A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Having backfired on every geographic front, the PLO strategy seemed to have been an abysmal failure. But it was not. For alongside the “land war” that the PLO unsuccessfully waged on all Israel’s borders was another war, as spectacular in its fireworks as it was in its political success. I am referring to the campaign of international terrorism that the PLO launched at the close of the 1960s and that engulfed the entire world throughout the next two decades.

  Early on in its campaign of terror, the PLO embarked on a series of massacres inside Israel: Kiryat Shemona, Ma’alot, Beit Shean, the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv. In each of these attacks, the PLO held innocent Israelis hostage in the hope that this time Israel would capitulate to its demands—usually the release of jailed terrorists. Israel did not. The demands of the PLO were never met, and the terrorists themselves inevitably ended up dead. Increasingly, the PLO favored war against international air traffic going to and from Israel, which afforded a greater chance of hitting Israelis where the PLO imagined they could not be defended.

  The air war opened with the hijacking of an El Al plane to Algeria in 1968, followed by the midair seizure of an El Al flight out of London and a ground attack on Israeli aircraft in Zurich. When Israel began developing methods to defend its flights, the PLO switched to non-Israeli carriers, blowing up American airliners in the Jordanian desert and hijacking a Belgian Sabena airliner to Israel in 1972. When the Sabena plane was hijacked, I was an officer in the Israeli special forces. My unit was assigned to storm the plane, which we did with improvised techniques. But the rapid accumulation of terrorist incidents quickly transformed such improvisations into an effective, professional discipline.

  Building on the experience it gained from the repeated terrorist attacks, Israel was soon able to make its own international airport and its national carrier, El Al, almost immune to terrorist assault. As a result, the PLO had to go farther and farther afield to inflict damage on Israeli targets. In 1976, Palestinian gunmen pulled off what they thought was the greatest of hijackings: they seized an Air France jet over Europe and forced it to fly to Entebbe, Uganda, where the government of Idi Amin afforded the hijackers a safe haven and the protection of his army. There, in the heart of Africa, the non-Jewish hostages were released, but 106 Jewish hostages were herded into an abandoned air terminal and held by Arab and German terrorists who threatened to execute them if the Israeli government did not release convicted terrorists from its prisons. In an operation unprecedented in military history, Israeli troops flew two thousand miles to this hostile country, eliminated the terrorists and the Ugandan soldiers who collaborated with them, freed the hostages, and returned them to Israel. In the Entebbe raid, three hostages lost their lives, as did my brother Jonathan, who commanded the rescue force.

  Operation Jonathan, as it is now officially known, proved to be the decisive battle in the war against international terrorism. The Entebbe raid inspired a series of bold counterattacks by Western security forces. Less than a year later, Dutch marine commandos simultaneously stormed a train and a school that had been taken over by South Moluccan terrorists, freeing 160 hostages. Months after this, a German team liberated eighty-six hostages aboard a German airliner that had been hijacked by Iranian terrorists to Mogadishu airport in Somalia. And in 1980 the British Special Service successfully freed the Iranian embassy in London after terrorists had held it for a week. Thereafter, the taking of hostages and skyjacking itself passed from international terrorist fashion (with a brief reappearance in the mid-1980s), and the PLO was forced to revert to other forms of terror.

  From the start, the PLO was joined by others in practicing terrorism. For the PLO was not just another terrorist organization or another “liberation movement.” It was the quintessential terrorist organization of modern times. It practically invented the craft of terrorizing people internationally, pioneering the arts of hijacking aircraft, blowing them up in midair, seizing hostages, assassinating diplomats, massacring schoolchildren, athletes, and tourists, and various other outrages. These methods were emulated by a rash of terrorist groups the world over, for the success of terrorism in one part of the world breeds imitation elsewhere. But the PLO did more than serve as an example to be imitated. From the early 1970s until Israel ousted it from Lebanon in June 1982, the PLO’s de facto state in Lebanon was a veritable factory of terror, providing a safe haven and a launching ground for terrorist groups the world over. Who didn’t come to the PLO bases in Beirut and Sidon? The Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the IRA, the Japanese Red Army, the French Action Directe, the Turkish Liberation Army, the Armenian Asala group, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and terrorists from all over Latin America as well as neo-Nazis from Germany—all were there. 51 They came to Lebanon, were trained there, then set off to murder their victims elsewhere. From this unpoliced PLO playground of horrors, the virus of terror was spread throughout the Western world, often with the aid of Arab governments and, until the exposure of its complicity in terror proved too embarrassing, with the aid of the Soviet bloc as well.

  But what was the impact of this campaign on Israel itself? Certainly, the PLO liked to claim great damage for each operation. (Abul Abbas, a commander of one of the PLO’s smaller splinters, announced that his abortive 1990 raid on the Tel Aviv beachfront claimed five hundred Israeli dead or wounded and did over five billion dollars in damage to Israel’s tourist industry. 52 In fact, no one was hurt.) But in physical terms, the damage of terrorism has actually been minor. The toll exacted in human lives was also considerably smaller than in outright war. Twenty-five years of PLO terrorism have claimed the lives of a few hundred Israelis, as compared with more than sixteen thousand killed in the wars. Every life lost to terrorism is a tragedy, but in aggregate terms the human and material costs of terrorism pale before those of all-out war.

  Yet the PLO’s terror succeeded where its land war failed—by inflicting significant political losses on Israel. Terror put the PLO on the world stage and gave credibility to its claims of desperation born of oppression. Initially, the terrorist attacks were seen not as the acts of a well-financed, well-oiled machine that enjoyed the support of a dozen states, but as the work of frustrated individuals who had nothing to lose. Every time a bomb exploded in Paris, London, or Rome, the PLO promptly explained that this violence was “due to the Palestinian problem” and would not end unless the Israeli “occupation of Palestinian lands” ended as well.

  Shortly after I came to the United States for college in 1972, the PLO carried out its notorious massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. Before this outrage, the PLO had carried out such actions as blowing up two American planes in the Jordanian desert and murdering an American ambassador, but it was not yet a household name. The news from Munich reached me at the home of an Israeli professor who was teaching at Brandeis University.

  “Well,” said one of his guests, “at least now everyone will know just who these people are.”

  “Exactly,” the professor responded grimly. “In a very short time, everyone will know who these people are.”

  He was right. Within a short time, the PLO had made its way into the living room and the consciousness of every person in the West. And as its fame spread, so did the power of its argument that “Palestine” had to be “liberated.” Country after country was swayed, if not by the perverted claim of the terrorists that they were fighting for human rights (even as they were trampling human rights), then by the power of sheer intimidation and black-mail. So successful was the endless parade of ghastly slayings, maimings, and hostage cliffhangers that the PLO was literally able to bring much of the West to consider the plight of the Palestinians to be the chief injustice crying out to be remedied in the modern world. By 1976, an American president, Jimmy Carter, had come to believe that underneath the savagery was a reasonable grievance that could be redressed with a negotiated settlement, just as the homelessness of the Jews had been redressed with the creation of Israel. Carter wrote:

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sp; There is no way to escape the realization of how intimately and intertwined are the history, the aspirations and the fate of the two long-suffering peoples, the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs…. The Palestinians are suffering from… circumstances of homelessness, scattered as they are throughout many nations, and their desire for self-determination and their own national homeland has aroused strong worldwide support. 53

  Even as its terrorism quickly bullied the West into craving an immediate solution to “the Palestinian Problem,” the PLO leadership was aware that if it were to capitalize on this effect and become the beneficiary of any solution, it would have to evade or at least minimize its own responsibility for the atrocities it was committing. Terror was useful for getting attention, but it had diminishing returns when it came to garnering respectability. Hence the PLO embarked on a campaign of denial. Even as the terror plague was at its height, it practiced an elaborate campaign of diplomacy and disinformation aimed at attributing the grisly deeds to “extremists” who were beyond its control, as opposed to the PLO itself, which was “reasonable” and “moderate.”

  By the mid-1970s, PLO speakers were covering the globe, proclaiming the organization’s commitment to peace, its abhorrence of violence and terror, and its new-found realism and pragmatism. 54 The PLO was then awash with money it had extorted from wealthy Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. (Kuwait put a quintessentially Moslem twist on Lenin’s famous phrase by providing the rope with which literally to hang Kuwaitis, as the PLO’s henchmen proceeded to do following Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait in 1990.) It therefore could easily afford a network of offices around the world from which to sell its message of moderation to a world audience that was becoming exceptionally eager to buy anything that could be used to “solve the Middle East conflict.” (By now, that “conflict” had also brought them the oil embargo.) Articulate, well dressed, and soft spoken, PLO representatives in Europe and North America, Latin America, Asia, and Australia presented their moderate wares on television, in the press, in Rotary clubs, in churches—even in synagogues.

  Thus, while PLO-sponsored terror was reigning everywhere, the PLO was busy denying. Indeed, this subterfuge had already been fully operational in 1970, when Black September, the first of a swarm of ostensibly independent terrorist splinters, was manufactured in order to carry out the assassination of Jordanian prime minister Wafsi Tal, the slaying of American ambassador to Khartoum Cleo Noel and his aide Curtis Moore, the Munich Olympic massacre, and other outrages. Arafat claimed to have no connection to Black September up until 1973, when a top PLO operative fingered Abu Iyad, his second in command, as its direct commander. 55 When Arafat was finally forced to admit that Black September and the PLO were one and the same, he was able to turn even this to public relations advantage by claiming that the PLO had since grown more “moderate.”

  In addition to concealing its involvement in terror by renaming itself, the PLO has tried to come out of the attacks as the hero by “negotiating” the release of hostages being held by its own gunmen. This is a ruse that has even succeeded on occasion, as in 1979, when the PLO negotiated the release of hostages whom a mysterious group called the “Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution” had seized in the Egyptian embassy in Turkey. The Turkish government was so grateful for the end of the crisis that it granted the PLO diplomatic recognition. Later, it transpired that the PLO “negotiator” had masterminded the hostage crisis in the first place. 56

  The most infamous example of this technique is the 1985 murder of a wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer on the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro. Klinghoffer was shot at close range and then thrown overboard. Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO executive and an Arafat protégé, arrived in Egypt and told the press that he had come at Arafat’s behest to mediate an end to the hijacking, 57 for a moment gaining the hijackers their freedom. But this time, the matter did not end quite as planned. Freed hostages described how the killers had hailed Arafat as they beat elderly passengers. Intercepted communications revealed that the murderers were not renegades but were minions of the PLO, directly under the command of Abul Abbas himself. American fighter planes nabbed the escaping PLO killers in a spectacular midair operation. In short order, the PLO was forced to switch from denying any relationship to the terrorists to denying that they had murdered anyone and asserting that the killing was a “big lie fabricated by the intelligence services of the United States.” 58 (Farouq Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” added insult to iniquity by suggesting that it was Mrs. Klinghoffer who had pushed her husband overboard in order to collect the insurance money. 59 Abul Abbas’s version was, “Maybe he was trying to swim for it.”) 60

  Despite these efforts to deflect blame from itself, the PLO was running into trouble because terrorism itself was running into trouble. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had led to the dismantling of the terror empire that the PLO had built in that country for over a decade, and to the expulsion of the PLO to Tunisia, where it was stripped of much of its power to wreak havoc. By the mid-1980s, an organized political counterattack had begun to undermine the political effectiveness of terrorism by exposing its Arab sources and the involvement of states behind the scenes—as well as pointing out the unacceptability of terror, regardless of the identity of its perpetrators or their professed motives. * Evidence was carefully marshaled that proved that terror, far from being the work of frustrated individuals, was in fact the product of a dismal alliance between terrorists and totalitarians.

  The United States led the West in fighting back against terrorism, most notably in the midair arrest of the Achille Lauro gunmen and in the raid on Libya in 1986, in which American and British bombers struck targets in Libya, narrowly missing Qaddafi himself. In 1987, the U.S. Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, ordering all PLO offices on American soil shut down, and declared: “The PLO are a terrorist organization and a threat to the interests of the United States and its allies.” After twenty years of laissez-faire terrorism, these actions finally established the principle that neither terrorists nor the terror states behind them would be allowed to get off unpunished. The greater awareness of the methods of the terrorist groups, combined with the risk of further American raids, threatened to topple the entire scaffolding of international terrorism—and the PLO’s hope of gaining legitimacy along with it. The climate had suddenly turned inhospitable to international terrorism, and the PLO faced the loss of its last means of inspiring the respect of the Arab world and its funding by Arab governments.

  By early 1988, the PLO had reached one of its lowest points since the organization had been founded. From its faraway seat in Tunis, unable to act out its bravado calls for the continuation of the “armed struggle” against Israel, it was fast being consigned to political irrelevance. Indeed, at the November 1987 summit of the Arab League held in Amman, Jordan, the Palestinian issue was put on the back burner for the first time in anybody’s memory. (The front burner was at long last devoted to the Iran-Iraq War, which at that point had been raging for most of the decade.) 62

  For the PLO, all this spelled the urgent need to make a radical break with the terror image it had previously evaded only with partial success, and to find other ways to demonstrate that it was still capable of “liberating Palestine.” After 1986 it became clear that for the PLO to earn acceptance in the West it must not only make increasingly vehement denials of its terrorist methods but also try to show the United States that it had changed its basic goal with regard to Israel.

  Thus, for example, there was a self-conscious shift toward the use of terminology that expressed the same goals but could readily be misinterpreted in the West. Consider, for example, the PLO’s incessant use of the phrase occupied territories to denote those Arabs that it seeks to liberate, or to which it will restrict its operations. The entire PLO leadership uses this term to mean all of Israel (“occupied” in 1948), while being fully aware that in the West it is understood to mean only Judea, S
amaria, and Gaza (“occupied” in 1967). Occasionally, however, a PLO member makes a gaffe and spills the beans. Thus, in an interview with the BBC in 1985, Abu Iyad, head of the Fatah’s military department, said, “When we say occupied Palestine… we consider all Palestine occupied…. Our resistance will be everywhere inside the territory and that is not defined in terms of the West Bank and Gaza alone.” 63

  Similarly, Farouq Kaddoumi, in the French daily Quotidien de Paris that same year.:

  When we speak of the armed struggle, whose legality is recognized by the United Nations, we are speaking of all the occupied territories of Palestine.… It is our right to fight the enemy that has taken over our land, whether this be in the 1967 occupation or in the previous one in 1948. 64

  But in the Western press such candor was extremely rare. Most of the time the PLO took pains to obscure its intentions. Indeed, one of the most successful devices for creating the impression of moderation in the PLO’s goals has been the game of Declaration and Retraction, whereby PLO leaders have issued ambiguous statements that could be interpreted as signifying a concession, such as the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, only to have them withdrawn immediately thereafter. A famous illustration of this technique is a document that Arafat purportedly signed in his besieged bunker in Beirut in 1982 in the presence of visiting American congressman Paul McCloskey. According to McCloskey, Arafat said that he was prepared to recognize Israel in the context of all UN resolutions, a statement he had actually made before and whose value was dubious even then. But McCloskey, apparently enthralled by his proximity to what he believed to be a world-changing event, promptly announced this “breakthrough” to the press, which dutifully trumpeted the news of Arafat’s new openness to the world—only to have the entire event denied by the PLO a few hours later. 65