Many Israeli commentators have called for the arrest and prosecution of Mossad chief Meir Dagan for the operation, which was captured on closed-circuit television and is widely available on the Internet.

The shocking criminality of Mossad—which is believed to have 48-50 members in assassination teams called Kidon, in addition to 100 field agents termed Katsa—stands compounded by the use of forged passports of British, Irish, French and German citizens of dual nationality living in Israel. They included one diplomatic passport. Clearly, there is no threshold below which Israel didn't stoop in carrying out the patently illegal and utterly indefensible cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man in a Gulf state that's far from unfriendly to the Western powers and Israel.

Israel can be reckless in using illegal means to the point of jeopardising its intelligence-sharing and diplomatic relations with friendly states. In the 1980s, the UK government shut down Mossad's operations on British soil after it was found to have forged British passports. But Mossad has made this a habitual practice in many countries, barring the US.

The Western powers have reacted to this ghastly, condemnable episode remarkably mildly and timidly, although it involves a flagrant breach of international law, besides elementary norms of civilised conduct. Their reaction would have been totally different if, say, an Iranian agency had been implicated in murdering a member of the Iranian resistance in Dubai. An emergency UN Security Council meeting would have been convened, and stiff sanctions imposed. The British foreign secretary's expression of “outrage” was targeted more at the forgery of British passports than at the cold-blooded murder of al-Mabhough, surely an incomparably greater offence.

Israel must be brought to heel on al-Mabhough's assassination. It's legitimate for Mossad to gather intelligence, but lawful states don't operate killer squads and assassinate their opponents. Israel has long used targeted assassination as state policy, and eliminated numerous opponents from Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah—most famously, Hezbollah's Abbas al-Masawi in the early 1990s, and the wheelchair-bound, nearly blind, quadriplegic Sheikh Yassin in 2004. The world must tell Israel that this won't be tolerated. Not only are non-judicial executions morally repugnant. They will eventually jeopardise the safety of Western and Israeli citizens themselves.

Assassinations have often been used by colonial governments to eliminate the leadership of liberation or resistance movements. But they at best cause temporary setbacks. Soon, new leaders or even more militant organisations emerge. So far, Hamas has confined its anti-Israeli activities to Israeli-Palestinian soil. If Mossad continues to target its leaders on foreign soil, Hamas could also reciprocate, leading to more violence and mayhem.

Mossad is generally lionised by the media as a super-efficient, flawlessly run agency which works with clockwork precision and never makes a mistake. But Mossad has a long history of botched-up operations. In 1973, it killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaking him for a Palestinian guerilla. In 1997, it tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashal by spraying nerve toxin into his ear at a rally in Jordan, but failed to kill him; its agents had to take shelter in Israel's embassy and the US forced Israel to produce the antidote for the poison. In 2004, New Zealand imposed sanctions on Israel after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months for trying to obtain false passports—one in the name of a quadriplegic man who had been unable to speak for years.

Mossad has had some big successes, as in drugging, clubbing and kidnapping nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu from Rome in 1986 and in killing a Canadian ballistics expert, Gerald Bull, in Brussels in 1990. Israel considered killing Vanunu too, but eventually jailed him for 18 years after a secret trial. The successes are often achieved repulsively and at a high cost. Al-Mabhough was attacked with a stun-gun, tortured and smothered, besides being shot.

His assassination is part of Israel's ruthless policy of killing its opponents to consolidate its occupation of Palestine, expand illegal settlements and tighten its economic hold over ordinary Palestinians in defiance of Security Council resolutions and global public opinion. The Israeli state harasses and humiliates the Palestinian people in an effort to crush their will to resist and sabotage a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian question. But it has failed to break the people's spirit.

Israel's daily infliction of pain and suffering on the Palestinians, its policy of pauperising them and controlling their physical movement makes much of the Third World's experience of colonialism look like a picnic. No Palestinian may go to his field or orchard, none may cross from one village to another, and nobody may earn a living without the Israeli state's permission.

People's movement is severely regulated through 700 to 900 checkpoints, barriers and closures (state-imposed bandhs) which ensure that they cannot travel or work. The number of closures can be as high as 100 days in a year. Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison inhabited by dirt-poor people.

Israelis, who have special number-plates on their cars, can cover the 20-kilometre distance between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the capital of non-sovereign Palestine, in 20 to 30 minutes. S/he is waved through checkpoints. A Palestinian could take two hours, eight hours, one day, or forever. Scores of Palestinian women, stuck at barriers and denied access to ambulances, are forced to give birth to babies without medical attention.

Israel imposed the unequal and unjust Oslo accords on the effete and compromised Yasser Arafat leadership in 1992. It failed to deliver its part of the bargain and then systematically isolated and weakened Arafat and his protégé, now Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose writ doesn't extend to Gaza, leave alone East Jerusalem, Palestine's historic capital. The PLO recognised Israel and agreed to a deal under which it would have sovereignty over only 22 percent of its original land area. But that wasn't generous enough for Israel, which violated the Green Line and thieved yet more land and water from the Palestinians.

Successive US governments have coddled the Israeli state, protected it from sanctions despite violations of UN resolutions, and pumped huge economic and military aid—equivalent to $1,000 for each citizen. President Bush was particularly indulgent towards Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and all but legitimised illegal settlements while denying the Palestinian refugees uprooted in 1948 by the Nakba (catastrophe) their right of return—a fundamental right in international law.

President Barack Obama held out some hope in his Cairo University address last June when he reiterated his support for talks for an independent Palestine. But Mr Obama has not delivered. He has repeatedly failed to rein in Israel's rogue-like regime and dropped US insistence on freezing the building of settlements. Other Western powers like France periodically make the right noises, but don't act effectively.

Israel is trying hard to gain diplomatic space by courting small and weak states in Africa and Asia. It has also built a strong military-supply and intelligence-sharing relationship with India. India, which for long advocated an independent Palestine, now cravenly sides with Israel and didn't even unequivocally condemn the December 2008 invasion of Gaza, for which Israel has been indicted by the UN's Goldstone Report.

Israel cynically exploits India's fear of terrorism by offering anti-terrorism expertise and equipment. India is now Israel's biggest weapons customer and is buying equipment including sophisticated all-weather radars and anti-missile systems. Israel often jumps the military bidding process by setting up joint ventures with DRDO and public sector defence companies.

This is an unhealthy relationship, unbecoming of an emerging power with a history of non-alignment. India is being extremely short-sighted in not recognising that Israel's recalcitrance is one of the greatest barriers to peace in West Asia. The fear of Israeli power is being used by countries like Iran to adopt a hard line by escalating uranium enrichment and cracking down upon domestic dissidents. Hundreds of dissidents have been rounded up for protests against the recent controversial presidential elections and for their sympathies for domestic reformists. Some are falsely charged with spying, which attracts the death sentence.

One such Iranian is social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh, who was married to an Indian and has visited South Asia many times. (For more information on him, visit www.freekian09.com.) The more Israel acts like a rogue, the more it will encourage the persecution of people like Mr Tajbaksh, and inflame anti-West sentiment in the Arab world, which is fuelling turmoil, unrest and violence.

A settlement of the Palestinian question remains a precondition for a real breakthrough in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Muslim world. This can only happen if Israel is tamed, effectively delegitimised as a responsible law-abiding state, and punished—instead of being indulged. (IPA Service)