In 1973, Israeli operatives in Norway mistakenly killed Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter they believed was a terrorist operative.
The incident became an international scandal and demonstrated the enormous danger of intelligence errors in operations built around individual targeting.
Justice without precision can quickly become injustice.
That makes today’s extensive use of video evidence, facial recognition, interrogation and multiple intelligence sources particularly important.
If Israel claims the right to pursue October 7 perpetrators years after the attack, it also carries the responsibility of getting the identities right.
But Munich offers an even bigger lesson.
Israel hunted many of the men connected to Munich.
Yet terrorism did not disappear.
Organizations changed. Leaders changed. Tactics changed.
The ideology survived.
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