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Chapter 4

Peace Would Be the End of All Our Hopes

The year 1974 began with the Nixon administration in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Nixon's abuse of power, coming when American society was already torn by the Vietnam conflict, shook American confidence in the integrity of government. Nixon resigned office on 9 August 1974, leaving Gerald Ford the daunting challenge of restoring the presidency and healing a nation. To ensure continuity, Ford asked Henry Kissinger to stay on as secretary of state and encouraged him to continue his efforts to forge a peace in the Middle East compatible with United States geopolitical interests. Kissinger brokered disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May, but a comprehensive peace settlement involving the Palestinians lay beyond the horizon of Kissinger's strategic thinking. The Palestinian national movement entered 1974 in disarray. Arafat signaled his interest in dialogue and scored a series of diplomatic successes that could have opened a pathway to a two-state solution, but the emergence of the Rejection Front, led by the PFLP, proved Arafat could not keep the more radical PLO factions in line. Predictably, new terrorist threats emerged. In 1975, civil war erupted in Lebanon, and for the better part of a year, until the Syrian military intervened to safeguard Syria's interests in Lebanon, the Palestinians were thrown into a struggle for survival.

The Rejection Front

While Nixon struggled to save his political life, Kissinger assiduously pursued peace in the Middle East. Although the Yom Kippur War the previous October had altered the strategic equation in the volatile region, the Geneva conference in December accomplished nothing. The White House had serious misgivings about Soviet participation in peace talks. In an unguarded remark, Kissinger admitted to reporters that the administration sought “to expel the Soviet Union from the Middle East.” The administration had even more serious misgivings about the participation of the PLO. “The best way to deal with the Palestinian issue,” Kissinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, was to “draw the Jordanians into the West Bank and thereby turn the debate…into one between the Jordanians and the Palestinians.” The strategy served Israel's interests well. In June, Yitzak Rabin, a former general who had served as Israel's ambassador to the United States, replaced Golda Meir as prime minister. In September, Kissinger told Rabin during a visit to Washington “a Palestinian state is likely to have as its objective the destruction of both Jordan and Israel.”¹ The diplomatic strategy precluded anything approaching a comprehensive settlement. But it did yield incremental successes. Kissinger's famed shuttle diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May.

The Palestinians did everything in their power to compel Kissinger to take their interests seriously. Between April and June, as Kissinger was trading time between Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem trying to stabilize the lines redrawn in the October war, Palestinian guerrillas mounted a series of operations in Israel. All the major PLO factions attacked. The bloodshed was awful. On 5 March, eight Fatah guerrillas seized a hotel in Tel Aviv. Kissinger was in Amman for talks with King Hussein and preparing to travel to Israel the following day. He returned to Washington instead. The Israelis launched a rescue operation, but it proved deadly. Seven guerrillas were killed in the fighting; twenty Israelis were killed, including the general commanding the operation. On 11 April, three guerrillas from Jabril's PFLP-General Command seized a group of Israelis in Qirayt Shemona. The IDF attempted a rescue, but it ended in bloodshed. The IDF killed three guerrillas, but nineteen hostages and soldiers were killed. Hawatmeh's DFLP mounted its own operation a month later. Three DFLP guerrillas took 100 Israeli high school students hostage in Ma'alot in northern Israel. The incident ended violently on 15 May, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel. All three guerrillas and 23 children were killed. On 13 June, the PFLP struck a kibbutz. This time four guerrillas and a number of Israelis died in the ensuing firefight. On 26 June, Fatah guerrillas came ashore by boat near Nahariya, Israel, on a mission to take hostages. Three Israelis and all the terrorists were killed in a firefight.²

The renewal of attacks in Israel proved the Palestinians could inflict harm even if they could not influence events. The factitious PLO was obsessed with its doctrine of no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel. Egypt's acceptance of U.S. mediation to regain Egyptian territory was an ominous sign that direct negotiations, recognition, and peace were in the offing. Yasser Arafat understood the new dynamic; in fact, he had already tried to establish a secret back channel to the United States. Just as Sadat understood that U.S. mediation, not Egyptian arms, could restore the Sinai to Egypt, Arafat understood that only U.S. mediation, not Palestinian terrorism, could secure a Palestinian state. This was not the vision of the destruction of Israel and the total liberation of Palestine that Palestinians had been conditioned to embrace, but it was a realistic glimpse at the only possible future—a Palestinian ministate on the West Bank and Gaza coexisting with Israel.

In June, the same month the PFLP and Fatah mounted their deadly attacks, Arafat convened a meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in Cairo. The PNC was supposedly the supreme legislative body of the PLO, but in practice Arafat dominated the PLO by controlling the executive committee as its chairman. The PNC was useful to him only to authenticate his decisions. Now Arafat convinced the PNC to accept the principle of PLO authority over any piece of Palestinian territory liberated from Israeli occupation. It was shrewd maneuver. Foremost in Arafat's mind was the possibility that Kissinger might actually succeed in convincing Israel to restore the occupied West Bank to Jordan, foreclosing the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state governed by the PLO. Kissinger was already making headway. Egypt was already showing signs of its willingness to back away from the principle that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people endorsed by the Arab League the previous November in Algiers. In July, Sadat recognized King Hussein's right to speak for the one million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Jordan. Arafat's proposal was controversial, but it gained the support of Fatah's major leaders. Abu Iyad, for one, realized that the changed dynamics forced the PLO to end its “all or nothing” policy.³ Arafat struggled to convince Palestinians that the new policy was not capitulation. Instead he proclaimed the declaration to be the centerpiece of a new policy to liberate Palestine in stages, implying any territory liberated, or ceded in negotiations, would become the staging ground for the guerrilla war of total liberation.

Arafat's enemies within the PLO, led as always by George Habash, the PFLP secretary-general, were not deceived by the rhetoric of liberation in stages. Habash grasped that Arafat was staking his hopes on the negotiations despite the efforts of Israel and the United States to exclude the PLO from the talks. Worse still, the negotiations were based on Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 Six Day War and the right of Israel “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Habash's thinking conformed to the PLO's official line—“We can by no means accept that the end of the aggression of 1967 should come at the price of confirming the aggression of 1948”—until Arafat succeeded in changing that line.⁴ The PNC vote caused a schism. Immediately following the PNC meeting in Cairo, George Habash broke ranks with the Fatah-dominated PLO and, in October, convened the first meeting of the Front for the Rejection of Capitulationist Solutions, or the Rejection Front, in Baghdad. Ahmed Jabril brought his PFLP-General Command into the new Rejection Front as did the leaders of smaller fedayeen organizations. Abd al-Ghafur and Abu Nidal, who had been working to sabotage the peace process for more than a year already, aligned themselves with the Rejection Front without formally joining it. It was no coincidence that Habash called the meeting in Baghdad. Iraq would become a principal backer of the Rejection Front, together with Libya and Yemen. The schism in the PLO would have deadly consequences. Over the next few years, the Rejectionists would assassinate PLO moderates and their Arab allies and would mount a series of international terror operations. In fact, the first deadly attack came even before the Rejectionists met in the Iraqi capital. There had not been a major international terrorist operation since Abd al-Ghafur organized the December 1973 atrocity at the Leonardo Da Vinci airport in Rome. The eight-month lull ended in a few moments of sheer terror over the Ionian Sea on a clear evening of 8 September 1974.

The Destruction of TWA 841

TWA flight 841 arrived in Athens after strict passenger screening in Israel had put it forty-five minutes behind schedule. Security in Israel was tight; it should have been rigorous in Athens. The previous August, terrorists had killed three in the passenger terminal there. But Athens was notorious for its security breaches. For the fedayeen, Greece was the transit point for weapons transfers to Europe. Athens was the first of three stops before TWA flight 841 was to reach its final destination in New York. Thirty minutes after leaving the Greek capital, the captain reported the flight reached its cruising level. It was his final transmission. The crew of Pan Am flight 110 en route to Beirut from Rome witnessed the final moments of TWA flight 841.

The captain of Pan Am 110 was the first to catch a glimpse of TWA 841 seven miles away approaching from the east some 3,000 feet below Pan Am 110. It was a beautiful evening over the Ionian Sea. The visibility was unlimited, and the scattered clouds below did not obscure the sea. All was routine. He looked away for a moment and in that instant the bomb that destroyed TWA 841 exploded. When he saw TWA 841 again the plane was climbing steeply, one of its engines was falling away, fuel leaking from the wing was leaving a whitish vapor trail, and luggage blown out of the rear baggage compartment was forming a cloud of debris in the wake of plane's and fluttering back to earth. The climb was so steep that in those moments it took the two planes to close from seven miles to a mile and a half, TWA 841 was nearly level with Pan Am 110. Then TWA 841 rolled over to the left, plunged into a steep descent, and began to spiral slowly toward the sea. It passed behind Pan Am 110 and from its passengers' and crew's field of vision. No one saw the impact with the water.

The crash of TWA 841 killed all 79 passengers and 9 crew members aboard the plane, 17 of them American. The next day, a U.S. warship recovered 24 bodies and enough wreckage for the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of the disaster. That same day, Abd al-Ghafur's Nationalist Arab Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the destruction of the jet. The organization's communiqué reported a Chilean national of Palestinian descent detonated the bomb killing him and a number of Mossad agents who were aboard the plane. If the claim was true, this was the first time Palestinian terrorists had resorted to a suicide bombing. No one has ever confirmed that Israeli agents died aboard TWA 841; it is certain that seven children and two infants were killed when the plane plunged into the sea.⁵

TWA 841 was Abd al-Ghafur's attempt to embarrass Arafat on the eve of the Arab League summit in Morocco in October. It was also al-Ghafur's final act of terror in a campaign that began the previous spring. Four days after the TWA disaster, Fatah assassins killed al-Ghafur in Beirut on Arafat's orders.⁶ Arafat denounced the terror operation in Paris and Rome in September and December and vowed to punish the men responsible. But Arafat ordered al-Ghafur's death not for terrorism but for breach of discipline. Arafat did not denounce Black September's terror when it served his aims. His calculations were different now. Abu Iyad, who as intelligence chief kept in contact with the more radical PLO factions, later lamented al-Ghafur's assassination because, he said, it turned internal disputes about strategy into a violent struggle for power.⁷ Iyad was especially worried that al-Ghafur's assassination would prompt his confederate, Abu Nidal, to seek revenge. In fact, Abu Nidal had already resolved to assassinate PLO moderates. In June, Fatah intelligence had thwarted the assassination of Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the man who accompanied Abu Iyad to Baghdad to confront Abu Nidal after the seizure of the Saudi embassy in Paris. For whatever reason, Abu Nidal believed Mahmoud Abbas's death was imperative. No one doubted that Abu Nidal's ultimate aim was the assassination of Arafat himself. In October, a month after the TWA atrocity, a Fatah tribunal tried Abu Nidal in absentia and sentenced him to death. Fatah never carried out the death sentence. Instead, Abu Nidal did most of the killing.

That same month, October, the Arab League reconvened in Rabat, Morocco, to consider the state of the Arab world. Eleven months earlier, during the Algiers summit, the League recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat could count the declaration as a diplomatic triumph. But the Algiers declaration was under attack. King Hussein, with Kissinger's firm support, held out for recognition of his kingdom's right to represent the interests of the nearly one million Palestinians living in Jordan. Anwar Sadat, who was by then committed to U.S. mediation, had endorsed this reinterpretation of the Algiers declaration in July. Arafat was determined that Arab League reaffirm the PLO's—and Arafat's—exclusive right to speak for all Palestinians. The Arab heads of state who traveled to Rabat in October were keenly aware of the risks of angering the PLO. In the weeks before the Arab League summit, Moroccan intelligence arrested a number of Palestinians who entered the country under aliases. Abu Iyad had sent them to assassinate King Hussein, but wild rumors about a conspiracy to assassinate any representative who did not reaffirm PLO's representation of the Palestinians swirled around the Moroccan capital. Abu Iyad later boasted of his involvement in the Palestinians plot to assassinate King Hussein—“I assume full responsibility for it and the honor of supporting their action”—but indignantly denied the rumors about a conspiracy to kill other Arab heads of state.⁸ In the end, the Arab League reaffirmed the PLO's unique status and proclaimed the right of the Palestinians to return to their homeland. Even King Hussein, who had risen to the floor to deliver an impassioned but ultimately futile defense of Jordan's territorial rights over the West Bank, voted in favor of the resolution. Henry Kissinger was crestfallen: “the collapse of the Jordanian option,” he lamented, “was a major lost opportunity.” Because the PLO rejected Israel's right to existence, and because the PLO remained committed to terror, the Rabat decision “guaranteed nineteen years of impasse on West Bank negotiations.”⁹

Arafat at the United Nations

Arafat was riding a rising tide of diplomatic success. He had convinced the PNC to endorse his desideratum of a Palestinian authority in the West Bank in June, and he had won the Arab League's reaffirmation of the PLO's right to speak for all Palestinians in October. In November, he triumphed again, this time in New York. On 13 November, Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly. In a lengthy speech that aired Palestinian grievances, Arafat promised the Jews living in Palestine the opportunity to live in Palestine in “peace and without discrimination,” but without a state of their own. Speaking as chairman of the PLO and “leader of the Palestinian revolution” Arafat offered Jews “the most generous solution, that we might live together in a framework of just peace in our democratic Palestine.” Although the maneuvering in Cairo demonstrated his still secret inclination to achieve a Palestinian state through negotiations, Arafat could not explicitly recognize Israel's right to exist within secure borders per Resolution 242. The most generous solution he could offer was not the most reasonable solution that could be envisioned: separate Jewish and Palestinian states. The most Arafat could offer Jews was the opportunity to live in a democratic Palestine under PLO rule. Because Arafat's speech had to resonate with the PLO rank and file, the leader of the Palestinian Revolution could not abandon the rhetoric of violence, so he concluded with a threat: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” It was not an empty threat. Arafat would not explicitly renounce violence for another thirteen years when the political terrain shifted still again, and even then violence forever remained an option for him. Still, Arafat understood the path to the creation of a Palestinian state wound through the labyrinth of American-brokered negotiations. The address before the General Assembly was a triumph. After the speech the General Assembly bestowed observer status on the PLO, placing it on the same plane as the Vatican.

Arafat's triumph was an affront to Israel. The General Assembly had rewarded terror by recognizing an organization whose members practiced it. After the General Assembly granted the PLO observer status, a PLO spokesman conceded “now that we are observers at the United Nations, we will think more deeply and thoroughly regarding armed operations.”¹⁰ Arafat had tried to distance himself from the terror of Black September, and in recent months had missed no opportunity to disavow the terror operations of PLO organizations hostile to him. But his personal connections with Black September's commanders were undeniable. Abu Iyad, a founding member of Fatah, was the force behind Black September and the person most responsible for the murder of the Israeli Olympians in Munich. Iyad feuded with Arafat, but he still served him. Ali Hassan Salameh, who once commanded Black September's European operations, was even closer to Arafat. Arafat's trust in him was an endorsement of Black September.