Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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      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.

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