Everybody assumes that Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, carried out the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas commander, in Dubai last month.
The Israeli Government will neither confirm nor deny it, but the average Israeli citizen is sure of it, and quite pleased by it.
After all, who else was going to go after him?
Well, theoretically it could have been the rival Palestinian political organisation, Fatah, which has been more or less at war with Hamas for almost three years now. (Fatah runs the West Bank; Hamas controls the Gaza Strip.)
Proponents of this theory argue that the Dubai hit was too clumsy and sloppy to have been a Mossad operation.
Would any serious spy agency put 11 people on a hit team? Why would seven of them be travelling on British passports borrowed or stolen from British-Israeli dual citizens resident in Israel? Would they let themselves be caught repeatedly on video surveillance cameras as they set up the killing? This was just not a professional operation.
It certainly was amateur night in Dubai, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Mossad was not behind it. The Institute for Espionage and Special Operations, to give its proper name, may be legendary, but some of its past operations have been anything but professional.
This time the hit team, though ridiculously large, was less incompetent: the victim died, and they all got out of Dubai safely. The fact that they left enough evidence behind for the Dubai police to figure out what happened does not exclude Mossad from consideration: it has bungled operations before.
The Dubai police say they are now 99 per cent if not 100 per cent sure that Mossad was behind the murder, and most Western governments assume the same.
The Dubai police chief has asked Interpol for a red notice on Mossad head Meir Dagan, the usual preliminary to an arrest warrant, but Dagan need not stay awake worrying about it. What should be causing him sleepless nights is the fact that all these killings are counter-productive.
Killing off the leaders of Hamas and of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia resistance movement, does not improve Israel's security. For example, it assassinated Hezbollah's leader, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992, and got the far more formidable Hassan Nasrallah as his successor. It also got the revenge bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina, which killed 29 and wounded 242.
The leaders who get killed are replaced by others of equal competence, the cycle of revenge gets another push, and Israel's reputation as a responsible state takes another beating. True, Israel does nothing that the United States, Russia and several other big powers have not done when fighting insurgencies, but they are shielded by their great-power status. Like it or not, there is one law for them and another for the others.
Smaller countries are expected to obey the rules. Many Israelis think they don't need to worry about this because everyone hates them anyway, but the wiser ones realise that the state's security still depends heavily on the goodwill of Western countries. Actions such as the Dubai operation erode that goodwill. But the wiser Israelis are not now in the majority.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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