Rafi Eitan, the former Mossad operations chief who had played an important role in tracking down the Black September group, told the author: “It would have been unthinkable to expect a forger to produce documents under high-stress operational conditions. All the paperwork for the real operation was produced by Mossad’s forgery department. There was no bomb maker as such on the team. The explosives were created in Tel Aviv and brought to the team in the field. The movie team did not include a woman. Yet female kidon have always been part of a hit squad. Having them there helps to get closer to a target. But where the film went totally wrong was the hit team members questioning the morality of their actions. It never happened. It could never happen. The real hit team chosen for the mission were hand-picked for their mental stability. Like all kidon
But Dagan wanted to judge for himself. He brought with him to the private viewing men who had been directly involved in the operational planning and execution of the Black September killers. His verdict at the end of the 145-minute movie was succinct: “Entertainment—maybe. Accurate—absolutely not.”
It was a review Dagan doubted would ever appear in any Spielberg filmography.
On Thursday, January 26, 2006, a day that came to be known in Israel as Black Thursday, Meir Dagan watched in mounting disbelief the images on the television screen in a corner of his office. The pictures switched from Gaza City to the West Bank, to Nablus and Bethlehem, from Ramallah to East Jerusalem, from one Arab township to another, from villages that were mere dots on the map on Dagan’s wall. Each image offered the same stunning sight of the green flag of Hamas raised in triumph. It fluttered from the minarets of mosques and the rooftops of buildings and moved through the streets in a great surge of green, held aloft by the chanting crowds. Hamas had won a sweeping, historic victory, one that had mocked all the pollsters, the foreign observers, and, most important for Dagan, the analysts of Mossad. How had everyone not foreseen what had happened? How had anyone not understood that Hamas had shown itself on poll day to be a disciplined organization able to turn out the faithful in huge numbers to vote? Why had no one discovered the preparation that had gone into creating the enormous green banners now being hung on public buildings? How had Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, its military wing, marching across the television screen, firing their guns in the air, their usual masks discarded, been so well rehearsed without attracting suspicion? These were questions being asked of Dagan by Israel’s Cabinet ministers. He had no ready answers. Not a man to rush to judgment, he continued to sit and watch, as did all Israel.
One certainty was clear. The peace talks would remain frozen. The reason was in the one statistic that ticker taped across the bottom of the television screens. Hamas had won 132 seats, leaving Fatah to cling to 43, and some of those by the slimmest of majorities, ending more than forty years of its domination of Palestinian life. Dagan would not quarrel with an Israeli radio commentator, who likened the victory to “an earthquake or tsunami.” It had changed for the foreseeable future Israel’s own relationship with the Palestinians and the Arab world beyond its borders. For better or worse? He did not know. He doubted if anyone in Israel could answer the question.
By that Thursday afternoon, Dagan was receiving the first calls from foreign intelligence service chiefs. They wanted to know how Hamas, a terrorist organization that had continuously undercut every step toward peace, a desire sought by moderate Palestinians, had managed to persuade such a majority of them to overwhelmingly vote for Hamas. And having done so, would they ensure that Hamas would now cease to attack Israel and try to create a real Palestinian state that would come to live side by side at peace with its Jewish neighbors?
