Making David into Goliath - Joshua Muravchik

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the pictures of ‘heroes,’” the newspaper said.15

      Two weeks later, these hopes were rewarded not by a hijacking but a new kind of attack on civil aviation. Three Japanese passengers disembarked from an Air France flight at Israel’s Lod Airport carrying violin cases. From these, they extracted assault rifles and hand grenades and began killing anyone they could, taking twenty-six lives, seventeen of them Puerto Rican pilgrims. The trio had escaped closer scrutiny because they were not Arabs: they were members of the Japanese Red Army acting on behalf of the PFLP out of “revolutionary solidarity.”

      The pace of international terror attacks was accelerating. In September 1972, Munich hosted the summer Olympics which promised catharsis to two nations. For (West) Germany, the games signified a negation of the ugly past symbolized by the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a showcase for the Nazi regime. For Israel, the parade of Jewish athletes carrying the flag of Israel in the city so closely linked to Hitler seemed an affirmation of the mantra, am Yisrael chai, the Jewish people live.

      But all of this was turned upside down when a team of eight armed Black September members stormed the residential block housing the Israeli team. Two athletes who fought back barehanded were killed on the spot, and nine were taken hostage. Spurning Israeli offers of help, Bavarian authorities planned a rescue operation in which the terrorists and hostages were first helicoptered to a military air base from which the terrorists were falsely informed that they would be allowed to fly with their prisoners to an Arab country. In fact, the Germans planned to attack them at the airport, using snipers and/or a special forces team that was stowed aboard the aircraft designated for the terrorists’ supposed escape.

      Astoundingly, members of the German special forces, as they waited for the terrorists and the hostages to be transferred from the Olympic village to the airport, voted to abort the mission on the grounds that they might be risking their own lives. Thus, the authorities had only the snipers to rely on, but there were fewer snipers than terrorists. The snipers opened fire as the terrorists alighted from the helicopters. Those who weren’t instantly downed tossed hand grenades into the choppers where the nine bound Israeli hostages sat, mortally wounding all of them.

      Five of the eight terrorists were killed in the gunfire, and the other three were taken into custody. But, not for long. A month later, a Lufthansa flight from Beirut to Frankfurt was hijacked and forced to divert to Zagreb, Yugoslavia. The hijackers demanded release of the three Olympics-massacre perpetrators, and the German government acquiesced at once, demanding only that the crew and eleven passengers be released simultaneously. It loaded the three onto a small executive jet and flew them to Zagreb where they boarded the hijacked plane. The hijackers, however, did not release their hostages but rather had the plane take off for Tripoli where the terrorists received a celebratory welcome. “The liberated heroes of the Munich [Olympics] operation and their liberators landed safely tonight,” exulted Libyan radio.16

      The Israeli government protested bitterly, but German Chancellor Willy Brandt defended his decision, saying, “The passengers and the crew were threatened with annihilation . . . I . . . saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed.”17 Brandt’s adamancy about avoiding “senseless bloodshed” left him vulnerable to terrorist blackmail. Fatah leader Abu Iyad observed contemptuously that “German authorities, moved by a sense of guilt or perhaps out of cowardice, were clearly anxious to have the captured fedayeen off their hands.”18

      This and the fact that the hijacked flight had carried, apart from the hijackers, only eleven passengers, all of them male, stimulated speculation that Bonn had been complicit in the entire episode. Author Aaron Klein put it:

      It was only a matter of time before a hijacked plane or some other extortionate measure would “force” the Germans to release the three terrorists, who were, after all, putting German lives at risk. German, Palestinian, and Israeli sources contended that the hijacking . . . was coordinated, in advance, with German authorities. . . . When Ulrich Wagner, senior aide to the [German] interior minister Genscher, was asked point-blank and on camera what he thought of the alleged German-Palestinian scheme, he replied, “Yes, I think it’s probably true.”19

      The operational commander of the Olympics killings, although not a direct participant, was Mohamed Daoud Oudeh, known as Abu Daoud. He found himself behind bars not long thereafter, albeit not for the Munich crime. Rather, he was arrested and condemned to death in Jordan for leading an infiltration of terrorists into Amman. This prompted Black September to mount “Operation Abu Daoud” to force his release.

      It was staged not in Europe but in Khartoum where a team of eight gunmen took over a reception at the residence of the Saudi ambassador. A large number of hostages were taken and released gradually, the quarry being two American diplomats, Curtis Moore and Cleo Noel, who had rotated as Washington’s chief representative in Sudan, and a Belgian diplomat, Guy Eid. The targeting of Eid remains unexplained. The terrorists said it was because he was Jewish, but he was not; and the name Eid, as they might have known, is actually Arab, reflecting the provenance of one of his forebears.

      The hostage-takers demanded the release of various Palestinian prisoners in Israeli and Jordanian jails, along with Sirhan Sirhan and members of the German Red Army Faction, the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang. But they gradually scaled down their demands to just Abu Daoud. While negotiations with the Sudanese government were still under way, the PLO’s Voice of Palestine broadcast this message: “Do what is required quickly because the blood of the martyrs is a revolution.”20 At this, the three diplomat hostages were taken to the basement of the building and, bound hand and foot, riddled with bullets by all eight terrorists.

      Then, the radio station of Fatah broadcast further orders: “Your mission is over . . . Present yourselves to the Sudanese authorities with courage.”21 Fatah’s leaders may have had a deal with Sudan’s government or may have known that it would not dare impose any real punishment. The gunmen were taken into custody, tried, convicted, had their conviction upheld by the Sudanese Supreme Court, and then were released. They had not secured the freedom of Abu Daoud, but two months later he was included in a general amnesty of Palestinian prisoners, part of a bargain by King Hussein to restore himself to the good graces of Egypt and Syria.

      Throughout the rest of 1973, the tempo of terror attacks in Europe continued unabated. In Cyprus, an El Al plane was fired upon and the building housing the Israeli ambassador was bombed. In Rome, an El Al employee was gunned down in the street, and two Arabs were arrested at Fiumicino Airport carrying revolvers and hand grenades. Two months later, five more were arrested with missiles preparing to down an EL Al flight. In Athens, a gunman tried to storm the El Al offices and, when thwarted, fled to a nearby hotel, taking seventeen hostages whom he traded for safe passage to Syria. Weeks later in that city, terrorists arrived too late to seize the El Al flight they had targeted, so they tossed their grenades and emptied their weapons randomly into a passenger lounge, killing three and wounding fifty-five. In Paris, six gunmen seized the Saudi embassy during a gathering, taking Arab and French hostages. They released the French in exchange for safe passage out of the country with their Arab hostages in tow.

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