Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Ivri still felt a pang of doubt. He told his aide to contact the Mossad and demand that they activate more means of making sure that Arafat was on the plane. He wasn’t showing any emotion, as was usual with him. “But we could see he was very worried,” said one of his subordinates who was there.

  Ivri needed to buy time. He knew that pilots could be overeager, that sometimes they’ll look for a reason to fire upon a target, interpreting a burst of radio static as an affirmative to shoot, for instance. He needed to calm twitchy trigger fingers. “Hold your fire,” he reminded his pilots over the radio. “If there’s no radio contact, do not open fire.”

  Sharon and Eitan weren’t in the bunker, but Eitan kept on calling Ivri to find out what was happening and to see whether the order to shoot down the plane had been given. Ivri gave the same reply each time: “Raful, we do not yet have positive confirmation that it is him.” This despite the fact that the Mossad had in fact already confirmed and then reconfirmed a positive identification.

  Separately, Ivri told AMAN and the Mossad that the visual identification was insufficient and he demanded yet another cross-checked confirmation that Arafat was on the plane.

  The F-15s’ radar screens picked up the blip of the Buffalo 370 miles into Mediterranean airspace. The fighters closed rapidly and flew tight circles around the lumbering target. They read the tail number, saw the blue and brown markings. They were positive they’d found the right plane.

  The lead pilot keyed his radio. “Do we have permission to engage?”

  Ivri, in the Canary bunker, knew that, by all accounts, the answer should be yes. His fighters had a positive visual ID and a clear shot in open skies over empty ocean. Their job—his job—was to eliminate targets, not select them.

  But Ivri’s doubts overcame him. “Negative,” he answered the fighter pilot on the radio. “I repeat: negative on opening fire.”

  He was still stalling for time, but he knew he couldn’t do so for much longer. His justification for delaying the attack—that he was waiting for additional information from the Mossad and AMAN—was weakening in the face of a chief of staff directly demanding over the phone that he give the attack order. Ivri understood that if he didn’t do so very soon, he would have to explain why to Eitan and, more troublingly, to Sharon.

  Tension was heightening in Canary. The minutes dragged on.

  And then, five minutes before five o’clock, only twenty-five minutes after the fighters took off, a phone jangled in Canary. It was the encrypted line connected directly to the Mossed. “Doubts have arisen,” the voice on the line said with embarrassment. It was the same intelligence officer who’d previously confirmed that Arafat had been identified as he boarded the aircraft.

  The Mossad had other sources who insisted that Arafat had been nowhere near Greece, and that the man on the plane couldn’t possibly be him.

  In the absence of another order, the pair of F-15s continued to circle the Buffalo. Ivri picked up the handset again and repeated his orders. “We’re waiting for more information. Keep eyes on the target and wait.”

  At 5:23, another report came in to Canary. Sources from the Mossad and AMAN said the man on the Buffalo was Fathi Arafat, Yasser Arafat’s younger brother. He was a physician and the founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent. On the plane with him were thirty wounded Palestinian children, some of them victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Fathi Arafat was escorting them to Cairo for medical treatment.

  Ivri breathed a sigh of relief. He keyed the radio. “Turn around. You’re coming home,” he ordered.

  —

  EVEN THIS NEAR DISASTER—COMING within one jittery pilot’s finger of murdering a doctor and thirty wounded children—did not weaken Sharon’s hand or dissuade him from the idea of targeting Arafat in the air. In fact, he became even more reckless. When the Mossad reported that Arafat was flying more commercial flights, with the PLO often buying up the entire first-class or business-class cabin for him and his aides, Sharon decided that one of those would make a legitimate target.

  He ordered Eitan, the air force, and the operations branch to come up with a plan to shoot down a civilian jetliner.

  Sharon sketched out the broad parameters. The flight would have to be shot down over the open sea, far from the coast, so that it would take investigators a long time to find the wreckage and establish whether it had been hit by a missile or had crashed due to engine failure. Deep water would be preferable, to make recovery even more difficult.

  Aviem Sella couldn’t believe his ears. “It was a direct and clear order from him: Shoot the plane down,” he said. “I had no problem with killing Arafat, who deserved to die, in my opinion. The problem was with shooting down a civilian airliner with innocent passengers aboard. That is a war crime.”

  In contrast to his brutal image, Eitan was a very cautious man politically, and it was evident that he did not want to be involved in such an adventure, Sella said. “But Sharon was so domineering that no one could stand up to him.”

  The air force drew up a detailed plan to shoot down an airliner. Its representatives at the Goldfish forum explained that they had chosen a precise spot on the commercial air route across the Mediterranean, one where there was no continuous radar coverage by any nation and where the sea below was a daunting three miles deep. A salvage operation there would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, with the technology of the time. This complex plan set strict parameters for where the Israeli aircraft could shoot down Arafat’s plane undetected, which meant there would be a fairly narrow window of opportunity for executing the attack.

  Because the operation would take place far from Israeli airspace, beyond Israel’s radar and radio range, the air force had to set up an airborne command post, in the form of a Boeing 707 fitted with radar and communications equipment. Sella would command the operation from this aircraft.

  Under Sharon’s direct orders, then, surveillance of Arafat was maintained continuously, and four F-16 and F-15 fighters at the Ramat David air force base were placed on interception alert. Over the course of nine weeks, from November 1982 to early January 1983, these planes scrambled at least five times to intercept and destroy airliners believed to be carrying Arafat, only to be called back soon after takeoff.

  General Gilboa expressed his sharp opposition to these operations time and again. “It was clear to me that the air force would execute it as well as could be, and the plane would vanish forever. They do what they are told, and if you give them an order to build a pipeline to move blood from Haifa to the Negev, they’ll do it excellently and won’t for a moment ask whose blood it is, but I had additional responsibility.”

  As head of AMAN research, it was Gilboa’s job to evaluate the political impact of each operation. “I told chief of staff Eitan that it could ruin the state internationally if it were known that we downed a civilian airliner.”

  On one occasion, with a commercial plane believed to be carrying Arafat from Amman to Tunisia over the Mediterranean, and the Israeli jets closing in, Eitan asked Gilboa if he thought their target was definitely on the plane. The two were standing in the central space inside Canary.

  “Chief of staff, do you really want to hear what I think?” said Gilboa. Eitan nodded.

  Gilboa could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He stalled, elaborating all the many reasons for believing Arafat might be on the plane, then enumerating all the many reasons to doubt he was on the plane.

  Eitan grew impatient. “Gilboa,” he barked. “Yes or no?”

  “My gut feeling,” Gilboa said, “is that he isn’t on the plane.”

  Eitan turned around and went to the red encrypted phone at the side of the room. “Arik,” he said to the defense minister, waiting impatiently in his office, “the answer’s negative. We’ll have to wait for another day.”

  —

  THERE IS A LESSON taught in IDF tra
ining—a lesson so important that the basics are mandatory for every recruit, and the details are a critical part of the officer training program as well. The lesson dates back to October 29, 1956, when an Israeli Border Police unit, ostensibly enforcing a curfew in the village of Kafr Qasim, rounded up a large group of residents as they were returning from work. Then they shot them. They killed forty-three people, including nine women and seventeen children. The policemen claimed they were obeying an order to shoot curfew breakers, but Judge Benjamin Halevy, in one of Israel’s most important judicial rulings, said that soldiers must not obey an order that is clearly illegal. “The distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order,” Halevy wrote, “is that above such an order should fly, like a black flag, a warning saying: ‘Prohibited!’ Not merely formally illegal, not covered up or partly covered…but an illegality that stabs the eye and infuriates the heart, if the eye is not blind and the heart is not obtuse or corrupt.”

  This lesson, ingrained in every soldier, was undoubtedly one of the only reasons that a war crime was not committed, despite the fact that on five different occasions, F-16 and F-15 fighters were called upon to intercept and destroy commercial airliners carrying Arafat. Indeed, the air force command intentionally obstructed these operations, refusing to obey orders that they believed to be manifestly illegal. “When we received the order,” Sella said, “I went with Ivri to see Eitan. I told him, ‘Chief of staff, we do not intend to carry this out. It simply will not happen. I understand that the minister of defense is dominant here. No one dares to stand up to him, and therefore we will make it technically impossible.’ Raful looked at me and never said anything. I took his silence as consent.”

  On each of the five occasions, Israeli planes identified their target over the sea, Sella said, but the mission was sabotaged. Once, the radios on the flying command post, the air force Boeing 707, were silenced by being set to the wrong frequencies, blacking out communications long enough to make the whole operation impossible. A second time, Gilboa determined at the last minute that there wasn’t enough evidence that Arafat was on the target plane. A third time, Sella informed Eitan, falsely, that the target plane had been identified too late and there was a danger that the interception would be detected by a nearby maritime nation. On the other occasions, “we simply drew the time out until the plane had left the zones in which it would have been possible to hit them without discerning what had happened.”

  In the end, though, Sharon’s plans for an intentional war crime were finally derailed by his past unscrupulousness. Under intense pressure from the Israeli public and after heavy international criticism, Begin was compelled to establish a judicial inquiry into the massacre at the Beirut refugee camps. It was headed by the president of the Supreme Court, Justice Yitzhak Kahan, but the real force behind it was Aharon Barak, the opinionated and conscience-driven attorney general who had blocked the killing of the Nairobi terrorists and had since been appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court. For three months, the panel heard evidence from all the Israelis involved and pored over thousands of documents.

  This inquiry and its hearings made the first cracks in Sharon’s monolithic power. After listening to Barak’s penetrating questions, it didn’t take long for the chiefs of the defense and intelligence communities to understand that their careers were also on the line. They quickly hired attorneys, who then instructed their clients to lay the blame at someone else’s door. The commission soon became a spectacle of mutual recrimination.

  The Kahan Commission published its findings and recommendations on February 7, 1983. The Phalange was found to be directly responsible for the massacre, but the commission ruled that some Israelis had to be held accountable as well: “It is our opinion that a fear of a massacre in the camps if the Phalange’s armed forces were introduced there…should have been aroused in anyone who had anything to do with what was happening in Beirut.” The commission found that Prime Minister Begin had “a certain degree of responsibility,” but it placed most of the blame on Defense Minister Sharon, chief of staff Eitan, and AMAN chief Saguy, along with some other senior officers and Mossad director Admoni. The commission recommended that Sharon be dismissed immediately.

  Sharon refused to resign, so Begin and his ministers fired him.

  Then, on September 15, 1983, Begin himself, stricken by anguish and sorrow, resigned the premiership and was replaced by Yitzhak Shamir.

  For the time being, the hunt for Arafat was called off. The fallout from Sharon’s relentless hunt for him, and the enormous collateral damage that hunt created, had raised Arafat’s stature even further. Arafat was now a man of international prominence and prestige. Much of the world now considered him a statesman rather than a simple terrorist. “Gradually,” Gilboa said, “the awareness grew that Arafat was a political matter, and he must not be seen as a target for assassination.”

  “Of course,” Gilboa continued, “everyone under him in his organization was an entirely different matter.”

  TRAVELING SOUTH FROM TEL Aviv to Ashkelon on Route 4, a driver moves along a thirty-two-mile two-lane major highway, the green Mediterranean scenery gradually giving way to sparser vegetation as the Negev Desert approaches. Route 4 runs parallel to the Mediterranean coastline, past the site of the ancient Philistine city of Ashdod, where the Israelis have built a new port city. Much of the sand-dune scenery that once dominated the terrain is now developed, all the way down to the Gaza Strip.

  On April 12, 1984, at 6:20 P.M., a bus set out to Ashkelon from Tel Aviv’s central terminus. There were forty-four passengers, among them four Palestinians, sitting apart from one another and pretending not to know each other, concealing their nervousness as they prepared to hijack the bus to Gaza and take the passengers hostage.

  These were difficult days for Israel. The country was still licking its wounds from the war in Lebanon, and still occupying part of that country. More and more soldiers were coming back in body bags, victims of the frequent clashes with guerrillas there. Inside Israel as well, violence reigned. On April 2, three terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who had entered Israel as tourists, opened fire with submachine guns and grenades in a busy street in central Jerusalem, wounding forty-eight people, one of whom died later. They were stopped only thanks to action taken by armed civilians. There were also acts of Jewish terrorism against Arabs. Right-wing extremists attacked Palestinian mayors, burned houses, and plotted to blow up five crowded buses. The Shin Bet caught them just before they carried out the latter attack.

  The four young Arab terrorists on Bus 300 had been caught up in this maelstrom of violence. They were from the Khan Yunis area in Gaza. Their leader, twenty-year-old Jamal Mahmoud Qabalan, was the oldest son in a family of sixteen. He had borne the burden of their livelihood since their father died, working as a dishwasher in various Tel Aviv restaurants. He had also served a year in an Israeli prison for minor terrorism infractions. His three companions were Muhammad Baraka, nineteen, and two cousins, Majdi and Subhi Abu Jumaa, both high school students less than eighteen years old. Qabalan had persuaded them to join him in the hijacking, which he hoped would stir wide international resonance. But beyond their nationalistic zeal, they had no links with any organization, nor any firearms apart from a lone hand grenade. Instead they carried knives, a bottle of yellowish liquid that looked as if it might be acid or some flammable substance, and an attaché case with some wires protruding, which was in fact nothing more than that, although they told their hostages it contained a bomb made up of two RPG rockets.

  Forty minutes out of Tel Aviv, when the bus reached the Ashdod junction, a passenger spotted the knife that one of the Arabs was carrying. He asked the driver to stop, pretending he was sick and wanted to throw up. As he got off the bus, he shouted “Terrorists!” and jumped out. The four realized they had been made, and Qabalan ran to the driver, pressed his knife to his throat, and ordered him in Hebrew to “Go—fast
.”

  The passenger who had gotten away called the police, who placed roadblocks along the bus’s route, but the bus sped through all of them. It reached a spot near Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip, where security forces managed to puncture its tires and bring it to a stop against a stone wall. Some of the passengers were wounded by the gunfire. Their shouts mingled with those of the other hostages and the hijackers. The driver jumped out and yelled to the passengers to do the same. Some succeeded, but then Qabalan closed the doors, and most were trapped inside.

  Soon the bus was surrounded by soldiers and special forces, as well as senior IDF officers and top Shin Bet personnel. The media also arrived in force at the scene, as did a swarm of curious onlookers. Qabalan shouted out that he would free the hostages only when five hundred Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails.

  Conducting the negotiation was the Shin Bet’s senior expert on Arab affairs, Nahman Tal. He soon realized who he was dealing with. As he declared in a later testimony, “Right away I understood that they were not serious people and they did not constitute a danger.” Ehud Barak, then chief of military intelligence, got the impression that if the Shin Bet managed to draw out the negotiations for another few hours, “the hijackers would agree to let the hostages go in exchange for some sandwiches.”

  Nevertheless, the Israelis still felt that if it was possible to free all the hostages immediately using force, there should be no negotiations. At 4:43 A.M., the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Levy, who was on the scene, ordered Sayeret Matkal to storm the bus. A sniper immediately took out Qabalan, who was standing at the front of the bus, and he fell, dead, onto the steering wheel, sounding the vehicle’s horn. The Sayeret fire also killed a young woman passenger. The soldiers also shot Baraka dead and found the Abu Jumaa cousins hiding among the passengers. At first, the commander of the Sayeret, Shai Avital, ordered that they be killed, but when he realized they were not dangerous, he rescinded the order immediately, “because, fuck it, I saw that from the moment the fighting was over, they were prisoners of war and it was forbidden to kill them.”