Amid the Iran conflict, Israel has avowed it will kill leaders yet unknown – a revolutionary, open-ended warrant for lawless execution. German schoolmasters of an earlier dispensation indulged the cruel sport of asking pupils in final examinations which disease had carried off Julius Caesar. The trap was designed to expose as a fool the candidate who could not answer, proof enough that Caesar’s assassination remained common knowledge long after antiquity itself had vanished. In the postmodern age of unbounded electronic warfare, extrajudicial killing has assumed a more sinister, revolutionary form: not a mere relapse into barbarism , but a novel, mutant paradigm of violence that exceeds even the egregious transgressions of pagan antiquity. Ex ante execution: The grammar of a novel transgression There are pivotal moments in geopolitics when language itself begins to signal a deeper rupture. Israel ’s lethal rhetoric emerges as a revealing instance.…