It now oversaw more than a million Palestinian inhabitants in those territories as well, many of them 1948 refugees who now were occupied by the same forces that had dispossessed them of their land twenty years before. In less than a week, the face of the Middle East had been completely transformed.
The war proved that the Israeli intelligence community and its military enjoyed unchallenged superiority over its rivals in the Arab states. Yet some Israelis realized that the mighty victory was not just a reason to rejoice—it was also an opportunity to forge a lasting truce. AMAN research chief Gazit composed a special top-secret paper, distributed to the leaders of the government and the military, that included a warning that “we should not look like braggarts, mocking a defeated enemy, debasing him and his leaders.” The memo called for immediate negotiations with the Arab states and the use of the conquered territories in a barter deal—an Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of an “independent Palestinian state” in exchange for an overall, absolute, and final peace treaty. In the Shin Bet, too, there were many who believed that this was a historic opportunity to end the national conflict between Jews and Arabs. Even Israel’s number-one spy, Meir Amit, grasped the potential for peace. But his advice fell on deaf ears.
The sharp transition undergone by the Israeli public and its parliamentarians and cabinet ministers—from citizens and leaders of a country on the brink of destruction to those of a seemingly invincible empire—made everyone blind to the truth that even victory and the occupation of enemy territory could entail grave dangers.
Amit was one of the few who comprehended the profound and dangerous new trend in the national psychology. “What’s happening now is a disappointment, a painful disappointment,” he wrote in his diary two weeks after the war. “I am apprehensive and worried and fearful at this waste of a victory….When I see how matters are being conducted, my hands go limp and I get a terrible feeling.”
—
WHILE AMIT SAW ISRAEL’S victory as an opportunity for peace, Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad saw the Arab nations’ overwhelming defeat as a catastrophe to be exploited. They realized that the disgraceful failure of the Arab states’ leaders would make room in public opinion for new leaders, who would be perceived as young, brave, and uncorrupted. Abu Jihad also grasped that it would now be easier to wage guerrilla warfare against Israel.
On June 20, just ten days after the war ended, Arafat and Abu Jihad announced from Beirut that Fatah would continue its struggle, only now from within territories Israel had just conquered. True to his word, Abu Jihad initiated a damaging wave of terror attacks in Gaza and the West Bank—thirteen attacks took place during September 1967, ten in October, eighteen in November, and twenty in December. The targets were mostly civilian: factories, houses, cinemas, and the like. In the wake of those attacks, no one in Israeli intelligence dared advocate negotiations with Fatah.
Although Abu Jihad was waging the war, it was clear to the Israelis that Fatah’s leader was Yasser Arafat. He was the one who laid down the diplomatic and ideological lines, and who gradually managed to unite all of the various Palestinian factions under his authority. He had also begun to mediate relationships with the leaders of the Arab states, who had originally seen Fatah as a dangerous threat. In 1964, the Arab states founded the Palestine Liberation Organization and placed a puppet of theirs, Ahmad Shukeiri, at its head. But in the wake of the organization’s dismal performance in the Six-Day War and with Arafat’s rising prominence, Fatah gradually began taking control of the PLO, until Arafat was finally elected its chairman. Abu Jihad became the coordinator of its military activities, in effect the second in command.
Arafat, who took to wearing a kaffiyeh headdress draped to look like a map of Palestine, had become the symbol of the Palestinian struggle.
“Israel must strike at the heart of the terror organizations, their HQs,” Yehuda Arbel, the Shin Bet commander in Jerusalem and the West Bank, wrote in his diary. “The elimination of Abu Ammar”—Arafat—“is a precondition to finding a solution to the Palestinian problem.” Arbel pressed the committee of three to take steps to achieve this goal. For his part, he drew up and distributed a wanted poster, the first of many, which included the following description: “Short, 155–160 cm; dark-skinned. Build: chubby; bald spot in the middle of his head. Hair on temples—gray. Mustache shaven. Demeanor: restive. Eyes: constantly darting back and forth.”
—
ISRAELI FORCES TRIED TO kill Arafat a few times during and immediately after the Six-Day War. In the days following Israel’s victory, a Shin Bet informer identified his hideout in the Old City of Jerusalem, not far from Jaffa Gate. A contingent of soldiers was sent to get Arafat, dead or alive, but he managed to flee just a few minutes before they arrived. Two days later, soldiers acting on another tip from a 504 agent raided an apartment in Beit Hanina, a village just east of Jerusalem, but found only a pita full of salad and tahini, with a few bites gone. A day later, Arafat managed to cross over one of the Jordan River bridges, dressed as a woman, in a cab belonging to one of his supporters.
In the meantime, PLO terror attacks against Israel became more frequent and more deadly. Between the end of the war and March 1968, 65 soldiers and 50 civilians were killed, and 249 soldiers and 295 civilians were wounded. The attacks launched by Fatah from its headquarters in Karameh, in the southern Jordan Valley, led to frequent clashes between the IDF and the Jordanian army, and the long border between the two countries seethed with tension, making normal life on the Israeli side impossible. The IDF brass urged Eshkol to approve a massive military operation, but he was hesitant.
The Mossad was frustrated. “The humiliation caused by the terror attacks produced a feeling of helplessness,” recalled Caesarea chief Zvi Aharoni. “I told the guys, ‘Think outside the box. Think of an idea how to kill Arafat.’ ”
The plan they came up with in January 1968 called for shipping a large car from Europe to Beirut, where it would be packed with explosives and then driven to Damascus by a Caesarea man operating under the cover of a businessman. It would be parked outside Arafat’s residence and detonated remotely at the right time. Amit went to Eshkol to seek approval but was met with a blunt refusal, on the grounds that the attack would invite and justify retaliatory attempts on the lives of Israeli political leaders. Eshkol saw Arafat as a terrorist, but one who had attained the status of a political leader, and this was perhaps the best proof of all of the PLO chairman’s success.
But the Palestinian terror continued unabated. On March 18, a school bus hit a land mine. Two adult escorts were killed and ten children wounded. Now the reluctant Eshkol gave in to the pressure. He agreed that killing Arafat would be the primary aim of the operation against the Palestinian forces in and around Karameh.
On March 21, 1968, a unit from Sayeret Matkal, the elite IDF commando force, was flown by helicopter to a staging point in the desert near the Fatah base in Karameh. The commandos’ orders were simple and clear: “Attack in daylight, seize control, isolate and kill the terrorists.” At a cabinet meeting the night before, the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Haim Bar-Lev, had promised “a clean operation,” by which he meant no or almost no Israeli casualties.
But things went very wrong, and the battle dragged on much longer than planned. The Jordan River is high at that time of year, the vegetation along its banks is thick and the terrain difficult to negotiate, which held up the mechanized forces that were supposed to support the commandos. Furthermore, due to faulty coordination, the air force dropped leaflets warning the civilian population to evacuate at a preset time. The element of surprise was lost and the Fatah forces had ample time to prepare for the assault. They fought back fiercely.
Arafat—again dressed as a woman—got away in a mad dash on a motorcycle.
Although the casualties—thirty-three Israelis dead, as well as sixty-one Jordanians and more than one hundred Palestinians—
favored the IDF, for the first time in a face-to-face battle the Palestinians had succeeded in holding out against the strongest army in the Middle East. This showed who the real victors were.
Arafat, immediately grasping the public relations potential of Israel’s bungled operation, turned it into a legend of Palestinian grit in the face of enemy attack. He even went so far as to (falsely) boast that his forces had wounded the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan. Thousands of Palestinians were inspired to enlist in the PLO. After Karameh, no one doubted that there was a Palestinian nation, even if Israel continued to deny it officially for many years thereafter. And no one could be mistaken: Yasser Arafat was that nation’s unchallenged leader.
The failure of the Karameh operation led Israel to adopt a more restrained policy in its raids into Jordan, and consequently engendered great frustration in the IDF. Transcripts of general staff meetings from that period reveal the extent to which the top brass was preoccupied with the PLO and with Yasser Arafat, who was regarded with great admiration by Palestinian youth.
The military and the intelligence community continued to look for ways to pinpoint and eliminate Arafat, but with no success. Eventually, out of desperation, they were even willing to adopt a particularly bizarre plan. In May 1968, a charismatic Swedish-born navy psychologist named Binyamin Shalit somehow heard about the secret three-man committee and proposed an idea based on the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a Chinese intelligence hypnotist brainwashes an American prisoner of war and sends him to assassinate a United States presidential candidate.
Shalit claimed that he could do the same, with Arafat as the target. Shalit told the committee at a meeting attended by AMAN chief Major General Aharon Yariv that if he was given a Palestinian prisoner—one of the thousands in Israeli jails—with the right characteristics, he could brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer. He would then be sent across the Jordan, join the Fatah forces there, and, when the opportunity arose, do away with Arafat.
Incredibly, the committee approved the plan. The Shin Bet found several suitable candidates, and they were interviewed at length by Shalit, who picked the man he thought most suitable. Born in Bethlehem, he was twenty-eight, solidly built and swarthy, not particularly bright, easily influenced, and seemingly not entirely committed to Yasser Arafat’s leadership. At the time of his arrest, he had been living in a small village near Hebron. A low-level Fatah operative, he was given the official code name Fatkhi.
AMAN’s Unit 504 was assigned to provide the necessary infrastructure, but the unit’s operatives vehemently opposed the plan. As Rafi Sutton, then commander of the unit’s base in Jerusalem, said, “It was a foolish, crazy idea. The whole business reminded me of science fiction. Wild imagination and delusions.”
Sutton’s objections, however, were dismissed. A small structure containing about ten rooms was put at the Shalit team’s disposal. Here, Shalit spent three months working on Fatkhi, using a variety of hypnosis techniques. The message drummed into the impressionable young man’s head was: “Fatah good. PLO good. Arafat bad. He must be removed.” After two months, Fatkhi seemed to be taking in the message. In the second stage of his training, he was placed in a specially prepared room and given a pistol. Pictures of Arafat jumped up in different corners and he was told to shoot at them instantly, without thinking first, right between the eyes—shoot to kill.
AMAN Chief Yariv and Aharon Levran, part of the three-man targeted killing committee and a senior AMAN officer, went several times to observe Shalit’s work. “Fatkhi stood there in the middle of the room and Shalit spoke with him, as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation,” Levran told me. “Suddenly Shalit banged his hand on the table and Fatkhi began to run around the table. He reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit. Then he put him in a room and showed us how Fatkhi raised his pistol to firing position every time Arafat’s picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive.”
In mid-December, Shalit announced that the operation could go forward. Zero hour was set for the night of December 19, when Fatkhi was scheduled to swim across the Jordan River into the Kingdom of Jordan. A fierce storm rolled in, and the rain was unrelenting. The usually calm and narrow Jordan overflowed its banks. AMAN wanted to postpone, but Shalit insisted that Fatkhi was in an “optimal hypnotic” state and that the opportunity had to be exploited.
A sizable entourage accompanied Fatkhi from Jerusalem. Shalit dropped him off and said a few hypnotic words. Fatkhi walked into the raging water, wearing a backpack that contained his gear. As he waded into the river, he was soon thrown off his feet by the current. He grabbed onto a boulder, unable to cross to the far side and unable to return. Ovad Natan, a driver from Unit 504 who had a large and muscular physique, jumped into the water and, at great risk, used a rope to tie himself to Fatkhi and pull him to his side. He then crossed the river with Fatkhi and deposited him on Jordanian territory.
Rafi Sutton was standing on the Israeli bank of the Jordan and watching as, soaked and shivering, Fatkhi waved goodbye to his operators. “He made a pistol out of his fingers and pretended to shoot an imaginary target between the eyes. I noticed Shalit was pleased with his patient. It was a bit after 1 A.M.”
About five hours later, Unit 504 received a communication from one of its agents in Jordan: A young Palestinian man, a Fatah operative from Bethlehem, had turned himself in at the Karameh police station. He told the policemen that Israeli intelligence had tried to brainwash him into killing Arafat and handed over his pistol. A source inside Fatah reported three days later that Fatkhi had been handed over to the organization, where he had made a passionate speech in support of Yasser Arafat.
FOLLOWING THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—both the refugees and those who had always lived there—found themselves governed by the enemy, the Jewish state that the PLO had vowed to destroy. Palestinians who had been neither involved nor interested in nationalist politics were now caught up in a maelstrom of conflicting currents—the Israelis’ determination to control the occupied territories and the PLO’s determination to drive the Israelis out.
All of them had lived under cruel and dictatorial Arab regimes, but a Palestinian could have chosen to be almost entirely isolated from the armed conflict that was being waged on the borders between the Arab states and Israel. Now the camps, which had grown into crowded slums, and the large Palestinian cities—Gaza, Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, and Hebron—were the main battlefield as Israel aggressively tried to assert its authority in the face of PLO terror activity.
The mission of the IDF and its soldiers, particularly the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds doing their compulsory military service, which had been in force since 1949, underwent a fundamental change as well. Whereas, before, combat troops patrolled the country’s borders, protecting it from external enemies, they were now reassigned to policing Palestinian cities and towns. The war also led to profound changes in the intelligence community. The Mossad, charged with collecting intelligence outside of Israel’s borders, relinquished responsibility for the newly occupied territories. That task fell to the Shin Bet, a small agency of around seven hundred employees that had previously been responsible mainly for countering espionage and political subversion.
From 1968 through 1970, while PLO attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians were growing more frequent, effective, and deadly, the Shin Bet was expanding rapidly. They obtained budgets, facilities, and personnel allocations and took on many Arabic speakers from AMAN, especially Unit 504, who’d been responsible for recruiting Arab sources. Soon, countering Palestinian terrorism became the principal objective of the organization.
The toughest theater of operations was the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated regions in the world. After the Six-Day War, Israelis drove through the Strip to reach Sinai, sought out bargains in its marketplaces, and ferried out Pales
tinian farm and construction workers. In 1970, Israel began establishing Jewish settlements in the Strip and northern Sinai. More and more often, the Israelis were attacked. The peak came in 1970, when five hundred terrorist attacks were perpetrated in the Gaza Strip. Eighteen Israeli civilians were murdered in these incidents, and hundreds wounded. By then, the IDF was able to control only the main transportation arteries; the PLO ruled everywhere else.
To suppress terror in the Strip, the Shin Bet drew up a list of Gazans suspected of being involved in attacks on Israelis. A great deal of information was gathered, and the list grew longer and longer. It quickly became clear that the Shin Bet—an intelligence-gathering organization—could not operate on its own. In order to arrest or eliminate wanted persons, it needed the manpower—and the firepower—of the military. It found an attentive ear in Major General Ariel “Arik” Sharon, who was appointed head of the IDF’s Southern Command in 1969. Sharon began introducing more and more military units into the Strip to assist the Shin Bet in hunting down and arresting or killing terrorists. The intelligence for these activities was supplied mainly by Palestinian informers or extracted from detainees under harsh interrogation.
Not everyone agreed with Sharon’s aggressive approach. Brigadier General Yitzhak Pundak, military governor of the Gaza Strip, responsible for civilian affairs, maintained that the way to curb Palestinian terror was to improve the quality of life for the territory’s inhabitants and allow them to manage civilian and municipal affairs on their own, with a minimal military presence in inhabited areas. “Saber-rattling and killing for the sake of killing couldn’t take us anywhere but to an intifada,” or popular uprising, Pundak said. “[Minister of Defense] Dayan and Sharon did not see eye to eye about what had to be done in the Strip. Dayan wanted contacts and connections with the population, whereas Sharon was hunting the terrorists and could see them only through the sights of his rifle, and the population did not interest him at all.”
Rise and Kill First Page 15