| Haaretz assumes, like so many, that Mossad is actually involved in this. What if someone else done it? Should the Mossad chief go then, too? |
An important figure with many followers goes overboard and gets exiled to a faraway village in the north. That creative solution comes courtesy of the rabbinical forum "Takana." But the sanction meted out to Rabbi Mordechai Elon should also be applied to another gentleman, who anyway already resides in the north: Maj. Gen. (ret.) Meir Dagan, the belligerent, heavy-handed chief of the Mossad.
The State of Israel did not claim responsibility for the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The entire matter is treated as AFMR - According to Foreign Media Reports. We can still argue both sides of the broader issue at hand: assassinating senior officials in hotels (see under Rehavam Ze'evi) and in public (Imad Mughniyeh, Fathi Shkaki, Abbas Mussawi, Ali Hassan Salameh, and the list goes on). But we could also narrow the question to the quality of the performance in Dubai. And what must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks.
If the perpetrators were from the Mossad (AFMR, of course), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be walking around with an acute sense of deja vu. Once again, an assassination of a senior Hamas leader in a friendly Arab country; once again, an operation designed to kill someone quietly and inconspicuously; once again, a diplomatic mess; and once again, it is all happening on Netanyahu's watch. In 1997, it was Khaled Meshal in Jordan. This time, it's Mabhouh in Dubai. |