Drie recensies van het boek Kill Khalid - The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas, van de Australische journalist Paul McGeough.

Paul McGeough is the former executive editor of Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald and the author of three books on the Middle East. He has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year and in 2002 was awarded the Johns Hopkins University–based SAIS Novartis Prize for excellence in international journalism. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

Times Online: How Mossad helped Hamas
A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise to power of Khalid Mishal

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.

New York Post: Kill KHalid

As Khalid lay in a coma, Mossad director Danny Yatom went to see King Hussein in the royal palace, confirming what the AFP had hinted. “We did it, he’ll die in 24 hours,” Yatom told the shocked king. “We’ve injected him with a chemical, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

King Hussein was furious. The assassination attempt could easily destroy the country’s bilateral security treaty with Israel, and because of the AFP report, everyone knew who was behind it. “You have jeopardized everything,” a royal aid yelled at Yatom.

With neighbors already unhappy over Jordanian relations with Israel and the US, the king’s political future depended on keeping Khalid alive. At the same time, the canny king saw an opportunity, McGeough says, to humiliate the man he detested: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hawkish prime minister, by getting him in trouble with the US.

The king called the White House, asking President Clinton to step in or risk a full-blown crisis in the Middle East. His tactic appeared to work: Clinton was sufficiently annoyed with the Israeli prime minister that he refused to take his calls, opting instead to broker through intermediaries the deal for Israel to hand over the formula for the poison and the antidote. When Israel had agreed to his terms, Clinton told King Hussein personally.
Eight days later, Khalid was out of the hospital, having received the Israeli treatment with his own medical consultants, including a pharmacologist from the Mayo Clinic.

The entire operation backfired. To get its agents back, Israel was forced to release Hamas religious leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and other prisoners. “Hamas was having its worst year,” a top US Official says. “But then Mossad’s balls-up in Amman turned their fortunes.”

Washington Post: The Martyr Who Did Not Die

As a reporter, I covered Hamas for years, and it was always tricky gauging Mishal’s influence. His exhortations to strike at Israel certainly resonated with the radical youths in Gaza, yet at times it seemed that his perch in exile left him out of day-to-day decision-making by Hamas leaders on the ground.

But Israel has systematically killed many of those leaders, and Mishal’s prominence has grown by process of elimination. McGeough makes a strong case that, even from afar, Mishal is deeply involved in daily events in Gaza. The author was with Mishal in his Damascus compound in September 2007, when Al-Jazeera was broadcasting scenes of Hamas security forces beating Fatah protesters in Gaza. An exasperated Mishal spoke by phone to the Hamas security chief in Gaza and told him to ease up.

Far too many earnest, lumbering books on the Middle East propose recycled versions of the path to peace. McGeough doesn’t offer a solution to the conflict. But he provides a highly instructive account of how Hamas emerged as a potent force and why its faithful honor Mishal as the “martyr who did not die.”

» Podcast: Paul McGeough leest voor uit Kill Khalid (92 min.)
» Video: Paul McGeough leest voor uit Kill Khalid (6 min. World Affairs Council, San Francisco 2009)

Achtergronden::

» The Gaza Bombshell (Vanity Fair 2008)
“After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.”

» Video: Interview met Meshal (Al-Jazzera 2008)
» Hamas leader acknowledges ‘reality’ of Israel (The Guardian 2007)
» Hamas softens Israel stance in calls for Palestinian state (The Independent 2007)