Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  By the time the drama was over, there were 34 Israelis dead and 72 wounded. Two of the Palestinian attackers survived. Their task, as fighting members of al-Fatah, their interrogators were later told, was to penetrate Israeli defences, take civilian hostages and attempt to free Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons.

  An even more bizarre incident took place six months later, when the Israeli Navy managed to stymie a massacre that the terrorists had hoped would make international news. A squad of seven Arabs manned the Agios Dimitrios, a modest-sized Greek coaster, which had several tons of high-explosives stacked on deck. It was intended that the charge be detonated in the Sinai port of Eilat.

  Motor vessel Ginan, one of several acquired by the PLO on the European market. They would use them to try to smuggle weapons into Gaza and, in several notable instances, attempt to detonate them at the approaches to an Israeli harbour while primed with tons of explosives. (Official IDF Photo)

  The insurgents hoped initially to hit the harbour with 122mm rockets and then ram the ship into the quay before setting off the main charge. It was discovered afterwards that there was enough TNT to destroy much of the city and clearly, had they been successful, the loss of life would have been enormous.

  About the same time the Israeli Navy captured another cargo ship, the Ginan, a Palestinian-owned mother ship from which al-Fatah intended to launch amphibious raids along the Israeli coast. A relatively small craft, she’d set out on her mission from the Lebanese port of Tripoli, north of Beirut.

  A month later the Stephanie arrived off the Israeli coast. It too was intercepted by a Dabur and another attack was averted. This time an al-Fatah team admitted having been sent by Abu Jihad, head of the military wing of al-Fatah, then opposed to the relatively ‘moderate’ Yasser Arafat. In this strike, a quartet of enemy combatants did get through. They entered Israeli waters in a rubber dinghy and disembarked at Nahariya on 22 April 1979, where they killed a father and his daughter as well as an Israeli policeman.

  The significant message that emerged from these attacks was that drastic situations involving security demanded drastic action, even if it meant cutting off the maritime approaches to Lebanon. Israel has been doing that for decades. Usually, a period of intense naval activity follows an attack, warnings are issued that the situation will be repeated if there is no let up and eventually, the Israelis withdraw. Until next time.

  As fundamentally unstable as the Eastern Mediterranean may sometimes be, the IDF has achieved a fair degree of control over the region, though as we all know, there is little in modern warfare that is iron clad. During the summer invasion of 2006, Hizbollah combatants targeted an Israeli warship that had crept too close to the shore and was bombarding Hizbollah shore positions. The ship was hit by a missile that set in on fire and almost sank it.

  With a variety of assets that include patrol planes, drones, satellite tracking as well as above-and-below water monitoring, Jerusalem has been able to maintain a reasonably effective security presence. For all that, the occasional attacker or group of them still manages to get through…

  Leaving Sidon harbour behind us at sunset, our Dabur gunboat continued on its patrol. A few miles out, the crew test-fired all weapons onboard. (Author’s collection)

  During Israel’s infamous Operation Grapes of Wrath, which sent the IDF into Southern Lebanon with a powerful series of armoured columns, the Israeli Navy blockaded all Lebanese ports. That measure had a direct bearing on subsequent discussions which, while not leading to anything substantive, did result in curtailment measures being implemented by the Beirut government.

  Security measures were not easy to maintain then, nor are they now, especially since there is regular sea traffic between Israel, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Greece, Egypt and all points in-between. Less than halfan-hour’s flight out of Ben Gurion Airport lies the Suez Canal, one of the busiest waterways on the globe. Minor ancillary matters also warrant consideration; Israel has undertaken not to interfere with the livelihood of hundreds of Lebanese who work legally off the coast, fishing, trading or sponge-diving.

  With the Suez Canal, the Israeli intelligence machine needs to cope with thousands of ships, large and small, that pass through the strategic channel each year. In the case of the Agios Dimitrios, there was good evidence that Israeli agents had been watching the ship long before she sailed from Syria. She’d called at several Mediterranean ports, including one in Greece, before she made her way south through the canal and into the Gulf of Eilat.

  The Agios Dimitrios was destroyed by long-range naval gunfire halfway up the narrow waterway and everyone on board was killed.

  The first interception by our Dabur took place not long after dark that first night at sea. Roughly five or eight clicks off the Lebanese coast, the men were called to action stations.

  By the time George and I had hauled ourselves on deck, the covers of the 20mm cannon had been removed, the Brownings shuffled up from below and all were manned. The rest of the crew took up positions along the gunwales armed with Galils, the standard IDF infantry weapon.

  A flare pistol and a bunch of grenades were placed within easy reach of Lieutenant Motti on the bridge. ‘I’ve used them before’, he disclosed. His mind was clearly elsewhere so we didn’t press for details.

  About a cable-length from a small, unlit boat, a searchlight on board the gunboat was switched on. We recognized the distinctive lines of one of the many fishing smacks that regularly line the sea wall at Tyre. At this point the lieutenant ordered that the Dabur’s engines be stopped, removed a loud-hailer from a position alongside where he stood and, in fluent Arabic, addressed the crew of the boat, by now only a short distance away.

  Nowadays, Israeli ships don’t come under fire as often as they did in the past. Naval gunboats are bigger and better equipped for trouble. In 1985 the Daburs were fired on several times a year, sometimes by offshore batteries manned either by Druze or Amal forces. One of these modest-sized patrol boats was hit by RPG-7 fire, which meant that it was less than 1,000 yards from the shore because the rocket selfdestructs at that range. A few years later, a Dabur came under accurate shore-based artillery fire and took heavy casualties. The shelling stopped when the batteries were rocketed by Israeli Air Force jets.

  The boat we’d stopped that night was clean. The men answered the usual questions and lifted their nets from the water for inspection and were allowed to continue. More interceptions were made before midnight.

  Motti’s orders in the event of hostile action were clear. He had the authority to return fire. If taking incoming, there was no need to request permission to retaliate. Air support was a constant on all operations and available night or day. In that heady period, with the IDF dominant in these waters, it very rarely came to that.

  The crew on board the boat with us were a mixed bunch, and the skipper was the only regular. The rest were doing their compulsory 30-days a year and were from diverse backgrounds.

  The engineer, for instance, was a plumber. The first officer (the equivalent of a petty officer in British or American navies) was an architect. The rest included a cab-driver, two medical orderlies, a store assistant, a graduate student and one crew member without regular work. Their commander was the youngest of the lot, but they listened and trusted him and there was never a quibble when orders were issued.

  ‘If somebody fires at us from a small boat and there are women and children on board, do you shoot back?’ my cameraman asked. De’ath was known for his outspoken ‘liberal’ leanings, which had several times got him into trouble in his native South Africa. ‘I won’t answer that’, Motti said. ‘You ask the others what they would do.’

  He had evidently been primed for that question by the Spokesman’s Office. Later, speaking to the crew, we were left in no doubt how they would react. Most had lost kin in one or other of the wars in the Middle East and they wouldn’t hesitate to blow up a boatload of guerrillas who sheltered behind hostages; kids or no kids.

  ‘Even if it
meant killing everybody on the boat?’ was George’s retort.

  ‘It would be better than the suicide bombing of our own people if we didn’t stop these animals here, at sea, where they can do no harm except to us. That’s why we’re here.’ This came from the plumber, as forthright with his own questions to us as his answers. He seemed to be enjoying his month away from home and his family of five.

  What was interesting about the Dabur crew was that every man onboard had been cross-trained. Lieutenant Motti commented: ‘We haven’t got space for specialists, so each member who serves on a Dabur must be able to do the work of at least four should any of the others be wounded.’ The same applied to him, he disclosed. If he were incapacitated, there was always somebody who could take his place. Training in the Israeli Navy, as we were to see, made for efficient crews. Additionally, they could use each others’ weapons and, if needed, run the ship for long enough to get replacements. Anyway, he explained, the gunboats rarely ventured far from home and it was not often that they worked alone.

  Motti reckoned he could probably have another gunboat come to his aid in less than hour. ‘They’re out there’, he disclosed, ‘just beyond the horizon.’

  Everybody on board had also been comprehensively trained in signals procedures. His men could identify the ships of all navies together with their respective aircraft, whether operational in the Mediterranean or not. They could distinguish between an October-class patrol-boat of the Egyptian Navy and similar vessels in French or Syrian naval service, some of which had earlier been reported active off Tripoli, to the north of Beirut.

  Early on the morning of the third day at sea we headed into Sidon harbour for a break that would last until nightfall. We might have gone in again, but the patrol boat was sniped at while leaving port.

  Although there were IDF forces in the city at the time, the Israelis enjoyed only a tenuous hold on the town. Also, there had been several suicide bomb attacks and quite a few Israelis had been killed.

  I’d actually passed through Sidon not long before a car bomb had demolished the regional Israeli headquarters building there and scores of people had been killed. A massive cache of explosives had been secreted in the ground floor of a building and cleverly cemented over before the first Israeli units arrived on their way north towards Beirut. The explosives were command-detonated some days after a headquarters detachment had moved in.

  In Tyre things weren’t nearly as bad. Though there was somebody targeting the gunboat from one of the pock-marked buildings near the mosque, his aim was poor. On that July early evening, we were the only boat setting out to sea and probably presented an easy target; there were two shots which broke the silence just before the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. One ricocheted off the bows, the other missed us altogether.

  There was another rifle shot soon afterwards, but by then we were a third of a mile or so out to sea. Meanwhile, some Israeli troops on shore had retaliated and we continued into the setting sun.

  Motti quipped: ‘We get sniped. Often. There’s not much we can do. They fire their guns, then they disappear into the old town … they’re not very good as marksmen go … or possibly they’re markswomen.’

  Meanwhile, in Lebanese waters, we enjoyed a relatively tranquil patrol. In Sidon, Motti even put out his rubber duck inflatable boat and we were able to circle the harbour several times, more in search of good fishing than much else. We were below decks again before noon to avoid the heat.

  From the boat, we could see that the town had taken a hammering, almost all of it during the invasion. Several ships had been sunk in the harbour by Israeli jets; their masts protruding untidily above the surface. Lieutenant Motti used them as markers, as did some of the troops ashore. Not all of these wrecks had been removed by the time I returned in 1996.

  ‘Could we go ashore?’ George De’Ath asked.

  ‘Not a good idea’, said the captain. ‘You’d need an escort. I have no men to spare.’ We left it at that.

  From where we were moored we could see something of the security problems that Sidon presented. When the Israelis finally decided to pull out of Lebanon, the soldiers based in all three Lebanese ports were glad to be out of there.

  Sidon, in particular – which dates from Phoenician times – was a warren of narrow alleys, bunker tunnels and strongpoints. Every vantage point was dominated by half a dozen hills that overlooked that venerable old settlement that today plays host to one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps along the Mediterranean. Those who had targeted us were probably among thousands who were waiting for just such an opportunity.

  They were to get a lot of practice by the time the Israeli government pulled its forces back in the mid-1980s. And still more when Jerusalem decided to go in after Hizbollah guerrillas in the summer of 2006.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Israel’s Border Wars

  ‘If as a result of the war in Lebanon, we replace [Palestinian] terrorism in Southern Lebanon with Shi’ite terrorism, we have done the worst [thing] in our struggle against terrorism. In 20 years of PLO [activity] no one PLO terrorist ever made himself into a live bomb.’

  President Yitzak Rabin while still Israel’s Defence Minister in 1985

  AFTER THE ISRAELI INVASION OF Lebanon in 1982, I’d go to Beirut three or four times a year. I’d head there too when I’d been working in the south of that trammelled land, usually when I had reports to get out. Or it might have been the wish to quaff a few beers with friends like Claude, Fadi, Rocky and the rest.

  For peace of mind, I’d try to link up with an IDF convoy going in that direction, since these were times when Islamic Jihad movements were abducting Westerners. Their numbers included British journalist John McCarthy and Terry Waite, the peripatetic envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moving about with the IDF was the sensible thing to do.

  Coming in from Israel, I’d usually pass through the Rosh Haniqra border post and follow the coastal road north to Tyre. From there it was a short hop to Sidon and then along the highway to the outskirts of Beirut. Occasionally, the Israeli Navy would open up on cars travelling that way, so it could be hairy and there were lots of road accidents. We’d joke that if the snipers didn’t get us, then some lunatic behind a wheel would.

  In Sidon we’d seek out our contacts and ask to be shown the latest bit of Fatah or fundamentalist mischief; perhaps where a roadside bomb had been laid and detonated from a nearby orchard (as so often happened); or where a mine had been planted, though that was usually done on gravel roads; or maybe somebody had thrown a grenade at a patrol from a high point overlooking the route.

  There would be much commotion about follow-ups or possibly a roadblock afterwards, but few of the perpetrators were caught. They’d be gone in a moment after doing their thing though, even then, ambushes would sometimes be laid by some of the bolder Jihadis.

  It was interesting to see how the Israelis coped. By then the war had swung full circle, from hands-on electronic warfare to weapons-in-your-hands. Although there were always casualties, the majority were Arabs. Many more Lebanese were killed by Israeli Air Force bombs or rockets – or by Israeli snipers – than members of the IDF.

  Even so, the number of young Israeli men who died in that war mounted steadily. Then, one day, the Knesset decided to withdraw them all. However, not before about 800 or so IDF soldiers had been killed and something like five times that number were wounded, of whom another 500 – as this kind of statistic goes in modern war – would be permanently maimed.

  Meanwhile, there were many incidents that accentuated the trauma of what was taking place just beyond the frontier line in the north, quite a few involving dissenters. Hersh Goodman, defence correspondent of the Jerusalem Post at the time, suggested that among the biggest doubters were brigadier generals who refused to serve in Lebanon, as well as pilots who returned to base with their bomb loads undropped.

  Even more revealing, a nation is in serious trouble when, no matter what else was going on in Israel or
the rest of the world at the time, all nightly broadcasts began with the funeral services of the latest combat deaths in Lebanon.

  It was strictly a personal choice, but for me the most interesting route to Beirut was not the direct road north, but by way of the fundamentalist stronghold of Nabatiya. I’d usually get there through the foothills that separate the coast from the interior after entering Lebanon at Metullah.

  To most journalists, Nabatiya was bad news. It wasn’t a big town, perhaps a little larger than Marj’Ayoun, the Christian stronghold in South Lebanon, and a lot more compact. Like Maarakeh, another strategic Shi’ite centre – which, like others, had its own command centre or Husseiniyeh – it was certainly big enough to keep the IDF from ‘sanitizing’ it militarily. They could always surround these settlements easily enough, systematically go through the various compounds and houses and arrest all the men and boys, but the leaders will always have planned a way out, sometimes using tunnels that led into the hills.

  Israel’s frontiers are the most thoroughly patrolled in the world. There are a dozen or more security measures including: landmines; electronic monitoring and listening devices; three, sometimes six, sets of fences; and the always-present human element. Twice each day, the entire border region is scoured by men and women searching for evidence of infiltration. This was a scene along the Lebanese border, where there is also a likelihood of being sniped at by Hizbollah militants. (Author’s collection)