Benyamin Netanyahu began his impressive career by claiming responsibility for his older brother Jonathan, who was killed in 1976 during a daring hostage release operation at Uganda’s Entebbe airport.
It is in the name of a war against terrorism “, by definition ruthless, that the ambitious Likud activist was promoted, in 1982, to number two at the Israeli embassy in Washington, then, two years later, to Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (UN ) At New York. However, he did not hesitate to criticize his own government when, in 1985, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian detainees in exchange for three Israeli soldiers, detained by a small group subservient to the Assad regime and in open struggle against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Shamir rightly considers that such an exchange weakens the PLO and its leader, Yasser Arafat, but he underestimates the links thus forged between the Syrian dictatorship and the Palestinian Islamists, whose leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was then released.
The Jordanian fiasco
Netanyahu created a surprise in May 1996 by winning the first election of an Israeli prime minister by direct vote, against Labor leader Shimon Peres, who himself had succeeded Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated six months earlier.
The Likud leader campaigned against the peace process launched in September 1993 by Rabin and Arafat, a process that Sheikh Yassin fought with the same virulence at the head of Hamas, this “Islamic resistance movement”, including the first attack -suicide coincides with the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.
The terrorist massacres perpetrated by Hamas during the electoral campaign naturally played into the hands of Netanyahu who, after further carnage in July 1997, vowed to hit Hamas in the head. Yassine being imprisoned again, the Israeli Prime Minister sent a Mossad commando, carrying Canadian passports, to assassinate the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Mechaal, in Amman. But the commando, after inoculating Mechaal with a slow-acting poison, is intercepted by Jordanian security.
King Hussein of Jordan is furious at this violation of the peace treaty he signed three years earlier with Rabin, on behalf of Israel, and at the White House. He demands from Bill Clinton, the sponsor of this peace treaty, that he obtain from Israel not only the antidote to save Khaled Meshaal, but also the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including Sheikh Yassin. The Israeli Prime Minister, after trying to deny the responsibility of the Mossad, is forced to accept Jordanian conditions in order to recover his commando.
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