Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  One of the terrorists rested the hand holding his pistol upon the head of the daughter of one of the hostages, Avraham Shamir. Shamir saw the man was wounded and he charged at him, grabbed his gun, and shot a terrorist standing at the front of the bus. Then he fired three shots at another terrorist. “Behind you!” warned a female hostage, and Shamir turned to see one of the Arabs aiming his weapon at him. They both fired at the same time and wounded each other. The courageous Shamir, still functioning, saw that the man whose gun he had grabbed was lying on the floor, muttering, his face covered in blood. He had a grenade in his hand, the safety pin removed. Shamir tried to stop him from dropping it, but he failed, and the grenade rolled onto the floor. He tried to use the terrorist’s body to block the blast, but that didn’t work, either. The grenade exploded, seriously wounding Shamir’s eyes and killing the terrorist and five hostages. The blast set the bus on fire. Some of the terrorists and hostages managed to escape, but most were burned alive.

  In all, thirty-five Israelis, thirteen of them children, were killed, and seventy-one were wounded. Nine of the terrorists died. One was captured at the scene, and another was found in a hospital where the casualties had been taken. “I see him lying there,” said Arieh Hadar, the top Shin Bet interrogator, “lightly wounded but with a feeding tube and an IV infusion, mocking us, right in our face. The doctor understood what was up, and he turned his back to us and said, ‘You’ll do what you do, and I’ll do what I do.’ We pulled out the tubes. He screamed a little from pain and began talking right away. ‘Abu Jihad sent us,’ he said.”

  The Coastal Road massacre, as it became known in Israel, is one of a handful of terrorist attacks, out of the thousands Israel has suffered, that have been branded into the collective consciousness. Defense Minister Weizman, full of remorse at having forbidden a preemptive attack, rushed home and ordered the IDF to launch a large-scale invasion of southern Lebanon, Operation Litani. Three days after the massacre, Israeli armor and paratroops crossed into Lebanon with the goal of killing as many PLO fighters as they could, destroying their bases in southern Lebanon, and pushing them north of the Litani River, some fifteen miles north of the Israeli border.

  The incursion achieved only a few of its objectives. Some three hundred PLO operatives were killed, their bases wrecked and arms depots seized. In addition, a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was set up and posted in the area, and a pro-Israel, mainly Christian militia, the Free Lebanese Army, was established. But with time, even all of these new forces could not prevent the firing of Katyusha rockets at Israel, or cross-border penetrations by PLO squads.

  Due to the fury engendered by the slaughter of civilians, Israeli soldiers also committed a few acts of killing prisoners and of looting during the weeklong Operation Litani. Once again, Israel sustained sharp international condemnation.

  Weizman understood that large-scale operations in Lebanon were out of the question. Mossad operations, meanwhile, required months of preparation: figuring out how to get into a target state under a cover identity, execute a hit, and get out without being discovered. So Weizman opted instead for precision raids and targeted killings by special-forces units—less complicated, faster, and requiring no cover story—undertaken by commandos in full combat gear. The division selected to carry out most of these missions was the naval commando unit, Flotilla 13.

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  THE MAN WEIZMAN PUT in charge of the operations in Lebanon was General Rafael “Raful” Eitan, who became chief of staff in April 1978. Eitan, a farmer and a carpenter, was a tough paratrooper who knew no fear during battle and a political hawk who “believed in taking the war against the PLO to the enemy’s rear, to harass them at their staging bases.”

  Eitan never saw himself bound by the rules of political correctness. Responding to rock throwing by Palestinians on the West Bank, he suggested to the Knesset that new Jewish settlements should be established there until the Arabs could only “run around like drugged bugs in a bottle.” One of his first moves as chief of staff was to pardon two convicted IDF criminals—Y., the POW interrogator under whose grilling a Palestinian terrorist suspect had died and another, who was involved in the Nairobi plot, was hospitalized, as well as Lieutenant Daniel Pinto, who had tortured and murdered two prisoners during Operation Litani, throwing their bodies into a well.

  A bearlike man of very few words, Eitan addressed the naval commandos at their base at Atlit shortly after taking over as chief of staff. “You, Flotilla 13, are like a priest’s balls,” he said. “Not used—but it’s nice that they’re there.” He paused for a moment and looked around to make sure everyone was smiling at his crude wisecrack. Then he became serious, cleared his throat, and delivered the main message: “All that is going to change.”

  Flotilla 13 was founded in late 1949 as a secret commando unit responsible for clandestine penetration and sabotage and targeted killing operations via the sea. The motto selected by the founders fit this spirit: “Like a bat out of the dark, like a blade slicing in silence, like a grenade shattering with a roar.” The unit’s insignia is a bat’s wings with the Israeli Navy emblem at the center. Its eighteen-month training program is as arduous as that of Sayeret Matkal, if not more so. Toward the end of it, recruits also undergo a hellish POW simulation.

  Between 1978 and 1980, Flotilla 13 carried out twenty-three raids against the PLO on Lebanese territory or at sea. In these operations, some 130 enemies were killed, hundreds were wounded, and stores of arms and ammunition were destroyed. Some of the attacks were aimed at wiping out entire terror squads preparing to attack inside Israel. Others targeted specific individuals, particularly Abu Jihad’s men.

  Under Eitan’s supervision, old rules of engagement began to bend. During the preliminary stages of the targeted killing of Abu Jihad’s senior operational commander, Azmi Zrair, who was responsible for many attacks against Israelis, including those at the Savoy Hotel and the Coastal Road, Rummenigge and his network of sources discovered that he operated out of the refugee camp at the port city of Tyre and regularly met an aide in a seaside café there.

  On August 5, 1980, commandos were to ride rubber dinghies to a point a kilometer from the beach, then swim underwater to the seawall, and from there use sniper rifles to take out Zrair and his aide. In a final briefing, Eitan ordered his men to booby-trap the seawall with a trip wire and an explosive device, in order to stop any attempt to chase the snipers and fire at them.

  Ami Ayalon, the commander of Flotilla 13, objected. “I said to him, ‘Chief, we will not leave booby traps,’ ” Ayalon recalled. “ ‘Kids might come along, or maybe a romantic couple.’ But Raful insisted. He didn’t even try to justify his order.”

  Then Eitan went further. “After you’ve killed Zrair,” he ordered, “spray the entire pier with your light machine guns, to make sure no one will return fire.”

  “I said to him, ‘Listen, where’s the logic here?’ ”Ayalon continued. “Who do we spray? All the civilians there? Why send us at all to pick off someone? Send in the air force. They’ll drop a one-ton bomb on the pier and it’ll all be over.’ ”

  Eitan’s orders didn’t matter in the end: On the day of the raid, IDF units on the border responded to rocket fire from Lebanon by shelling the Tyre refugee camp. Because of the panic there, no one went to the port for coffee.

  But the argument between Ayalon and Eitan was born of a new and problematic reality that Israel’s activity in Lebanon had created. When the Mossad targeted PLO personnel in Europe, it followed a strict policy of avoiding harm to innocent civilians. More than a few plans were dropped because civilians might have been endangered. But as long as the targets were located in enemy countries, and as long as the innocent civilians were Arabs, the finger on the trigger became quicker. Moreover, Mossad operations had to be approved by the prime minister, a civilian answerable to politics, who usually was involved to some extent in the planning. On the
other hand, only some of the IDF operations required approval at the political level, and only after they had already been hammered out inside the army. Even then, the approving authority was usually the defense minister, not the prime minister. Incursions into Lebanon were considered acts of war—and much more is permitted in war, particularly on Arab soil. The issue of collateral casualties became less important.

  The standards of conduct prevalent in corrupt and civil-war-torn Lebanon began to infect the Israelis, who went there to kill in order to protect their own citizens. Eitan presided over, and even encouraged, that trend. “Raful’s attitude was that it made no difference which Palestinians we killed in Lebanon—they either were terrorists or would become terrorists or they gave birth to terrorists,” said David Shiek, deputy commander of Flotilla 13 at the time. “Once, Raful joined us on the missile boat on the way to a raid and an officer asked him how we were supposed to identify the terrorists. Raful answered, ‘If they haven’t got [birthday party] balloons, they’re terrorists.’ ” Another former naval commando recalled an operation after which the IDF spokesman reported that “thirty terrorists were killed,” but in fact the raiders had hit a truck by mistake and many of its passengers were women and children.

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  IN ADDITION TO THE increasingly bloody commando operations, Weizman authorized Eitan to significantly step up the activities of intelligence units in Lebanon, particularly those of AMAN’s 504. But in the wildness that was Lebanon in the late 1970s, seemingly everything was permitted. On several occasions, 504 allowed its agents to kill people without the authorization—or even the knowledge—of the unit’s superiors. For example, in December 1978, an agent by the name of Muhammad Abdallah suspected that a certain man had seen him broadcasting to Israel. “The same night, that man died of natural causes by swallowing a pillow,” said Yair Ravid, who commanded the unit’s northern region. In yet another case, in July 1979, a Syrian operative named Qasim Harash threatened to expose Israeli agents. “We called a session of the special tribunal,” Ravid boasted, “with me as the judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel, and unanimously sentenced him to death, without the right of appeal.” A 504 agent code-named the Brazilian shot Harash dead. Agents from 504 brought his body to Israel and buried him in the cemetery for enemy dead, facedown, in a final jab of debasement.

  Israeli intelligence was establishing a permanent presence in Lebanon, both to gather information on Arafat and to destabilize the PLO. With Begin’s vigorous support, they forged a secret alliance with the Phalange, the militia of the Lebanese Maronite Christians, the Palestinians’ most bitter enemies. The Christians had their own sources, and they shared the information they gathered with Israel. Under the protection of the Phalange, the Mossad was also able to set up its own base close to Beirut, and IDF officers were able to conduct scouting parties throughout Lebanon, gathering important intelligence about the PLO and Syrian forces.

  However, this partnership came at a moral price. The Phalangists were exceptionally brutal, “a fundamentally corrupt gang of murderers that reminded me of a pack of wild dogs,” said Uzi Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s nephew and a commander of Sayeret Matkal at the time.

  They adorned their belts with ears severed from the people they killed, gruesome trophies of war. They boasted of the massacre they had carried out in the Palestinian refugee camp Tel al-Zaatar—the Hill of Thyme—in August 1976. “One thousand Palestinians in the ocean is pollution,” the Phalangists said, almost as a war slogan, “but five million Palestinians in the ocean is the solution.”

  The Phalangists didn’t limit their brutality to Palestinians. Their chief executioner, an Israeli-trained Maronite militant named Robert Hatem, said he personally killed or oversaw the killing of some three thousand people. The Phalangists had commandeered an old cow slaughterhouse in Beirut’s Karantina quarter, where prisoners were taken. “Almost no one who came there to be questioned left alive,” Hatem said. “We used to shoot them in the head and dump their bodies into lime pits—Syrians and Shiites and Palestinians and son-of-a-bitch officers of the Lebanese army. Everyone who wanted to kill us, we killed them first.”

  Hatem said that Mossad officers approved the killing of only a few prisoners, including four Iranian diplomats who were tortured before being shot and dumped in the pits. But the Phalangists’ wider rampage was clearly carried out with the strong backing of the Israelis.

  “At the outset of our relationship with them, I took a pill against nausea and carried on,” said Reuven Merhav, the Mossad official heading the unit that liaised with the Phalange. “Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and they really helped us against the PLO. But the more the days went by, I reached the conclusion that linking up with people like these could only lead to disaster.” Merhav left the Mossad as a protest against the continued relationship, but the agency’s strategic alliance with the Maronites only deepened.

  The leaders of the Phalange accurately gauged Begin’s sentimental nature and realized how to enlist his support. “Begin saw himself as the savior of the oppressed, a helper of people in distress,” said Mordechai Zippori, who had served under Begin in the Irgun and was a close friend of his since those days, becoming a senior IDF officer and deputy defense minister in Begin’s government. “He wasn’t really well versed in the history or the conduct of affairs in the Middle East, and he was convinced that the Phalangists were a Western Christian minority that the PLO wanted to annihilate. Just like he saw us, the Jews in Israel.”

  Zippori was the only politician in the administration to stand up to the Mossad and the IDF, and he tried to persuade them and Begin that “we must not be the Phalangists’ patrons and get embroiled in their conflicts.” But it was in vain. “The delights of the lavish banquets at Jounieh (where the Phalange HQ was situated) totally addled the judgment of the army brass.”

  Still, despite all the bodies eaten away in Hatem’s lime pits, the PLO’s various militias managed to consolidate their positions in southern Lebanon. They fired shells and rockets into Israeli communities along the border, and the IDF responded by bombarding Palestinian strongholds with artillery and from the air. During 1979, the two sides had settled into a rote and seemingly endless pattern of exchanging blow for blow.

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  ON APRIL 22, 1979, at close to midnight, a terror squad from the PLO-affiliated group headed by Abu Abbas landed in a rubber dinghy on the beach at Nahariya, an Israeli city seven miles south of the Lebanese border. One of its four members was Samir Kuntar, then sixteen and a half years old. After trying to break into a house and being frightened away by gunfire, and after killing a policeman who tried to arrest them, the four broke into the apartment of the Haran family and took the father, Danny, and his daughter Einat, four, as hostages. They dragged them to the beach, where soldiers and police had already deployed, and a firefight ensued. Kuntar shot Danny and then grabbed Einat by the hair and dashed her head, with all his might, against a rock, again and again, until she was dead.

  Danny’s wife, Smadar, hid in a crawl space in their apartment with their two-year-old daughter, Yael. Smadar covered the toddler’s mouth with her hand, to keep her from crying out and allowing the attackers to find them. “I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed,” she wrote in an article in The Washington Post, aimed at rousing the world’s awareness of the horrors of terrorism. “So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. ‘This is just like what happened to my mother,’ I thought.”

  In her panic, Smadar pressed too hard. She smothered her little girl.

  The head of the IDF’s Northern Command, Major General Avigdor “Yanosh” Ben-Gal, arrived at the scene shortly after the incident. He saw Einat’s shattered head, Yael’s lifeless body, and Smadar screaming with anguish after realiz
ing she had lost everything dear to her. “You cannot imagine the dimensions of the atrocity,” Ben-Gal said. At the funeral for Danny and his two children, Prime Minister Begin quoted a line from Israel’s national poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik: “Satan has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a little child.”

  The horrendous murder in Nahariya was to become yet another milestone in the degeneration of the conflict between Israel and the PLO into total warfare. Chief of staff Eitan gave Ben-Gal a simple order: “Kill them all,” meaning all members of the PLO and anyone connected to the organization in Lebanon.

  Such a policy had never been approved by the government of Israel. There is no way of knowing to what extent Defense Minister Weizman, who had once been a hawk but by this time was much more moderate, was aware of it. “We had a lot of disagreements about many current matters” was how Eitan described their relationship. “I was in favor of carrying out retaliatory actions against the terrorists in Lebanon. [Weizman] used to change his positions…in order to find favor and placate public opinion. Ezer simply didn’t understand the Arabs….Concessions to the Arabs are taken by them as a sign of weakness and weariness of the struggle….Ezer did not accept my opinion, and I didn’t accept his opinion.”

  With Eitan’s blessing, Ben-Gal appointed the man he called “the IDF’s top specialist in special ops,” the man who’d suppressed terrorism in Gaza ten years before, Meir Dagan, to head a new unit known as the South Lebanon Region (SLR). Dagan was promoted to colonel, and Ben-Gal took him to the summit of one of the hills overlooking the south of Lebanon. “From now on,” he told him, “you are emperor here. Do whatever you want to.”

  Ben-Gal and Eitan defined the goal for Dagan: to intimidate, to deter, to make it clear that Israel would be aggressive on offense, not merely reactive on defense. More specifically, the object of the covert activities during the first stage was to hit PLO bases throughout southern Lebanon, as well as the homes of residents who assisted the terrorists and gave them lodging before they set out on operations against Israel.