What I'm Reading: Kill Khalid

One of my professors asked me to write a paper on the foreign policy of Hamas, which is a little unconventional because Hamas is not a state (even if it does control Gaza), and pretty exciting because non-state actors are some of the most important players in the region. I promptly ordered a book I'd seen recommended elsewhere in the blogosphere: Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas by Paul McGeough.

Let's say that you're Benjamin Netanyahu, and your country has just signed a major peace treaty with one of your historical enemies--Jordan. Leaders on both sides have both taken tremendous political risks to pull this off, but you've succeeded. Your eastern border is secure, you have an important ally in the peace process, and you're looking at a bright future of cooperative, trust-building projects in the coming years. Your Mossad chief is friends with King Hussein and dines in his palace. Now, how do you take all that and screw up everything? While the ink is still wet on the treaty, you send Mossad agents across the border on Canadian passports to assassinate a Hamas agent the King has granted asylum to. And you fail, badly. You violate Jordanian sovereignty, humiliate the king, and create a political crisis that jeopardizes his rule. You create such a mess that you're forced to release your most valued Hamas prisoner (Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) in order to get your agents back.

That's the tone of the book. You can tell McGeough thought the 1997 assassination attempt was really, really dumb. This is a book that makes you cringe, as you watch bad decisions and incompetence create an international crisis. But the book is about much more than that single event; it's about the entire history of Hamas, from the childhoods of its leaders up to the present. It's also a fascinating account of Israel's cold peace with Jordan. I enjoyed McGeough's very readable depiction of what actually goes on behind the scenes in the Israeli-Jordanian relationship. The book also covers US efforts to breakup Hamas funding, including the famous trial against the Holy Land Foundation.

Like any book about Israeli-Palestinian issues, it has generated a polarized response. Half the Amazon.com reviews are 5 stars and half are 1 or 2 stars. The negative reviewers accuse the author of being biased towards the Arab/Palestinian perspective and of minimizing Hamas' murderous ideology. McGeough does seem biased--this was particularly evident to me in his brief treatment of the 1948 and 1967 wars--but that should not stop readers from enjoying the many strengths of the book. As Aaron David Miller argues, nobody comes to this conflict without bias; we should not pretend otherwise. After I finished the book I wondered if the Israelis interpret this event differently than the author does, but yesterday I read an interview with Israel's first ambassador to Jordan, Shimon Shamir. He called the assassination attempt "ill-conceived and poorly executed", which suggests McGeough's interpretation is at least broadly accepted by both sides. The key to understanding the Israeli perspective is their total frustration that Jordan was harboring Hamas in the first place. Shamir emphasizes this in his interview.

One Amazon.com review caught my eye. The reviewer is frustrated that the book humanizes a man who is murderous, hateful, and anti-Semitic. I disagree with him that humanizing such a notorious character is a bad thing. All too often, we paint our enemies in crude strokes using a giant, sloppy paintbrush. They are terrorists. They are barbarians. They are animals. When we engage in this kind of reductionism, we don't learn anything. The reality is that our enemies are human beings, with complex and subtle human motivations. We can never understand our enemies or achieve our political objectives until we understand that. The US made a mess of things in Iraq when it spoke only of "terrorists" undermining the peace. Gradually we learned to map the human terrain with increasing resolution. We spoke of disaffected Ba'athists and Muqtada al Sadr and al-Qa'ida in Iraq. We developed different strategies for dealing with different actors. We learned that insurgents fought for a variety of reasons, and that some of them could be won over.

As much as we loathe Hamas, it is a permanent part of the landscape in the Middle East now. Any progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will probably require its participation. We can't ignore Hamas. It's imperative we understand it. That's why this book is such a valuable contribution to the literature on the conflict.