Through the DST Mossad could provide evidence to the country’s judicial arm when it came to issuing arrest warrants, wiretaps, and subpoenas. These were served by a team of investigating judges who could also order the detention of suspects for an initial six days and even keep some of them imprisoned for years. In court, the suspects were judged by professional magistrates rather than under the jury system of Britain and the United States. Meir Dagan felt this approach could offer lessons to the Bush administration as it faced growing pressure and controversy over its own approach to fighting terrorism: its incarcerating suspects in its Guantánamo Bay camp, its continued rendition of suspects to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and the doubtful legality of its military tribunals to try suspects.
The meeting with the two DST officers was conducted in Dagan’s office and not in one of the small conference rooms where he usually met senior foreign intelligence officers; the choice of venue was a further indication of the closeness between the DST and Mossad. Like agents from British and European services, the DST regularly sent senior officers to the Palestinian Territories before traveling on to see Dagan. The visits were known as “pulse taking” by the Mossad director, who saw them as another way to check the strength of Palestinian fervor. On the surface it was a means to try and expunge decades of isolation that the removal of the Jewish settlers from Gaza had done little to diminish.
Dagan usually learned little from the visits by MI6 officers, Germany’s BND, Spain, and the CIA. “Indeed some of their interpretations were wide of the mark,” one of his aides told the author. But the DST usually provided well-informed judgments, helped by the ability of its agents to not only speak Arabic fluently but to understand its culture. It meant a DST evaluation could be trusted enough to be matched against what Mossad’s own informers in Gaza and the West Bank reported. For Dagan it was essential to get the French view of the coming Palestinian elections and the influence wielded by Hamas at ground-roots level in its challenge to Fatah, the ruling party. Yasser Arafat had designed it to create a nationalist mythology using the symbols of his kaffiyeh, stubble, and gun, to fuel a revolutionary belief in which political struggle was heroic, fiery militance superior to mundane governance, vehement rejection better than compromise, that all opponents—especially Israel—were evil, that terrorism was cleansing, and that the eventual victory would be all the better for it. But Arafat was gone and in the past year Fatah the organization had become increasingly inured to corruption. In the Palestinian Territories the despair among the young had grown by the day, along with unemployment, social chaos, and Fatah’s seeming inability to recognize that governing required attention to the prosaic details.
Into this situation had emerged Hamas. The terrorist organization had also been founded on hatred, paranoia, and an apocalyptic vision of how Israel would be destroyed by a plentiful supply of suicide bombers and huge financial support from Iran. Hamas politics were rooted in absolutionist terms: vengeance was glorious and victory was achieved through martyrdom. Founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who became its spiritual leader, Hamas was cautiously encouraged by Israel as a means of balancing the extremists within Fatah. “Incredibly as it seems today, we thought the ‘divide and rule’ policy that had worked so well in the past would do so this time,” recalled Rafi Eitan. In August 1988, Hamas published its “charter,” calling on all Muslims to “destroy Israel and its people.” The response was swift. Yassin was killed in his wheelchair by a fusillade of rockets from Israeli gunships. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the organization’s strategist, was killed by the same method shortly afterward. In 1997, Mossad failed to kill Khaled Meshal, the head of the organization’s international branch in Amman (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate”). Salah Shehade, the architect of Hamas’s suicide-bombing strategy, was killed by Israeli F-16 jets who precision-bombed his home in Gaza. His wife and children also died in the attack. By then more than three hundred suicide attacks had claimed four hundred Israelis, many of them women and children. But Hamas had continued to attract support among Palestinians with its pledge it would control the Palestinian Territories by 2027.
