May 15, 2009
NOT KILLING AN ARAB:
How Mossad helped Hamas: A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise to power of Khalid Mishal (Duncan Campbell-Smith, 5/14/09, Times Literary Supplement)
The undisputed leader of Hamas today, barricaded with his family inside a fortified office complex on the outskirts of Damascus, is Khalid Mishal. The racy title of McGeough’s book sums up his central thesis, that Mishal came to power largely as the result of a botched assassination attempt by seven Mossad agents in September 1997.Eschewing the more familiar air-to-ground missile, car bomb or silent bullet in the night, Israel’s secret service opted for a poison that would supposedly result in death a day or so later, while leaving no clues for the autopsy. Stepping out of his car on the way to the office one morning, Mishal encountered a couple of men posing as tourists. One caught his attention by noisily pulling open a soda can; the other leapt up and squirted a deadly toxin into his ear. At this point, however, Mossad’s plan went awry. A bodyguard chased and caught the two assailants, who were handed over to the police. Mishal himself was taken to hospital in time to halt, and eventually reverse, the usually fatal after-effects. And four Mossad accomplices were run to ground in the local Israeli embassy.
Unfortunately for all concerned, except Mishal, this was the embassy in Amman. The intended victim was a Jordanian citizen, living openly in the capital with the tacit approval of the government. Worse than a crime, the assassination attempt was a blunder with calamitous consequences. It had been ordered not only in total contravention of the existing understandings between Jordan and Israel, but also days after Hussein – in a last desperate bid for a breakthrough – had sent a plan to the Israeli Prime Minister for a thirty-year truce that he hoped might conceivably win support from all Palestinian factions, including Hamas.
The attack was therefore seen as the crudest possible rebuff. Hussein and his government reacted accordingly, while Arabs in the street rejoiced at the sight of Mossad operatives caught behaving like Keystone Cops. Only after the intervention of President Clinton and secret midnight visits to Amman by Netanyahu and several senior colleagues, including Ariel Sharon, was the crisis eventually brought to an end.
For Netanyahu himself, the episode was hugely damaging. He had authorized the assassination personally, in defiance not only of that private letter from Hussein six months earlier but also of wiser councils within his own government. (Thus did Hussein discover, in Professor Shlaim’s words, that Netanyahu “was devious, dishonest and completely unreliable” – a judgement McGeough amply endorses at several points.) The ensuing breach with Hussein undermined Netanyahu’s credibility with his colleagues and the wider public, and contributed directly to his defeat and temporary withdrawal from politics less than two years later.
Whom you treat as a peer his people assume is one.