home | 1946-21st century | Muslims and Israelis, 1976-88

The West Bank and Gaza, 1967 to 1969

Israelis emerged from the war of June 1967 (the Six-Day War) relieved and elated. They cheered, shouted, cried and embraced each other in the streets. There was a new sense of power of the state of Israel and a belief that new times had started. It influenced Jews elsewhere. Israel's leading diplomat, Abba Eban, noticed a sudden proliferation of yarmulkes on the streets of Paris, London and New York. He noticed children in the United States playing "Jews and Arabs" rather than cowboys and Indians.

Israel emerged from the war occupying Egypt's Sinai Desert, the Gaza Strip, Jordan's West Bank, and Syria's Golan Heights. And Israel took control over the whole of Jerusalem's east side, Israel's Minister of War, Moshe Dayan, having announced Jerusalem's liberation. The Israelis had followed through on their threat made against Jordan at the beginning of the war. In trying to keep Jordan out of the war, they had warned King Hussein that if he joined the other Arab states in attacking Israel that they, Israel, would take the entire city.

On June 29th, the Israelis destroyed the barriers and dismantled the checkpoints that had existed between the smaller, western part of the city - dominated by Israel since the 1948 war -  and the larger eastern half of the city that had been ruled by the Jordanians. The United Nations had intended Jerusalem to be a united international city. Now it was united but under Israeli rule. A century earlier, Jerusalem had been around 73 percent Arab. It had been only 40 percent Arab in 1944. In wake of the War of 1967 many Arabs had fled, and now the Muslims population in Jerusalem was down to 21 percent of a total of 263,307 (12,646, or 5 percent, of whom were Christian). Jerusalem had once been a city of little interest to the Israelis - second at least to its major urban center, Tel Aviv. But by now Jerusalem was acquiring a new significance associated with the religious heritage of Jews.

Israelis went to the old Jewish Quarter on the eastern side of the city, from which Jews had been expelled in 1948, and they found their synagogues destroyed. They went to the Western (Wailing) Wall, denied them by the Jordanians despite the armistice agreement they had signed in 1949. There, against the Wall, the Jordanians had built a latrine, and the Israelis cleaned their holy place. The Western Wall was now accessible to all Israelis. And the Israelis left the Muslim holy places accessible to Muslims. Dayan announced that they had "not come to conquer the holy places of others. He ordered troops to take down a flag they had placed above the Muslim holy places, and he visited the al-Aqsa Mosque - the third holiest place in Islam.

The Muslims did not see the Israelis as liberators from Jordanian rule. Palestinians caught advocating independence had been silenced or sent to concentration camps by the Jordanians, and Jordan had sent its Bedouin soldiers against Palestinian demonstrations. The Israelis were making themselves dominate over the Palestinians, but in Jerusalem they were giving the Palestinians a new freedom of sorts. The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, allowed them to build a monument dedicated to Palestinians who had fallen fighting Israel in the War of 1967. But old resentments against the Jews did not die easily. Palestinians were free to visit their former neighborhoods in western Jerusalem and they were not molested, while Israeli soldiers were subject to attacks when entering eastern Jerusalem.

In the wake of military victory, many Israelis were looking forward to a "Greater Israel." Some of this was religious, a desire to gain land that had belonged to Jews in the first millennium BCE. Many believed that victory had been the work of God - a common view that had existed around much of the world, including the United States. Advocates of a Greater Israel rejected the international aspect of Israel's founding, which recognized a partition between Jews and Palestinians. Some of those advocating a Greater Israel spoke against concerns over world opinion. They spoke of the world being fundamentally against the Jews and of humanity being divided between Jews and gentiles (the goyem). Some of them looked upon isolation from the rest of the world as an opportunity to reduced temptations of assimilation and secularization.

Many secular Jews were also enthusiastic for a greater Israel. Among them, the former prime minister, Ben Gurion, enthusiastically campaigned for more people from abroad to settle in Jerusalem. Settlements began in Palestinian areas, some of them in areas that Jews had been driven from in recent decades. The new prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, refused to stop expansion of settlements, and she encouraged immigration to Israel. She saw "Palestine" as a British invention and recognized that in the recent past Arabs identified with a larger Islamic territory. She spoke of not returning the occupied territories because there was nobody willing to negotiate with Israel to return the territories to. And she bemoaned the fact that the Arabs were unwilling to allow the Jews a little sliver of land while they had so much more land for the Arabs to live on. Golda Meir was joined by Moshe Dayan who spoke of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as containing no mention of territorial limits and said that "We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State," [note]  bringing to mind for some the expansion against American Indians.

In considering territory, security was a consideration for the Israelis. The PLO was active and dangerous. The pre-war borders were described as indefensible - described as "Auschwitz borders" by Abba Eban. While some Israeli leaders favored withdrawal from newly occupied lands, Israel's Minister of Defense, Dayan, was adamant about keeping control of them for security and as something to bargain with, with hostile neighbors. Dayan was pessimistic about Israel's neighbors, believing that they would strike again when it suited them.

Israeli military commanders were to manage Palestinian as well as Israeli affairs in the territories. In 1949, the Fourth Geneva Convention on Rules of War had  adopted laws that governed the treatment of civilians in territories under military occupation. It had outlawed, among other things, the resettlement by an occupying power of its own civilians on territory under its military control. But Israel rejected the claim that they were occupying the territories.

In November, 1967, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, aimed against Israeli occupation of lands taken during the War of 1967. But the resolution did not mention Israel specifically. Israel rejected the claim that they were occupying the territories and considered the resolution irrelevant.

Terrorism and War in Jordan

The 1967 war between Egypt and Israel left the Suez Canal closed to all shipping, including oil. The demand for oil from Libya, conveniently located on the Mediterranean Sea, rose. Libya increased its price for oil, and other  members of the Organization of Petroleum Producers (OPEC) raised their prices. An era had begun in which OPEC would be in the news. Egypt continued its hostilities, Nasser hoping that Israel would be unable to withstand the economic burden of defending against periodic attacks. On July 1, Egypt began shelling Israeli positions near the Suez Canal. On October 21, 1967, Egypt sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat, killing 47. The Israeli death toll between June 15, 1967, and August 8, 1970, was 1,424 soldiers and more than 100 civilians. Meanwhile, the Suez Canal was damaged, and it would remained closed until 1975.

Defeat in the War of 1967 left many Muslims across the Middle East humiliated. Arab nationalism and socialism had been popular in Muslim societies, represented by Nasser in Egypt and secular regimes in Sudan Libya, Syria and Iraq - a view that included criticism of Saudi Arabia and other gulf state monarchies as feudal. Defeat of Muslim armies in the Six-Day of 1967 rocked the Middle East. The popularity of secular socialist regimes faded, and more hope focused on Islam.

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood became more influential and replaced Leftists as leaders on university campuses. In the wake of the War of 1967 more than 300,000 Palestinians fled to Jordan. Palestinians were disappointed by the performance of  the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians during the war.

The Arab defeat in the Six-Day War left some members of the PLO organization, al-Fatah, discouraged, but not Yasser Arafat. At a meeting of about twenty in Damascus, Arafat listened to what he considered defeatist talk, including the complaint by one with fundamentalist leanings that resuming guerrilla activity would merely provoke Israel and destroy their movement. Arafat said that the performance of the Arab armies vindicated what he had said about the need of Palestinians to help themselves. The defeat of 1967, he said, was "prelude to a great victory." Arafat was ready with a plan to organize million of Palestinians now living under Israeli occupation. In August 1967 Arafat was describing the West Bank as a tinder-box awaiting al-Fatah's spark.

Arafat had no success inspiring revolt in the West Bank (still officially Jordanian territory). Palestinians outside of the occupied territories emerged from the War of June 1967 eager for confrontation with Israel. In the summer of 1967, four hundred Palestinians, students and workers, left their job or studies in Germany for training in Algeria. Soon they were in Syria and were sent on raids into the West Bank, under Israeli occupation. Some of them were arrested and some of them died.

In 1968, working with the PLO was a Marxist-Leninist group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The leader of the PFLP, George Habash, was of Greek descent, from a merchant family expelled from Palestine by the Israelis in 1948 when Habash was twenty-two. The family had gone to Egypt, but Habash was working out of Beirut, Lebanon, where he had earned a university degree and had become a pediatrician. Habash was opposed to any accommodation with Israel - anything that could be called a peace process - and he hoped to provoke the Arab states into crushing Israel.

Palestinian guerrillas crossed from Jordan and attacked Israeli kibbutzim. In March 1968, the Israelis retaliated, at Al Karamah, said to be a guerrilla capital. The Israelis were driven back and suffered substantial losses, and the PLO acquired a new prestige within the Arab community.

On July 28, 1968, PFLP guerrillas seized an Israeli airliner in Zurich Switzerland. They released 25 Israelis on board in exchange for 16 Arab fighters imprisoned in Israel.

On November 22, 1968, a car bomb exploded in the Jewish sector of Jerusalem, killing twelve, and on July 18, 1969, Palestinians bombed a Jewish owned department store in London. On July 29, two members of the PFLP took over an El Al airliner and diverted it to Damascus. There they let the passengers debark. Then they blew up the plane. Syria took control of the plane's 16 Israeli passengers and exchanged them for 13 Syrians and 58 Egyptians held in Israeli prisons.

On February 26, 1969, Israel's prime minister, Levi Eshkol died. Arafat's al-Fatah took credit, claiming that it had killed Eshkol with a surface-to-surface missile. Arafat declared, "our primary goal now is the liberation of Palestine through armed force, even if the struggle continues for tens of years." [note]

Attitude arising from the Israeli-Arab conflict was expressed on April 17, 1969 by a Beirut newspaper, Al Moharrer, which called  Barbra Streisand a Zionist and called for her films to be banned in the Arab world. Films played in by the actor Omar Sharif are banned in his native Egypt. Sharif acted in the film Funny Girl with Streisand in which he kisses Barbra Streisand. There was news too of Sharif's relationship with Streisand off-screen. Sharif has become too liberal for a lot of Muslims, too cosmopolitan, too friendly with Jews.

Back in the world of violence, on May 22, 1969, in Copenhagen an attempted assassination of  David Ben-Gurion failed. The three who were arrested were released by Danish authorities because "intent to kill" was insufficient grounds for an indictment. On August 29, 1969, PFLP members diverted a U.S., TWA, passenger airliner to Damascus, evacuated the passengers and blew up the aircraft. In February 1970, a Swiss airliner blew up shortly after its takeoff from Geneva, and a PFLP group under Ahmed Jabril claimed responsibility. On July 22, five members of a group that called itself the Popular Struggle Front hijacked an Greek airliner flying from Lebanon to Athens. And they won the release of seven Palestinians imprisoned in Greece.

Palestinians in Jordan were unhappy about King Hussein not having broken relations with the United States during the 1967 war, and they were unenthusiastic about monarchy, while Hussein was unenthusiastic about violence and guerrilla attacks against Israel. Armed Palestinian groups were in many of Jordan's cities and beyond the control of local authorities. Between mid-1968 and the end of 1969 there had been at least five hundred violent confrontations between Palestinian guerrillas and Jordan's army and security forces, and some Jordanian officials loyal to Hussein were calling for a return to discipline and the rule of law. In Lebanon, PLO forces were also creating havoc. There, armed Palestinians were clashing with Lebanon's security forces and creating a government crisis and divisions. The leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, was not inclined to keep the groups under him disciplined, in Lebanon or in Jordan.

During the summer of 1970, Jordanian forces and Palestinians continued to clash. By early September, guerrilla groups were occupying strategic positions in Jordan. In a move against the hostile reaction of  Jordanian authorities the  Palestinians called a general strike, and they called on those other than Palestinian to join them.

Intervening in the conflict in Jordan was another hijacking. On September 6,  the PFLP try to hijack five airliners. One was an Israeli plane with Israeli security personnel on board, and Israeli security prevented the takeover. The Israeli plane landed in London, and British authorities imprisoned a surviving hijackers, a Palestinian woman, Leila Khaled. Three of the four other airliners were under guerrilla command and were forced to fly to an airfield near Amman, Jordan. The fifth airliner was flown to Cairo, the passengers taken off the plane and the plane blown up.

The hijackers at the airfield in Jordan wanted to exchange those they had taken hostage for Palestinians held in Western prisons. Britain gave them Leila Khaled over the objection of the Israelis, who believed that giving into terrorist demands encouraged more terrorism. The 400 hostages held by the hijackers in Jordan were released in exchange for seven other Palestinians. And the three planes in Jordan were blown up.

King Hussein was fed up with the Palestinians, and, by September 16, forces loyal to him were at war with the PLO. Syria sided with the PLO and sent forces into northern Jordan, which Yasser Arafat declared a liberated area. Arafat described Hussein's military assault on his PLO forces as genocide against the Palestinian people. Israel, in secret agreement with Hussein, placed its forces on alert. The United States announced that naval units were converging on the eastern Mediterranean to reinforce the Sixth Fleet as a precautionary measure. Syria refrained from using its airforce against Jordan, fearing that otherwise the United States and Israel might enter the conflict on the side of Hussein.

On September 22, the league of Arab states met in order to end the fighting between Hussein and the Palestinians.[note]   At the conference, Hussein confronted Arafat, accusing him of conspiring to overthrow him, and he produced tapes of radio broadcasts as proof. Arafat retaliated by pounding the table and screaming obscenities. He accused Hussein of being an agent of imperialism and of conspiring with the USA and Israel against the Palestinians. The Libyan leader, General Moammar al-Qaddafi, accused Hussein of being a lunatic. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, disheartened by the vulgar recriminations and incoherent ranting, declared them all to be mentally unbalanced.

An ailing and tired Nasser, who had suffered several heart attacks and had been ordered by his doctors to rest and to avoid exertion, managed to hammer out an agreement among the participants at the conference. Arafat and Hussein shook hands in a frosty manner. And, hours later, Nasser suffered another heart attack, collapsed and died.

With Nasser gone, Hussein felt free to launch a plan to eject more Palestinians from his country. Late in 1970 he established contact with Syria and with the new head of state in Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and determined that they would do little to help Arafat. Arafat had returned to his headquarters in northern Jordan and was sending messages to Hussein professing moderation and promoting a policy of live and let live, but it was too late. Hussein moved against the PLO and forced it and Arafat to withdraw to Lebanon, while Palestinians in Jordan were to move to the West Bank in greater number.

Peace talks between Israel and the Arab states were going nowhere. Henry Kissinger, in the Nixon administration at the time, has described it as follows:

Israel, never having lived within accepted frontiers, saw no essential difference between locating its boundaries in one unaccepted place and another; condemned to Arab belligerency, it sought the widest imaginable security belt. The Arab countries were torn between their philosophical objection to the existence of the Israeli state and the practical reality that they could not altar the status quo except through some form of diplomacy. [note]

Some Palestinians continued on the path of war. On February 22, 1972, five Palestinian hijackers had seized a German Lufthansa airliner flying from New Delhi to Greece. They had directed the plane to South Yemen and released their hostages in exchange for a 5 million dollars - a great success for them and for South Yemeni authorities, who took one million of the ransom money for themselves.

On May 8, 1972 four Palestinians belonging to an organization called Black September had seized a Sabena airliner on the ground at Israel's Lod Airport, hoping to trade the passengers for 317 guerrillas being held in Israel. Israeli commandos rescued the passengers. Two terrorists and one passenger died.

Black September was associated with the PLO, and Arafat went along with the actions of Black September, as he did the actions of the PFLP, which were popular with the Palestinian people. Arafat wished to maintain the support of those in Black September and the PFLP. He maintained a loose organization and did not publicly denounce or associate himself with the sensational and violent deeds of subordinate groups.

On May 30, 1972, people friendly toward the PFLP but not associated with the PLO got into the act. Japan's Red Army Faction, fervent for proletarian revolution, killed 25 and wounded 76 at Israel's Lod Airport. The Israelis killed two of the terrorists and wounded a third. Then on July 8, in retaliation for the attack at Lod Airfield, an Israeli team killed Ghassan Kanafani, leader of the PFLP

Black September terrorists struck again on September 5, 1972, killing 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games in Munich Germany. Arafat has been accused of planning the attack at Munich. At any rate, members of his Fatah organization were involved with Black September and the Munich killings.

On March 1, 1973, eight Black September members seized the Saudi embassy in Sudan. They demanded the release of the surviving gunman of the Lod Airport Massacre and the release of Japanese Red Army members in jail in Germany. They were refused, and they killed the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Claude Noel, and two other diplomats.

In Greece on August 5, 1973, two gunmen belonging to the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (ANYOLP) shot down passengers disembarking from a TWA airliner that had arrived from Israel. Five passengers are killed and 55 wounded.

Anwar Sadat and the Yom Kippur War

Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, had begun his rule by following Nasser's policies, but he was working his way toward policies of his own. With the failure of the 1967 war he had swung with others toward more devotion to Islam - as had President Jafaar Muhammad al-Nimeiry of Sudan and  the ruler of Libya since 1969, Muammar al-Qaddaffi. Nimeiry added to his shift  a book Why the Islamic Way,  and Qaddafi issued his Green Book. Sadat tried enhancing his support with Koranic references in his speeches and became known as "the believer president." He released Islamic activists from prison and left the Muslim Brotherhood as illegal but tolerated, and in some cases the Brotherhood was encouraged as a counter-balance against the secular leftist forces. Sadat encouraged the growth of Islamic organizations on university campuses to counter Nasserites and leftists. He had several rivals and leftists arrested, and he began to move away from what had been Nasser's ties with the Soviet Union.

Sadat chose war against Israel as a way out of the deadlocked negotiations and to restore Arab honor. He was joined by the Syrians and by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, with Saudi Arabia expected to contribute money rather than soldiers. The new war against Israel began on October 6, 1973 - to be called the Yom Kippur War, and also the Ramadan War. Sadat labeled the war a jihad.

President Richard Nixon responded by asking the U.S. Congress for 2.2 billion dollars for military aid for Israel, and king Faisal felt betrayed. Faisal had warned that he would be forced to use oil as political leverage to offset support Israel was receiving in the West. And, the day after Nixon's request to Congress, Faisal launched an oil embargo against the U.S. and the Netherlands.

The Soviet Union was airlifting supplies to Syria and the United States was airlifting supplies to Israel. Israel was outnumbered twelve to one against the Syrians, and the Syrians had 1,100 tanks to 157 for the Israelis, but Israel drove the Syrians back. Israeli forces crossed the Suez Canal and, on October 21, managed to surround Egypt's Third Army. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was in Moscow trying to stop the fighting. Sadat wanted to end the war to prevent further disaster, and by August 25 the U.S. had pressured the Israel into a cease fire. The war had lasted nineteen days. Around 8,500 soldiers had been lost by Egypt and Syria. And the Israelis had lost nearly 3,000 dead or missing.

Terrorism, the PLO and United Nations, to June 1976

In Italy on December 17, 1973, five members of the ANYOLP killed 33 passengers on a TWA airliner, forced the plane to fly to Kuwait, and there the members of ANYOLP were released to the PLO. 

On April  11, 1974, PFLP guerrillas attacked the Israeli settlement of Qiryat Shemona, killing 18 and wounding 16 others. The Israelis refused to negotiate and killed the assailants.

The Palestinians of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) seized a school in Israel on May 15, 1974,  in the village of Ma'alot, taking 100 students and their teachers hostage. Israeli forces crushed the terrorists, but twenty-seven children died in the process.

On September 7, a Pan Am airliner exploded just after takeoff from an Athens airport - attributed to the ANYOLP (Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine). Six days later, three members of the Japanese Red Army invaded the French embassy in the Netherlands and won the release of a comrade in imprisoned there. The four Japanese were put on a plane that flew them to safety in Syria.

In October 1974 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3210, which recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as representing the Palestinian people and gave the PLO observer status at the UN - a move opposed by Israel, the United States, Bolivia  and the Dominican Republic. An Arab summit conference later in October proclaimed the PLO as the legitimate spokesman for the Palestinian people.

On November 13, Yassar Arafat spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. In his speech he justified the violent attacks on Israel on the grounds that he had been fighting an invasion and colonialism and that the Palestinian people had "lost faith international community." With Arafat at the United Nations was his colleague Ali Hassan Salemeh - one of the killers at the Munich Olympics. Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, was tracking down the Munich killers and would assassinate him in 1979. The Israelis drew a line short of Arafat despite his probable connection to the Munich massacre.

On November 22, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3236, which spoke of the rights of Palestinians to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty and asked the UN secretary general to create contacts with the PLO concerning questions about Palestine. That same day four members of the ANYOLP hijacked a British airliner on November 22 and flew it Libya, then to Tunis, while they demanded release of Palestinian terrorists being held in Egypt and the Netherlands. They killed one passenger, injured a two crew members, and they were released to the PLO.

On August 23, 1975, three people hijacked an Egyptian airliner and demanded the release of five Libyans in Egyptians jails. Egyptians troops stormed the airplane, captured the hijackers and no passengers were injured.

Black September struck again on September 15, 1975, its members seizing six diplomats in Egypt's embassy in Spain. They demanded that Egypt withdraw from the peace talks with Israel, taking place in Geneva. With their hostages they flew to Algeria, where the Egyptian diplomats were released.

On December 1975, in Vienna, members of the PFLP took over a conference of oil producers. They won 50 million dollars in exchange for 81 hostages and a flight to safety in Algiers.

On June 27, 1976, seven terrorists belonging to the PFLP and the Red Army Faction hijacked a French airliner flying from Tel Aviv to Paris. They diverted the flight to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where they were tolerated by Uganda's ruler, Idi Amin. The hijackers demanded the release of 53 comrades being held in various jails in France, Switzerland, Israel and Kenya. Two hundred Israeli commandos raided the airport, rescuing the airline passengers, killing the terrorists and some of Idi Amin's soldiers. The leader of the raid, Lt. Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of the future prime minister of Israel, was also killed.

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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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