A Durable Peace (34 page)

Having failed to destroy Israel by seizing Jordan, the PLO moved on to the easier task of seizing Lebanon. (The PLO has proved
remarkably flexible as to the location of the territory it seeks to liberate.) With the other Arab states all but closed to
PLO operations, Lebanon appeared to be the ideal stage for its renewed assaults against Israel. Unlike the exposed terrain
of the Sinai and the natural divide of the Jordan River Valley, southern Lebanon forms a geographic continuum with the north
of Israel; its hilly terrain, covered with lush vegetation, affords good cover and good escape routes. As early as 1969, the
Lebanese army had fought PLO units that were trying to carve out a “Fatahland” in southern Lebanon, and the conflict had spread
as far north as the capital. Arafat announced that he had no wish to interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab state (a
cruelly laughable pledge, given the PLO’s track record in Jordan, Lebanon, and later Kuwait); the Syrians threw their weight
behind the terrorists in the hope of undermining the Lebanese government; and by 1975, the PLO had established a de facto
state, extending from West Beirut south to the Israeli border.

From there, PLO terrorists launched repeated missions against Israeli targets, almost none of them military. The massacres
of 1974 in Kiryat Shemona, in which eighteen Israeli civilians were murdered, and Ma’alot, in which the terrorists gunned
down twenty-six Israelis, most of them schoolchildren, originated in southern Lebanon. So did the Coastal Road massacre of
1978, in which a PLO hijacking of an intercity bus ended with the deaths of thirty-five Israeli hostages. So did the Nahariya
slayings of 1974 and 1979. (In the latter attack, a PLO “fighter” crushed the skull of a five-year-old girl in front of her
father, then murdered him as well.)

In addition, the PLO used the territory of its de facto state to shell Israeli cities and towns. For years, the entire population
of the northern border towns and villages was regularly driven into underground bomb shelters by barrages of PLO-launched
Katyusha missiles, the little brothers of the Scud missiles that Iraq launched against Israel in 1991. By 1982, the population
levels of
Kiryat Shemona and Nahariya had fallen ominously; factories, schools, and beaches were being closed repeatedly to avoid mass
casualties during the shellings; and fear of economic ruin and depopulation had spread.
⁴⁹

As in Jordan, this buildup had two consequences. The first was an internal Lebanese civil war, in which Shi’ites and Christians
did battle with the PLO in an attempt to expel the Palestinian overlord from their midst. More than anyone else, they could
testify to what a PLO state would be like, since they lived in one: unbridled confiscation of property, wanton murder, wholesale
rape, and the forcible induction of children as young as twelve into the PLO’s service. Those who sing the blessings of a
PLO state would do well to refresh their memories as to how the dress rehearsal went by reading the documentary material assembled
in
The PLO in Lebanon
by Raphael Israeli.
⁵⁰
The tab for the imposition of this PLO dominion and the subsequent civil war came to more than a hundred thousand lives,
paid for by the Lebanese.

The second consequence of the rise of the PLO in Lebanon, as it had been on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, was an Israeli
response. Israel took action to defend its northern towns and kibbutzim in the form of armed intervention in PLO-controlled
Lebanon, first in the Litani Operation in 1978 and later in Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982. Much maligned at the time,
this latter operation indeed lived up to its name. Since the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut in 1982 and the establishment of
the security zone in the south of Lebanon thereafter, there have hardly been any successful terrorist penetrations from southern
Lebanon into the north of Israel. And though the Peace for Galilee Operation did result, as the PLO had long hoped, in a war
with Israel by at least one Arab state, Syria, it was a limited war, waged on the soil and over the skies of Lebanon (and
Lebanon alone) during June 1982. While Israel’s aim was the uprooting of the PLO bases, it encountered resistance from the
Syrian armed forces that were, and still are, occupying most of Lebanon. Israel destroyed Syrian missile batteries and almost
one hundred Syrian fighter aircraft, while
losing only a single plane. (These successes decisively demonstrated the inferiority of the weaponry upon which the Soviet
bloc was relying for its air defenses, and foreshadowed the techniques that were to be used by the United States in the Gulf
War nine years later.) But even though Israel was pushed to commit what in Arab eyes was a most egregious sin, entering an
Arab capital (West Beirut was the head of the PLO octopus in Lebanon), the oft-promised mobilization of the entire Arab world
to assault Israel, or even to save the PLO, never materialized.

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:

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.”