What Did Mossad Get Wrong?

If you were a gambling man down to your last million dollars, you could safely bet the lot on the fact that Israel will not be punished for the Mossad’s murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband initially described the abuse of British passports as “outrageous” and said an investigation was underway. Yes, but there’s a general election approaching in the UK, and that alone is (sadly) a good enough reason for each of the three main political parties to avoid any kind of confrontation with Israel which could be costly in terms of Jewish donations in particular and support in general. (It’s not impossible that when Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mossad chief Meir Dagan were discussing the possible diplomatic and political fall-out if anything went wrong, Netanyahu said to Dagan something like, “The British won’t make any problems for us, they’ve got an election coming.”)

But even if there’s to be no punishment, what happened in Dubai has been deeply damaging to Israel’s already badly tarnished image in the world (I mean the world of so-called ordinary people if not that of their governments). It adds to the correct impression that the Zionist state’s leaders have complete contempt for international law and what the world thinks, and that the state itself is becoming, if it is not already, a monster beyond control.

On the assumption that Mossad didn’t want the operation to be as counter-productive as it is in terms of Israel’s image, the question arising is what did it, Mossad, get wrong? More