Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if...Seumas Milne

[Liibaan]

This is no ripping yarn, but a murder to fan more conflict

 

Israel's Region-wide Underground War

 

The media may revel in a Mossad hit, yet Britain's response to a plot that could threaten its own citizens has been craven

 

 

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if ­Iranian ­intelligence was almost ­universally believed to have ­assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the ­operation ­using forged or stolen passports of ­citizens of four European states, including Britain, with dual Iranian nationality.

 

You can be sure it would have ­triggered a major international storm, stentorian declarations about the threat of state-sponsored terrorism, and ­perhaps a debate at the UN ­security council, with demands for harsher ­sanctions against an increasingly ­dangerous Islamic republic.

 

Substitute Israel for Iran, and the first part of that scenario is exactly what happened in Dubai last month. A senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was murdered in his hotel room in what was widely assumed from the start to be an operation by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Less than a month later, strong suspicion has turned to as good as certainty with the revelation that the hit team had used the passport identities of six Britons with dual nationality and currently ­living in Israel.

 

But instead of setting off a diplomatic backlash, the British government sat on its hands for almost a week after it was reportedly first passed details of the passport abuse. And while the Foreign Office finally summoned the Israeli ambassador to "share information", rather than protest, Gordon Brown could ­yesterday only promise a "full investigation".

 

In parallel with this languid official response, most of the British media has treated the assassination more as a ripping spy yarn than a bloody scandal which has put British citizens at greater risk by association with Mossad death squads. It was an "audacious hit", the Daily Mail enthused, straight out of a "Frederick Forsyth page-turner", while the Times revelled in an attack that resembled nothing so much as a "well-plotted ­murder mystery".

 

Running throughout all this is a breathless awe at Mossad's reputation for ruthless brilliance in seeking out and destroying Israel's enemies. In reality, the Dubai operation was badly bungled, as the Israeli press has already started to acknowledge. Despite having the relatively easy target of an unarmed man in a luxury hotel in a non-hostile Gulf state, Mossad managed to get its agents repeatedly caught on CCTV and effectively exposed Israel's responsibility through the hamfisted passport scam.

 

Dubai follows a long history of ­Mossad bungles, from its accidental 1970s killing of a Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaken for a Palestinian Black September leader, through its failed assassination attempt against the Hamas leader Khalid Mish'al in Jordan in 1997, when agents had to take refuge in Israel's embassy and the US forced Israel to produce the antidote for the nerve toxin used in the attack.

 

In that case, the would-be assassins were carrying the Canadian passports of Israeli citizens, apparently with their knowledge. But while Mossad has used British documents in other attacks, it has naturally steered clear of faking the passports of its US sponsor. So at the same time as Israel is demanding the British government change the law without delay to prevent the arrest of visiting Israeli leaders on war crimes charges, what is Britain planning to do over the abuse of its citizens' identity to carry out state-directed murder?

 

Very little, it seems. Part of the ­explanation has to be that Britain and the US have of course been carrying out their own assassination campaigns, in violation of the laws of war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his new book on secret SAS operations in occupied Iraq, Mark Urban estimates that 350 to 400 were killed in covert British attacks. The Joint Special Operations Command run by General Stanley McChrystal, now US commander in Afghanistan, was ­responsible for perhaps 3,000 deaths. In Pakistan, US drone assassination attacks are now routinely carried out against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, real or imagined.

 

And since launching its war on terror, the US has also adopted Israel's practice, stretching back decades, of carrying out killings far from the theatre of war. First, Israel's attacks were targeted against PLO leaders; more recently against the ­Islamists. But since the fiasco of the Mish'al plot, its assassinations have mostly been confined to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israel made a determined attempt over the past ­decade to decapitate Hamas of its entire leadership.

 

Now that focus has again widened. Under the direction of Mossad director Meir Dagan, Israel is running a region-wide underground war against the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas – which have both maintained an effective ceasefire for more than a year – and their Syrian and Iranian backers. Since the ­killing of ­veteran Hezbollah leader Imad ­Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, Israeli-hallmarked assassinations have ­multiplied in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

 

But coldblooded ­killing isn't only a morally ­repugnant crime. The lesson of ­colonial ­history is that ­decapitation ­campaigns against ­national ­resistance movements don't work. In the short term they can disrupt and demoralise, but if the ­movement is socially rooted, other ­leaders or even organisations will take their place. That was Israel's ­experience when it killed the Hezbollah leader ­Abbas al-Musawi and his family in the early 1990s, only for him to be succeeded by the more effective and ­charismatic Hassan Nasrallah.

 

Such campaigns also tend to spread the war. Unlike the historic PLO ­factions, Hamas has always confined its armed attacks to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Writing in the Guardian in 2007, Mish'al confirmed the "principle that the resistance should only be fought in Palestine". But in the aftermath of the Dubai assassination, Hamas leaders have started to hint strongly that policy could now change, and that they could respond to Israel's attacks in "the ­international arena".

 

If so, it would give an added dimension to the assessment by Ben Caspit in the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv yesterday that the Dubai killing had been a "tactical operational success, but a strategic failure". So far the response of British ministers to Mossad's provocation has been craven. Unless that changes fast, they can only increase the risk of being drawn further into a conflict ready to erupt again at any time.

 

 

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Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He is also the author of The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners. This article was first published by the Guardian on 18 February 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes

[Liibaan]

Getting away with murder

 

Israel has been caught with a smoking gun in Dubai, but Washington is turning a blind eye, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed

 

 

Check this out. Here's a story of two countries from the Middle East. One is an ancient civilisation with a rich history that goes back 5,000 years. It's a functioning democracy with free elections held at regular intervals. It's a huge country of 70 million people. It has remained within its borders and hasn't attacked any country in the last 100 years. It is pursuing a nuclear power programme, which it insists is for peaceful purposes.

 

The second is a country that also claims to be a democracy. In this democracy you get citizenship and voting rights not on the basis of your origins, even if you were born in this land, but on your ancestry. This country was founded on land stolen and forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. It has fought at least three wars and is locked in permanent conflict with its neighbours on all sides. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and other state-of-the-art killing machines. It pursues assassination as a state policy and regularly sends death squads around the world to take out people it doesn't like.

 

Which do you think is a threat to world peace? The first country that has no history of aggression, or the second, that has killed tens of thousands of innocent people in wars of aggression against neighbours and in coldblooded executions?

 

No prizes for guessing that the two countries in question are Iran and Israel. And if anyone had any doubts about the evil and criminal nature of the state of Israel, they should have been cleared after what happened in Dubai. Sending death squads into a five-star hotel in posh and peaceful Dubai using European passports and IDs -- the whole business reads like a John Le Carré or Robert Ludlum potboiler. But, as they say, reality is more curious than fiction.

 

International media and diplomatic circles are buzzing with stories and theories about how the Israelis planned the whole thing and executed it with professional precision. Typically, the entire European press has been obsessing over the forged passports and fake IDs, totally ignoring the real issue at the heart of this unfolding crisis: another coldblooded murder of a top Palestinian leader by Israel.

 

The UAE authorities, especially the Dubai police, deserve a pat on the back for not only cracking the murder but also having built a solid case against the Israelis with credible and irrefutable evidence. They virtually caught the killers with blood on their hands, thanks to the solid security structure in place. It was this watertight case that forced the British, Irish, German and French authorities to summon Israeli envoys to "explain" the affair.

 

But is it enough? Imagine if such a thing had happened in any other city or country and the finger of suspicion had been pointed at an Arab or Muslim country, not Israel. All hell would have broken loose and ambassadors of the concerned country would have been thrown out within hours. In fact, as The Guardian 's Seumas Milne argued in a brilliant piece this week, imagine what would have happened if it was not Israel but Iran that had sent in the killers and the assassination had taken place in a Western country using the passports and IDs of Western citizens?

 

By now US and NATO jets would have bombed Iran back to the Stone Age, just as they did in neighbouring Iraq, with the UN and its movers and shakers passing a dozen resolutions against the Islamic republic. But now we are talking about the almighty Israel. And when it comes to Israel, there are different laws and rules of engagement. It can get away with anything, even murder. And it repeatedly has. This isn't the first time Israel has sent killer squads to take out its detractors and individuals who refuse to accept its tyranny or stand and stare while it kills at will a helpless and defenceless people.

 

Steven Spielberg's Munich, a glorified version of Mossad's murderous operations against Palestinian officials in 1972, is only one chapter out of Israel's long history of crimes against Palestinian people and its Arab neighbours. How can we forget what happened in Lebanon in the 1980s and as lately as 2006? What about the carnage in Sabra and Shatila, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that saw the killing of at least 3,000 Palestinians? And what about Gaza in 2008-2009?

 

Israel has gotten away with all that. And in all likelihood it will get away with the murder in Dubai as well, no matter how forcefully the UAE authorities demand the arrest of Mossad's chief and action against the killers.

 

Hillary Clinton was in the Middle East when this whole thing blew up in Israel's face last week. However, the top US diplomat who would have been president remained focussed on Iran's ayatollahs. She repeatedly warned the Arabs against the "clear and present danger" presented by Iran, accusing Tehran of building nuclear weapons and "sponsoring terrorism" in the Middle East, a new charge to the long litany of charges against the Islamic republic. We have been here before -- and not very long ago -- in Iraq.

 

And of course there was no reference to the threat Israel poses to its Arab neighbours. Nor any reference to its continuing persecution of Palestinians and the blaze it fuels across the Muslim world. Secretary of State Clinton couldn't have chosen a more appropriate platform to launch the offensive against Iran. She chose the US-Islam Dialogue Forum in Doha to strike at Tehran, concluding it rather nicely in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It's Iran, she warned the Arabs ad nauseam, not Israel that poses a grave threat to peace and security in the Middle East.

 

So what if Israel is still squatting on Palestinian and Arab land! So what if Israel continues to send killer hit squads into Arab cities! So what if Iran hasn't attacked any Arab or Muslim neighbour in a long, long time. The Shia Iran must be a threat to Sunni Arabs because the US, Israel and their Western allies say so. If this is a breathtaking example of hypocrisy and double standards, so be it! No matter what ordinary Arabs and people across the Muslim world think. What matters is what Israel wants and how far the West will bend over backwards to humour it.

 

If this isn't true let Israel's friends prove it so. I would love to get corrected. The Sunday Times has disclosed that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu personally visited Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv to give his blessings for the Dubai operation, just as his predecessors had blessed the killing of other Palestinian leaders, including Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and, very possibly, Yasser Arafat.

 

The question is: How long will Israel get away with murder? And how long will its Western friends and allies protect it because of their own so-called historical guilt or whatever? Why do we have two sets of laws and standards for Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbours?

 

Secretary Clinton was confronted with these questions during a Q&ampA session with Arab students in Doha. Not surprisingly, Clinton had no answers to offer. Instead she introduced her audience to new US envoys to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Muslim world, Rashad Hussein and Farah Pandit, both Indian Americans.

 

Why is it so hard for Washington to see that it is not cosmetic gestures like this but real justice that can bridge the widening gulf with the Islamic world?

 

* The writer is opinion editor of Khaleej Times.