Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "dubai"

You’d think there was something wrong with spying.

People pay rather a lot of money to watch Daniel Craig dispose of villains in the bloodiest fashion. They nod in approval when M pushes 007’s perfect false passport across the desk. Yet everyone seems to be peeved about what in all likelihood is a Mossad hit against a Hamas operative in his Dubai hotel room on January 20.

Oh, that’s right, because the Hamas guy – meanies though Hamas might be – was a real human being who’s now dead, after all.

No, wait, that isn’t it. Western governments don’t really care about dead Arabs. If they did, they wouldn’t have sent Tony Blair to be the Middle East peace-process point man for the Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia), even though it ought to be perfectly clear that the only person disliked more in the Arab world than the stammering King of Cool Britannia is the future head librarian of the Presidential Library in Crawford, Texas. (Why so unpopular? Started a war that killed a lot of Iraqis, that’s why. Arabs do care about dead Arabs…sometimes.) So it isn’t the dead guy that’s behind the international fuss.

Ah, that’s right. These spies used our passports. Of the 11 assassins identified by Dubai’s police chief this week, all were carrying British, Irish, German or French passports. Three of the British passports carried the near-perfectly correct details of three Brits who’ve also taken up Israeli citizenship. Three others included names similar to European-Israeli citizens, though other details were incorrect.

To a crime novelist, the passport thing seems pretty tame. I suspect that, actually, the Euro pols and dips would like to lambaste Israel for the hit itself. They can’t quite bring themselves to do it, because, after all, Islamic extremism is the West’s current Enemy Number One. And whatever you think of Hamas, they’re into Islam and they’re pretty extreme. So the passport shenanigans get to be the focus of Euro ire.

I can understand why European governments will feel the need to throw a diplomatic hissy fit. But they’re wasting their time on the Israelis. In Israel you can throw a real, full-on hissy fit in public at some outrageous slight, and your Israeli target will simply go blank-faced and turn away, as though you’re the one who’s gone too far. The diplomatic version is laughably unsuited to the Middle East.

In other words, diplomacy in this region is pointless. You want someone to get a message, you kill.

If that sounds like the world of crime fiction, then that’s why this neighborhood is so well-suited to the genre. That’s why my Palestinian crime novels are a better way to understand the reality of this place than the international pages of your newspaper (which, you can be sure, will be running stories in which diplomatic protests by Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay are taken seriously, rather than being treated as the piffling waste of time that they truly are.) Don’t take them seriously. Get yourself a novel instead.

(I posted this on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog).

Hamas is steadily rebuilding its power in the West Bank, stockpiling weapons and material underground, biding its time for a renewal of the conflict with its Fatah rivals.

Palestinian security officials have been telling me this for some time, and they are frankly filled with fear and foreboding. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned it again in an interview with the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat during the week, accusing Hamas of smuggling weapons to the West Bank.

The Hamas buildup is one of the reasons Abbas has allowed his independent prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, to stay in his job so long, despite the popularity Fayyad is accruing at the expense of Abbas’s Fatah. Fayyad has managed to reform the Palestinian security forces, persuading the U.S. to give tens of millions of dollars in security aid.
Without those reforms, the Palestinian security forces would either fold in minutes if faced with a Hamas uprising in the West Bank, or would even join Hamas to save themselves.

So it’s significant that after 10 days in which Abbas repeatedly berated Fayyad’s plan to declare a Palestinian state in 2011 — which would convince the world that if Fayyad could create a state, Fatah might’ve become irrelevant and therefore not worth the cash it siphons away — the president also highlighted the urgency of Fayyad’s most important achievement. (He first talked about it in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper in January, when he said he had “verified information” that Hamas planned to take over the West Bank by force.)

Of course, U.S. and European security advisers to the Palestinian security forces don’t claim to have made much of their new charges. If Hamas is able to recreate its West Bank network, the Palestinian security forces will hold up their advance for only about a week, they estimate.

That’s not bad, given that two years ago the Palestinian security forces were good for nothing much at all. A week might also buy time for a cease-fire, which might in turn preclude an Israeli invasion of the West Bank — it’s unimaginable that the Israelis would allow the West Bank to come under Hamas control.

Part of Abbas’ accusation against Hamas is that its leadership is allowing radical young military leaders to blow off steam by plotting a West Bank armed takeover. In return, those military leaders aren’t pushing as hard for rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

The Hamas leaders in Gaza are keen to avoid such attacks, because they’re barely recovering from the hammering they received a year and a half ago at the hands of the Israeli army. The cause of that war, remember, was rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

Hamas kicked Fatah out of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Fatah people were shot and tortured, and a few were tossed from tall buildings. Since then, both sides have engaged in a low-flame civil war which involves lengthy detentions without trial, torture and kneecappings.

The West Bank looks like an attractive playground into which Hamas can shove its angrier military types. After all, if the Fatah cops fail to intercept a Hamas attack against Israelis in or from the West Bank, Israel usually blames Fatah rather than Hamas.

Within the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, support has been increasing for more militant action — yes, more militant than the leadership which ultimately wants to eradicate Israel but is prepared to wait a long time to do so. (In Gaza, that counts as dovishness...)

Those military leaders have turned, according to international analysts, to a brand of Islam more commonly called “Salafi.” In short, it’s the extreme Islam favored by many in the Gulf States. It’s quite alien to most Palestinians, who are conservative but not particularly fundamentalist in their religion. Still, once a military type gets stirred up, the hard line often looks appealing.

Abbas better hope he hasn’t leaned too hard on Fayyad. The week of grace his prime minister’s reforms will have bought him in the event of an attempted coup by Hamas might prove to be the difference between a nice retirement at his house in Dubai and the kind of kangaroo justice meted out by the Islamist in Gaza three years ago.

(I posted this on Global Post.)