Last chance for Mideast peace opens

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The chances for a last-minute resurrection of the Middle East 'peace process' just rose dramatically -- and we have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people, to thank for it.

That was probably not what Netanyahu intended last month when he authorized the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to send a hit team into Jordan on fake Canadian passports. He just wanted them to murder a leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, a militant Islamic organization that opposes a negotiated peace with Israel.

Instead, two of the Israeli would-be assassins got caught in the attempt on Hamas political official Khaled Meshal, and ended up in a Jordanian jail. Three more allegedly took refuge in the Israeli embassy in Amman. And Netanyahu stands a good chance of being forced to resign in the ensuing scandal -- which would be very good indeed for the Middle East peace process.

Hamas leaders are in some senses legitimate Israeli targets, since Hamas's military wing has taken responsibility for two recent suicide bombings in Israel. (Those bombings, however, were largely a response to Netanyahu's decision to start building a huge Jewish settlement in Arab East Jerusalem, which has led to a rupture in peace talks since March.) But that is not the point.

The point is that it is unlawful to equip your secret agents with forgeries of a friendly country's passports, and send them into the territory of a neighbor with whom you are at peace to commit murder. And it is either perfidious, or extremely stupid, to order such an operation just when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are stumbling back into motion after a seven-month halt.

Did Netanyahu order the operation personally? "The prime minister's responsibility over civilian intelligence services... is absolute and personal," said Israeli commentator Amir Oren. "If... the Mossad is responsible for this operation, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad head Danny Yatom will need to resign." There are even reports that Netanyahu overrode objections to the operation by his own security advisers, which is hardly surprising given its astounding clumsiness.

The Mossad operation to kill Meshal combined key elements of the three dumbest secret service murders of modern times.

The fake Canadian passports were a reprise of a 1973 Mossad killing in Norway, in which the Israelis had to apologize profusely to both Ottawa and Oslo. (The victim also turned out to be an innocent by-stander mis-identified by Israeli intelligence).

The bizarre weapon used in the Amman attack -- a pellet bearing an exotic poison injected into Meshal's ear during a street encounter -- was lifted from a famous Bulgarian operation of the 1980s, when a Bulgarian dissident living in London was killed by a poison pellet fired from the tip of an umbrella.

Both the Bulgarian secret police then, and the Israelis now, appear to have believed that if one of their highest-profile enemies died from a poison injected in the street by persons unknown, the operation would not be traced back to them. These people should not be allowed to read James Bond novels.

The other precedent for this operation was Mossad's own January 1996 assassination of 'Engineer' Yahya Ayash, then the chief bomb-maker of Hamas's military wing, by a bomb concealed in the earpiece of his cell-phone. (Mossad has a thing about ears).

That operation was a technical success, but in political terms it was criminally stupid. Peace talks were making good progress under prime minister Shimon Peres's Labor government at the time, and he was cruising smoothly towards re-election on a wave of sympathy caused by the recent assassination of his predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, by an anti-peace Israeli fanatic.

After Israel broke the truce by killing Yahya Ayash, Hamas sent its suicide bombers into action. Sixty six Israelis were killed by bombs on crowded buses during the election campaign in the spring of 1996, and the carnage destroyed Labor's electoral lead (as Hamas intended). Netanyahu narrowly won the May election, and the peace process has been on the rocks ever since.

So was this abortive operation a conscious attempt by Netanyahu to sabotage what remains of the peace process? Nobody knows, maybe not even Netanyahu himself. As the normally reticent King Hussein of Jordan said: "I personally just can't figure out what the Israeli prime minister thinks, and this worries me a lot."

What is clear is that Netanyahu is in deep political trouble. Since the Amman operation fell apart last week, he has been scrambling to avoid a collapse of the peace treaty with Jordan.

He has already freed the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a paralyzed and nearly blind 61-year- old scholar who has been in Israeli jails since 1989, and sent an Israeli doctor to Amman with an antidote to the poison injected into Meshal.

"If we had not received a treatment for Khaled Meshal which, thank God, enabled us to bring him back to normal health," said King Hussein, "we would have taken many actions." But Netanyahu is going to have to release many other Hamas leaders now held in Israeli jails if he wants to get the Israeli agents out of Amman and restore stable relations with Jordan.

That will make his political position in Israel precarious, which is all to the good. Only Netanyahu's fall can now rescue the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and avoid a return to large-scale violence. He is highly ambivalent about the whole notion of trading land for peace, and he is a permanent hostage to parties in his coalition that are determined to expand Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian lands. So it is time for 'tough love'.

Western countries that have traditionally supported Israel uncritically can now serve it best by making Netanyahu's position untenable. The United States, which expended enormous effort on mediating a shaky renewal of Israeli-Palestinian talks last week, should openly rebuke Netanyahu for sabotaging them.

Canada, whose citizens are placed at risk by Mossad's persistent use of fake Canadian passports -- "we had a case of a similar kind in 1981, and we thought we had an agreement (to stop it)," said Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy angrily -- has already recalled its ambassador from Israel. It should freeze its relations with Israel so long as Netanyahu stays in power.

And the European Union, or at least those European countries on whose soil Mossad agents have killed or kidnapped people -- Norway, Belgium and Italy leap to mind -- should show solidarity with Jordan by pulling their ambassadors out of Israel too.

A display of anger by Israel's closest supporters, combined with the damage Netanyahu himself has done to Israeli security -- he presses Arafat to arrest Hamas leaders, and then ends up releasing those in his own prisons -- might bring him down and force a 'national government', or even new elections in Israel.

It is the only hope of rescuing the peace process, and it is certainly worth a try.