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JEWS and ARABS from WW2 to 1979 (15 of 18)

In Italy on December 17, 1973, five members of the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (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, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attacked the Israeli settlement of Qiryat Shemona, killing 18 and wounding 16 others. The Israelis refused to negotiate and killed the assailants.

The 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. Six days later, three members of the Japanese Red Army invaded the French embassy in the Netherlands and won the release of a comrade 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 (PLO) 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 in the 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 murdered a German passenger and injured two crew members. The Tunisian authorities handed the hijackers over to the PLO, who denied any links to the hijackers.

On August 23, 1975, three people hijacked an Egyptian airliner and demanded the release of five Libyans in Egyptians jails. Egyptian 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.