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The Uses of Terrorism

The redefinition of the Middle East conflict from Arab–Israeli to Israeli–Palestinian sapped the sympathy Israel had enjoyed as an underdog since its founding. The emergence of Palestinian nationalism following the Six Day War transformed Israelis from “pioneers” into “colonizers.” This furnished an ideological basis for supporting Israel’s enemies that dovetailed with the enduring “realist” considerations that led diplomats and military brass of most countries at most times to tilt to the Arab side. Their instincts of self-interest were powerfully reinforced in the 1970s by new measures of intimidation brought to bear by the Arabs.

The intimidation took two forms: terrorism and oil. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Yasser Arafat himself led an effort to kindle guerrilla warfare there. But the small size of the territory and the nature of the terrain made it unsuitable for a guerrilla campaign. The Israeli army was strong and highly motivated, unlike the forces of many genuine colonialist armies whose morale was often low. And the population of the West Bank, which had forged ties with the Jordanian monarchy over the preceding two decades, was initially lukewarm to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) cause.

So Fatah and the more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) and its various offshoots (all of these groups operating under the umbrella of the PLO) focused instead on small-scale infiltrations into Israel to kill random civilians and destroy property. In the various Arab uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s, invariably described as “glorious” in Arab discourse, women, children, and the elderly were targeted as freely as men capable of bearing arms.**

And, indeed, much the same may be observed today in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere where Arabs are fighting other Arabs. A bomb in a market is a routine form of warfare.

As Israel took steps to prevent infiltration, measures that were largely although not totally effective, the Arabs shifted their attacks to more vulnerable venues. The idea of striking Israelis outside of Israel was pioneered by the Marxist PLO faction, the PFLP. In July 1968, just a year after the Six Day War, a team of three PFLP commandoes hijacked an El Al flight en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land in Algiers. Although the initial motive for such acts was simply to get at Israelis where they were less protected, the execution of terror abroad soon proved to have the considerable ancillary benefit of evoking an appeasement response from the nations that found themselves to be proxy battlegrounds.

Quite possibly, the idea of hijacking was borrowed from American radicals, several of whom had recently commandeered flights, demanding to be taken to Cuba. But the Arabs put some new twists on this form of protest. For the most part, the American radicals just wanted to get to Cuba because they idealized its political system. They used the method of air piracy because Americans were barred from travel to Cuba, and as a means of dramatization. The Arabs, in contrast, were hungry for violence. There was relatively little in this first PFLP hijacking, but the copilot was injured by the hijackers, one of whom then dipped his finger into the blood and tasted it, exulting, according to an account later given by an Italian priest aboard the plane, “It’s good, the blood of Israel.”¹ In subsequent actions, his comrades were to savor much more blood of Israelis and others.

A second innovation of Arab hijackers was to hold passengers and crew hostage, demanding the release of prisoners in Israel or elsewhere and sometimes also seeking ransom in cash. In the case of the hijacking to Algiers, the non-Israeli hostages were released promptly, but the Israelis were detained. After a few days the women and children among them were released, but a dozen Israeli men were held for forty days and “treated like war prisoners,” in the words of the plane’s pilot.² This means that they were held by the government of Algeria acting in shameless collusion with the hijackers. (This, too, contrasted with Cuba which, despite its enmity to Washington, did not abet hijackers except by allowing them to stay on Cuban soil.) Initially, Israel refused to bargain with Algeria. But eventually it capitulated and a deal was struck through the mediation of the Italian government in which two dozen Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel in exchange for the hostages and aircraft after thirty-nine days’ captivity.

In response to the Algiers hijacking, El Al initiated security measures that foiled other hijackings, but the Palestinian tactic of terrorizing civilian aviation was just getting started. Five months later, two PFLP members raked an El Al jet preparing for takeoff in Athens with submachine guns, and one hurled incendiary grenades at the engines. The fire they ignited was put out, but one passenger died from his bullet wounds and a well-known Israeli actress, Hanna Maron, lost her leg.

Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sounded rattled as he denounced “insane terrorism,” while Minister of Transportation Moshe Carmel struck a calmer, more ominous note. Noting that “members of the [PFLP] openly train in Lebanon,” Carmel warned, as The New York Times summarized, that “Israel would not tolerate a situation in which El Al airliners were attacked and those of Arab countries could fly in peace and safety.”³ A few days later, Israeli commandos landed at the Beirut airport under cover of darkness and dynamited thirteen parked Arab airliners.

Israel’s claim that the terrorists were aided and abetted by the various Arab governments was inarguable, but its choice of Lebanon as the target for retaliation was dubious given the weakness and relative moderation of the Beirut government. The UN Security Council passed a resolution denouncing Israel’s action without mentioning the attacks that had provoked it. And French President de Gaulle, who, in 1967, had frozen a contract for the delivery of additional Mirage jet fighters to Israel, now seized the moment to claim a high-minded rationale for canceling it outright. Whatever the justice or wisdom of Israel’s attack on Lebanese soil, the United Nation’s unbalanced resolution was a harbinger of much that was to follow.

Two months later, February 1969, the Athens attack was repeated in Zurich, where four terrorists sprayed machine gun fire and tossed grenades at an El Al plane taxiing for takeoff. A pilot trainee was shot through the chest and died at the hospital. More would probably have been killed were it not for the heroics of Mordechai Rachamim, a twenty-two-year-old who had immigrated with his parents from Iraqi Kurdistan seventeen years before and was now a member of a squad of sky marshals that Israel had hastened to form in the wake of the Algiers hijacking.

Armed only with a twenty-two-caliber Beretta, deemed small enough that its bullets, if fired within an airplane, would pose little risk to the craft’s integrity, Rachamim at first shot back at the attackers through a blown-out window in the cockpit. But the “horrifying realization” that a bullet or grenade to a fuel tank could immolate the entire plane impelled him to improvise more dramatic action.⁴ He sprinted to the back of the now-stationary plane, and used an emergency exit to slide down to the tarmac, then scaled the perimeter fence and closed on the terrorists while finding cover behind mounds of snow plowed high along the road that paralleled the runway. When he got close he yelled at the gang to drop their weapons. Apparently not recognizing that he was alone and that his small pistol was no match for their two Kalashnikovs and grenades, one of the two gun-toters did as commanded. The other, apparently the leader, turned to confront Rachamim who shot him dead on the spot. Now out of ammunition, Rachamim rushed the other three terrorists in a rage. He seized one by the throat and began choking him, screaming “Why are you attacking civilians? Why won’t you face me on the battlefield?” He stopped only when he felt the barrel of a gun pressing his back. It was a Swiss policeman, ordering him to desist.

Rachamim was taken into custody along with the three surviving terrorists, loaded into a police car where he was seated between two of them, none of the three in handcuffs. He was held for a month before being released on bail and allowed to fly to Israel after promising to return for trial on manslaughter charges,⁵ which he did nine months later, winning acquittal.

With El Al increasingly well protected, the terrorists turned to non-Israeli carriers. In August 1969, a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv was commandeered over Italy by two hijackers, styling themselves the Che Guevara Brigade. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old woman who had once worked as a school teacher, was Leila Khaled. Petite, attractive, and given to posing with a Kalashnikov, she became something of an icon in the Marxist-Leninist world. At the time, the hijackers said they had targeted a US airline to protest America’s sale of military aircraft to Israel. Later, in her autobiography, Khaled said, “Our minimum objective was the inscription of the name of Palestine on the memory of mankind.”⁶

They forced the plane to land in Damascus where the crew and passengers executed an emergency evacuation before the “brigade” blew up the cockpit. Collaborating with the terrorists as the Algerian government had done, Syria held passengers and crew prisoner overnight, then released all but the six Israelis on board. Days later, four female Israelis were released. But the two men were held more than three months until Israel agreed to exchange thirteen Syrians in its custody.⁷ The US State Department denied a leak that, in brokering the deal, Washington had promised Hafez al-Assad’s government a seat on the UN Security Council,⁸ but Syria was indeed soon elected to one of the rotating seats for the next two years, only the second time in the United Nations’s history that the country had secured this position.

Only ten days after the TWA hijacking, grenades were tossed at the El Al offices in Brussels and the Israeli embassies in Bonn and The Hague. These caused injuries but no deaths. The PFLP released to the Lebanese press photos of four perpetrators who it said ranged in age between thirteen and sixteen, and whom it christened “Tiger Cubs,” members of the front’s Ho Chi Minh Division. It also warned in a press conference that it would no longer seek to avoid deaths among the nationals of other countries in its attacks on Israeli assets.⁹

As if to illustrate the point, two months later, November 1969, two men belonging to the Popular Struggle Front, an offshoot of the PFLP, threw a hand grenade into the El Al office in downtown Athens. Among the fourteen people injured none was Israeli. Hardest hit was the Natsos family, residents of a working class suburb of Athens who were migrating to Canada and happened to book El Al for one leg of their journey.

The father, Christos, was the only one to escape injury. “Why? Why?” he sobbed to journalists after his wife and two young sons were rushed to the hospital.¹⁰ A few days later two-year-old George succumbed to his wounds while his five-year-old brother, Athanasios, was blinded, although surgeons held out hope they might restore vision to one of his eyes. The mother, Katina, was also seriously wounded. The two attackers arrested carried Jordanian passports. “If I ever meet a Jordanian, I am going to kill him,” swore Christos after little George’s death.¹¹

February 1970 was a particularly bloody month. In Munich, three terrorists bombed and strafed an airport bus and a transit lounge holding passengers awaiting an El Al flight, causing one death and many injuries. Days later, a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv was brought down by a bomb, killing all aboard, sixteen Israelis and thirty-one others. Yet another PFLP offshoot, the PFLP-General Command, claimed responsibility.

In July 1970, as the two men who had tossed the grenade that killed George Natsos and blinded his brother awaited sentencing, a team of six commandos, each carrying weapons, took over an Olympic Airways flight from Beirut to Athens. They commenced negotiations for the exchange of those on board for the seven Arab terrorists held in Greek prisons: the two killers of Natsos, as well as the two who had machine gunned the El Al flight in 1968, and three others whose plans to hijack a TWA flight had been aborted.

The Greek government agreed to the trade but insisted on the formality of first completing the process of sentencing the grenade-throwers. The government’s official statement explained: “When the Greek laws will have been observed and the sense of justice will have been fulfilled by putting two of the Arabs on trial, the Government will hand them over to the International Red Cross.”¹² Within a month, all seven terrorists were free.

Having succeeded in wreaking havoc at very little cost to themselves, the air terrorists were on a roll. Foreshadowing the terror spectacular mounted by al Qaeda decades later, the PFLP hit upon the idea of hijacking several jetliners simultaneously.

The plot was executed on September 6, 1970. A TWA flight from Frankfurt, a Swissair flight from Zurich, and El Al and Pan Am flights from Amsterdam were hijacked simultaneously. The first two were flown to a remote military airstrip in Jordan called Dawson’s Field. The last was a jumbo jet unable to negotiate Dawson’s short runway, so it was taken to Cairo.

The events aboard the El Al flight were the most dramatic, since El Al uniquely had begun carrying sky marshals. When the two hijackers made their move, the pilot put the plane into a sudden drop which succeeded in knocking them off their feet. Then a sky marshal shot and killed one hijacker, a Nicaraguan “Sandinista,” while others overpowered his accomplice, a short woman who turned out to be none other than Leila Khaled, back again just a year after her first hijacking, having undergone plastic surgery to avoid recognition.

With one would-be hijacker dead and the other subdued, the pilot made an emergency landing in London. Almost at once, reportedly, he received orders to take off for home. Apparently, Israel was eager to interrogate Khaled rather than release her to Britain. But London would not allow the takeoff and took custody of Khaled. Three days later another PFLP commando hijacked a British Overseas Air Company flight and took it, too, to Dawson’s Field, demanding the release of Khaled.

After a few days, the PFLP released most of its hostages, except crew members and Jews, and dynamited the three planes. This had unforeseen consequences in Jordan where Palestinians constituted the majority, their numbers augmented by King Hussein’s policy, unique among Israel’s neighbors, of granting citizenship to some of the refugees of 1948. The PLO had thus based itself in Jordan, where thousands of young fighters trained in camps around the country. As the movement gained momentum the PLO increasingly acted as if sovereign in Jordan, setting up road blocks throughout the capital, ignoring local laws, and disdaining Jordanian police and officials. King Hussein had tolerated these infringements on his sovereignty, but he could not allow them free rein to operate against Israel. A host country is always considered responsible for attacks emanating from its soil, and Hussein knew that Israel practiced severe retaliation.

More than once the king had come to the brink of expelling the PLO, but he dared not defy the other Arab states, especially Nasser’s Egypt, which considered the Palestinian cause sacrosanct (except of course on their own territory). The use of a Jordanian airfield for hijacking operations and destruction of Western aircraft despite the king’s firm alliance with the West was, however, a step too far—all the more so as one of the proclaimed goals of these highjackings was to destroy a new US peace initiative that Jordan had accepted, as had Israel and Egypt. This was the last straw. Only a week earlier King Hussein had escaped an attempt on his life, the second within three months’ span, both attributable in all likelihood to the Palestinian bands.

Now, he unleashed his army against the Palestinian guerrillas and crushed them, surprising many who had overestimated the military prowess of the PLO. The fighting took a toll in civilians as well as combatants, with the number of Palestinians deaths estimated variously at two or three thousand. Nasser mediated an end to the onslaught at the price of the PLO’s withdrawal from Jordan. A codicil to the deal secured the freedom of the remaining airline hostages in exchange for the release of seven terrorists from prisons in England, Germany, and Switzerland. These were Leila Khaled; the three who had attacked the Munich airport bus and lounge; and the three who had strafed and grenaded the El Al jet in Zurich and managed to escape Mordechai Rachamim’s wrath.

Flight from Jordan proved to be the prelude to a new chapter in the history of the PLO. Until this point, all or virtually all of the attacks on civilian air travel had been the work of the PFLP and its offshoots. Fatah had held back from this particular tactic because, as the dominant group in the PLO, it felt answerable to the Arab states. Arafat’s deputy Abu Iyad chafed at this self-restraint, complaining that Fatah had “compromised its revolutionary character” trading “militancy” for “respectability.”¹³

His fretting proved premature. Although the PFLP’s recklessness had pushed King Hussein too far and brought the whole PLO to disaster, it apparently convinced Fatah that it, too, needed to turn to international terror to compete with the PFLP for headlines and a reputation for revolutionary fervor. This impetus was reinforced by logistics. Expelled from Jordan, the PLO moved its headquarters and operational bases to Lebanon. There, it still had access to a border with Israel, but a shorter and more remote one that made infiltration more difficult, another factor arguing for action abroad.

Yet Arafat was reluctant to abandon all claim to the respectability his adroit phrasing of the Palestinian cause had won in the West. So he resurrected a tactic from the past. In 1965, when Fatah staged its first raids inside Israel, it took no credit. Instead, responsibility was claimed by al-Asifa, a fictional creation that was nothing but an alias for Fatah. Years later, Arafat explained his reasoning: “If al-Asifa succeeded, Fatah would then endorse” its actions. “If it did not succeed, then al-Asifa would take responsibility . . . and not Fatah.”¹⁴

Fatah’s new false front announced itself to the world in November 1971, just over a year after the expulsion from Jordan. Four men gunned down Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, the executor of King Hussein’s crackdown on the Palestinians, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. Reenacting the bloodthirstiness of the first El Al hijacker, one of the killers knelt beside the body and lapped up Tal’s blood. The PFLP at once issued a press release claiming credit, but the boast was false. It soon was established that the party behind the deed was a previously unheard of group calling itself Black September.

The next month the same group shot and wounded the Jordanian ambassador in London, and a few months later it mowed down five Jordanians in their sleep in Germany, claiming they were intelligence agents of some sort. Less spectacularly, Black September was apparently also responsible for several attacks on European oil and industrial facilities in 1971 and 1972.

So, by 1972, in addition to the PFLP and its offshoots, there was nominally a new major player in the international terror game. In February 1972, a team of three Arabs hijacked a Lufthansa plane and forced it to fly to Yemen, demanding release of those detained in Germany for the murder of the five Jordanians. One of the hostages was Joseph Kennedy III, the nineteen-year-old son of Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated four years earlier by the Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, whose release from jail in the United States had been a demand of earlier hijackers. In this case, however, the gunmen settled for a five-million-dollar cash ransom from Germany.

The year 1972 also marked the initiation of a new tactic, although it is not clear which of the terror groups was behind it. Arab men in Europe seduced local women then arranged trips in which the women could meet the young men’s families in Palestine. In each case on some pretext, the Arabs convinced the women that they had to fly on separate flights and they loaded some small electronic device, a purported gift for the family back home, in the women’s luggage. The “gift” contained a bomb. In February 1972, one such bomb detonated in an El Al cargo hold, but the damage was less than intended, and the pilot managed to return to Rome’s airport and land the craft without casualties.

Early in May that year, Black September seized a Sabena flight to Tel Aviv where the four terrorists—two men, two women—demanded release of 315 Palestinians in exchange for the passengers and crew. The Israeli government commenced negotiations with them, but also organized a rescue operation. The hijackers were told that their demands would be met, and a team of mechanics in white overalls proceeded onto the tarmac to make the plane ready to fly to an Arab country. The “mechanics” were in truth an elite squad that stormed through the emergency doors, shooting the two males hijackers to death and taking prisoner the two females. The rescue team included two future prime ministers—Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu—as well as Mordechai Rachamim, the hero of the Zurich attack.

After this thwarted effort, the Christian Science Monitor reported that “Arab world opinion” expected “further and better-planned hijackings” and generally welcomed the prospect. “Photos of the Arab skyjackers were splashed through the press in Beirut and other Arab capitals, presented mainly as the pictures of ‘heroes,’” the newspaper said.¹⁵

Two weeks later, these hopes were rewarded not by a hijacking but a new kind of attack on civil aviation. Three Japanese passengers disembarked from an Air France flight at Israel’s Lod Airport carrying violin cases. From these, they extracted assault rifles and hand grenades and began killing anyone they could, taking twenty-six lives, seventeen of them Puerto Rican pilgrims. The trio had escaped closer scrutiny because they were not Arabs: they were members of the Japanese Red Army acting on behalf of the PFLP out of “revolutionary solidarity.”

The pace of international terror attacks was accelerating. In September 1972, Munich hosted the summer Olympics which promised catharsis to two nations. For (West) Germany, the games signified a negation of the ugly past symbolized by the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a showcase for the Nazi regime. For Israel, the parade of Jewish athletes carrying the flag of Israel in the city so closely linked to Hitler seemed an affirmation of the mantra, am Yisrael chai, the Jewish people live.

But all of this was turned upside down when a team of eight armed Black September members stormed the residential block housing the Israeli team. Two athletes who fought back barehanded were killed on the spot, and nine were taken hostage. Spurning Israeli offers of help, Bavarian authorities planned a rescue operation in which the terrorists and hostages were first helicoptered to a military air base from which the terrorists were falsely informed that they would be allowed to fly with their prisoners to an Arab country. In fact, the Germans planned to attack them at the airport, using snipers and/or a special forces team that was stowed aboard the aircraft designated for the terrorists’ supposed escape.

Astoundingly, members of the German special forces, as they waited for the terrorists and the hostages to be transferred from the Olympic village to the airport, voted to abort the mission on the grounds that they might be risking their own lives. Thus, the authorities had only the snipers to rely on, but there were fewer snipers than terrorists. The snipers opened fire as the terrorists alighted from the helicopters. Those who weren’t instantly downed tossed hand grenades into the choppers where the nine bound Israeli hostages sat, mortally wounding all of them.

Five of the eight terrorists were killed in the gunfire, and the other three were taken into custody. But, not for long. A month later, a Lufthansa flight from Beirut to Frankfurt was hijacked and forced to divert to Zagreb, Yugoslavia. The hijackers demanded release of the three Olympics-massacre perpetrators, and the German government acquiesced at once, demanding only that the crew and eleven passengers be released simultaneously. It loaded the three onto a small executive jet and flew them to Zagreb where they boarded the hijacked plane. The hijackers, however, did not release their hostages but rather had the plane take off for Tripoli where the terrorists received a celebratory welcome. “The liberated heroes of the Munich [Olympics] operation and their liberators landed safely tonight,” exulted Libyan radio.¹⁶

The Israeli government protested bitterly, but German Chancellor Willy Brandt defended his decision, saying, “The passengers and the crew were threatened with annihilation . . . I . . . saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed.”¹⁷ Brandt’s adamancy about avoiding “senseless bloodshed” left him vulnerable to terrorist blackmail. Fatah leader Abu Iyad observed contemptuously that “German authorities, moved by a sense of guilt or perhaps out of cowardice, were clearly anxious to have the captured fedayeen off their hands.”¹⁸

This and the fact that the hijacked flight had carried, apart from the hijackers, only eleven passengers, all of them male, stimulated speculation that Bonn had been complicit in the entire episode. Author Aaron Klein put it:

It was only a matter of time before a hijacked plane or some other extortionate measure would “force” the Germans to release the three terrorists, who were, after all, putting German lives at risk. German, Palestinian, and Israeli sources contended that the hijacking . . . was coordinated, in advance, with German authorities. . . . When Ulrich Wagner, senior aide to the [German] interior minister Genscher, was asked point-blank and on camera what he thought of the alleged German-Palestinian scheme, he replied, “Yes, I think it’s probably true.”¹⁹

The operational commander of the Olympics killings, although not a direct participant, was Mohamed Daoud Oudeh, known as Abu Daoud. He found himself behind bars not long thereafter, albeit not for the Munich crime. Rather, he was arrested and condemned to death in Jordan for leading an infiltration of terrorists into Amman. This prompted Black September to mount “Operation Abu Daoud” to force his release.

It was staged not in Europe but in Khartoum where a team of eight gunmen took over a reception at the residence of the Saudi ambassador. A large number of hostages were taken and released gradually, the quarry being two American diplomats, Curtis Moore and Cleo Noel, who had rotated as Washington’s chief representative in Sudan, and a Belgian diplomat, Guy Eid. The targeting of Eid remains unexplained. The terrorists said it was because he was Jewish, but he was not; and the name Eid, as they might have known, is actually Arab, reflecting the provenance of one of his forebears.

The hostage-takers demanded the release of various Palestinian prisoners in Israeli and Jordanian jails, along with Sirhan Sirhan and members of the German Red Army Faction, the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang. But they gradually scaled down their demands to just Abu Daoud. While negotiations with the Sudanese government were still under way, the PLO’s Voice of Palestine broadcast this message: “Do what is required quickly because the blood of the martyrs is a revolution.”²⁰ At this, the three diplomat hostages were taken to the basement of the building and, bound hand and foot, riddled with bullets by all eight terrorists.

Then, the radio station of Fatah broadcast further orders: “Your mission is over . . . Present yourselves to the Sudanese authorities with courage.”²¹ Fatah’s leaders may have had a deal with Sudan’s government or may have known that it would not dare impose any real punishment. The gunmen were taken into custody, tried, convicted, had their conviction upheld by the Sudanese Supreme Court, and then were released. They had not secured the freedom of Abu Daoud, but two months later he was included in a general amnesty of Palestinian prisoners, part of a bargain by King Hussein to restore himself to the good graces of Egypt and Syria.

Throughout the rest of 1973, the tempo of terror attacks in Europe continued unabated. In Cyprus, an El Al plane was fired upon and the building housing the Israeli ambassador was bombed. In Rome, an El Al employee was gunned down in the street, and two Arabs were arrested at Fiumicino Airport carrying revolvers and hand grenades. Two months later, five more were arrested with missiles preparing to down an EL Al flight. In Athens, a gunman tried to storm the El Al offices and, when thwarted, fled to a nearby hotel, taking seventeen hostages whom he traded for safe passage to Syria. Weeks later in that city, terrorists arrived too late to seize the El Al flight they had targeted, so they tossed their grenades and emptied their weapons randomly into a passenger lounge, killing three and wounding fifty-five. In Paris, six gunmen seized the Saudi embassy during a gathering, taking Arab and French hostages. They released the French in exchange for safe passage out of the country with their Arab hostages in tow.