Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
into a new round of warfare against Israel. The battle had four fronts — the West Bank, Jordan,
international terrorism, and Lebanon.
On the fi rst front, Fatah and the PLO, operating from bases inside Jordan, attempted to
ignite a guerrilla war in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and lead terrorist attacks into Israel.
Israel quickly defeated this effort by rooting out the armed enemy cells in the territories.
On the second front, which followed, the PLO attacked Israel from bases in Jordan. The
Jordanian government was unwilling or unable to stop these operations. Israel responded by
hitting PLO safe havens in Jordan, which gave Jordan's government an incentive to act against
the Palestinian raids. Facing increased resistance from the Jordanian army and government,
which were reluctant to be dragged into an armed confl ict with Israel, the PLO sought to take
over Jordan itself. In September 1970 the escalating tension led King Hussein and his armed
forces to attack and soundly defeat the PLO, expelling them from the country. At a critical mo-
ment, when the radical Syrian regime, the PLO's ally, ordered its army to invade Jordan and
overthrow the king, Israel warned that it would meet any such invasion by force. The Syrians
backed down.
The third front was international. PLO member groups like the Popular Front for the Lib-
eration of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked planes and tried to attack Israeli facilities abroad. After
the PLO's expulsion from Jordan, Fatah used similar tactics, creating a front group called Black
September as a cover. Among these attacks, planned at the highest levels of Fatah and the PLO,
was the 1972 assault on the Olympic village in Munich, Germany, and the kidnapping and kill-
ing of Israeli athletes there. In response, Israel initiated a campaign of reprisals, killing Fatah
and PFLP representatives in Paris, Rome, Nicosia (Cyprus), and Beirut.
In June 1976 a four-member terrorist team consisting of two Palestinians and two German
sympathizers hijacked an Air France plane with 248 passengers and a twelve-member crew,
diverting it to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The hijackers demanded the release of forty Pales-
tinians held in Israel and thirteen others imprisoned in other countries for previous terrorist
attacks. The hijackers separated Israeli and Jewish passengers from non-Jewish passengers and
released the latter. On July 4, a 100-man IDF task force landed at Entebbe for a successful res-
cue operation. All the hijackers were killed, as were 3 of the remaining 105 hostages. The assault
team's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, was also killed.
In the 1970s, on the fourth front, small squads of PLO gunmen left the new PLO bases in
Lebanon to infi ltrate across the border and attempt to murder as many Israelis as possible be-
fore being killed or captured themselves. Two of the most notorious of these terrorist attacks
were the massacre of twenty-seven Israelis, twenty-one of whom were children, by members of
the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), on May 15, 1974, and the murder
of eighteen Israelis, eight of them children, by terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, in Kiryat Shmona on April 11, 1974. The end of PLO control of southern Lebanon
by Israel's Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982 largely stopped Palestinian groups from carrying
out attacks of this kind.
Both the nature of the Palestinian assaults and the success of the Israeli responses — es-
pecially in saving Jordan's government from being overthrown by pro-Soviet Syria and the
PLO — impressed U.S. and Western policymakers, laying the basis for an emerging alliance.
