Missing the Point on Hamas
By Matthew Levitt
Paul McGeough, an accomplished reporter with the Sydney Morning Herald, has written a page-turner of a book on the failed assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khaled Mishal, but as a serious and balanced study of Hamas, the book's flaws run deep and wide. The layman will find it hard to put down Kill Khaled: Mossad's Failed Hit . . . And the Rise of Hamas but should be forewarned that McGeough's lacklustre analysis does not match his expert storytelling.
McGeough expertly tells the tale of the failed assassination and the way Mishal leveraged his new status as Hamas's "living martyr" to great effect in fending off rivals to his leadership within Hamas. What McGeough fails to convey adequately are the events that led Israel officials to decide that targeting a then relatively unknown Hamas leader, on the streets of one of only two Arab countries at peace with the Jewish state, was a risk worth taking. Only after the book's first 126 pages is the reader eventually introduced, in passing, to the string of spectacular terrorist attacks Hamas carried out in the weeks before the attempted assassination of Mishal in Amman, Jordan.
Readers should not expect to read of these terrorist attacks in Kill Khalid, let alone of logistical and support networks Hamas maintains to support them. The Hamas suicide bombers who targeted an outdoor Jerusalem market in July 1997 are not the subject of a chapter or analysis in McGeough's telling of the Hamas story, nor are the suicide bombers who targeted Jerusalem's popular Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in September of that year.
The attempt to assassinate Mishal immediately followed this second attack, carried out by a cell that the Israeli Shin Bet warned was planning still more attacks. According to US and Israeli authorities, Mishal personally funded and approved of just these types of attacks.
My complete review, published in Saturday's Weekend Review section of The Australian, is available here.
