On 19 January, as the people of Dubai marvelled at the very rare instance of rain in the city, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was being given muscle relaxant before being smothered. His assassins were 26 operatives that were using fake passports to get around the city. The operation took place quickly and mercilessly, at the end of which the Hamas operative who had been accused of trying to get his organization closer to Iran lay dead. What the agents, who have been by now been identified as Mossad, did not count on was the fallout.
Dubai is by no means a stranger to intrigue and assassination. Last year a Chechen operative was killed in the city; the issue was hushed up with style so as not to scare tourists. Shortly before I left the fair City of Gold in 2004, an international organized crime war between Mahmoud Ibrahim and Chota Rajan had spilt into the area. Again, things were hushed up.
This was a pattern the Mossad expected to continue. The organization was disappointed. Dubai had been secretly souping up its CCTV cameras with expectations of terrorism to soon reach its shores. The National Security Agency i.e. secret police had been given increasing sums of money to do what they were learning to do from some of their most effective counterparts in Russia and south Asia. Most horrendously for Mossad, police chief Lt. General Dahi Khalfan Tamim held constant press conferences updating the public on all developments.
And there were developments.
Hours of CCTV footage showed the entire assassination being set up, with the agents coming in and getting ready for the big hit at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel. Passports were recovered and before anyone could sneeze, the killers’ photos were stuck up everywhere.
The old police chief apparently has taken accountability and openness to the point that he might be on Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed’s hit list of people to fire.
Tamim has risen in the public scene to the point that his Facebook group has swollen in size (it was set up in 2007 after he headed an armed robbery investigation). An Israeli hip-hop video is taking shots at him for his apparent camera-time hogging (you know you’re doing things right when…).
I am not in any sense applauding Tamim beyond doing what the police should have been from when they were set up. I’m just so very shocked that it is being done, and over such a high-profile case.
If anything Tamim has reigned himself in a fair bit. He hasn’t as such admonished Israel directly, but has been playing that delicate game of criticizing Mossad instead.
And of course our man Shiekh Mo wants things to not mar Dubai’s lovely shining face.
Israel is citing the uncovering of its agents as anti-Semitism. No mention about an Israeli supermarket using the murder of a human being as parody for an advertisement.
The fallout for Israel is that 26 of its agents cannot take part in this sort of exercise again (why did they need so many people to ice one guy?). What happened in January may be the last assassination of its kind.
For years I’ve heard about the, “Brilliant Mossad,” that was unbeatable. However when even conservative magazines like the Economist start questioning the agency’s effectiveness, you realize things have changed. The magazine whispers that there might even be some internal turmoil going on with the organization.
Anthony Lowenstein goes so far to call the hit a mighty chapter in Israel’s moral decline. After seeing the hip hop video and supermarket ad mentioned above, I cannot but agree.
There are three things from this entire incident that I will remember for a very long time:
a) That if this is a play by Israel-Mossad (and this is hard to refute when crime-media-shy Dubai points at them) then the finger should not just be pointed at Mossad but at PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
b) That there are a host of guest actors in this little play that are not being looked at. One of the fact that especially stands out is that none of the 26 held fake US passports; someone somewhere did not want to piss off the CIA.
c) In the words of my primary source of post-colonial media anaysis, As’ad Abu Khalil, Mossad made the same mistake that has helped every Arab resistance group fight against it effectively: it assumed that Arabs do not have the capacity to confront its mighty mighty machinations. Arabs effectively just proved that they in fact, do.
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