Arabs (73 page)

The Palestinians disabled a number of Israeli vehicles with rifle-propelled grenades and inflicted a number of casualties with small arms before the Israelis completed their withdrawal across the Jordan.

For the Palestinians, Karamah was a victory of survival against superior forces and a moment of dignity (significantly, the word
karama
means “dignity” or “respect” in Arabic) when the Israelis were forced to withdraw under fire. Dignity came at a high price, however. Though inflated casualty figures were reported in the Arab
press, at least 28 Israelis, 61 Jordanians, and 116 Palestinian fighters were killed in action.
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Yet the battle of Karamah was treated as an outright Palestinian victory across the Arab world. For the first time since 1948, an Arab army had stood up to the Israelis and shown that the enemy was not invincible.

Fatah was the prime beneficiary of the battle. As Leila Khaled recalled with some critical detachment, “Arab news media inflated the incident to make it appear as if the liberation of Palestine was just around the corner. Thousands of volunteers poured in; gold was collected in kilos, arms came by the ton. Fatah, a movement of a few hundred semi-trained guerrillas, suddenly appeared to the Arabs like the Chinese liberation army on the eve of October, 1949. Even King Hussein declared that he was a commando!”
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Salah Khalaf, one of Fatah’s founders, claimed that their offices were flooded with volunteers—some 5,000 in the first forty-eight hours following the battle. And Fatah operations expanded accordingly: 55 operations in 1968 grew to 199 operations in 1969 and peaked at 279 operations against Israel in the first eight months of 1970.
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Public support for the Palestinian armed struggle, and Fatah in particular, masked the factionalism and deep political rifts that fragmented the Palestinian national movement. Differences in ideology gave rise to a variety of tactics that would lead the Palestinian armed struggle from guerrilla warfare to terrorism.

The PLO underwent a major transformation in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Ahmad Shuqayri, who had never succeeded in establishing his leadership over the broader Palestinian movement, tendered his resignation as chairman of the PLO in December 1967. Though Arafat’s Fatah movement was in a strong position to take over the PLO, its followers chose instead to preserve the organization as a front for all Palestinian factions. Yet Fatah emerged as the dominant party under the PLO’s umbrella, and in February 1969 Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO, a title he would hold until his death in 2004.

Not all Palestinian groups accepted Fatah’s leadership. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by medical doctor George Habash (1926–2008), had deep ideological differences with Fatah. The PFLP believed that according to the Chinese and Vietnamese models, the armed struggle for national liberation could only occur after a social revolution; Fatah, in contrast, put the struggle for national liberation first. The PFLP leader was dismissive of Fatah, believing the rival organization ideologically bankrupt and tainted by association with Arab governments he deemed corrupt.

When Fatah took control of the PLO, the Popular Front leadership decided to follow their own path to the Palestinian revolution and to raise international awareness of the Palestinian cause. They left Fatah to pursue the armed struggle through guerrilla raids in Israeli territory—a strategy that looked increasingly quixotic given
the high casualties the Palestinians suffered (1,350 guerrillas killed and 2,800 taken prisoner by the end of 1969, according to Israeli records).
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The Popular Front opted instead for high-profile operations against Israeli and U.S. targets abroad designed to raise international awareness of the Palestinian issue.

The Popular Front was the first Palestinian organization to engage in air piracy. In July 1968, three PFLP commandos hijacked a passenger jet of the Israeli national carrier, El Al, and ordered the pilot to land the plane in Algiers. The hijackers released all the passengers unharmed, preferring to hold a press conference rather than hostages. In December 1968, Mahmoud Issa, the veteran of Karamah, evacuated and sabotaged another El Al plane in Athens. He had been instructed by his superiors to surrender to the Greek authorities, in the expectation that his trial would generate wide press interest and serve as a platform to put the Palestinian cause to a global audience. Issa carried out his mission to the letter, seizing and evacuating the plane before detonating grenades in the empty aircraft and surrendering to the puzzled Greek authorities.

The Israelis responded to Palestinian attacks on their airliners by bombing the Beirut International Airport, where they destroyed thirteen Boeing aircraft of the Lebanese national carrier Middle East Airlines. “We thanked the Israelis for enlisting Lebanese support for the [Palestinian] revolution,” Leila Khaled remarked ironically, “and admired their audacity in blowing up planes that were seventy to eighty percent American owned!”
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The PFLP believed its strategy was producing results and that it had focused international attention on the Palestinian cause. “The world was at last forced to take notice of Palestinian actions. The Arab press couldn’t ignore them, nor could the Zionists conceal them,” Khaled concluded.
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In the international press, however, the Palestinians were gaining a reputation for terrorism that would undermine the legitimacy of their movement in Western public opinion.

As in the Algerian revolution, women played an important role in the Palestinian armed struggle. Amina Dhahbour became the first Palestinian woman to take part in a hijacking operation when she commandeered an El Al jet in Zurich in February 1969. Dhahbour’s involvement was an inspiration for women in the movement. Leila Khaled heard the news on the BBC World Service and immediately told her women comrades. “Within a few minutes we were all celebrating the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of women,” she recalled.
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Khaled, who had recently joined the Popular Front, volunteered for the Special Operations Squad and was sent to Amman for training. In August 1969, Khaled was given her first mission. “Leila,” her superiors told her, “you are going to hijack a TWA plane.” She was thrilled by the assignment, which she saw as a mission against American imperialism.
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She was firmly convinced that the strategy of hijacking Israeli and American aircraft advanced the strategic objectives of the movement to liberate Palestine.
“Generally,” Khaled wrote, “we act not with a view to crippling the enemy—because we lack the power to do so—but with a view to disseminating revolutionary propaganda, sowing terror in the heart of the enemy, mobilising our masses, making our cause international, rallying the forces of progress on our side, and underscoring our grievances before an unresponsive Zionist-inspired and Zionist informed Western public opinion.”
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The hijacking of the TWA plane was timed to coincide with an address by President Richard Nixon to the annual meeting of the Zionist Organization of America in Los Angeles, California, on August 29, 1969.

Given the extensive security measures applied by airports today, it seems incredible how easily Leila Khaled and her associate smuggled pistols and hand grenades onto TWA Flight 840 in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Shortly after takeoff, her accomplice forced his way onto the flight deck and announced the plane was under a “new captain.” Leila then assumed command of the aircraft. “To demonstrate my credibility, I immediately offered [the pilot] Captain Carter the safety pin from the grenade as a souvenir. He respectfully declined it. I dropped it at his feet and made my speech. ‘If you obey my orders, all will be well; if not, you will be responsible for the safety of passengers and aircraft.’”
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Once she had secured control over the plane, Khaled enjoyed her command enormously. She ordered the pilot to fly to Israel. She communicated directly with air traffic controllers en route, and particularly relished forcing the Israeli authorities to address the aircraft not as “TWA Flight 840” but as “Popular Front, Free Arab Palestine.” She had the pilot circle over her native city, Haifa, which she saw for the first time since 1948, shadowed by three Israeli fighters. Finally, she instructed the pilot to land in Damascus, where all of the passengers were ultimately released unharmed. Leila and her associate were held under house arrest by the Syrian authorities for forty-five days before they were allowed to return to Lebanon. They had enjoyed complete success in their mission and escaped with impunity.

 

The late 1960s were the heyday of the Palestinian commando movement. Fatah’s operations in Israel and the Popular Front’s hijackings brought the Palestinian cause to the world’s attention and gave hope to exiled Palestinians the world over. However, relations between the Arab host states and the Palestinian revolution soon began to deteriorate. The tensions were most pronounced in Lebanon and Jordan.

Palestinian guerrillas enjoyed significant public support in Lebanon, particularly among Leftist and Muslim groups disenchanted with the conservative Maronite-dominated political order. The Lebanese government, however, saw the Palestinian movement as a direct threat to its sovereignty and a risk to the country’s security. When Israeli commandos attacked Beirut Airport in 1968, the Lebanese authorities attempted to crack down on the Palestinians. Clashes erupted between the Lebanese
security forces and Palestinian guerrillas in the course of 1969. Egyptian president Nasser intervened to broker a deal between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian factions. The Cairo Accord of November 1969 set the ground rules for the conduct of the Palestinian movement in Lebanese territory. It permitted Palestinian guerrillas to operate from Lebanese territory and gave the Palestinian factions full control over the 300,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon. The Cairo Accord provided a tenuous truce between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian movement that would be stretched to the breaking point over the next six years.

Relations with the Kingdom of Jordan were even more volatile. Some of the Palestinian factions openly called for the overthrow of the “reactionary” Hashemite monarchy to mobilize Palestinian and Arab masses through social revolution, which they saw as the necessary first step for the liberation of Palestine. Salah Khalaf acknowledged that the guerrillas were in part to blame for the breakdown in relations. “It’s true that our own behaviour wasn’t terribly consistent,” he wrote. “Proud of their force and exploits, the fedayeen [Palestinian commandos] often displayed a sense of superiority, sometimes even arrogance, without taking into consideration the sensibilities or interests of the native Jordanians. Still more serious was their attitude toward the Jordanian army, which they treated more as an enemy than as a potential ally.”
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But all the Palestinian factions believed King Hussein behaved duplicitously toward them and that he had thrown in his lot with the Americans and even the Israelis against the Palestinian cause.

By 1970 the Jordanians and the Palestinians were on a collision course. In June, the Popular Front took the first secretary of the American Embassy in Jordan hostage and seized the two largest hotels in Amman—the Intercontinental and the Philadelphia, taking more than eighty guests as hostages. King Hussein responded by sending his army to attack Palestinian positions in the refugee camps of Amman. The fighting raged for a week before a truce was struck and all the hostages were released. Leila Khaled regretted that the Popular Front had not continued fighting. “We missed the opportunity to depose Hussein when we had the confidence of the people and the power to defeat his fragmented forces,” she later reflected.
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The Popular Front struck again in September 1970 when it hijacked another plane to Athens and demanded the release of Mahmoud Issa. Since his own attack on an El Al passenger plane in Athens in December 1968, Issa had been held in a squalid Greek jail cell, forgotten by the outside world. The show trial he had hoped for in Greece, to focus international attention on the Palestinian cause, never materialized. As a result of its bold and successful hijacking, the PFLP was able to seize headlines and forced the Greek government to release Issa.

Mahmoud Issa returned to Jordan to a hero’s welcome, and within two months he had his next assignment. He was to prepare a landing strip for a spectacular PFLP
operation—a synchronized three-plane hijacking that would bring Israeli and Western aircraft to the deserts of Jordan. The Popular Front hoped by these means to secure the front pages of the world’s press and to assert the authority of the Palestinian revolution over Jordan. It was a deliberate provocation, a challenge to both King Hussein and his army. Issa went to work on a disused airstrip to the east of the Jordanian capital Amman known as Dawson’s Field, renamed for the occasion “Revolution Airport.”

On September 6, 1970, commandos of the Popular Front boarded an American TWA airliner en route from Frankfurt to New York, and a Swissair flight from Zurich to New York, and forced both planes to land in Jordan.

The PFLP also assigned four commandos to seize an Israeli passenger plane that same day. The El Al ground staff refused boarding passes to two of the would-be hijackers, who chose to hijack an American Pan Am airliner instead. The Pan Am pilot refused to land his aircraft at Dawson’s Field, claiming the runway was not long enough to accommodate his massive Boeing 747 aircraft. He flew to Beirut, where Popular Front explosive teams wired the first-class cabin, and then directed the plane on to Cairo. The hijackers told the passengers and crew they would have only eight minutes to evacuate the aircraft once the plane landed. In fact, the explosives went off only three minutes after the plane touched down. Remarkably, all 175 passengers and crew managed to get off safely before the aircraft exploded.