As’ad AbuKhalil has an excellent piece on the Al-Jazeera English website, in which he examines all the hasbara-fueled myth-making around the alleged prowess of Israel’s Mossad.
As I noted in this reflection on the recent Dubai affair, Israel’s spymasters and policymakers made the two fatal mistakes therein of underestimating both the capabilities and the intentions/commitment of the leadership of Dubai’s police authorities. It seems to me that this under-estimation could well have resulted from the Israeli leaders having drunk too much of their own KoolAid about the alleged “invincibility” of the Mossad.
After the debacle he presided over in Amman in 1997, current Israeli PM B. Netanyahu should have been well aware that Mossad can and does make some serious mistakes! But no, since he and his key security advisers hang out only with people, including many Americans and other westerners, who worship the ground the Mossad stands on, he had evidently forgotten that inconvenient fact.
It’s a pity that in his piece, As’ad didn’t include the Amman affair in the list of Mossad debacles he presents. To be quite fair in his use of evidence, I think he should have referred, too, to the killing in Damascus two years ago of longtime Hizbullah strategist Imad Mughniyeh, which was almost certainly organized by the Mossad. But even if you put all Mossad’s claimed “successes” in their practice of the arts of violence, subterfuge, and cruelty into the hopper along with their many evident failures, it is still clear that the Mossad is very, very far from being the “all-knowing, always very smart” spying and secret-ops outfit that its many propagandists paint it as.
At the root of everything, though, is the serious misjudgment, made by so many colonial administrations in the past, that their side and their people are so smart, and all members of the indigenous majority so basically dumb and ineducable, that the use of subterfuge, alleged “smarts”, and prestidigitation will always enable to the “smart, colonial minority” to outwit and prevail over the indigenous majority.
That hasn’t worked anywhere since the 19th century. Back then, the ability of colonial administrations to monopolize the flow of information meant they were almost completely unhampered in their implementation of large-scale extermination projects in locations far from the bastions of their home “civilization”. And they were therefore able–and nearly always oh, so willing– to kill and oppress the indigenes on a massive scale in pursuit of their colonialist projects, and also to twist, divide, and manipulate the indigenes without anyone back home being easily able to “report on”, or really understand those dreadful facts.
But guess what, Israel! We are no longer in the 19th century! Within the region of which you’re a part, you may dominate everyone else on all the steps on the ladder of military escalation, right up to, of course, very advanced nuclear weapons… But military might on its own is of no use in the 21st century. And meanwhile, other actors in the region have considerable amounts of strategic, civilizational, and tactical smarts– and they have access to all modern means of communication.
In fact, these days, the myths you continue to propagate about the alleged superiority of everything Israeli, including the capacities of your Mossad, clearly stand in the way of you being able to make realistic judgments about the capabilities and intentions of your neighbors in the region, and therefore about the true balance of forces there. By continuing to try to rely on force, coercion, and manipulation rather than genuine peacemaking and seeking viable, sustainable ways to become integrated into the region as a Jewish state within it, you are in fact just making the failure of the whole “Jewish state” project even more probable. So carry on drinking the KoolAid of your own alleged “superiority”, if that is what you want to do… But don’t be surprised if increasing numbers of people around the world refuse to drink it with you.