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This is an unfortunate example to have chosen. I just finished reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark, who goes to great lengths to show the involvement official and semi-official Serbia in the assassination plot.
In particular, Dragutin Dimitrijević (a.k.a. "Apis") was both chief of Serbian military intelligence and a leading member of the Black Hand. According to Clark, he was "the principle architect behind the plot". Serbian officer Major Vojislav Tankosić also played a key role training and arming the Princip and co.
The relationship of the Black Hand and other Serbian irredentist groups to "official" Serbia was also complicated. Lots of members of the Serbian officer corps and intelligence service were more or less openly members, and the groups existed with the tacit approval and often support of the government and its institutions. Indeed, much of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia concerns demands that "official" Serbia divorce itself from these groups and networks.
Clark also alleges that Prime Minister Nikola Pašić was forewarned of the plot and even tried to send a clumsy warning to the Austrians.
Seems like pretty thin evidence, "two degrees of separation" notwithstanding. What it does prove is how the practice itself is a sort of Pandora's Box. Everybody was scandalized by the assassination, no European power took credit for it. It led to a massively destructive war.
So now that Israel has embraced and normalized the practice as S.O.P in engaging in warfare, what are we to make of it? It's dangerous at best. They know they could start a regional war by conducting assassinations in Tehran. That's the point. They want a regional war so they can drag America to their defense.
The 1914 plot is a very good example for how and why the practice has not been used in warfare in the past. Imagine if the US engages in a Proxy war with China, and China starts assassinating US politicians or sending mailbombs to civilian factory workers. All hell would break lose.
In my view, the case as made in the book is pretty strong that official Serbia bears significant responsibility for the assassination. Clark spends about the first third of the book tracing the history of Serbian irredentism, the relationships between terrorist irredentist groups, and the Serbian officer corps and the civilian politicians. These guys were trying to maintain secrecy and plausible deniability, so by its very nature the case relies on some circumstantial evidence. That said, I wouldn't describe the evidence as "thin" - I found myself pretty well convinced.
If you haven't read it, I expect you'd enjoy Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. Isreal's targeted assassination programmes have been extensive ever since they began hunting Nazis post-WW2 - the author credits them with "at least" 2,700 since then, which is to say this isn't something the've embraced and normalised recently.
Clearly, whatever our assessment is, at least some important decision makers within the Israeli state think it's an effective means of achieving their goals - and have done for a while for now.
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