Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Arafat wanted to avenge the capture of Abu Sharah and his men, so he responded in kind. Two weeks later, on September 25, 1985, a Force 17 squad raided an Israeli yacht berthed in the marina at Larnaca, snatched three civilians, and demanded that their Palestinian comrades be released. But then, rather than wait for their demands to be answered, for no discernible reason, they instead murdered the three hostages and surrendered to the Cypriot authorities.

  “The bastards killed three Israelis in cold blood, shot them in the back of their necks,” a former cabinet minister said. “Of course, Israeli public opinion wouldn’t have tolerated it if we sat back with our arms folded.”

  An urgent meeting of the Israeli cabinet was called. At the urging of Defense Minister Rabin, Operation Wooden Leg—the assassination of Abu Jihad and Force 17 commander Abu Tayeb, and the bombardment of the Western Sector and Force 17 buildings in Tunis—was approved.

  The goal, as Rabin put it, was to make clear that “there is no immunity for any PLO element anywhere in the world. The long arm of the IDF will be able to reach and punish them. Israel will determine the manner of combat and the place of the attack, solely in accordance with its own considerations.”

  Only Ezer Weizman, a minister without portfolio in the cabinet and former commander of the Israeli Air Force, who would later be president of the state, was opposed. At the time, he was conducting secret unauthorized talks with the PLO. “[Jordan’s] King Hussein and [Egypt’s] President Hosni Mubarak are in the United States now,” he said at the cabinet meeting. “There is an effort under way to advance the peace process. The timing is wrong.”

  Peres responded with sarcasm: “And in a week or two weeks’ time, will the time be right?”

  Preparations for the attack began immediately, and on October 1, ten F-15 fighters flew to Tunis, armed with GBU-15 guided bombs. Also in the air were two Boeing 707 tankers, which would refuel the fighters twice. Another Boeing served as an airborne command, control, and communications post. Two Hawkeye spy planes were tasked with jamming radar installations in Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria.

  The F-15s dropped their bombs, then turned back toward Israel. All the targets were hit, including the principal objectives: the offices of the Western Sector Apparatus and Force 17. More than sixty PLO personnel and local Tunisian workers were killed, and seventy were wounded.

  “When we turned around to head back, there was a great feeling of release,” said one of the pilots. “I let out a huge roar in the cabin, to relieve my stress. Flying home was much more significant than usual. I saw the shores of Israel with different eyes. I was filled with elation that I’d never felt before.”

  Prime Minister Peres, speaking at a high school in southern Israel after the initial reports of the raid came out, said, “Terrorist headquarters are not immune. We have a right to attack them. Cold-blooded murderers cannot be allowed to get away with it. Every act of theirs has a guiding and organizing hand.”

  Yasser Arafat, who toured the wrecked buildings later that afternoon, used the opportunity to inflate the legend that his life was always saved by miracles. “I have been saved by a miracle from certain death,” he declared, in his theatrical manner. “I was on my way to my office in the headquarters at Hammam Chott, a quarter of an hour’s ride away. I told the driver to turn off the road and to head for another headquarters, and it was there that I heard about the raid. I picked up the phone and called Cairo and Amman. I said I had not been hit and was continuing to direct the struggle.”

  In fact, information in Israel’s possession had shown that he was not supposed to be at the site during the time of the raid. “We knew where Arafat’s residence was located, but we decided he wasn’t a target and we didn’t propose it to the government,” said Yoni Koren, of AMAN.

  Still, the general feeling of elation in Israel was mixed with some sour disappointment. None of the PLO’s commanders had been in their offices when the missiles struck. Abu Iyad, commander of Black September and initiator of the operation against the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, whose name was very high up on Israel’s hit list, even accompanied Arafat on his visit to the site, as if to spite the Israelis even more.

  Only one senior official, Nur Ali, was killed, and he was considered very moderate. Indeed, he’d actually been in touch with Israeli officials in secret negotiations over prisoner exchanges and was one of the PLO officials who had held secret contacts with Defense Minister Weizman. As for Abu Jihad, he had been at a meeting in his home, not very far away, and had heard the bombs exploding.

  The failure to eliminate more of the PLO leadership led the Mossad to initiate its own pinpoint operation. It began planning a “negative treatment”—a euphemism for targeted killings commonly used by the Mossad at the time—to be meted out in Tunis to Abu Jihad. For more than a year and a half, Caesarea explored a variety of plans and ideas, including targeting his home with remotely controlled missiles, selling a booby-trapped limousine to him through a double agent, and placing a sniper in the center of Tunis to shoot him on his way to work.

  All of these ideas were discarded, either because of the high risk of innocent civilians being killed in the attack or because of the risk to the operatives themselves. Tunisia was considered a “target country,” which demanded the most stringent safety precautions while Caesarea personnel operated there and meant that after the targeted killings, extricating the operatives involved would not be easy.

  Caesarea command eventually concluded that it would need the IDF’s firepower and transportation capabilities. The Mossad requested assistance from Sayeret Matkal and the naval commandos, just as it had done in Operation Spring of Youth, in Beirut in 1973. The Mossad turned to the head of AMAN, Major General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who was in charge of the Sayeret. He himself had commanded one of the Spring of Youth forces and afterward became a senior officer, known for his restraint and caution. He firmly opposed Sayeret’s involvement in the mission. He believed that the Mossad could and should execute the mission itself and that “there was no need to endanger so many soldiers.” In an interview a few months before he died, in 2013, Lipkin-Shahak said, “It was clear to me that we could do it, but I thought that a small Mossad force wouldn’t leave the footprint that a commando raid would, making it clear that Israel was behind it.”

  The plans for the assassination of Abu Jihad and the lingering question of whether the army would be involved caused a significant amount of tension between the IDF and the Mossad. The final decision could be made only by the politicians, but for the time being, Prime Minister Shamir and Defense Minister Rabin refrained from intervening.

  And then the whole paradigm shifted.

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  APPROXIMATELY 2.5 MILLION PALESTINIANS (no general census was conducted during that period) lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, having been under Israeli rule since 1967. Their frustration and bitterness had been growing steadily year after year. Israel had opened its gates to Palestinian workers, and some 40 percent of the workforce crossed the border every day to work in Israel, but only menial jobs were available, at exploitation wages and in difficult conditions. Palestinian construction laborers and dishwashers watched resentfully as Israelis thrived and reached an almost Western European level of economic prosperity.

  Inside the occupied territories themselves, unemployment grew, and there were few jobs available for those with higher education. The cities were intolerably overcrowded, and Israeli authorities did nothing to improve municipal services, nor did they provide land for building and agriculture to meet the needs of a burgeoning Palestinian population.

  Israel did, however, confiscate Palestinian lands and settle increasing numbers of its own citizens there, a blatant violation of international law. Many of these settlers were ideologically driven, believing in the idea that “Greater Israel” belonged to the Jews. Others were simply seeking a better standard of living and taking advan
tage of the heavily subsidized housing.

  After enduring these aggravations, wretched conditions, and visible injustices for years, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were on the verge of exploding. But this was something that Israeli intelligence either could not see or did not want to see. A longtime focus on pinpoint warfare against the PLO and its leaders had concealed the swelling rage of the Palestinian people from Israel’s intelligence community and its politicians. The Israelis’ tactical achievements and ability to locate and eliminate PLO leaders and militants nearly anywhere in the world had given them the sense that Israel could forever impose its rule over the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories without consequence.

  Israeli intelligence had also overlooked another dramatic development: A young, vibrant, and charismatic leadership stratum had evolved in “occupied Palestine” and was functioning independently and separately from Arafat, Abu Jihad, and the PLO command. A large majority in the West Bank and Gaza supported the PLO’s spectacular acts of terrorism, but many were also finding those theatrical displays of violence to be less and less relevant to their everyday problems. Arafat was still seen as the father of the nation, but his actions, especially those now undertaken from distant Tunis, did not appear likely to bring about the independence that he had promised anytime soon.

  Then came a spark.

  On October 4, 1987, five dangerous terrorists belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) escaped from the IDF’s Gaza prison. Two days later, the Shin Bet, with the help of local agents it was running in Gaza, located the terrorists in a hideout apartment in the Sejayieh neighborhood. A team from the agency’s Birds unit, disguised as Arabs, kept the apartment under observation. Nearby, special forces of the YAMAM, the police counterterror unit, prepared to act, under the command of David Tzur. “The Shin Bet guys saw them getting into two Peugeot 404 cars, one white, the other light blue, heavily armed, and driving off. We tailed them, and the moment they spotted us, they opened fire. Next to the soccer field, we caught up.” Four of the terrorists were killed by the first volley fired by the YAMAM. A fifth man, who escaped from the vehicles, was shot later. A Birds operative, Victor Arzuan, was also killed in the exchange of fire.

  The funerals for the five Palestinians turned into a stormy demonstration. Protesters shouted in the streets that the five had been murdered. The rioting was more violent than anything the IDF had witnessed in the occupied territories thus far.

  “From an operational point of view,” said Tzur, who was later to become a deputy commissioner in the Israeli police and chief of the Tel Aviv region, the location and liquidation of the five terrorists “was a clear-cut success for the YAMAM.” But Tzur also admitted that this tactical accomplishment, and others like it over the years, had blinded Israeli intelligence from seeing the big picture and made them “miss the dramatic development that was about to take place.” Even the violent funerals were not perceived as being more than localized outbursts of anger.

  Then, on December 8, the driver of an IDF tank carrier lost control and crashed into a line of cars carrying Palestinians on their way back into the Gaza Strip from work in Israel. Four were killed, and seven injured. The fallacious rumor soon spread that the accident was actually an intentional Israeli act of revenge for the fatal stabbing of an Israeli two days before. The funerals of the dead workers once again became mass protests.

  A wave of demonstrations swept across the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987, marking the start of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, the Intifada. The Shin Bet, the IDF, and the government were stunned and “for weeks failed to grasp the significance of the protests, so much so that it did not even occur to Defense Minister Rabin, when they began, that he should curtail a trip abroad and come back to Israel,” says the PM’s military secretary, General Nevo.

  The IDF had believed for years that it could control the Palestinians with minimal forces. But when rioting mobs hurled rocks at small detachments of soldiers, who had no crowd dispersal equipment or protective gear, the soldiers responded with gunfire. More than a thousand Palestinians were killed, many more were wounded, and Israel’s international standing took a nosedive. Each evening, the world saw on TV how the Israeli troops aggressively suppressed masses of Palestinians demanding political independence and an end to occupation. The underdog equation had reversed completely: Israel was now Goliath, and the Palestinian Arabs, in the eyes of the international community, were now David, with his slingshot and stones. “The Intifada,” said then–Mossad director Nahum Admoni, “caused us a lot more political harm, damage to our image, than everything that the PLO had succeeded in doing throughout its existence.”

  Lacking an adequate response to the uprising, and without a real understanding of its causes, Israel once again turned to the weapon it was so familiar with, and which many believed could change the course of history: targeted killings. Abu Jihad, who’d already survived repeated Israeli attempts on his life, was once again the primary target. Partly that was because of his own boasting. In an interview on Radio Monte Carlo in January 1988, he claimed to have given the order to start the Intifada. The PLO reiterated this in some of its publications. The Arab world applauded. Israel’s political leadership accepted his declarations as the absolute truth. The heads of the intelligence community acknowledged, or at least did not contradict, their authenticity.

  But Abu Jihad was lying. Neither he nor Arafat had given any order for the commencement of the Intifada. It had surprised them just as it surprised Israeli intelligence. In truth, it was a popular uprising, and it was young men in their late teens and early twenties, acting independently from the leaders in Tunis, who ignited the flame. But the facts of the matter did not interest the heads of the PLO, the Arabic media, or Israeli intelligence.

  Moreover, that overeagerly accepted “truth,” however misconceived, was an attractive one for the Israelis. If the uprising was caused by discontent built up among the Palestinian population in the occupied territories over long years of arbitrary military rule and Israeli encroachment on their land, its root causes would have to be addressed. If it was all a PLO plot, it could be brought to an end simply by killing the man behind it.

  After the Intifada broke out, Defense Minister Rabin ordered the IDF to give the Mossad all the assistance it required to plan Abu Jihad’s assassination. AMAN chief Lipkin-Shahak was “still not convinced that such a large and complex operation was necessary,” but he grasped that the political circumstances had changed and he withdrew his objections, at least during the planning and training stages.

  Meanwhile, Abu Jihad and Arafat tried to ride the wave of international sympathy that the uprising generated. While covert preparations for the raid on Abu Jihad’s home in Tunis were under way, he and Arafat initiated their own clandestine operation, a clever public relations exercise. They called it the “Ship of Return” operation. The idea was to sail a vessel into Haifa carrying 135 Palestinian deportees from Israeli-controlled areas, and also as many journalists and camera crews as would accept the invitation to cover the voyage and its dramatic ending. The PLO leaders wanted the voyage of the “Ship of Return” to look like that of the Exodus, the well-known steamer that illegally carried Jewish immigrants to British Mandatory Palestine back in 1947. Fatah tried to keep the plans a secret until the last minute but failed, and the Mossad received real-time notification. The Palestinians had chartered a ship in Piraeus, but the ship’s owners canceled after Israel warned them that if they let the project go ahead, their ships would never be allowed to berth in Israel again. Instead the PLO purchased a Japanese-built ferry ship named the Sol Phryne in Cyprus for $600,000.

  An urgent meeting of the Israeli cabinet was called to discuss the subject, and they approved a joint IDF-Mossad clandestine operation to block the Sol Phryne, “even before it could sail from Limassol port.” The hope was that thwarting the plan and killing its participants “would p
roduce a sense of despair in the Palestinian leadership, a reduction in the media coverage in the occupied territories, and deal a blow to the motivation for continuing the Intifada,” said one of the ministers who took part in the meeting.

  On the morning of February 15, 1988, three of the PLO activists who had been sent by Abu Jihad to Cyprus to organize the voyage of the Ship of Return got into their car, not far from the hotel where they were staying. “Rover,” chief of Bayonet, and Eli were sitting in another car, watching them, after many tense hours of surveillance, during which the local police almost caught the Israelis. When the three Palestinians got into their vehicle and started it, Eli pushed a button, detonating another of his bombs. The three Palestinians were killed.

  Eighteen hours later, naval commandos dived under the Sol Phryne and attached a small limpet mine to its hull. It blew a hole in the side of the vessel, which began to sink. The voyage of the Ship of Return—the Palestinian Exodus—was over before it could begin. “Listen, history plays strange games,” said Yoav Galant, commander of the naval commandos, as he climbed, dripping, from the Black Sea at 3 A.M. onto the Israeli missile boat waiting for him. He was referring to the voyage by his own mother, Fruma, in the original Exodus many years before.

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  ON MARCH 14, THE Israeli security cabinet under Prime Minister Shamir met again to discuss the killing of Abu Jihad. The prior approval of his elimination by various prime ministers over the years, including Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin, was not valid under a different premier. And even if the same man was heading the government, the security forces would still have to seek renewed approval if much time had gone by, because it was possible that the political circumstances had changed or the prime minister had changed his mind. Approval had to be given immediately before a targeted killing was carried out, the moment that operational readiness was reached, even if it had been green-lighted some time before.