Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ up ladders onto the wings and forced open the emergency doors. The assault was over in moments. The Israelis killed Taha and another hijacker and captured the two women. The bullets that ripped through the cabin wounded five passengers, killing one. That same evening the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. General David Elazar, issued a challenge: “If all the countries would do as we did, there wouldn't be the disgrace of hijacking in the world.”¹⁶

      The Sabena incident marked a turning point in assault on civilian aviation. It did not end “the disgrace of hijacking in the world,” but it raised the risks to the hijackers. The hazards to the hijackers had been negligible thus far. Israeli sky marshals had captured Leila Khaled and killed her accomplice in the El Al incident in September 1970. But the terrorists involved in other operations were not even imprisoned—or not for very long—much less killed. The British, after all, set Khaled free. After the commandos burst into the Sabena jet and killed Taha, terrorists understood that governments had options other than capitulation. Khaled's statement, made after her release in September 1970, that the hijackings proved “we could impose our demands” was no longer valid. Israeli commandos would mount a more spectacular rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976; West German commandos would do so in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1977. In both operations the commandos killed hijackers and rescued hostages. The glory days of the air pirates came to an end in Lod. But the risks increased on all sides. Palestinian hijackers did not execute a single passenger or crew member until December 1973. In future hijackings, terrorists would realize that the credibility of their threats depended on their willingness to kill.

      Wadi Haddad grasped the new dynamic. Black September claimed the Sabena operation, but when it failed Haddad lost his most experienced air pirate. Three weeks after Israeli commandos cut down Ali Taha, Haddad turned the Ben Gurion International Airport at Lod into the scene of an atrocity. The Israelis were learning to combat air piracy, and El Al had begun to throw up extraordinary security around airliners after the ground attacks against airliners in Athens, Zurich, and Munich between December 1968 and February 1970. The Israelis were on high alert for Palestinian terrorists, and they had reason to be alert to threats posed by Europeans. The spectacular terror operations of previous years succeeded in attracting mercenaries to the Palestinian cause. Because of its Marxist rhetoric, the PFLP held special appeal. The German Revolutionary Cells provided recruits in search of battlefronts in the world revolution. In April 1971, Israeli security personnel seized four French terrorists with explosives inside the terminal at Lod.¹⁷ But the Japanese were the first to join forces with the Palestinians. The Japanese Red Army, or JRA, was the radicalized Japanese students' answer to the call for revolutionary violence. The JRA, although small, already had carried out its first hijacking in March 1970, months before Skyjack Sunday in September. In February 1971, the JRA's leader, Fusako Shigenobu, traveled to Lebanon to establish relations with Habash and the PFLP. By 1972, JRA militants were training there. Haddad sent them into action at the end of May.

      On 31 May, three members of the JRA boarded Air France flight 132 from Paris to Tel Aviv during a stopover in Rome. The three men had no intention of commandeering the plane, because theirs was a suicide mission to massacre passengers in the arrival terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport. Shortly after arriving at 10:30 P.M., the three retrieved their baggage inside the terminal, drew automatic weapons and grenades from their bags, and opened fire indiscriminately. The Japanese killed 24 in the massacre, including 19 Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and wounded more than seventy others in the rampage. Two of the attackers were killed, one when he crossed in front of his comrades' line of fire, a second when a grenade exploded in his hands. The third, Kozo Okamoto, was captured and imprisoned in Israel.¹⁸ Witnesses described the rampage: “all of a sudden I saw a tall man in a brown shirt pulling a machine gun and cocking it…. I heard bursts of fire that lasted a few minutes…. I saw people rolling, scattering away…. I saw two people limping through the exit doors.” Emergency personnel arrived to find a scene of carnage, shards of glass, and pools of blood. Shimon Peres, minister of transportation, arrived at Ben Gurion and gave the first briefing to the media: “I am sorry to say that the bloodbath was extremely terrible.” He vowed that Israel would “take every step to fight this new madness.” The PFLP viewed things differently. The PFLP immediately announced “its complete responsibility for the brave operation” and identified the fallen heroes as members of the Squad of the Martyr Patrick Arguello, a reference to the air pirate killed by Israeli security on the El Al flight during the Skyjack Sunday operation. The PFLP believed it had ample justification to describe the operation as brave and the fallen terrorists as martyrs. It timed the operation to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Israel's aggression in the June 1967 Six Day War, and claimed it was a reprisal for the Sayaret Matkal killing of Ali Taha during the takedown of the hijacked Sabena flight earlier in the month. The attack was “the revolutionary answer to the Israeli massacre performed in cold blood…a tribute to the blood of two heroes who fell as a result of a cheap trick.”¹⁹

      Israeli authorities interrogated Kozo Okamoto the terrorist who survived the attack. The twenty-four-year-old gave critical details of the planning of the attack and the operational alliance between the JRA and the PFLP. The Lod massacre was to have been a suicide operation, and Okamoto pleaded with the Israelis to permit him to take his own life. But Okamoto would live a long life. He languished in an Israeli prison for twelve years, but he was not forsaken. He went free in 1985 as a result of a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PFLP and disappeared into Lebanon. Japanese authorities never abandoned efforts to bring him to justice and in 2000 persuaded their Lebanese counterparts to arrest him and three other JRA militants. The Lebanese extradited three, but Okamoto escaped prosecution. News of his arrest sparked protests by Lebanese Muslims, who regarded him as a hero for his actions at Lod, and the Lebanese government granted him asylum.²⁰

      The Lod massacre revealed the power of ideology to incite to murder. The Japanese militants killed without regard to the innocence of their victims in the name of a struggle that was not their own. Israelis understood that hatred of the Jewish state could justify indiscriminate murder of Jews in the minds of Palestinian terrorists. But the Japanese had no personal connection to Palestine. Their motivation for undertaking a suicide operation for the PFLP was a vague ideological notion that the liberation of Palestine would somehow promote a global revolution. European terrorists who would soon enlist in the PFLP as mercenaries shared this view without ever articulating how indiscriminate slaughter could lead to a more just revolutionary world order.

      The Israelis were swift to exact vengeance. On 8 July, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP spokesperson in Beirut, with a car bomb. It was Kanafani who, beginning with the July 1968 press conference during the El Al hijacking in Algiers, justified the most unjustifiable acts of violence as the voice of the PFLP. The Mossad must have taken great satisfaction at his death, even though in killing him the Mossad also killed his seventeen-year-old niece. Over the next few weeks, Mossad letter bombs maimed the director of a PLO research center and editor of a PFLP newspaper.²¹ Kanafani's assassination was a prelude to a Mossad assassination campaign sanctioned by the Israeli cabinet at the end of the year in reaction to Black September's next operation—in Munich.

      The Games of Peace and Joy

      After Lod, Black September became the most clear and present danger. The Sabena hijacking in March went badly, but by the summer of 1972 Black September was preparing for its most infamous operation “to affirm the existence of the Palestinian people,” as Abu Iyad explained it, “by taking advantage of the extraordinary concentration of mass media.”²² In 1972 there was only one event that could demand extraordinary media coverage: the Games of the XX Olympiad in Munich.

      The West German government welcomed the summer Olympics as an historic opportunity to erase the ignominious memories of Hitler's 1936 Berlin games. Chancellor Willy Brandt hoped to prove that West Germany was a different state. The venue for the games held great significance for the twenty-one-member Israeli delegation as well. Because Germany under Nazi rule was the epicenter of the Holocaust, by participating in the games the Israeli Olympians would prove the Jewish nation would forever survive. But СКАЧАТЬ