‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.' This is the description Sir Walter Scott gave to lying back in the 1600s, a description that the Mossad should have taken into account when perpetrating a mass, international fraud that ended with the murder of Hamas official, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, in Dubai earlier this year. Israel had apparently expected that the murder of Al-Mabhouh would be swept under the rug but the recent arrest of a man in Poland who is accused of supplying the killers with a fraudulent German passport shows that not only is the investigation continuing but that it is bearing fruit. There will, no doubt, be more arrests, and convictions will be handed down around the world. Israel is running scared, at the moment, as so many of its military operations have been condemned by the world. It is so scared that it somehow is trying to rationalize a demand that the Poles send the arrested man to Israel to be tried. Exactly what jurisdiction Israel may have over the suspect, who is Israeli but who was arrested in Poland after having committed a crime against the state of Germany, is a mystery. More likely, Israel wants to prosecute domestically for the same reason that it wants to conduct its own investigation of its attack on the aid flotilla two weeks ago. When investigations and prosecutions are conducted inside Israel, Israel makes all the rules. By employing the fiction that it is a country at war surrounded by nations eager to destroy it, it can implement all kinds of rules designed to sway court decisions in favor of the government. Under the current circumstances, however, it is unlikely that Israel's Maggrieved allies are going to rush to its defense, and criminals are likely to be prosecuted by the countries they committed crimes against. Israel has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in other countries. For once, it is Israeli crimes that will be exposed. __
