Scandal over Mossad use of UK passports curiously fails to materialise with Britons awe struck at Israeli daring.

 

by  Robin Shepherd

There is something very strange going on in Britain, and Israel's detractors are hopping mad. Not, I hasten to add over the apparent use by the Mossad of six British passports in the assassination in Dubai of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Criticism on that score is both reasonable and necessary. No country can allow its passports to be used by a foreign state, let alone in the course of a secret service hit job. Britain is no exception.

What vexes them is not so much the use of the passports per se as the fact that the kind of hyserical public furore that we have come to expect whenever a stick presents itself for the beating of Israel has singularly failed to materialise. On the contrary, large sections of the British press have responded with barely disguised awe at the audacious operation that the Israelis had the balls to carry out.

The usual suspects in the Guardian and the BBC look uncommonly isolated. Witness BBC MidEast Editor Jeremy Bowen on World Service Television this morning.

A dour and subdued looking Bowen was asked to reflect on the effect the affair might have on the UK's already strained relationship with the Jewish state but was only able to warn of "very severe" consequences at some vague point in the future if the allegations were proved to be correct.

Seumas Milne, a regular columnist for the Guardian and one of the most fanatical opponents of Israel in the British press, was almost tearful at the sheer refusal of both the media and the government to jump to attention in the usual manner. Writing in today's Guardian he said:

"…instead of setting off a diplomatic backlash, the British government sat on its hands for almost a week after it was reportedly first passed details of the passport abuse. And while the Foreign Office finally summoned the Israeli ambassador to "share information", rather than protest, Gordon Brown could ­yesterday only promise a "full investigation".

"In parallel with this languid official response, most of the British media has treated the assassination more as a ripping spy yarn than a bloody scandal which has put British citizens at greater risk by association with Mossad death squads. It was an "audacious hit", the Daily Mail enthused, straight out of a "Frederick Forsyth page-turner", while the Times revelled in an attack that resembled nothing so much as a "well-plotted ­murder mystery". Running throughout all this is a breathless awe at Mossad's reputation for ruthless brilliance in seeking out and destroying Israel's enemies."

Milne is right. The public mood in Britain is remarkably pro-Israeli on this issue. Consider an opinion piece in the Times today by Melanie Reid tellingly headlined: "We're all thrilled by Mossad the movie." In the course of her article, Reid says:

"What the secret agents did — and, critically, what we saw them do — was compelling and breathtaking in its cleverness. Box office, in other words."

And, she goes on:

"It is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back. They don't waste time explaining or justifying or agonising; nor do they allow their detractors to enter their country and then afford them generous welfare payments. They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything."

But there's more:

"I've felt this way ever since the Entebbe raid in 1976, an occasion when the Israelis showed Hollywood a thing or two. After two Palestinians and two Germans had hijacked an aircraft on a flight that had originated in Israel, the Israeli army simply swooped in, killed the hijackers and freed all but three of the hostages. It was decisive, bloody and clever. Lieutenant-Colonel "Yoni" Netanyahu, the older brother of the present Prime Minister, Binyamin, was the only commando killed in the fighting."

And more:

"Maybe, as the West becomes increasingly gentle and polite, and pays those monthly direct debits to Amnesty International, we need the Israelis to remind us that the world is not made according to our template. Maybe that is why we are drawn towards tales of uncompromising, ruthless derring-do. How else to explain the veneration of the SAS, the worldwide glut of books and movies on covert operations?

"One last point. Usually, in comedy heist movies, no one gets killed. Somewhere a family is weeping at the death of Mr al-Mabhouh and no one takes any pleasure from that. But the people who die in Mossad operations tend to be, like the Hamas leader, morally compromised. There's a side to us that acknowledges that some assassins' victims may have had it coming to them. So we're appalled, but not so appalled that we don't look forward with relish to the sequel. Ultimately, this is less about siding with the Israelis than loving winners."

There is a lesson in all this, and it is a refreshing one. I spend a lot of time on this website expounding on the depth and breadth of UK (and wider European) hostility to Israel. Late last year I published a book on it. But as I say in the book and as I now repeat here in this article, the battle for Europe's soul is still an open one.

Britain in particular is a 50-50 nation: as much the country of Churchill as of Chamberlain, as much the country of the proud and steadfast defender of democracy as of the mindless appeaser cringing and grovelling before terrorists and tyrannies.

It doesn't always seem that way, particularly since the elite institutions of this country are so much more in thrall to the thinking of the second of those two alternatives than the first. But there is another Britain, and sometimes it shows its face.

How curious that on precisely the occasion when Britain really does have reason to be critical of the Israelis that different face of Britain should decide to come out and show itself.

 

Robin Shepherd

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.