Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid MIshal and the Rise of Hamas

$10 ($5 students) at the door

presented by Berkeley Arts & Letters

Over the last two decades, Hamas has become both one of the most infamous terrorist groups on the planet and also the democratically elected, champion party of Palestine. However, the very fact that it still exists at all is a miracle; just ten years ago, Hamas was a far more marginal militant group, isolated by Yasser Arafat and systematically jailed and harassed by Israel. But one botched assassination set in motion a series of improbably events.

Kill Khalid tells the story of the dramatic 1997 assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency. Mishal, then a little-known Hamas official, eventually survived the poisoning and later rose to become the head of Hamas, leading the group’s social welfare programs and directing suicide car bombings during the ensuing decade. Acclaimed journalist Paul McGeough carefully reconstructs both the history of Hamas and the decade of dramatic, repercussive action that followed Mishal’s near death. With access to key players and observers of the Middle East conflicts, including exhaustive interviews with Mishal himself, Kill Khalid is a riveting tour de force of investigative journalism. Like Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, McGeough takes a ginle, transformative event and uses it to present the motives of many complex groups and their convoluted histories. As King Hussein grapples with how to deal with Hamas’s growing ascendancy, as Israel changes multiple courses to combat new threats, and as Mishal and Hamas devise novel strategies to secure its goals, McGeough details crises that were narrowly averted and reports the missed signals and lost opportunities for peace in the Middle East.

Paul McGeough is the former executive editor of Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald and the author of three books on the Middle East. He has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year and in 2002 was awarded the Johns Hopkins University–based SAIS Novartis Prize for excellence in international journalism. He lives in Sydney, Australia.