July 23, 2006

Unlike run-of-the-mill books on the Mossad which read like spy thrillers, this one from a man who himself was once chief of Israel’s dreaded secret agency contains no juicy details of the cloak-and-dagger operations for which the Mossad is so famous or notorious, depending upon which side of the divide you are on. It is a serious book that dwells on the intricacies of Intelligence — “the craft of the impossible”, as the author calls it.

The greater part of the book deals with moral and ethical principles involved in intelligence gathering and the relationship between the political leadership and an intelligence agency. Can intelligence operatives and the chief himself jeopardise their careers and sometimes lives on missions for which the political authority chooses to stay in the grey area?

The author served the Mossad for 40 years in various capacities and worked with six prime ministers — Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin (Shimon Peres as a stop-gap arrangement following Rabin’s murder), Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, the last one being the only one to be elected as prime minister twice. All of them trusted him, with the exception of Peres, for whom the author fails to hide his contempt for bungling several diplomatic opportunities.

The only Arab he seems to admire was the late King Hussein, whom Peres seriously annoyed by what appeared to be a breach of trust. And the man he hated most was, of course, Yasser Arafat. There was no falsehood in which Arafat did not indulge, there was no promise he did not break, and there was no act of terrorism in which he wasn’t involved, but like all of Abu Ammar’s enemies he admits, “That Arafat was able over so many years to lead his people and to almost literally force the Arab world and the powers that be in the world at large to recognise the validity of the cause he personified was, without doubt, a singular success equal to very few achievements reached under similar circumstances.”(p 121)

As most Arafat biographers have noted, he was determined never to allow himself or the Palestinian cause to become a pawn in the hands of any Arab leader. That was why he was hated — first and foremost by another remarkably intelligent Arab — Hafez al-Assad. But Arafat played his cards very intelligently. In the words of the author he had acquired “a deep love of, and obsession with, espionage and intelligence. He would learn how to ‘play’ with information, how to make use of genuine intelligence in the service of his cause, how to trade intelligence with foreign services and obtain benefits in return and how to engage in disinformation and take it to the ultimate bounds of absurdity.”

In no other country in the world perhaps does a spy agency occupy such importance in strategic planning and decision making as the Mossad does in Israel. This is but natural for a country that came into being through a process of which espionage and terror were an essential part. Once it came into being, Israel has survived through the most unabashed use of state terror and is now — as divine justice will have — haunted by counter-terror. The cumulative effect of what went into the making of the state of Israel, of the constant wars it has waged on all its neighbours, its economic genocide of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and — more regrettably — of the persecution of its own Arab citizens have given the Israeli leadership and even the common citizen a psyche that in the word of Edward Said has come to resemble that of the members of a cult.

Israelis now believe in the myths developed by Zionist leaders, and even a man like the author whose professional decisions during a 40-year career in the Mossad were based on hard facts considers the myths to be facts. The result is that you get such nonsense as the Jews “resettling” in a “barren” Palestine, the Gaza and West Bank are “disputed territories” not occupied territories, and in 1982 Israel “entered Lebanon” not invaded it.

As is typical of people obsessed with “ideology”, the author claims credit for regime change in Palestine — a reference to Arafat’s surrender finally to pressures from America and from some of the Arab countries to appoint a prime minister so that his interlocutors could pass him by and negotiate with his appointee. From the long-term perspective, this served no purpose, for until his death Arafat remained in command of the Palestinian movement, the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas and later of Ahmad Qorei having no impact on the Palestinian situation. Instead, Israel chose to complete what it had begun during Arafat’s life-time — building the Middle East’s Berlin Wall. The construction of the Wall was the ultimate proof of Israel’s failure to get any collaborators in the Palestinian Authority. Yet the author calls the appointment of a prime minister by Arafat as “regime change”, considers this an achievement and claims credit for it. One can see regime change in Afghanistan, when the Taliban were ousted, or in Iraq, when the Anglo-American invasion ended the Saddam regime. But how can there be a regime change in Palestine, which is not even an independent country?

And when it comes to Al Qaeda one is appalled at the paranoia that has gripped the Israeli mind in spite of the fact that America has turned the Jewish state into one of the world’s strongest military powers. About Al Qaeda, the author’s remarks hardly appear to be those of an intelligence officer trained to base his tactics on ground realities, for he remarks: “Al Qaeda has set its sights on the entire world with the goal of affecting an Islamic international revolution that will encompass the entire planet.” Mark the words “entire world”, “international revolution” and “the entire planet” in one small sentence! Is this an intelligence officer talking? Must he sacrifice the pragmatism of “the craft of the impossible” on the altar of prejudice and confuse political propaganda and ideological rhetoric with general staff planning? It is scary that people with such a state of mind are advisers to men who have their fingers on the nuclear trigger.

The author has one original idea to offer: let America and the European Union make Hezbollah and Hamas “partners” in the war against terror. It is with cooperation from these two “terrorist organisations”, he says, that Al Qaeda can be tackled.