Arriving in Israel from assignments elsewhere in the Middle East, especially by land, always brought with it a sense of immediate relief.
Over the past two decades, I made that journey many times – crossing the Egyptian border to Eilat on the Red Sea, or walking over the Allenby Bridge en route through Jordan from the Persian Gulf – then catching a long-distance taxi toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Israel was a reassuring outpost of the modern world, a prosperous and open society where leaders were chosen in free elections and subjected to endless scrutiny. Its democracy had blemishes, to be sure, but the relentless criticism of a ferociously independent press never let you forget them.
Very few of these descriptions apply in most Arab countries, and almost none of them in many.
This is why the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh matters.
A DEATH AND ITS AFTERMATH
On January 20, al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room at a Dubai hotel, a victim of deliberate electric shock and suffocation. The hotel’s video surveillance tapes suggested that several execution teams, involving a dozen or more people, were involved in the assassination. Over the next month, the total number of suspects rose to 26.
According to local security officials, the alleged assassins had entered Dubai on forged or stolen British, Irish, French, Australian and German passports. It is believed that they made their way out of the emirate before the corpse was discovered.
As always in such incidents, Jerusalem dismissed assertions that the Mossad, its national intelligence agency, was behind the Dubai hit. But leading Israeli politicians concede that al-Mabhouh, a key figure in the military wing of Hamas, the extremist party that governs the volatile Palestinian enclave of Gaza, was a high-priority target.
“The fact that a terrorist was killed, and it doesn’t matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza, is good news to those fighting terrorism,” said former foreign minister Tziipi Livni, head of the opposition Kadima Party.
No major Israeli official, present or past, has ever come so close to public endorsement of targeted assassinations in a foreign country.
Eight of the passports used by the suspected assassins have been traced to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, where they were apparently copied or stolen from travelers with dual Israeli and British nationality.
The mainstream Israeli press implicitly treats the Mossad role as a fact, notwithstanding the official line. “The operational goal was achieved. The assassins came home safely (aside from two Palestinians who evidently helped them). Yes, they were photographed, but they knew that this was a possibility,” Tel Aviv-based Ha’aretz, the country’s oldest and most influential newspaper, reported.
“The real snafu,” it added, “was the use of forged European passports bearing the names of real Israeli dual citizens.”
In an unprecedented step, the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Ireland jointly summoned Israel’s ambassadors to their foreign ministries for explanations on February 18. Two days later a statement from the European Union characterized the killing as “profoundly disturbing” and condemned the theft of its citizens’ identities.
“We take this case extremely seriously,” said Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, who called the use of British passports”an outrage.”
The point was not sympathy for Hamas, which has little if any high-level support in Europe. It was, rather, how far Israel is now willing to go it alone – heedlessly and defiantly – in actions that dangerously compromise its longterm allies and violate international law.
Put another way, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is also a blunt reminder of how far Israel has wandered from its own founding principles.
NOT JUST ANY OTHER STATE
One of the insistent hopes of Israel at its inception, expressed repeatedly by early leaders, was to enjoy the rights and shoulder the obligations of any legitimate nation.
Yet from the very first, it has not been like every other nation.
The Jewish state established on May 14, 1948 was a direct product of calculated mass genocide, the Holocaust, arguably the most devastating crime against humanity in contemporary history.
The new country was “not just another sovereign nation,” US President HarryTruman said, but “an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization”.
The sheer horror of the Nazis’ final solution “explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state,” said Andrei Gromyko, Soviet ambassador to the UN at the time, announcing Moscow’s diplomatic recognition. “It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.”
Within a few years, Soviet support had shifted decisively to the Arab Bloc. But by the mid-1950s, Israel could depend upon vital backing and military assistance from the United States, and in most instances from The United Kingdom, France and Germany – three of the very countries whose citizens were used in January as unwitting covers for the al-Mabhouh execution.
Israel’s close ties to the West have overlapping motives for all sides, including common economic and strategic interests. Yet in a very real sense, their grounding remains the shadow of the Holocaust – and also the ancient moral laws of Judaism itself.
“The State of Israel,” founding father David Ben-Gurion promised on the day its nationhood was declared, “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
It would also “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” he added.
It is difficult to reconcile the spirit of that declaration with the killing in Dubai and other probable assasinations in recent years. Or with seemingly endless land seizures on the Palestinian West Bank, contrary to Israeli promises and UN resolutions.
It is impossible, in light of Israel’s grim origins, to justify the collective punishment – the demolition of entire neighborhoods and villages “linked” to a single terrorist – that has gradually become a standard response to the “Palestinian problem.”
That phrase conjures up profoundly troubling parallels, although their meaning depends on who does the conjuring.
Listen to Avigdor Lieberman, a longtime rightwing firebrand in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, on the subject of his Arab-Israeli colleagues’ protests against to harsh policies in the Occupied Territories in 2006:
“The fate of collaborators in the Knesset will be identical to that of those who collaborated with the Nazis. Collaborators, as well as criminals, were executed after the Nuremberg trials at the end of the World War Two. I hope that will be the fate of collaborators in this house.”
Today, Lieberman is his nation’s foreign minister. The gap between his words and those of David Ben-Gurion measures the troubling moral distance Israel has travelled since 1948.
THE CASE OF ADOLPH EICHMANN
It also measures the distance between the extra-judicial murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 and the case of Adolph Eichmann in 1961.
Eichmann was the architect of the Holocaust, the man who designed the system that transported millions of Europoean Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. Mossad agents hunted him down and kidnapped him in Argentina in 1960. He was brought to Israeli, and put on trial in a civilian court.
After three months of testimony from hundreds of witnesses, for the defense as well as the prosecution, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership in an outlawed organization, and hung on May 31, 1962.
As a teenager in Detroit, I watched television coverage of that trial, which was broadcast live internationally. It was meant to make a worldwide impression, and it did.
Eichmann was a monster by any standard, qualitatively and categorically more sinister than a Hamas operative in tiny impovershed Gaza. The Mossad could easily have murdered him on the spot in Buenos Aires.
What the trial of Adolph Eichmann said is that principles counted. Without them, all was lost.
That commitment, a determination to answer the moral void of the Holocaust with the rule of law, is in question today.
WHAT ISRAEL’S ENEMIES FEAR
A tragedy of epic proportions is played out in this evolution. A tragedy that needn’t be.
At home, for the most part, Israel’s successes as a nation continue to reflect openness and individual rights, which are the basis of its prosperity. The contrast with nearby countries – where autocratic government, tyrranical police authorities and puppet media institutions make daily life a nightmare for their own inhabitants – remains stark.
But abroad and in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, a growing tendency to go it alone, to treat its best friends and global opinion with casual contempt, prevails. It has made Israel no safer, despite enormous security expenditures and a “secret” arsenal of atomic weapons.
The nuclear deterrent can only be used as a last resort, with perilously uncertain consequences. If one Hamas militant is liquidated, the record clearly shows that another will soon take his place. But the example of Israel’s democratic system and affluent economy are permanent, destablizing rebukes to its enemies.
“I look at the way people live here every day,” Palestinian taxi driver plying the road from Jerusalem to Haifa once said to me. “And every day I ask myself the same question: ‘Why is there no Arab country with this kind of freedom, this kind of modern life.”
