Middle Eastern Terrorism

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Mark Ensalaco. Middle Eastern Terrorism

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Middle Eastern Terrorism

From Black September to September 11

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The PFLP-General Command claimed responsibility for the destruction of Swiss Air 330, but almost immediately disavowed it. The atrocity was such an unconscionable escalation of the war against civilian aviation that even other Palestinian organizations repudiated it. The PLO officially gave solemn assurances that it “strongly condemns such barbaric actions” and “no commando contingent would have carried out such an action.” Arafat's Fatah went so far as to send its condolences to the families of the victims.17 The condemnation may have been disingenuous or it may have evinced serious disagreements within and between the fedayeen organizations about terror. But the reality was that George Habash's threat—“to turn passengers into hostages, blow them out of the sky, attack them in the terminals”—was now real in each of its dimensions. Terrorists had taken the first passengers hostage when the PFLP hijacked jets to Algiers and Damascus in 1968 and 1969; they would seize jets and hostages thirteen more times before Haddad's death in 1978. Terrorists had attacked passengers in European terminals five times since Christmas 1968; they would strike airports in Athens and Rome in 1973, in Paris in 1975, in Istanbul in 1976, and in Rome and Vienna in 1985. Now Jabril's PFLP-General Command had blown the passengers of Swiss Air flight 330 out of the sky. A year later, in January 1971, authorities in London averted the mid-air bombing of an El Al flight when they discovered a young Latin American woman with explosives in her carry-on luggage. In August 1972, the PFLP-General Command managed to put a bomb aboard an El Al flight out of Rome. The bomb exploded but did not destroy the jet.18 Terrorists would blow jets out of the sky again in 1974 and 1988. Regardless of the doctrinal disputes among the Palestinian factions over the strategy of terror, the Palestinian national movement was becoming equated with international terrorism.

Skyjack Sunday

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