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ISRAEL and the MIDDLE EAST to 1979 (3 of 8)

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. 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]

Hostility rising from the Israeli-Arab conflict was expressed on April 17, 1969 by a Beirut newspaper, Al Moharrer. It called  Barbra Streisand a Zionist and called for her films to be banned in the Arab world. In the 1968 film Funny Girl, the actor Omar Sharif kissed Streisand, and there was talk of Sharif's relationship with Streisand off-screen. Sharif had become too liberal for a lot of Muslims, too cosmopolitan, too friendly with Jews. And films he played in were banned in his native Egypt.

Back to 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 a 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 tried 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 hijacker, 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-Gaddafi, 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 seized a German Lufthansa airliner flying from New Delhi to Greece. They 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 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 were killed and 55 wounded.