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"A Mossad hit backfires on Netanyahu … again" by Paul McGeough
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Paul McGeough
was published in
The
Sydney Morning Herald on 20 February
2010. To view
this article online, please go to http://www.smh.com.au/world/a-mossad-hit-backfires-on-netanyahu-x2026-again-20100219-olvz.html.
"A
Mossad hit backfires on Netanyahu …
again"
By Paul
McGeough
That same old
feeling for Benjamin Netanyahu must be
excruciating. And it is probably cold comfort
for the Israeli Prime Minister that his
Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, is
likely to suffer along with him.
When Netanyahu last
was his nation's leader, Mossad served up a
dish of malodorous failure when it bungled the
attempted assassination of a future leader of
Hamas. That was in 1997, when the spy agency's
plan to inject a mysterious poison into Khalid
Mishal's ear turned to farce in the streets of
Amman in Jordan.
Twelve years on,
Netanyahu has again let Mossad loose and as a
result he now presides over a diplomatic and PR
nightmare in the wake of an otherwise
successful hit on another senior Hamas figure
who the Israelis claim was about to close an
arms deal in the United Arab
Emirates.
As is often the
case in the Middle East, this one has
percolated slowly - the body of the arms dealer
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found in Room 230 of the
plush Al Bustan Rotana Hotel on January
20.
But it was not
until this week - with Mabhouh long in the
grave and seemingly forgotten in the wider
world - that the whole business erupted as a
media sensation for Netanyahu.
Had Mossad's
indiscretion been to offend just the Dubai
sheikhs, already on their knees financially,
Israel might have fobbed them off - possibly
enlisting Washington to back-channel a
half-hearted apology.
But in an operation
that almost certainly required a personal
sign-off by Netanyahu, Israel has given deep
offence in London, Dublin, Paris and Berlin -
because the Mossad team used these governments'
passports as cover for its hitmen in
Dubai.
But this story has
more. The passport abuse is the cause of
official offence in the capitals of these
robust democracies - where opposition
politicians, pressure groups and the media
routinely put the squeeze on governments to
help them overcome any reluctance to
investigate such matters.
The capturing of
virtually every move by the Mossad team on the
emirate's ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras
has made this an electrifying story around the
world. Their antics at Dubai airport; at the
hotel - some of them entering and leaving the
room in which they killed the Hamas man; and
Monty Pythonesque moments as others darted into
rest rooms to emerge minutes later in new wig
and/or beard disguises have provided
near-voyeuristic images to go with an otherwise
po-faced yarn about passport abuse.
And just to kick
along the Israelis' sense of embarrassment,
those damnable Dubaians have cleverly taken
their mountain of CCTV footage and edited it
down to a 27-minute clip so crisp that it warms
the cockles of the hearts of editors at
newsdesks around the globe.
Therein lies the
silliness of the Mossad planners. Had they had
just half an ear to the wall-to-wall coverage
of a celebrated murder in Dubai - when an
Egyptian billionaire had his lover, the
Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim, eliminated in
2008 - they would have been aware that local
authorities had cracked the case by falling
back on the same CCTV cameras that they used to
piece together Mossad's madness.
Back in 1997, when
Mossad tried to take down Khalid Mishal, who
today heads Hamas, King Hussein of Jordan had
Netanyahu firmly by the cojones because one of
Mishal's quick-witted bodyguards managed to
capture two of the Mossad agents - thereby
forcing Israel to trade prisoners. Netanyahu's
humiliation was complete when the then US
president, Bill Clinton, forced him to hand
over samples of the poison and an antidote to
Jordanian doctors fighting to save Mishal's
life.
In the case of the
January visit to Dubai by Mossad, this sense of
acute embarrassment at the capture of one's
associates may fall to Mahmoud Abbas, the head
of Fatah, Hamas's arch-rival in the contest for
Palestinian hearts and minds, and who is
buttressed as head of the Palestinian Authority
by the US and Israel.
Details remain
sketchy but Jordanian officials have delivered
to their Dubai counterparts two Palestinians
who reportedly had fled to Amman from Dubai in
January after helping the Mossad team that
murdered the Hamas arms dealer. In previous
incarnations, both are said to have served in
Abbas's Fatah-dominated security forces in
Gaza, where their duty was to wrong-foot and
nobble Hamas.
It is par for the
course for Abbas's critics to ridicule the
extent to which he is propped up by the US and
Israel, helping to manage the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But
things could become very ugly for Abbas and
Fatah if, as a result of events in Dubai, he is
accused of collaborating with Israel in the
killing of a Hamas leader who, if only because
of the manner of his parting, will be revered
as a true soldier for Palestine.
One of the
admirable performances in all these curious
circumstances is the performance of the Dubai
authorities. They were entitled to be affronted
by the behaviour of the Israelis, but they
waited for a full month before announcing on
Thursday that they were 99 per cent certain in
their belief that Mossad dumped this mess on
their doorstep.
Paul McGeough is the author of
Kill Khalid: Mossad's Failed Hit … And
The Rise Of Hamas (Allen &
Unwin).
The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem
Fund.
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