Bunglers Take Israel Backward

The political fallout from Israel’s inexplicably mindless effort to assassinate a Hamas leader in Amman 12 days ago continues to spread. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now been forced to release from Israeli prisons not just Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, but a flock of other Palestinian militants as well, part of the heavy price he is paying for approving, if not ordering, the bungled assassination attempt. This is humiliation of a high order for the man who was elected prime minister on a promise not to equivocate with terrorists and who has consistently demanded as a condition of proceeding with the peace process that the Palestinian Authority deal harshly with Hamas.

What awaits informed explanation is why Netanyahu risked so much in an operation whose devastating political and security consequences should have been foreseen, whether or not Israeli assassins had succeeded in killing Khaled Meshaal, who was reportedly involved in Hamas suicide bombings.

The government’s defiant after-the-fact assertion of Israel’s right to fight terrorism “without compromise” rings pathetically hollow following its release of Yassin and other Hamas prisoners. The government compromised with terrorism because its bungling had left it no choice.

Israel has had no better or braver friend in the Arab world than Jordan’s King Hussein, who has risked much steering his country--most of whose citizens are Palestinians--toward peace with Israel. The attempt by Israeli agents to kill Meshaal on the streets of Amman in broad daylight was not just a domestic embarrassment to the king but a personal insult. Consequently it was the king who insisted on the release of Yassin and the Hamas prisoners. In exchange he sent back to Israel the two presumed intelligence agents who, after entering Jordan on forged Canadian passports, had tried to commit murder in Jordan’s capital.

The big winner in all this is, of course, Hamas. It has fortuitously seen its leader set free. It has gained in prestige, to the point where Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, probably has little choice but to release the Hamas activists who he recently arrested. In sum, Netanyahu has brought about precisely the reverse of what he set out to achieve. Hamas is stronger, the Israel-Jordan relationship is deeply strained, Mossad, Israel’s CIA, is discredited, and the prime minister is exposed as a prime bungler, the instigator of a hugely costly and wholly avoidable fiasco.