The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (26 page)

The soldiers told Nuha to come with them. She got into the jeep with Bashir and drove south; Nuha wasn't sure what they wanted.

"You look tired," Nuha told Bashir on the road to Jerusalem. "Did they beat you?"

"Stop!" the captain screamed at Nuha. "You can't talk to him!"

They arrived at the Muscobia, the Russian compound that served as an Israeli military interrogation center in Jerusalem. The soldiers brought Nuha into a small room and Bashir into the room next door. Shortly afterward, Nuha would recall, she could hear Bashir's screams. After listening for what seemed an interminable time, she couldn't bear to hear any more and fainted.

Three hours later, the jailers brought her a cup of water. They called her to the next room and opened the door. She saw Bashir, his head bowed, clad only in his underpants. Two men stood on either side of him, wielding sticks.

"Brother," Nuha said. "Oh, my brother." The interrogators then dragged Bashir away and told Nuha to find her way back to Ramallah on her own.

Bashir, by his own account, never admitted any connection to the supermarket bombing. "I endured the beatings, the hoods, and the dogs. They did not break me." He denied membership in the PFLP and disavowed any knowledge of its operations.

By now the world knew of the PFLP and the headline-grabbing operations that had terrorized the Israelis. Many Palestinians, still in shock from the defeat and occupation following the Six Day War, had begun to realize that small guerrilla operations alone would not achieve their long-awaited liberation of Palestine. They came to embrace the PFLP's strategy of "spectacular operations" to reverse years of humiliation and failure and to focus the world's attention on the Palestinian plight. These attacks, combined with the operations of Fatah and other groups, were immensely popular among Arabs, who still saw Israel as illegally occupying Palestine.

"In 1968 a Palestinian
fedayi
could travel right across the Arab world with nothing more than his organisation card and be welcome everywhere," Bassam Abu-Sharif, then a member of the PFLP, would recall in his memoir. "No passport—just the card. Nobody, nobody, in the Arab world then dared raise a voice against
a fedayi. . .
. " In the aftermath of the Six Day War,
"the fedayi was
god." Many of the guerrilla attacks against Israel were launched from Jordan, and this sharply raised tensions between King Hussein and Israeli leaders and consequently between the king and the guerrilla groups.

In March 1968, in response to the guerrilla incursions, Israeli infantry, tanks, paratroopers, and armored brigades crossed the Jordan River and attacked Fatah positions in the Jordanian town of Karama. The Israeli force, fifteen thousand strong, drew heavy fire from Jordanian and Fatah artillery. Twenty-eight Israeli soldiers died, and the Jordanians captured several Israeli tanks, which would soon be paraded through the streets of Amman. Israel had inflicted more casualties, and it achieved most of its military objectives, but to an Arab world starved for signs of strength, the courage of the guerrillas demonstrated that the Palestinian resistance was genuine. The heroic image of Yasser Arafat, who by most accounts stood under fire to direct his fighters at Karama, grew larger still. The battle of Karama, though in many ways a military defeat, would go down as one of the great symbolic victories in the history of the Palestinian resistance, further enhancing Fatah's image within Jordan. Now King Hussein would find it even more difficult to pressure the guerrillas. On the contrary, in the aftermath of Karama he declared, "We are all fedayeen."

From Cairo to Baghdad to Damascus to Amman, thousands of Arabs flooded rebel offices to volunteer in the renewed fight against Israel. Fatah even got its own frequency on Egyptian radio, Arafat was invited to Cairo as a state guest of Nasser, and the ranks of Fatah swelled.

The "spectacular" operations of the PFLP, meanwhile, began to attract legions of young Europeans, who saw in the airline hijackings a willingness to risk everything to achieve liberation. This was a time not only of cold war, but of revolution, inspired in part by massive and worldwide street protests against the Vietnam War and, in some cases, support of the Vietcong. In the third world, the Vietcong were often seen as freedom fighters and the United States as their oppressors. Similarly, the Palestinian rebels, through the hijackings and other high-profile operations, quickly became identified on the Left with the struggle for revolutionary justice against an occupying power. In the United States, even within much of the Left, and especially among idealistic young Jews who would soon make aliyah to the Holy Land, Israel was still considered the just victor of the recent war. But the surging radical movements in Europe began to feed the Palestinian nationalists with wide-eyed anti-imperialists: Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, and German youths who had become frustrated with the capitalist system and its leaders.

Inspired by Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and by Chairman Mao's admonition to become "fish in a revolutionary sea," the European leftists arrived in PLO and PFLP training camps in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, and Yemen. From these connections, "solidarity committees" sprang up across Europe, doling out financial aid and medical supplies and sending volunteers into the occupied territories.

Soon, infamous revolutionary groups and fugitives throughout the West became identified with the Palestinian struggle. They included the Venezuelan Communist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka Carlos the Jackal), Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang), and various factions of the Red Brigade: ETA from Spain, the Italian Brigada Rossa, Action Directe of France, and the Japanese Red Army. "The only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence," declared George Habash, "thereby turning the occupied territories into an inferno whose fires consume the usurpers." His slogan was "unity, freedom, vengeance."

For thousands of Palestinians, the "spectaculars" brought a sense of power out of defeat and attention to the Palestinian cause as never before. Many Palestinians believed their attacks were against not Israeli civilians, but rather "soldiers in civilian clothing" in a "colonial settler regime" that could be mobilized against them in a moment's notice. This was war, the Palestinian rebels believed, and their attacks represented their only recourse to bringing attention to their cause. "When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle," Habash said. "For decades world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now." In much of the world, however, the PFLP tactics had turned people against the Palestinians and their liberation movement.

The PFLP operations, moreover, provoked a massive Israeli crackdown. Thousands of Palestinians were jailed, including many who had no knowledge of any guerrilla operations. They were held indefinitely without charge. The PFLP tactics thus became a growing source of tension within the Palestinian nationalist movement, and in February 1969, the same month Bashir was arrested, a new faction broke off from the PFLP, soon to be called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Laila, one of the DFLP founders, believed the "lunatic actions" of the PFLP against civilians outside Israel had "smeared the legitimacy of the resis­tance." The DFLP leadership also objected to the rhetoric of "pushing the Jews into the sea" and began to see their struggle as against not Jews, but Zionism. They advocated for coexistence between Arabs and Jews within a single state, where no one would be forced to move. Some within the DFLP even began to talk of Arab and Jewish states existing side by side. Even among some of the radical factions of the Palestinian resistance, the idea of coexistence was gaining ground.

By 1970, however, ideological tensions within the Palestinian movement were minor compared with the antagonistic atmosphere between the Palestinians and King Hussein of Jordan. After the battle of Karama, Fatah and other factions in the Palestinian liberation movement had grown so strong that they became a virtual state within a state in Jordan, turning the capital, Amman, into their "Arab Hanoi." Rebels saw the king as coddling the West through his qualified support for a UN compromise, which they feared would scuttle their right of return. Some rebel leaders had labeled the king a "paper tiger" and threatened to topple him. On September 1, following a Jordanian army shelling of Palestinian refugee camps, the king survived an attack on his convoy that the Jordanians believed was an assassination attempt.

A few days later, with Bashir still in prison and awaiting his long-delayed trial, PFLP fighters staged perhaps the most spectacular operation in the history of the Palestinian resistance. Their plan was to simultaneously hijack three New York-bound airliners from European capitals, thereby maximizing the number of U.S. passengers and the consequent international attention. The airliners would then land in an old British airfield in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers would be held until Israel released Palestinian political prisoners.

PFLP operatives seized two of the flights and directed them toward Jordan. The third attempt was foiled. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian "queen of freedom fighters," underwent plastic surgery to hide her identity. She and a fellow PFLP operative posed as a Mexican bride and groom. The attempted hijacking, on an El Al flight from Amsterdam, went awry when the pilot took the plane into a sharp plunge to throw the "newlyweds" off balance. The "groom" was shot dead by the Israeli security chief on board; Khaled was taken to a jail in London. However, three days later, when a Palestinian working in Bahrain heard that his heroine queen had been taken prisoner, he single-handedly hijacked a British airliner and ordered the pilot to join the other two planes already on the ground in Jordan. Palestinians would come to know this stretch of desert east of Amman, in Hussein's kingdom, as "Revolution Airport."

"I'm sorry," Bassam Abu-Sharif shouted through his megaphone to the several hundred passengers, standing in the sun in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, "we have just hijacked you to the desert in Jordan. This is a country in the Middle East, next to Israel and Syria. We are fighting a just war, a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation. The reason you're in the middle of it is that we want to exchange you for prisoners who were taken in Israel and other countries."

The list of Palestinian prisoners included the name of Khaled, the "Mexican bride" whose hijacking operation had unraveled and who sat in jail in London. Khaled would be released in a prisoner-for-hostage exchange, as the direct result of the actions of her admirer. (Bashir's name would appear on another prisoner-exchange list two years later, during a hijacking at the airport near Tel Aviv; the operation ended when Israeli commandos shot and killed the hijackers. Bashir remained in prison.)

After six days, the crisis at "Revolution Airport" ended with all hostages safe and three charred jumbo jets in pieces on the tarmac, blown up by PFLP fighters to demonstrate their seriousness to the world. Within days, however, King Hussein used the PFLP's spectacle as reason for swift action against all Palestinian factions in the country.

For two weeks in September 1970, civil war erupted as the king's troops engaged PLO, PFLP, DFLP, and other Palestinian factions in fierce battles in the Palestinian refugee camps formed after 1948 and in provincial towns across the desert kingdom. Jordanian troops outnumbered Palestinian guerrillas by more than three to one and had more than nine hundred tanks and armored vehicles, compared with none for the Palestinian side. When Syria crossed the Jordanian border to fight on the side of the Palestinians, the king secretly contacted Israel, asking for air support against the Syrians: a rare personal appeal from an Arab leader to Israel to attack other Arabs. On the ground, especially in the refugee camps, it was Arab against Arab as the Jordanian military unleashed its hardware, killing thousands of Palestinians in the span of eleven days. The month would forever be known to Palestinians as Black September.

On September 26, at the urging of Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Hussein and Yasser Arafat flew separately to Egypt, where they signed a cease-fire agreement. This was to be the last political act of consequence for Nasser. Two days later, the Egyptian leader, still revered across the Arab world despite his central role in one of its most catastrophic defeats, died of a heart attack. Millions of people filled the streets of the Arab capitals, wearing black and sobbing openly, in scene after scene of mass grief. The era of pan-Arab nationalism, of a single hero promising to lead the people to victory over an oppressor, was finished.

Dalia was sickened by the actions of the PFLP. In later years, she would recall her horror at a PFLP-organized attack on the Lod airport, when three members of the Japanese Red Army opened fire with Kalashnikovs, killing twenty-five people, including Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. Attacking civilians crossed an ethical line and "hit a very hard place in me." At times like these, Dalia understood how someone could feel murderous in response to such attacks.

Between her classes at the university in Tel Aviv, or at home on the weekends, Dalia wondered who these people were and how they thought they could achieve their goals with such extreme tactics. She wondered about Bashir, too. Who was he, really?

Bashir was in jail, a member, according to the Israeli authorities, of the PFLP. It was hard to believe that the same young man who had come to Dalia's door—whose family was received with such warmth in her home—could be part of the Popular Front. She was stunned not because she had considered Bashir a friend, but because she thought the connection was, in some ways, even deeper than that. "It's beyond friendship, because you didn't choose it," she would say. "Israel did not choose to have the Palestinians, and the Palestinians did not choose to have Israelis. It's a given, and that's the most critical point, how one deals with the given."