The Aroyo killings also effectively ended the debate inside the Israeli defense establishment about how to handle the Palestinian population in the conquered territories. Sharon’s approach triumphed. Massive forces poured into the Gaza Strip and, acting under Sharon’s orders, demolished houses in order to create wide access roads through the crowded refugee camps. One night in January 1972, Sharon ordered the expulsion of thousands of Bedouin from a 2,500-acre area south of Rafah. General Shlomo Gazit, who was in charge of government activities in the occupied areas, was shocked. He boiled with anger when he heard about the action the following morning, and threatened to resign. “There is no other way to describe this act than ethnic cleansing and a war crime,” he later said.
Sharon was given free rein to use special forces and secret units to unearth and kill terrorists before they could strike in Israel.
Meanwhile, Dagan and his men continually devised new methods for finding and disposing of these wanted Palestinians. One tactic was to ambush them in brothels. Another was to hide in trees in the citrus groves when they knew that terrorists were planning to meet there, communicating by pulling on fishing cord stretched out between them in order to maintain absolute silence. When the terrorists turned up, they were all shot dead.
They also frequently used a Palestinian collaborator to sell booby-trapped grenades to the Palestine Liberation Army. The fuses would be clipped from the usual three-second delay to a half-second, ensuring that whoever used them would blow himself up. And on one occasion, borrowing from Operation Mincemeat, a British World War II ploy, Dagan pretended to be a corpse and was carried by his comrades—two of them Palestinian collaborators and the others disguised as Arabs—into a terrorist hideout. Once inside, they killed everyone.
A month after the Aroyo killings, on January 29, 1971, two jeeps under Dagan’s command were moving down a road that ran between the Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City. Along the way, they encountered a local cab loaded with passengers driving in the opposite direction. Dagan identified two “reds” among the passengers: Fawzi al-Ruheidi and Mohammad al-Aswad, who was also known as Abu Nimr. Dagan ordered the jeeps to turn around and chase down the cab. The jeeps caught up and blocked the road, and Dagan’s soldiers jumped out and surrounded the cab. Dagan approached the vehicle with his pistol drawn. Abu Nimr jumped out, holding a hand grenade, the pin drawn. “If you get any closer,” he yelled, “we’ll all die!” Dagan paused for a second or two. Then he yelled “Grenade!” and charged Abu Nimr, grabbing the hand holding the grenade and butting him in the head with his helmet. Bleeding profusely, Abu Nimr lost consciousness, and Dagan calmly and carefully removed the grenade from his grip, found the pin on the ground, and reinserted it. This act of bravery won Dagan a medal from the chief of staff. It also gave Sharon occasion to coin his black-humor description of Dagan: “His greatest expertise is separating an Arab and his head.”
Indeed, there is little room for argument over the effectiveness of Dagan’s chosen methods. The Shin Bet and IDF special forces, led by the Grenade Rangers and inspired and backed by Sharon, essentially wiped out terrorism in the Gaza Strip between 1968 and 1972. The Palestinian organizations had no response to Dagan’s tactics. They could not figure out how the Shin Bet learned their secrets, or how Israeli soldiers in Arab guise could suddenly appear, undetected, to capture and kill their fighters. The Shin Bet’s list of four hundred wanted men (to which new names were continually added) had been reduced to ten in 1972. That year, only thirty-seven terror attacks originated in the Gaza Strip, down from hundreds in each of the preceding years. That number would continue to go down in each successive year, for four years.
But there was a price to be paid for those methods, too.
Yitzhak Pundak later recalled reading a report filed by the unit that read, “Our detail was chasing a wanted terrorist in Al-Shati [a refugee camp in Gaza]. He ran into one of the houses. The unit broke in after him, disarmed him, and killed him in the house.” Pundak says he drew the attention of an intelligence officer to the possibility that if such a report reached the UN or the Red Cross, it would cause an international scandal. “So what’s the problem?” said the officer, according to Pundak. “Destroy the report.”
Pundak took this story to Southern Command chief Sharon, and when he refused to investigate further, Pundak recalled, he told Sharon, “You are a liar, a crook, and a knave.” Sharon rose and raised his hand as if to slap Pundak, but Pundak wasn’t scared. “If you do that, I’ll break your bones right here in your office,” he said. Sharon sat down. Pundak says he saluted, declared, “Now I know you’re also a coward,” and left the room.
Several journalists have collected accounts from Dagan’s unnamed men saying they shot people after they surrendered, their hands in the air. One was quoted as saying that he and other soldiers had apprehended a Palestinian who was wanted for murdering an IDF officer. A Shin Bet agent who was with them purportedly said the man could never be brought to trial, because the secret service would be forced in court to name the collaborator who had provided the information that led to his capture. The soldiers let their captive “escape”—and then shot him as he ran.
Another unit veteran said, “The captive would be led from the house he was captured in to a dark alley off to the side, where the soldiers would leave a pistol or grenade in a certain way that made it very tempting for him to reach out for it. When he did, they’d shoot him. Sometimes they’d tell him, ‘You have two minutes to run,’ and then they’d shoot him on the grounds that he’d run away.”
Other former Grenade Rangers said that when it came to the list of red targets, Dagan had unilaterally annulled the IDF’s rule that suspects be given a chance to surrender before being killed. Under Dagan’s command, a red was a target for assassination on sight. Dagan confirms this but says it was justified: “All the allegations about us being a death squad or a gang of killers are nonsense. We were acting under combat conditions, with us and the wanted men both in civilian clothes and armed with the same weapons. There is not, and there cannot be, from my point of view, an arrest procedure for an armed man. Almost all wanted persons at that time were armed. Any man carrying a weapon—whether he is turning, running, or fleeing but still holding a weapon—you shoot him. Our goal was not to kill them, but neither was it to commit suicide. It was clear that if we did not shoot first, they’d shoot at us.”
After one arrest operation, on November 29, 1972, ended with the wanted man dead, Pundak demanded that Dagan’s deputy, Shmuel Paz, be court-martialed. In the trial, it was reported that Paz had fired from a distance at the man, who was carrying a rifle, and he fell. Paz advanced toward him, firing the whole time to make sure he was dead. “And what exactly would you want me to do?” Paz asked. “The fact that the man fell does not mean that he is not putting on an act or that he’s only wounded and still able to fire at us. There’s no other way to act in such a situation,” Dagan said.
Paz was given the benefit of the doubt and was acquitted. All the other complaints, rumors, testimonies—to say nothing of the many dead bodies—were swept into a closet, locked tightly to prevent any outside inquiry.
Without doubt, Dagan’s unit was ruthless, and it operated under its own rules. One can reasonably argue that this was the beginning of an extrajudicial legal system parallel to criminal law in Israel, a system that developed quietly and in total secrecy. Dagan’s unit was, for the first time, eliminating people in territory controlled by Israel, instead of arresting and prosecuting them, as required by international law. “In order to protect its citizens,” Dagan said, “the state must sometimes perform actions that run counter to democracy.”
All of this was embraced by the Israeli civil authorities, even as they ostensibly turned a blind eye. What the state’s leaders wanted most of all was quiet in the conquered territories. That quiet allowed Israeli governments to enjoy cheap Palestinian labor and cheap imports from
the territories, as well as a market for exports—an important matter for a country surrounded by hostile states with which it had no trade relations.
Moreover, it enabled the construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Right-wing Israelis believe that Israel must hold on to the areas that it conquered in 1967, in order to maintain the strategic advantage. In addition, many religious Jews believe that the conquest of biblical Judea and Samaria was an act of divine intervention, restoring the nation to its historical homeland and hastening the coming of the Messiah. Both of these groups hoped that establishing as many settlements as possible would forestall the establishment of a Palestinian state in the future.
In the absence of terror attacks, the political echelon interpreted the quiet achieved by the Shin Bet and the IDF as a complete victory and a vindication, as if history had come to a halt and there was no need to come to grips with the Palestinian question.
AT 10:31 P.M. GMT on July 23, 1968, El Al Flight 426 took off from Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport. A Boeing 707 with thirty-eight passengers, twelve of them Israelis, and ten Israeli crew members, the aircraft was scheduled to land in Tel Aviv at 1:18.
About twenty minutes after takeoff, one of three Palestinian terrorists on board barged into the cockpit. Initially, the pilots thought the man was drunk and asked a stewardess to remove him, but he pulled out a pistol. The copilot, Maoz Porat, hit the man’s hand, hoping he would drop the pistol. He did not. The terrorist hit Porat on the head with his gun and wounded him, then fired a shot at him but missed. He pulled out a hand grenade, but the plane’s captain reacted quickly and told him he would land the plane wherever he chose. At 11:07, the control tower in Rome received a message saying that the plane, then at an altitude of 33,000 feet, was changing its course and heading for Algiers, where it landed at thirty-five minutes after midnight, with the consent of the Algerian authorities. On the way, the hijackers broadcast to whoever was listening that they were changing the aircraft’s call sign to Palestine Liberation 707.
Upon arrival, all non-Israelis, as well as all the women and children, were released. The remaining seven crew members and five passengers were held hostage at a facility of the Algerian security police close to the airport, where they were imprisoned for three weeks, until they were released in exchange for twenty-four of their counterparts in Israeli jails.
The seizure of Flight 426 was a stunningly audacious assault by a new faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP had been founded the previous December in Damascus by two refugees, George Habash, from Lydda, and Wadie Haddad, from Safed—both pediatricians, Marxists, and Orthodox Christians. In one swift blow, the PFLP had won a short-term tactical and strategic victory, demonstrating that it had the terrifying capability to seize an Israeli civilian airliner and publicizing the Palestinian cause throughout the world. It also forced Jerusalem to negotiate with an organization it refused to recognize, a humiliating concession. Worse still, Israel was forced, in the end, to agree to a prisoner swap, an indignity it had declared would never happen.
But Flight 426 was merely a prelude. Though relentless efforts by the IDF and Shin Bet were making militant attacks inside and along Israel’s borders increasingly difficult, Arafat and his followers—an endless array of splinter groups and sub-factions he could acknowledge or disown, depending on his momentary needs—realized the world offered a much bigger stage than the Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
Terror could erupt anywhere. And Western Europe was thoroughly unprepared to stop it: Borders were porous, barriers at airports and seaports were easily dodged, police forces were flaccid and impotent. Leftist student movements nurtured an empathy with Marxist-leaning Palestinians, and Europe’s own radicals—the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, for instance, or the Red Brigades in Italy—offered logistical as well as operational cooperation.
All of this posed an enormous challenge for Israel’s intelligence community. As long as the Palestinian problem had been confined to the territories Israel occupied following the Six-Day War, things were relatively simple. But now the whole wide world was the front line, with Jews—and especially Israelis—the targets.
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A LITTLE MORE THAN a year after the Flight 426 debacle, TWA Flight 840 took off from Los Angeles for Tel Aviv with 120 passengers—only six of them Israelis—and seven crew members. It stopped in New York, then landed in Rome to refuel. Half an hour after taking off for its last layover, in Athens, four Palestinians who’d boarded the plane in Rome went into action. One of them forced a stewardess at gunpoint to open the door to the cockpit. The copilot, Harry Oakley, was amazed to see that behind the man there was a woman, a grenade in her hand.
“She was very fashionably dressed, all in white,” recalled Margareta Johnson, an air hostess on the flight. “A white floppy hat, white tunic, and white trousers.” The “not unattractive lady,” as one of the male stewards described her, ordered the captain to redirect the plane to fly over Haifa, saying it was her birthplace, which the Zionists would not allow her to return to.
Leila Khaled was indeed born in Haifa in 1944. After the Jewish victory in the bitter battle for that port city, her family fled to Lebanon, intending to return when the dust of war settled. But the newly established State of Israel barred the return of refugees, and Khaled grew up in an overcrowded refugee camp in Tyre, in southern Lebanon. She developed an acute political awareness, and by the age of fifteen she already was a member of the Jordanian branch of a pan-Arabic secular socialist movement headed by the later co-founder of the PFLP George Habash.
TWA 840 was not Khaled’s first assault on civil aviation. On February 18, 1969, she had helped plan an attack against an El Al Boeing 707 as it was about to take off from Zurich airport. Four Popular Front members, tossing hand grenades and firing AK-47s, charged the plane from the tarmac, spraying the cockpit with bullets and fatally wounding the copilot. She also was involved, either directly or behind the scenes, in several other attacks. But the hijacking of TWA 840 made her famous.
After the demonstrative flight over Israel, escorted by Israeli Air Force fighters that could do nothing, for fear of harming the passengers, the plane landed safely in Damascus, where all the passengers and crew were released, with the exception of two Israelis who were held hostage for three months and then released in exchange for Syrian soldiers. The hijackers blew the nose off the empty plane and were spirited away to safety by Syrian intelligence.
Khaled, meanwhile, became a symbol of the era, the best-known female terrorist in the world. She was profiled in hundreds of articles and heralded in songs of praise for freedom fighters. Her picture appeared on posters, the most iconic of which featured her clutching an AK-47, black mane flowing from beneath her kaffiyeh, a striking ring on her finger. “I made it from a bullet and the pin of a hand grenade,” she said.
On September 6, 1970, Khaled and her colleagues attempted to hijack an El Al flight out of Europe, but they failed. The captain, Uri Bar-Lev, a former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot, put the plane into a sudden dive, creating a negative g-force and flinging the hijackers to the floor. An undercover Shin Bet man shot and killed Khaled’s partner, while another one came from inside the cockpit and overpowered her. She was handed over to the police in London when the plane landed.
But four other Popular Front squads were more successful, hijacking Pan Am, Swissair, and TWA planes that day (and, three days later, a BOAC plane), landing them in Jordan, and demanding the release of Khaled and many of her comrades.
The passengers were released, except for the fifty-five Jews and a male crew member, who were taken to a Palestinian neighborhood in Amman. The hijackers blew up the empty planes as television cameras broadcast the images to the world. The media called it “the blackest day in aviation history.”
It also was a black day for Jordan’s King Hussein, who was depicted in the international m
edia as an inept monarch who had lost control of his kingdom. The Palestinians constituted a majority of the Jordanian population, and Hussein feared, justifiably, that the appetites of Arafat and his henchmen, who were behaving as if the country belonged to them, were growing and that they were planning to rob him of his kingdom. After the global embarrassment of the hijacked planes and an attempt on the king’s life by a Palestinian cell, his retaliation was swift and severe. In mid-September, he ordered the Jordanian army, police, and intelligence services to launch a brutal attack against Arafat’s people, massacring them indiscriminately. In a series of operations during a month that the Palestinians dubbed “Black September,” thousands of Palestinians were killed, and the PLO was forced to relocate to Lebanon, where what remained of its decimated leadership began rebuilding.
Fatah and its factions soon regrouped and let loose a savage wave of international terror. The point, explained Bassam Abu Sharif, of the PFLP, was “to show that the expulsion from Jordan had not weakened us at all.”
On November 28, 1971, just over a year after Jordanian prime minister Wasfi al-Tal ordered the assault on the Palestinians, he was shot dead in Cairo. Two weeks later, a group of gunmen tried to kill the Jordanian ambassador to Great Britain, Zaid al-Rifai. Two months after that, Palestinians executed five Jordanian citizens in Germany, supposedly for collaborating with Israel, and then bombed the offices of a Dutch gas company and a German electronics firm, accusing them of trading with Israel.
All of those attacks were carried out by a hitherto unknown organization called Ailool al-Aswad—Arabic for “Black September,” so named to memorialize the massacre in Jordan. The name may have been new, but this was not a new organization. The Mossad quickly discovered that Black September was another of the ever-evolving Fatah factions, led by Salah Khalaf (nom de guerre: Abu Iyad), the former commander of Rassed, the PLO’s intelligence branch, who was trying to maintain his terrorist standing amid recurring infighting. In order to act against a wider range of targets, Khalaf redefined the enemies of the Palestinian people, beginning with “U.S. imperialism, passing through the Arab regimes tied to it, and ending with Israel.”
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