CAIRO: Few issues in global affairs polarize like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If one doubts this, look at the selection in any bookstore. On China or India, major global players with populations over a billion, one might find a handful of titles, mostly focusing on non-controversial topics of history or culture. Home to conflicts that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, Rwanda and Sudan are lucky if they get anything.
Israel-Palestine, by contrast, is an embarrassment of riches. On a recent visit to my local bookstore, I counted no less than 60 books, nearly all of them making a case, in some form or another, for what Israel-Palestine should or should not look like. Detached scholarship that simply describes how things are is much harder to come by.
One exception is a recent work by Australian journalist Paul McGeough. Published in early 2009 by The New Press, “Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas, is one of the best books on the Palestinians in years.
Essentially, the book is a biography of Khalid Mishal. McGeough follows the Hamas leader from his family’s forced exodus from the West Bank after the 1967 war, through his student days in Kuwait in the 1970s where he first embraced the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, through his rise to the top of the Hamas leadership.
The reconstruction of Israel’s 1997 attempt to assassinate Mishal, then living in Jordan, reads like a mix between a Hollywood thriller and a bad comedy.
Israel’s leaders at the time, which included current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, somehow thought it was a good idea to have Mossad agents dressed as Canadian tourists “bump into Mishal on the street and spray him with poison. The idea was that since the poison would take several hours to take effect, it would make it seem as if the Hamas hard-liner had died from natural causes.
Instead, everything that could go wrong did. The would-be assassins were quickly captured, giving the enraged King Hussein, having just gone out on a limb to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel, a golden bargaining chip to extract maximum concessions, including the release of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin. And the notoriety gained from the incident vaulted Mishal past more pragmatic contenders for the Hamas leadership – the exact opposite of what Israel originally intended.
Finally, “Kill Khalid makes a notable effort to improve understanding of Hamas’ history, something that is insufficiently documented both in Arabic and in English. In the US, coverage of the movement is often influenced by ideological conceptions of terrorism whereas in the Arab world, Hamas tends to receive uncritical adulation for its “Resistance. McGeough account of the rise of Hamas, and its long-term rivalry with Fatah are as good as any, and reason alone to read the book.
“Kill Khalid is a model of what journalism should look like. Leaving no stone unturned in his quest to get his material directly from the horse’s mouth, McGeough interviewed nearly every Hamas political leader, including 50 hours with Mishal. Because of this extensive reliance on primary-source interviews, the level of depth goes way beyond what is usually written on the topic and the book must-read for anyone interested in Israel-Palestine.
With the new administration in Washington pledging to rejuvenate the peace process, the publication is timely. Many factors make success difficult – one of them is Hamas’ historical intransigence towards Israel. Unless they can move beyond this position, the Obama administration efforts are not likely to go very far.
No book, however, is better suited to provide clues as to whether Hamas can, or even wants to do so.
