The terrorists forced the pilots into the air and on to Athens, where the plane landed that evening. While Italian authorities were left to put out the fires, tend the wounded, and identify the dead, Greek authorities were thrust into tense negotiations. The Palestinians never identified their organization, but told Greek authorities “we love liberty, especially Palestinian liberty.” Their only demand was like the one made in the name of the National Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestinian a month earlier: the liberation of the men captured in the Athens airport attack in August. The demand came with a threat. “We are going to conduct a slaughter at the Athens airport,” one of the terrorists told the tower. If the carnage in Rome was not enough to convince Greek authorities the seriousness of the threats, the Dutch pilot, Captain Joe Kroese, dispelled any doubts. “They're serious…they've already killed four”—and they were threatening the life of a fifth hostage—“They're going to shoot him.” But before authorities could arrange for an Arab speaker to calm the terrorists, the sound of gunfire came over the cockpit radio. “It's too late” was all the pilot could say.
In fact, the pilot was hearing simulated executions. The terrorists had not killed four or five but only one hostage, an Italian airport employee they selected at random. “He was sitting there all alone,” another passenger later told authorities. The hijackers “asked him, even very politely, to come to the galley” from his seat in the rear of the plane. “He walked up calmly. Nobody had any idea of what was about to happen.” Nobody except the terrorists. Another passenger could see through an opening in the curtain that he was pleading for his life. One of the terrorists shot him twice at point blank range. This was the first hostage murdered aboard a hijacked jet since the PFLP initiated the campaign of hijackings in 1968. That same night, the Palestinians ordered the crew to fly them to Kuwait. They left the body of the murdered Italian hostage on the tarmac in Athens as proof of their love of liberty. The incident ended in Kuwait City thirty hours after it began in Rome with the explosion of automatic weapon fire and grenades. After arrival, the terrorists simply surrendered.
The year 1973 ended as violently as it began with terror claiming victims along a wide arc from the Holy Land to the Old World. But the illogic of terror was shifting. The conflagration in Rome served a very different purpose than previous operations. The purpose of the hijacking of the El Al flight in July 1968 was to raise Palestinian morale by demonstrating the fighting spirit of fedayeen at a moment when the Arab armies and Palestinian guerrillas felt dispirited. The Skyjack Sunday operations two years later were intended, in Leila Khaled's words, to demonstrate to the world that the Palestinians had a legitimate cause at a moment when the world would offer no more than tents and old clothes. The purpose of Black September's Munich Olympic operation was to force the world to be alarmed by the consequences of neglect of the Palestinian national aspirations. But the purpose of this latest outrage was not to embolden Palestinians by harming Israelis or to force indifferent or hostile Western powers to alter their foreign policies, its purpose was to damage Arafat and to destroy an incipient peace process that would promise less than the destruction of the Jewish state and a complete reversal of the Catastrophe of 1948. And to succeed in this, Palestinian extremists would strive to prove to the world that Palestinians were incapable of moderation.
Chapter 4
Peace Would Be the End of All Our Hopes
The year 1974 began with the Nixon administration in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Nixon's abuse of power, coming when American society was already torn by the Vietnam conflict, shook American confidence in the integrity of government. Nixon resigned office on 9 August 1974, leaving Gerald Ford the daunting challenge of restoring the presidency and healing a nation. To ensure continuity, Ford asked Henry Kissinger to stay on as secretary of state and encouraged him to continue his efforts to forge a peace in the Middle East compatible with United States geopolitical interests. Kissinger brokered disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May, but a comprehensive peace settlement involving the Palestinians lay beyond the horizon of Kissinger's strategic thinking. The Palestinian national movement entered 1974 in disarray. Arafat signaled his interest in dialogue and scored a series of diplomatic successes that could have opened a pathway to a two-state solution, but the emergence of the Rejection Front, led by the PFLP, proved Arafat could not keep the more radical PLO factions in line. Predictably, new terrorist threats emerged. In 1975, civil war erupted in Lebanon, and for the better part of a year, until the Syrian military intervened to safeguard Syria's interests in Lebanon, the Palestinians were thrown into a struggle for survival.
The Rejection Front
While Nixon struggled to save his political life, Kissinger assiduously pursued peace in the Middle East. Although the Yom Kippur War the previous October had altered the strategic equation in the volatile region, the Geneva conference in December accomplished nothing. The White House had serious misgivings about Soviet participation in peace talks. In an unguarded remark, Kissinger admitted to reporters that the administration sought “to expel the Soviet Union from the Middle East.” The administration had even more serious misgivings about the participation of the PLO. “The best way to deal with the Palestinian issue,” Kissinger told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, was to “draw the Jordanians into the West Bank and thereby turn the debate…into one between the Jordanians and the Palestinians.” The strategy served Israel's interests well. In June, Yitzak Rabin, a former general who had served as Israel's ambassador to the United States, replaced Golda Meir as prime minister. In September, Kissinger told Rabin during a visit to Washington “a Palestinian state is likely to have as its objective the destruction of both Jordan and Israel.”1 The diplomatic strategy precluded anything approaching a comprehensive settlement. But it did yield incremental successes. Kissinger's famed shuttle diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January and between Israel and Syria in May.
The Palestinians did everything in their power to compel Kissinger to take their interests seriously. Between April and June, as Kissinger was trading time between Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem trying to stabilize the lines redrawn in the October war, Palestinian guerrillas mounted a series of operations in Israel. All the major PLO factions attacked. The bloodshed was awful. On 5 March, eight Fatah guerrillas seized a hotel in Tel Aviv. Kissinger was in Amman for talks with King Hussein and preparing to travel to Israel the following day. He returned to Washington instead. The Israelis launched a rescue operation, but it proved deadly. Seven guerrillas were killed in the fighting; twenty Israelis were killed, including the general commanding the operation. On 11 April, three guerrillas from Jabril's PFLP-General Command seized a group of Israelis in Qirayt Shemona. The IDF attempted a rescue, but it ended in bloodshed. The IDF killed three guerrillas, but nineteen hostages and soldiers were killed. Hawatmeh's DFLP mounted its own operation a month later. Three DFLP guerrillas took 100 Israeli high school students hostage in Ma'alot in northern Israel. The incident ended violently on 15 May, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel. All three guerrillas and 23 children were killed. On 13 June, the PFLP struck a kibbutz. This time four guerrillas and a number of Israelis died in the ensuing firefight. On 26 June, Fatah guerrillas came ashore by boat near Nahariya, Israel, on a mission to take hostages. Three Israelis and all the terrorists were killed in a firefight.2
The renewal of attacks in Israel proved the Palestinians could inflict harm even if they could not influence events. The factitious PLO was obsessed with its doctrine of no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel. Egypt's acceptance of U.S. mediation to regain Egyptian territory was an ominous sign that direct negotiations, recognition, and peace were in the offing. Yasser Arafat understood the new dynamic; in fact, he had already tried to establish a secret back channel to the United States. Just as Sadat understood that U.S. mediation, not Egyptian arms, could restore the Sinai to Egypt, Arafat understood that only U.S. mediation, not Palestinian terrorism, could secure a Palestinian state. This was not the vision of the destruction of Israel