Book Review: Kill Khalid

The publisher’s flyer that accompanied my review copy of Paul McGeough’s new book, Kill Khalid,

Khalid Mishal coordinating with Iranian President Mahmoud  Ahmadinejad in Teheran

describes the author as “one of Australia’s most proclaimed foreign correspondents.” I assume they meant “acclaimed”, but it’s an appropriate mistake. McGeough was a war correspondent in Baghdad during  2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and emerged as a trenchant critic of the war. Now the war in Iraq was opposed by many good people, who opposed the Coalition of the Willing aims and methods.

The excesses of Halliburton and the Australian Wheat Boards $300 million bribery of Saddam Hussein together with  the endless bombings in Baghdad and the remorseless toll of young American dead seen every night on the Lehrer report all combined to sour support for the war . This approach was not good enough for Paul McGeough. His style is more conspiratorial. Indeed his critique of   western policy in Iraq plumbed new depths with his ‘world scoop’ that Iraq’s then leader, Iyad Allawi personally shot  Al Qaeda prisoners, in a Baghdad jail. This exclusive story remains exclusive.

Now in this context, I approached Mr McGeough’s venture into new territory, literally and journalistically with trepidation. This  book, in my view, idealizes Hamas, the radical Islamist group which McGeough unremarkably and uncontroversially argues rose from the ruins of the sadly failed Oslo peace process to defeat the corrupt Fatah regime in the Palestinian elections of 2006.Hamas seized control of Gaza, by then evacuated by Israel in a unilateral withdrawal. Kill Khalid in micro-detail recounts the well known story of the Israel secret services botched assassination of  Khalid Mishal. Mr McGeough’s thesis is that the rise of Hamas to prominence in Palestinian politics is all Israel’s fault. Why am I not surprised to learn this? Central to his books thesis’ is that the long-running “peace process” is all an Israeli ruse, because all Israeli governments since 1967 have been determined to keep the occupied Palestinian territories for ever. McGeough sees successive US administrations and other western governments as dupes of this Israeli ruse. More conspiracy nonsense.

Poll after poll show that the moderate majority of Israelis support a 2 State solution (Bi-partisan Australian policy since 1948), Prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and a more recent convert (with his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza) Ariel Sharon have laboured to find a way to get out of the territories without risking Israel’s existence, through a return to the pre-1967 situation with minor modifications. Rabin was assassinated precisely because he was willing to evacuate a large part of the territories. Barak lost office after  Palestinian violence (Second Intifada) caused the failure of the Camp David summit, at which the Palestinians were offered a state covering 95% of the West Bank. Sharon was attacked as a traitor by his former followers when he removed Israeli settlements from Gaza.

Kill Khalid is an ersatz thriller, Mossad assassins, exotic poisons, car chases, high-level diplomacy and international blackmail make up the elements of an improbable, but already known story. All that is missing is James Bond’s exploding pen and Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone.

Iranian proxies: Khalid Mishal with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

But  returning to Mr McGeough has a serious purpose in all this: to expound his modest contention  that Hamas led by Khaled Mishal, must lead the Palestinians. The books context is that bright hopes of the Oslo peace accords were killed off by Binyamin Netanyahu, and now with the election a decade later of a Netanyahu coalition including  Barak (Labor) and Lieberman (Russian Jews), Netanyahu will do it again! .  Under Arafat’s leadership, McGeough argues, the Palestinian Authority sank into corruption and incompetence. This opened a political space for the rise of Hamas. 

Again this unremarkable, almost banal argument then jumps to the conclusion expanded recently on  ABC’s Lateline ‘that Hamas was a nationalist organization’. Using Kill Khalid as a platform, McGeough shows Australians can master globalization for in a recent opinion piece to the New York times, McGeough has emerged as perhaps the principal Anglo-Saxon advocate of Hamas. Paul McGeough is savvy enough to admit in the NYT,   that Hamas would not abandon its charter calling for the destruction of Israel. ‘Nonetheless, others to whom  he (Mishal) speaks have told me that Mr Mishal has said that when the time comes Hamas will make some of the moves demanded of it by the West.’  Well that’s a sound basis for a shaky Israeli coalition to make such a dangerous and far reaching move. It seems strange that a reporter who has spent so much time in the Middle East and presumably has been exposed to the full spectrum of passionate Israeli’s would have so little empathy or insight, that he would not understand that Jewish history would not suggest Israel grab such a chimera and risk everything on it.

Mr McGeough’s view that the failure of past peace efforts can all be laid at Israel’s door is plain tosh. If Arafat had accepted the offer made to him by Ehud Barak in 2000, there would be a Palestinian state today. If Hamas had not exploited the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using it as a launch-pad for its Iranian rockets, the Israeli electorate would not have elected a right of centre  coalition.  Mr McGeough is not unsubtle enough to avoid mentioning Hamas or Mishal’s connection with the hardline regime of Ahmadinejad in Iran. But ‘Kill Khalid’ minimises and understates that connection. It is a surprising connection given the hatred between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. Indeed it is Mishal’s singular achievement, a leader of a Sunni fundamentalist faction like Hamas that it is largely armed and trained by the Shi’ite Persians, who strike such fear in the hearts of all Sunni Arab states.

Various media reporting of this recent conflict in Gaza negligibly ignored what the American call ‘the game changer’ in the recent invasion.   Iran gave Hamas long range ‘Grad’ rockets for January’s conflict, put 900,000 people in South Israel under daily fire. Only repeated good luck and the efficient civil defence of a democratic State, where all kinders, primary and secondary schools were closed, prevented Hamas/Iran from killing many Israeli civilians. If McGeough ever wandered the streets of Ashdod (230,000), Beesheba ( 520,000) or Ashkelon (180,000) during the recent war in Gaza he would have heard the Orwellian street PA calling ‘tzevah Adom’ ( Red Alert), Reality would even be clear to him. Things are what they appear to be. 

I found this a strange book. Strange in that, even with the assistance of his mysterious fixer, Ranya Kadri, McGeough is always turning up at otherwise impenetrable events run by one of the worlds most sought after terrorist Khalid Mishal. 

It is all very well to say “You make peace by talking to your enemies.” That presupposes an enemy who is willing to talk to you. At present even the sharpest Israel critics believe that Hamas does not want to talk, it wants to establish a Muslim State between the Jordan and the Mediterranean rivers. Mr McGeough says Hamas don’t really mean what they say in their Charter.

McGeough’s attempt in ‘Kill Khalid’ to portray Mishal is a latter day Archbishop  Makarious or Jomo Kenyatta rather than a dangerous Iranian proxy distorting Palestinian nationalism. Rehabilitating Hamas and Mishal as ‘Kill Khalid’ attempts is an intellectually immense task,  that it will take more than a roving reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald to achieve. Shlomo Aveineri , a genuine intellectual titan and  Emeritus professor of Political Science at Hebrew University and dove explained:

What Mr. McGeough did not mention is that Hamas views all Jews, not just Israel or Zionism, as its enemies.

Its charter goes to some length to state that the Jews (together with the Masons) were responsible for the French and the Communist revolutions; that they instigated World War I to destroy the Ottoman caliphate; that they instigated World War II to make money out of commerce in war materials; that they control world finance and the media; and that they have established numerous secret organizations to achieve world domination.

Some of this is straight out of the anti-Semitic literature of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and some of it — especially the references to the two world wars — is the original contribution of Hamas ideologues.

No Western democracy would tolerate an organization with such views. These are the issues that have to be raised with Hamas leaders by anyone who cares for peace in the Middle East.

Michael Danby is the Federal Labor Member for Melbourne Ports