For the 54 hostages left behind, the squalor of the jets was replaced by the squalor of the Wahdat refugee camp. The U.S. State Department could not be certain, but reports indicated that 37 or 38 of the hostages were American. Their captors still did not threaten them with death; a PFLP communiqué stated only that it would hold them indefinitely as prisoners of war. This was a different kind of threat—interminable captivity—Americans would face in the 1980s in Lebanon. A Palestinian refugee camp was not a safe haven. On 17 September, what had been armed clashes between the Palestinians and Jordanians erupted into full-scale civil war. The same Jordanian army that had come to the defense of the Palestinians at Karameh two years before launched a full-scale assault on PLO positions. The ensuing combat was terrible. Over the next ten days, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) mediators attempted to sustain negotiations over the fate of the hostages but, by the third week of September, ICRC officials acknowledged there had been no direct contact for days with the guerrillas holding the hostages. The guerrillas were on the defensive.
On 26 September, the Jordanians proudly announced troops loyal to the king had rescued 15 hostages from the Wahdat refugee camp; the PFLP predictably announced it had freed them. The next day, the PFLP released 33 more hostages. Now the PFLP held only six hostages, one fewer than the seven fedayeen whose release they demanded. On 28 September, as the violence spiraled out of control, Egyptian president Nasser convened an emergency meeting of the Arab League to end the internecine violence in Jordan. When envoys were unable to broker a settlement, Nasser summoned the king and the chairman of the PLO to Cairo to work out the details of a fragile truce. But neither the truce nor Nasser survived what the Palestinians regard as “Black September.” Already frail, Nasser collapsed and died of a heart attack on 28 September. The internecine violence of Black September killed Nasser, and his dream of pan-Arabism died with him.
The next day the PFLP released the remaining six hostages. Leila Khaled and her comrades imprisoned in Switzerland and West Germany went free soon after. Years later, the BBC tracked down Khaled and asked her about Skyjack Sunday and the decision to free her. “No one heard our screams and our suffering,” she said; “all we got from the world was more tents and old clothes. After 1967, we were obliged to explain to the world that the Palestinians had a cause.” Asked about the negotiations, Khaled remembered that the terrorists had an advantage. “They could not do anything but accept the demands. We just wanted these governments to recognize that these people had a legitimate struggle. I think the European governments recognized us in a situation when we had power. It was a good step for us because [it showed] that governments could be negotiated with and that we could impose our demands.”25
For Khaled and the leadership of the PFLP the obligation to explain to the world that the Palestinians had a legitimate struggle justified mass hostage-taking. The tactic was reprehensible, but it was effective because hostage-taking propelled Western governments into an insuperable moral dilemma. The British prime minister and his counterparts in Israel, Europe, and the United States understood that appeasement of the terrorists would embolden them. But despite the declared policy to reject negotiations at all costs, the potential costs in human lives because of inflexible adherence to the policy were too great. Confronted with an onslaught against civilian aviation, governments would have to tighten airport security to prevent terrorists from boarding aircraft, or they would have to form elite counterterrorist units to assault hijacked planes and kill hijackers. This was not a dilemma for governments alone. Even in the days before instantaneous broadcast of news via satellite, the inevitable news coverage of the crisis in Jordan intensified the pressure on the governments to capitulate to terrorist demands. Governments were in a moral dilemma, so too were the sentinels of a free society—the new organizations. The ethical debate about media coverage of terrorist operations is a direct consequence of terrorists' determination to manipulate the news. Because terrorism is inherently newsworthy, the reality is that media organizations cannot simply decline to cover terrorism. The terrorists understand all of this perfectly well. The hijackings were a means to broadcast a set of demands and advance a set of political objectives. In the media age, terrorism is politics by other means.
Arafat's Terror Option
September 1970, Black September, was a terrible ordeal for Arab unity: the Palestinians were killed not by Israelis but by their Jordanian brothers. The truce between the Palestinians and Jordanians, called out of respect for Nasser, did not hold. Fighting inevitably resumed. Before the last Palestinian enclaves were eliminated in July 1971, PLO fighters suffered appalling casualties; estimates fall in the range of five to fifteen thousand killed.26 King Hussein's Bedouin army had driven Arafat and the PLO from Jordan, but the PLO was vengeful, not vanquished.
In August and again in September 1971, senior PLO leaders met in Damascus, Syria, and endorsed the strategy of international terrorism George Habash and Wadi Haddad had initiated in 1968. Guerrilla attacks against Israeli border positions had accomplished nothing. And now the PLO was consumed with avenging the betrayal of Jordan and the moderate Arab states. Wadi Haddad's assault on civilian aviation at least forced Western governments to negotiate with the Palestinians over the lives of passengers and crews, if not yet to resolve the broader political question of the political status of the Palestinian people. International terrorism became an option in the absence of real military capabilities or a commitment to political settlement. Except for Arafat, whose attitude mattered most, the PLO leaders did not pause to consider the possibility that the strategy would actually damage Palestinian aspirations by creating the perception that the Palestinians were criminals undeserving of a state of their own. But PLO chairman Arafat faced a dilemma. If he opposed the terrorist option, the PFLP and smaller groups could act autonomously, but that entailed the risk of fracturing the unity of the PLO and losing power. And Fatah itself was divided over terror. Abu Iyad, head of Fatah intelligence, raised his voice in defense of terror, although he was careful to characterize his actions as revolutionary violence. When the moment came to decide, Arafat absented himself from the meeting. It was act of moral ambiguity that did not absolve the future president of the Palestinian National Authority of complicity in terrorism.27 Arafat merely adapted the adage of Mao—a revolutionary he admired—to the circumstances of the Palestinian revolution: if power proceeds from the barrel of a gun, Chairman Arafat was intent on controlling the gun. At the conclusion of the Damascus conference, the chieftains of the PLO militias decided to intensify the campaign of terror. For the next few years, until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, terror would have a new name.
On 28 November 1971, a Palestinian assassination squad murdered Wasfi Tel, the Jordanian prime minister, in the ornate lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo where Tel was attending a meeting of the Arab League. It was a gruesome spectacle. No one, not even Tel's bodyguards, noticed the two Palestinians who followed Tel into the Sheraton, and no one sensed the danger until one of them, Essat Rabah, fired five gunshots into the Jordanian politician at point blank range. As Tel lay bleeding to death, a second Palestinian, Mozar Khalifa, stooped down and licked the blood flowing out over the marble as the crowd watched on aghast, and he claimed the act in the name of Black September. “One of the Butchers of the Palestinian people was thus executed,” is how Abu Iyad expressed it, “Black September, the underground organization set up early that autumn, had just carried out its first operation.”28 It was the first anyone had heard of Black September; it would not be the last.
Chapter 2
Revolutionary Violence Is a Political Act,
Terrorism Is Not
The year 1972 was an election year in the United States. Richard Nixon, who had come into office in 1969 amid mounting protests against