Among them was a boy named Khalil al-Wazir, who had been born in Ramla, a town southeast of Tel Aviv, in 1935. During the 1948 war, he and his family, along with many other residents of Ramla, were deported to Gaza, where they lived in a refugee camp.
By the time he was sixteen, al-Wazir already was the leader of one of the militant groups. Eager to avenge his family’s deportation from Ramla, al-Wazir said, he “sought out mujahideen who had taken part in the [1948] Palestinian War so that we could learn from their personal experience in battle.”
Those veterans of the ’48 war trained al-Wazir and his friends, and they, in turn, trained other young Palestinians. In 1953, when he was just eighteen years old, al-Wazir commanded two hundred young men, all passionately motivated to fight the Zionist enemy. At the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955, al-Wazir’s men began a series of sabotage and murder operations inside Israel. The Egyptians, using the young militants as cheap proxies, sent reinforcements of Palestinian students from Cairo to Gaza. Among them was a young electrical engineering student at the University of Cairo, Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini—Yasser Arafat.
Arafat’s place of birth is disputed. According to the official Palestinian version, he was born in 1929 in Jerusalem, as might be expected from a Palestinian leader. However, it has also been argued that Arafat was born in Gaza or even in Cairo. Regardless, he came from an important Palestinian family with ties to the grand mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and to Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, the commander of Palestinian forces in 1948, both of whom were primary targets for assassination at that time.
Arafat, who took the nom de guerre Abu Ammar, and al-Wazir, who took the name Abu Jihad, became associates and confidants. They worked together to strengthen the Palestinian cells in the Gaza Strip.
Nevertheless, Israeli intelligence was not overly concerned with the festering militancy in the refugee camps. “In general, one could say that the Palestinian diaspora really didn’t interest us,” said Aharon Levran, who served as an AMAN officer at the time. “They did not constitute a significant force then.” Rather than a long-term strategic issue, the militants were considered an immediate tactical problem, a concern only to the extent that they slipped over the border to harass and terrorize Jews. And that problem ostensibly had been solved by the 1956 Sinai Campaign: Egypt, fearful of Israeli reprisals and more concerned with preserving peace on the border than with the plight of Palestinians, stopped sponsoring those raids.
The militants, however, did not see matters the same way. Abu Jihad and Arafat, blindsided and betrayed when the Egyptians prohibited further infiltrations, decided the Palestinians could end their plight only by engaging in independent operations. Israel’s military victory in the Sinai Campaign, which stopped the terrorist infiltration by Palestinians from Egyptian territory, thus also inadvertently led to the creation of a separate guerrilla movement.
After years of roaming from country to country, in late 1959 Arafat and Abu Jihad relocated to Kuwait. They had come to realize that in the eyes of Nasser, who was trying to unify the Arab world under his leadership, their activities would only be seen as obstructions. They knew that as long as they stayed in one of the major Arab states, they would never manage to create an effective all-Palestinian organization under their own authority.
Abu Jihad accepted the supremacy of Arafat, who was six years his senior and who already possessed a wide network of ties across the Palestinian diaspora. Arafat regarded himself as the leader, but he immediately identified Abu Jihad’s operational capabilities, something he himself lacked. For two years, Arafat, Abu Jihad, and three comrades worked on developing a series of principles and operational frameworks for their organization. They did so in secret, to avoid arousing the opposition of the Arab states. Finally, on October 10, 1959, the Palestine Liberation Movement was officially established.
They soon discovered, however, that the Arabic acronym of their name, Hataf, spelled a word that ingloriously translates as “quick death.” So Abu Jihad, who had a special sensitivity for symbolic matters, proposed that the letters be reversed to form the acronym Fatah—that word means “glorious victory.”
The basic principles, disseminated at the time in the form of leaflets, would later be concentrated and expressed in the Palestinian National Covenant. Article 9 states, “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” and Article 6 in effect calls for the deportation of all Jews who had arrived in Palestine after 1917. Article 20 notes, “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history….Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.” Article 22 mentions that “Zionism is…racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.” Most of the covenant’s strictures against Zionism allege that it is a tool of international imperialism.
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ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE, PREOCCUPIED WITH Nasser and convinced that Egypt posed the most credible and formidable threat, completely missed the founding of Fatah. It wasn’t until early 1964, more than four years after the fact, that two Israeli spies filed the first field reports on the organization. Uri Yisrael (known in the Mossad as “Ladiyyah”) and Yitzhak Sagiv (“Yisrael”), working under the cover of Palestinian businessmen, warned that the cells of students functioning with Fatah’s support and inspiration were gaining more and more momentum in Europe and should not be belittled. On April 6, 1964, with the entire Mossad tied up with the affair of the German scientists, Ladiyyah wrote to his Mossad handlers, warning, “I am coming to the conclusion that the danger we face from the scholars, students, and educated [Palestinians] is of no lesser significance than the arming of the Arab states with weapons of mass destruction.”
At first, their Mossad case officers were unimpressed, dismissing Arafat, Abu Jihad, and their friends as “students and intellectuals stronger with words than in actions.” But Ladiyyah and Yisrael persisted, warning that their Palestinian acquaintances were speaking with increasing frequency about “the armed struggle against the Zionist entity.”
Fatah was “something entirely different from anything that had existed before,” they insisted in a May 1964 report. “These two”—Arafat and Abu Jihad—“are capable of inspiring the Palestinians to act against us.”
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FATAH CARRIED OUT ITS first terror attack on January 1, 1965, an attempt to bomb Israel’s National Water Carrier, the huge pipe-and-canal system that brings water from the Sea of Galilee to the country’s arid south. It was a highly symbolic act—threatening to cut out the source of life, water, in the desert of the Middle East—one that touched the raw nerves of all the residents of the region. The construction of the canal system had been a contentious issue, causing considerable agitation in Arab public opinion at the time. Although Prime Minister Salah Bitar of Syria declared in September 1963 that the Arab states had decided to wage “an unyielding campaign to prevent [Israel] from realizing its dream” of bringing water to the desert, those were empty words. It was only Fatah, still small and with few resources, that took the initiative and acted.
Planned by Abu Jihad, the operation was fairly amateurish, and an utter failure. The group that was supposed to carry out the first military act by Fatah was arrested in Gaza a whole week before the launch date. Another group was also arrested in Lebanon a few days before the launch date. Eventually, a third group coming from Jordan did manage to lay explosives at the National Water Carrier site, but they failed to go off and were discovered by a security patrol. The members of the unit were caught. Despite this evident failure, the news of the operation reverberated throughout the Arab world. At last there was a force ready to take on the Israelis. AMAN, for its part, took notice but did little more.
At the same time, Ladiyyah’s connections, established over years o
f living a double life, paid off. Arafat and Abu Jihad maintained close contact with Palestinian students throughout Europe, particularly in East and West Germany. Ladiyyah had a Palestinian friend, Hani al-Hassan, who headed West Germany’s Palestinian Student Association and whose brother, Khaled, was one of Fatah’s five founding members. Hani was in financial difficulties, and Ladiyyah came to the rescue. He offered to pay the rent on Hani’s apartment, at Beethovenstrasse 42, Frankfurt, which also served as headquarters for the student organization. The leaders of Fatah periodically gathered there as well.
In January 1965, the Mossad’s surveillance unit, Colossus, planted microphones in the apartment. For the next eight months, Israeli operatives eavesdropped on the Palestinians’ strategy sessions from a post across the hall, listening as they vowed to “wipe Israel off the map,” as Abu Jihad declared at one of the secretly recorded sessions.
Rafi Eitan, who years earlier had commanded the IDF force that expelled Abu Jihad’s family from Ramla, was chief of the Mossad’s European operations at the time. Listening to the plotting, he understood straightaway that this was a movement with potential, and that it had a particularly charismatic, dangerous leader. “Arafat’s true nature was apparent even back then in the meetings in Frankfurt,” Eitan said. “The students told Arafat and Abu Jihad that there were fifteen Palestinian organizations and that it was important to ensure that all of them operate under a single command. Arafat said that that wasn’t necessary, and that it was actually a good thing for each organization to have its own militia and budget. Doing so would guarantee, he said, ‘the continuation of the struggle against Zionism until we throw all the Jews in the sea.’ ”
Throughout the first half of 1965, Fatah carried out more and more guerrilla attacks, mining roads, sabotaging pipelines, and firing at Israelis with small arms. Most of these attacks failed, but their echoes reached Rafi Eitan in Paris. In May 1965, Eitan asked Mossad director Amit to order a Caesarea unit to break into the apartment on Beethovenstrasse and assassinate everyone there. “We can do it easily,” he wrote to Amit. “We have access to the target and this is an opportunity that we may not get again.”
But Amit, still reeling from the capture of Caesarea operatives Cohen and Lotz, refused to sign off. He didn’t see the group as much more than a gang of young thugs with no real capability.
“Too bad they didn’t listen to me,” Eitan said decades later. “We could have saved ourselves a lot of effort, heartache, and sorrow.”
In the months that followed, there were more attacks, and their frequency steadily increased, reaching a total of thirty-nine in 1965. It was clear that Arafat and Abu Jihad were a problem that wasn’t going to go away. “At first their terror attacks were ridiculous,” said Aharon Levran, who was then deputy chief of AMAN’s intelligence collection division. “But as time went on, they became more serious….Faced with those situations, the intelligence community reacted in two typical ways,” Levran said. “First, they set up a special department to handle the matter. Second, they struck at the top of the pyramid.
The “special department,” a secret committee to examine how to counter Palestinian terrorism, was established in August 1965 and had three members: Levran; Mike Harari, deputy chief of Caesarea; and Shmuel Goren, commander of AMAN’s Unit 504.
The committee of three issued orders for the elimination of Arafat and Abu Jihad. Knowing that the unit’s recent catastrophes made it extremely unlikely they would get authorization for a targeted killing operation using Caesarea, the committee instead recommended a return to letter bombs. Using information gathered by Ladiyyah and Yisrael, these bombs would be sent to a number of Fatah officials in Lebanon and Syria.
On October 8, Mossad director Amit met with Prime Minister and Defense Minister Levi Eshkol to submit the plan for his approval. “We have three targets,” Amit said. “Our guy [Ladiyyah] has come back from the capitals [Beirut and Damascus], and we want to execute.”
After identifying the targets, Amit noted that Ladiyyah “has brought all of the necessary information, and the proposal is to send each one of them a ‘gift.’ ” The letters would appear to be from people known to the targets. To make them seem as authentic as possible, they would be mailed directly from inside Lebanon.
“It will be a woman doing it this time. She’ll go to Beirut and slip the letters into a mailbox there….[She is] South African, with a British passport, and she’s ready to do it.” Amit was speaking about Sylvia Rafael, daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, who had developed a strong allegiance with the Jewish people, immigrated to Israel, and was recruited by the Mossad. She was trained by Moti Kfir and became the most famous female operative in the history of Caesarea.
Amit told Eshkol that there would be a whole wave of letter bombs. While the Mossad focused on its three targets, AMAN would simultaneously send twelve to fifteen of the lethal envelopes to Fatah operatives in Jordan.
Eshkol was skeptical. “Have we ever had an attempt that worked out all the way?…In Egypt it didn’t work out all the way,” he said, reminding Amit that the letter bombs sent to the German scientists in Egypt didn’t kill them, but only caused injuries.
Amit reassured him, saying, “We’re putting in more [explosive] material this time. Now we’re putting in twenty grams.”
Nevertheless, the booby-trapped envelopes didn’t work this time, either. A few recipients of the letters were slightly wounded, but most of the letters were discovered and defused before they could do any harm at all.
At that time, Arafat and Abu Jihad were in Damascus, which had agreed to extend its patronage to Fatah’s activities and to allow its military units to use some of Syria’s training facilities. The possibilities for any sort of Israeli action in Damascus were very limited, especially after the capture of Eli Cohen and the panicky evacuation of the other operatives there. Furthermore, from Syria, Fatah could better coordinate its struggle against Israel, making frequent entries into the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian rule. Fatah established bases there, from which they launched terror attacks inside Israel. Most of the attacks were sabotage attempts of civilian targets, including private houses, institutions, and infrastructure, like water pipes, railways, and dirt roads.
In 1966, there were forty Fatah attacks in Israel. Though the frequency of the attacks remained the same as in 1965, there was a dramatic difference in the audacity and quality. Starting in the middle of 1966, Fatah began trying to hit Israeli military targets. In one such operation, on November 11, 1966, three Israeli soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a land mine. Retaliation followed two days later when Israeli forces raided a Palestinian village, Samua, south of Hebron in Jordanian territory. The original goal was to demolish houses in the village, in the hope of sending a signal that would deter the Arab states and motivate them to act against Fatah. However, the Jordanian army intervened. The result was sixteen dead Jordanian soldiers, one dead Israeli, and a sharp increase in tension on the border.
Still, the urge to sweep the Palestinian problem under the carpet was so strong that the Israeli establishment did all it could not to even utter the name Fatah. “We didn’t want to give Fatah credit, to say that this or that terror attack was its work,” said Shlomo Gazit, head of the Research Division of AMAN from 1964 to 1967. “On the other hand, we had to refer to them somehow, so we decided on a neutral term.” That word was paha, the Hebrew acronym for hostile terrorist activity. For decades, this was the term used by Israeli officials when they told the public who was behind acts of terror.
In early 1967, the situation worsened rapidly. By the start of May, Fatah had launched more than a hundred attacks on Israel, across the Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian borders. Thirteen Israelis were killed: nine civilians and four soldiers. The back-and-forth of small-scale attacks—Palestinians raiding across the border, Israel retaliating—deteriorated Israel’s already fragile re
lationships with neighboring Arab countries.
On May 11, Israel declared that it was warning Syria for the last time that if it did not restrain Fatah, Israel would take large-scale military action. That warning led to the establishment of a joint military command by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and the concentration of enormous forces by all sides. Many Arabs believed that at last the time had come for the liquidation of the State of Israel.
In Israel, many people feared that another Holocaust was imminent. An atmosphere of gloom prevailed. Some expected tens of thousands to die. Mass burial sites were hastily prepared in public parks like Gan Meir, in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Prime Minister Eshkol gave a speech on Israeli radio on May 28, 1967, that only made things worse. Because the text had been changed at the last moment, Eshkol stuttered over key phrases. The Israeli public understood it as lack of resolve on his part, aggravating existing fears.
However, the heads of the Israeli Army and intelligence community were sure of their own capabilities and pressured Eshkol to let them strike first. Mossad chief Amit flew to Washington, where he met with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Amit understood from McNamara’s response that he had obtained what he later described as a “flashing green light” for Israel to launch a preemptive attack.
The Six-Day War broke out at 7:45 on the morning of June 5, 1967, with the entire Israeli Air Force bombing and strafing dozens of enemy airfields. Thanks to detailed and precise intelligence gathered by the Mossad and AMAN over long years of preparing for war, Israel’s Air Force was able to destroy, within hours, nearly every combat plane that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan owned. By the time the war ended, on June 10, Israel was occupying territories that increased its size by more than 300 percent. Its conquests included the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
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