It always reads like a John Le Carre novel. A team of unknown men and women enter a country on false passports, check into a large hotel, pose as tourists, businessmen, attractive divorces looking for adventure, or honeymooners looking into each other’s eyes.
Coincidentally, at the same hotel is a known terrorist who is responsible for killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in that Spartan little Middle East country. The target is almost always a big spender and not particularly retiring with his entourage of bodyguards and blond bombshells on either arm who held beauty titles or were models in better days.
Within hours of arriving, the team, never once acknowledging each other, find their cache of weapons hidden in some obscure part of the city. Within hours more, the target is dead. If the deed is committed in the target’s hotel room, he is usually shot through the heart or the head, the only item separating him from his assassin is a room service wagon . Sometimes, the method is highly imaginative with intricate bombs placed under his bed or in the water tank of a toilet so that when the weight of the target reclines on his bed, or flushes after using the loo, he is blown to pieces.
The team is gone before the authorities can put six men and women in some kind of common data base, though ultimately when it is too late, they will realize the passports they used to enter the country were fraudulent, and the target was a wanted Hamas or Hizbollah terrorist who hales from Gaza or the West Bank.
Let’s digress a moment to the catastrophe in Haiti when the only country that was able to deliver, set up, and perform emergency field surgeries and other medical procedures were the Israelis. The world hardly yawned. Few realized that when it came to grace under pressure and split second life-saving timing, only the Israelis had on-the- ground experience from their own catastrophes back home.
Flash forward to the assassination of Abu Jihad in his villa in Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia when Ehud Barak, a former Israeli Prime Minister, donned a blond wig and went in drag to lead his men and women into the area to eliminate him. How poignant when his wife, put her head against the wall near the staircase and said, “Shoot me too.” How typical when one of the Israeli team replied, “We have no quarrel with you. Go and tend to your children.”
What about Golda Meier’s hit list—so appropriately entitled “kill the head of the snake” after the Munich Massacre when Israeli athletes were systematically murdered in the Olympic village? One by one by one, those responsible for the murders—each and every head of a terror organization—the heads of the snake—were killed, slowly and methodically throughout the world in a variety of different ways.
Is it surprising that the Home Office in the United Kingdom and undoubtedly, country by country throughout the world by now, suspect this latest hit to be planned and orchestrated by an elite team of Mossad agents?
The reality is that this struggle as the Palestinians call it, or el Naqba—the catastrophe—as they refer to it when Israel became a nation in 1948 under the guidelines and auspices of the United Nations, has been a war of attrition, a shadowy force of undeclared conflict, and most recently, a cynical murder by leaders who convince their own civilians to blow themselves up in the middle of a busy shopping plaza, supermarket, or restaurant. Killing themselves in an effort to kill Israelis has become an honored endeavor—the bombers rewarded in Paradise at Allah’s table, and treated as rock stars or soccer heroes who have passed on to eternity.
Organizing an assassination of a terrorist who is the architect of these suicide bombings that terrorize a country is frowned upon by international powers. False passports were used, those belonging to British citizens who happened to have Israeli nationality as well, guns and other weapons were supplied by agents obviously in place in the country where the unfortunate target was visiting. It was clearly a daunting mission and one that only highly motivated men and women could carry out successfully. Did they adhere to the letter of the law to murder the terrorist? No. Did they perform their dastardly act on foreign soil? Yes.
It’s all very ugly. Killing is never the preferred solution, unless it is the only solution. But as someone once said a long time ago after the Palestinians under the leadership of Yasser Arafat and his band of thugs, refused each and every offer of land, peace, and conciliation, beginning with the two-state solution proposed by the United Nations, “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Too bad their suicide bombs work more efficiently than the good sense of their leaders. As for the accusations that the Israelis were responsible for this latest hit, who knows? Rumor has it that an attractive hotel maid was the last person to enter the room of the target. Maybe the terrorist made an unwanted advance. Perhaps the hotel maid was upset at his miserly tip. Or just possibly, she was indeed part of the squad who sent a message—that they will track down and kill every last person whose Modus Vivendi is to systematically murder Israeli citizens until the land is empty and barren and the Jews are driven into the sea.