As Bernard Lewis catalogued at the time, the constitution of almost every Arab state, including those that had come under the rule of revolutionary parties professing “secular” ideologies, proclaimed Islam to be the “state religion” or the “religion of the state.”46
The emphasis was on “democratic,” but this was not meant in the sense in which the term is used in the West. The “democratic” countries after whom the PLO intended to model its state were the ones over which Abu Iyad gushed: the People’s Republic of China, North Vietnam, and Cuba.
If the “democratic, secular state” was intended neither to be democratic nor secular, in the normal meaning of those terms, neither was it clear, for that matter, that it would long be a state. As late as 1971, Nabil Sha’ath, a top Fatah official, rebutted charges from left-wing groups within the PLO that Fatah had abandoned pan-Arabism, by reiterating Fatah’s original view of the relation between the Palestinian and the broader Arab cause. “We see the Palestinian state as a step towards federation,” he insisted.47
If there was, in short, more packaging than substance in the new vision that Arafat and his fellows were proffering; it nonetheless sufficed to put the Palestinian cause in good standing with the revolutionary Left. When, in 1969, some hundred-and-fifty young Europeans traveled to a Middle Eastern training camp to prepare themselves to enlist in revolutionary struggles, Palestinian liberation was among the designated causes.48 That same year, a time of extreme radical agitation among Western youth, a bomb was planted in the communal hall of West Berlin’s Jewish congregation. The authors of the act left a flyer decrying “the Left’s continued paralysis in facing up to the theoretical implications of the Middle-East conflict, a paralysis for which German guilt feelings are responsible.” It went on:
We admittedly gassed Jews and therefore feel obliged to protect them from further threats of genocide. This kind of neurotic backward-looking anti-Fascism, obsessed as it is by past history, totally disregards the non-justifiability of the State of Israel. True anti-Fascism consists in an explicit and unequivocal identification with the fighting fedayeen.49
Also that year the journal Free Palestine exulted: “[Al Fatah] has certainly been able to achieve a breakthrough in what used to be a Zionist domain: the Western leftist movements. Al Fatah has become to many synonymous with freedom fighting and an expression of struggle against oppression everywhere.”50
Of course, the revolutionary Left occupied only a corner of the Western political scene. But, even if marginal, it was in much better odor than the fascist Right that had once constituted the European allies of the Arab leadership. Hitler’s collaborator, al-Husseini, had continued to represent the Palestinian Arab cause into the 1960s, and the propaganda offices of Nasser’s government employed several escaped officials of the Nazi regime. This may have explained some of the self-defeating over-the-top rhetoric that helped to put the Arabs at a disadvantage in the contest for international sympathy.
Now, however, a critical makeover had been achieved. No longer did Israel enjoy the public relations gift of opponents who were collaborators of Hitler and Goebbels; now they faced the comrades of such chic, romanticized figures as Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. Not only had David become Goliath, but on the other side the frog had become a prince.
This transformation reshaped the view of the conflict not only in the eyes of the international Left but to some extent in the mainstream. For example, TIME, whose reportage cum commentary had been warmly pro-Israel in 1967 to the point of endorsing the retention of territories Israel had captured, now ran a cover story on Al Fatah. The headline, “The Guerrilla Threat in the Middle East,” sounded negative, but the body of the article was admiring:
With the fanaticism and desperation of men who have nothing to lose, the fedayeen have taken the destiny of the Palestinians into their own hands. . . . In the aftermath of the Arab defeat, the fedayeen are today the only ones carrying the fight to Israel. The guerrillas provide an outlet for the fierce Arab resentment of Israel and give an awakened sense of pride to a people accustomed to decades of defeat, disillusionment and humiliation. In the process, the Arabs have come to idolize Mohammed (“Yasser”) Arafat, a leader of El Fatah fedayeen who has emerged as the most visible spokesman for the commandos.51
In the battle for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world, the Arab side had taken, to borrow a phrase from the PLO’s new hero, Chairman Mao, a great leap forward.
The redefinition of the Middle East conflict from Arab–Israeli to Israeli–Palestinian sapped the sympathy Israel had enjoyed as an underdog since its founding. The emergence of Palestinian nationalism following the Six Day War transformed Israelis from “pioneers” into “colonizers.” This furnished an ideological basis for supporting Israel’s enemies that dovetailed with the enduring “realist” considerations that led diplomats and military brass of most countries at most times to tilt to the Arab side. Their instincts of self-interest were powerfully reinforced in the 1970s by new measures of intimidation brought to bear by the Arabs.
The intimidation took two forms: terrorism and oil. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Yasser Arafat himself led an effort to kindle guerrilla warfare there. But the small size of the territory and the nature of the terrain made it unsuitable for a guerrilla campaign. The Israeli army was strong and highly motivated, unlike the forces of many genuine colonialist armies whose morale was often low. And the population of the West Bank, which had forged ties with the Jordanian monarchy over the preceding two decades, was initially lukewarm to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) cause.
So Fatah and the more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) and its various offshoots (all of these groups operating under the umbrella of the PLO) focused instead on small-scale infiltrations into Israel to kill random civilians and destroy property. In the various Arab uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s, invariably described as “glorious” in Arab discourse, women, children, and the elderly were targeted as freely as men capable of bearing arms.**
And, indeed, much the same may be observed today in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere where Arabs are fighting other Arabs. A bomb in a market is a routine form of warfare.
As Israel took steps to prevent infiltration, measures that were largely although not totally effective, the Arabs shifted their attacks to more vulnerable venues. The idea of striking Israelis outside of Israel was pioneered by the Marxist PLO faction, the PFLP. In July 1968, just a year after the Six Day War, a team of three PFLP commandoes hijacked an El Al flight en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land in Algiers. Although the initial motive for such acts was simply to get at Israelis where they were less protected, the execution of terror abroad soon proved to have the considerable ancillary benefit of evoking an appeasement response from the nations that found themselves to be proxy battlegrounds.
Quite possibly, the idea of hijacking was borrowed from American radicals, several of whom had recently commandeered flights, demanding to be taken to Cuba. But the Arabs put some new twists on this form of protest. For the most part, the American radicals just wanted to get to Cuba because they idealized its political system. They used the method of air piracy because Americans were barred from travel to Cuba, and as a means of dramatization. The Arabs, in contrast, were hungry for violence. There was relatively little in this first PFLP hijacking, but the copilot was injured by the hijackers, one of whom then dipped his finger into the blood and tasted it, exulting, according to an account later given by an Italian priest aboard the plane, “It’s good, the blood of Israel.”1 In subsequent actions, his comrades were to savor much more blood of Israelis and others.
A second innovation of Arab hijackers was to hold passengers and crew