A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise
to power of Khalid Mishal
Duncan Campbell-Smith
In March 1997, disappointed over the latest reversals in the peace
process in the Middle East, King Hussein of Jordan wrote a letter to
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister of ten months' standing,
that must figure as one of the saddest documents in the history of
the Arab-Israeli conflict. Having openly endorsed Netanyahu in the
Israeli general election of May 1996 - a disastrous miscalculation -
Hussein felt a deep sense of betrayal. Netanyahu had wasted no
opportunity in the ensuing months to disparage the peace process
begun in Oslo in 1993, and to assert a combative line on new
settlements in the Occupied Territories.
The King saw his vision of an eventual peace for the region turning
to "a distant elusive mirage". The letter is quoted at some length in
Avi Shlaim's authoritative biography, Lion of Jordan (2007). "I could
remain aloof", wrote Hussein, "if the very lives of all Arabs and
Israelis and their future were not fast sliding towards an abyss of
bloodshed and disaster, brought about by fear and despair." And so it
proved. In Kill Khalid, Paul McGeough, an Australian journalist with
long experience as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East,
chronicles the bloodshed and disaster that followed. Things have
fallen apart just as Hussein predicted - and went on lamenting, until
his death in February 1999 - and it is the members of Hamas, full of
passionate intensity, who have been the chief beneficiaries of the
fear and despair. McGeough's narrative, constructed from the
scribbled notes of years on the road, as well as dozens of privileged
interviews and a careful gleaning of the media record, recounts the
story of the Islamist party. In the process, it draws on the wider
history of the triangular relationship between the Palestinians, the
Jordanians and the Israelis over the past half-century to explain the
dramatic rise to power of Hamas. If McGeough treats the suicide-bomb
strategists of the movement with an impartial eye that some readers
may find unsettling, he has nonetheless produced a compelling and
wholly credible account of a political phenomenon that most outside
observers misjudged for years - and with which US policy-makers must
contend, as hopes rise for an Obama peace initiative.
Lees verder:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6287680.ece 
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