they could see were small targets idientified by the twelve numbers of the coordinates, and there was no need to look for anything more.

...the intelligence community's very success fostered the illusion among most of the nation's leaders that covert operations could be a strategic and not just a tactical tool -that they could be used in place of real diplomacy to end the geographic, ethnic, religious, and national disputes in which Israel is mired...Indeed, in many respects the story of Israel's intelligence community as recounted in this book has been one of a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures.