Hey, everybody. This is Daryl Cooper and you are about to hear a special episode of The Martyrmaid podcast. This episode is meant to be a sort of addendum to Fear and Loathing in The New Jerusalem, my earlier series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli Palestinian conflict. If you've managed to find this episode without having first listened to that earlier series, I recommend listening to that series first. I know it's a time investment, but it is very thorough and there are going to be a lot of things in this episode that I'm going to glide past or maybe cover lightly, because I'm going to be assuming that you're already familiar with that earlier material.

I'll try not to do that, but it's going to be inevitable. This episode is going to cover the period from 1948, the year of Israeli independence, and the Palestinian Nakba to the Lebanon War of 1982. It is not meant to be a thorough history of that period, the way Fear and Loathing was of the pre 1948 period. To do justice to that story would require another ten episodes, not just this one. So this one has a narrower focus.

The story I want to tell today is not about every figure and every event and motivation relevant to the conflict in those years. It's specifically about how the level of savagery has escalated over the years, the steps by which those escalations occurred to bring us up to the point where we are now with virtually unrestrained violence and dehumanization, completely normalized on both sides. So it's not a pretty story. And several sections of this podcast are not going to be for the faint of heart. It's not something to listen to with your kids in the car.

At times when I was putting the notes together, it started to even feel a bit voyeuristic. The violence started to feel sort of gratuitous and pornographic, you could say, because, well, every time I tried to delete a passage, though, I thought, no, well, this has to be in here. And so I end up putting it back in. Because it's one thing to hear that there was a terrorist attack today and 14 people were killed. I think it's really important to try to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who goes through something like that to see before our mind's eye what those people saw.

Because only then can we even attempt to understand why people would react to these things the way they do. That means imagining that it was your mother who was forced out of her home by Israeli soldiers after seeing your father killed. And then your mother walking out in the desert carrying your baby brother collapses in the heat before she can make it to a safe place, and she dies and the baby dies before your eyes. And now you're 19 years old, living in a refugee camp, and somebody comes along asking if you want to join the resistance against the people who did that to you. And it means imagining that the families butchered by Palestinian terrorists were your family, that your wife and children or your husband and children were brutally murdered in front of you, and then you're offered an opportunity to vote for a politician who promises to take a savage revenge on the people who did that.

It's really hard for people outside of the region or not from countries that have been engaged in serious local conflict recently, to understand what being in a state of war for such a long time does to people. The Palestinians have been living in degraded conditions, terrorized and controlled by Israeli security forces, subject to periodic military assault for many decades now. Decades. Most Palestinians who are alive today, in fact, virtually all of them at this point, have lived their entire lives under those conditions. The Israelis, you remember a few years back, back in 2015, 2016, when ISIS terrorism in Europe and the US was at its peak and it seemed like an attack was happening somewhere practically every other week for a while.

I remember that time well, and it was nerve racking. I remember myself saying some things that, in retrospect, I probably didn't mean about what might need to be done to get that under control. Well, the Israelis have been dealing with that kind of thing for many decades, as we'll see in this episode, dealing with attacks every bit as savage as anything ISIS did in the US. Or Europe, and all of it happening in a tiny country the size of a small US state.

War radicalizes and hardens people, and prolonged war can corrupt the soul in profound ways that can be hard to see from the inside. What I don't like is when people who are not a party to the war, americans and others who do everything that they can to cheer on the conflict and intensify the level of hatred and dehumanization that's driving it. I understand why Israelis and Palestinians have gotten to that place. It's their families being killed. I'm not going to tell somebody whose family has been murdered how they're supposed to feel about it.

But if you're on the outside looking in, I think we all have an obligation to try to talk the two sides back from the brink, to try to be peacemakers, rather than prodding them on like a group of middle schoolers yelling, Fight. Fight.

Anyway, enough preaching. I will try to avoid that in this episode. This topic makes me preachy. I know, and I hate when I get preachy as much as you do. I'll just be upfront.

I have a lot of personal connections to people on both sides of this conflict, and I get agitated when I see people that I otherwise respect saying awful things about them.

Anyway, after this is released and I've had time to knock out a few other projects, I've been keeping on the back burner. I will do a follow up episode that will focus on the period from 1982 up to the present day, with a focus on the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah and other jihadist elements in the Palestinian movement, as well as the profound impact caused by the Iranian revolution. Very quickly, as many of you know, I have another podcast with my friend Jacob Willink. That podcast is called Jacob Unraveling, and we discuss historical topics and current events. We try to tie the two together.

Most recently, we've done a couple episodes on the latest outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. Jocko is pretty much the sole sponsor of the Martyrmaid podcast. So if you like this show, go check out Unraveling. Go check out Jocko Podcast, his main podcast feed. If you haven't, and head on over to Origin Main.

That's Maine with an E, like the state Originmaine.com, where you will find super high quality gear of various sorts, all made right here in America. At the Origin factory. They've got everything from buffalo hide, boots, high quality jeans, hoodies, jackets, martial arts gear. They got a line of archery hunting gear. Now you'll see, when you go to the website, the stuff is pricey.

But this is not something where the Jocko name is licensed out or just slapped onto a product mass produced at some anonymous factory. This stuff is all custom designed, custom made, and it really shows in the quality, as you will see. So let's get to it. You are about to listen to a special episode, war all the Time israel and Palestine, 1948 to 82. Here we go.

I am content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.

No, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place.

It is somewhere. Hell does exist, but its reference is to something that transcends all things.

Why we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion?

April 1956, at a funeral in southern Israel. Eight years since the Israeli War of Independence, or as the Arabs called it, the Nakba, the catastrophe the Arab states had fought with the newborn Israeli Defense Forces in 1948. But Jordan, Syria and Egypt were not up to that task. They lacked the resolve and the coordination of the Zionists, and they lacked the investment as well. And when they felt they'd done enough to save face, their forces withdrew, leaving the Palestinians to pay the price for their failure.

The Israelis invaded and took over parts of the country that still had large Palestinian Arab majorities. And in the process, they drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs out of their homes for good and for eight years now, in 1956, those people had languished in squalid refugee camps, ringing the borders of the new Jewish state. Palestinians who still lived within Israeli borders were restricted in their movement and activities, herded into neighborhoods surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards to keep them in. Now, no one not the Israelis, not the Palestinians, not any country in the region thought that 1948 was the end of the matter. The secular rulers of Egypt, Syria, and a short time later, Iraq, they all wanted to unite the Middle East into a pan Arab national state.

Of course, they all thought they should be the ones leading it. And they saw Israel as an open wound in the heart of the Arab world that had to be healed before that dream could be realized. Arabs across the region were shocked and humiliated by the terrible performance of Arab forces in the 48 war, and so leaders played on those feelings to bolster their credibility on the Arab street. For the Palestinians, this wasn't just a political game. It was much more personal, much closer to home, obviously.

And as far as they were concerned, their resistance hadn't ended just because Syria, Egypt and Jordan had thrown in the towel. A swelling hatred grew in the hearts of humiliated men in the Palestinian refugee camps. Their mothers and their grandmothers were living in tents and tin and cinder block shanties, living on canned rations delivered by the UN or the Arab states, while the homes and land that their families had lived in, sometimes for generations, were now in the hands of Jewish occupiers just a few miles away. And so raids and skirmishes never stopped. When the 1948 war officially ended, some young guy in a refugee camp with no job and no future might not be able to give his mother her house back, but he could burn that house down.

That sounds irrational and nihilistic, but I would be slow to judge until you've seen your mother chased out of her home at gunpoint, forced to walk out into the desert with whatever she could carry, and ending up in the state that the Palestinians now found themselves in. The Arab governments were humiliated as well, and so they provided supplies and training and intelligence and just general encouragement to any Palestinian militants who were eager for revenge. Sometimes those militants targeted infrastructure in Israel, and sometimes they targeted people. Their state sponsors were not picky about the targets, as long as they harassed and destabilized Israel. In one attack, sponsored by Egyptian intelligence, a dozen Palestinian and Bedouin terrorists slipped into southern Israel and intercepted a bus on the road.

They waved it down and stopped it at gunpoint, and when it stopped, they opened fire at point blank range and killed eleven people. On board was a nine year old boy who had managed to avoid being shot by hiding under a seat. And after a while, after he thought that the killers had left, not knowing that every other person on the bus had been killed, he called out, have they gone? But they had not gone. And one of the killers came back and shot the boy in the head.

He lived a while longer, but he was paralyzed for 32 years, and then he died at age 41.

The Zionists, after years of insurgent warfare and with the Second World War hardly in the rear view mirror. These were a hardened bunch, and they were well prepared to defend themselves from Arab raids when the occasion arose. But they couldn't defend everywhere, all the time. The Arabs inevitably chose the time and place to harass or attack. And the Israelis had neither the organization nor the manpower to cover the whole border and interdict every raid.

And so Moshe Dayan, boss of the Israeli Defense Forces at the time, explained in a lecture what the Israeli strategy would be. Quote we cannot prevent the murder of workers in orchards or of families in their beds, but we have the ability to set a high price for our blood. End quote.

In April 1956, dayon was standing over the grave of a young Israeli lieutenant who, by chance, he had just met personally. The previous day, a squad of Palestinian militants had opened fire on a kibbutz near the southern border with Gaza. And the lieutenant had ridden out to confront them, but he was outnumbered, and the guerrillas killed him. And then they gouged out his eyes, and then they dragged his body through a field and left the mutilated corpse for people to find. And Diane was at his funeral to deliver the eulogy.

Quote let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance. End quote.

Now, moshe dian was no softy. This is a hard man and a clear eyed soldier. And he was not suggesting that his people should take pity on those refugees, much less that they should forgive anybody who attacked Jews in Israel, whatever their reasons. What he wanted was for his audience to see things clearly as he did, to not be delusional and understand that there could be no forgiveness from the Palestinians for what had been done to them. There could be no sufficient restitution short of giving back their homeland and abandoning the Zionist project.

And so if the Israelis were not willing to do that, dion was telling them, then they were going to have to put aside this false hope that some arrangement can be reached where both sides get enough of what they want. They have to put that aside and they'd have to look squarely at what was going to be required of them. Quote we are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters. And without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water.

Millions of Jews annihilated because they had no country gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people. We must not flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and await the moment when they are strong enough to get our blood. We will not avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak. This is our generation's destiny. End quote.

The Israelis had reason to believe that the attack that had led to the lieutenant's death had been organized by the same Egyptian intelligence chief who had been causing a lot of their other problems. And they wanted that guy dead. It so happened that the dead lieutenant's cousin was a bomb maker for Israel's fledgling special operations and military intelligence branch. And so it seemed appropriate to make him the instrument of revenge. And so what he did was hollowed out the pages of a book and filled it with explosives rigged to go off when the book's package was opened.

That part was easy enough. The hard part was making sure that it got to the right guy without being opened by some lackey working in the mailroom. And so the Israelis called on a Bedouin man who had been doing undercover work for Israel in Gaza. The thing is, the Bedouin wasn't actually working for the Israelis. Actually, he was a double agent working for the Egyptian intelligence boss that the Israelis were targeting.

Now, the Israelis had already figured that out, but neither the agent nor Egyptian intelligence knew that the Israelis had figured it out. And so rather than cut that guy loose or just kill him, the Israelis thought this might come in handy sometime. And so they kept him on the payroll until it did. Well, now his number had been called. And so they give him this package with the book in it, and they really play it up.

They're like, look, we are trusting you with this because it's just so important. I mean, if the Egyptians ever got a hold of this, that would be the end of us. I don't know what we'd ever do. Just pray the Egyptian intelligence boss never gets his eyes on what's in this mean. They got him real excited.

They told him it was of the utmost importance that he bring this package to another Israeli agent in Gaza, hoping that instead he would rush to deliver the book to his Egyptian boss. And that's just what he did. When Colonel Mustafa Hafez heard what the book was supposed to contain, he got so excited that instead of having the package checked by technicians, he just tore it open on the spot and 300 grams of explosive blew up in his face. And he died on the floor right there in the headquarters of Egyptian intelligence. A brilliant operation on the Israelis part.

And while that couldn't bring the young lieutenant back to life, it could, as Dion said, send a clear message that a heavy price would be exacted for Israeli blood and that wherever you were, you might think you're safe, you might think you're too high up the food chain to be vulnerable. You are not.

Now, intelligence and clandestine operations are an art, not a science. And sometimes bombs went off in the faces of the wrong people. Other times, Israeli units sent on punitive raids into Palestinian villages, killed innocent people, or destroyed the homes or the orchards or the livestock or gardens of Palestinian families as punishment for the crime of a cousin or a second cousin or an even more distant relative. Prominent targets were hunted individually, but the new state of Israel did not have the resources or the trained manpower for a whole lot of that kind of thing. So the explicit strategy in these early years was deterrence through collective punishment, or, as nationalist and other revolutionary thinkers in the 20th century called it, through terror.

These were not law enforcement operations to take down a perpetrator or even military operations to eliminate enemy personnel or resources. Much of the time, the purpose, to put it very bluntly, was to terrorize and intimidate the Palestinian population so that they would put pressure on their sons and their brothers and cousins to stay out of the fight. And don't piss the Israelis off because you're going to bring their wrath down on all of us. It was to say, look, if you want to kill Israelis, people close to you are going to die. They're going to get their houses blown up and their livestock killed and their orchards burned down.

And so think about that before you plan your next raid.

You have to remember that back in these days, again, we're talking late 40s, early 50s. Israeli intelligence did not have detailed files on all the militants in a given region. They didn't have electronic surveillance tracking their communications or high altitude drones and satellites tracking their movements. Most of the time, they wouldn't know their names or what they look like. Someone would take a few potshots at a kibbutz or an Israeli military patrol would run over a landmine, and then whoever did it was gone.

And all the Israelis would know. A lot of the time is that some eyewitness said they went that away toward some village, a refugee camp. They also lacked the resources to track all the movements of the regular military forces of the neighboring Arab states. And so sometimes when Israeli units were sent out on punitive raids, they would encounter military units of the Jordanian or Syrian or Egyptian armed forces. And when that happened, the Israeli forces did not avoid contact if they thought that they could handle it, if they thought they could handle it, they would initiate contact, they would attack.

And it sent a message to those countries that they were going to be held responsible for any trouble Israel had from the Palestinians coming from their direction, so that hopefully it would incentivize those other countries to get the Palestinians under control themselves in order to avoid Israeli retaliation.

As the Israeli state was built out, its intelligence and military capabilities matured and differentiated and specialized. In 1953, David Ben Gurion, longtime leader of the movement and now Israel's first prime minister, ordered the formation of a new special operations unit under the command of a 25 year old soldier named Ariel Scheinerman, sometimes called Aric, and better known to most of you as Ariel Sharon. Sharon's team essentially functioned as a targeted assassination squad. Although they would sometimes conduct their own missions, like infrastructure sabotage and other things. It was called Unit 101.

And these guys were real cowboys. Their first mission was really just Sharon and a bunch of his buddies sneaking into a Palestinian village to blow up the house of an alleged terrorist while the guy was asleep inside, very loose in terms of how they conducted their operations. Sharon had fought with abandon as a 20 year old in the 1948 war, and he was badly wounded in it. Now, as a commander, he very quickly earned a reputation for always being out front of his men, always taking the most dangerous jobs and manning the most vulnerable positions, never asking his men to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. He was a very good soldier, very courageous, extremely motivated, sometimes too motivated.

You see, officially, the way the process was supposed to work officially was military intelligence would identify a potential target, they would investigate that target, and if the target was approved for liquidation, then Unit 101 would get its orders to develop an operation and take that guy out. Well, that's a slow process. And patience was never one of Ariel Sharon's strong suits. And so, while he waited for Israel's spies to identify his high value targets, unit 101 occupied itself by developing its own intelligence, running its own operations, attacking and terrorizing Arab villages where Palestinian militants were thought to be hiding or using for support.

Sharon was one of those guys who was never comfortable unless he was out on an operation. As soon as one mission was over, he was begging his superiors to turn him loose on another one. And not just waiting for orders, but coming to them with, know, we should hit this, we should do that. He wanted to continue attacking Palestinian villages and camps, of course, but he also wanted to go after not just military, but civilian targets in Egypt and Syria and Jordan. Sometimes when he couldn't provide his superiors with a good reason to attack the Arabs, he and his men would just create one.

They'd run an off the books operation to bait an Egyptian military unit to engage them. And then they'd call headquarters and say, we're under attack by the Egyptians. We need reinforcements. And the IDF would show up in force unit 100. And one's intelligence officer, Uzi Aylam, said, there were many cases in which we at Aric's bidding, provoked the enemy over the border and incited war.

In a real analysis of who started it, over the entire history of the IDF's retaliations, we will not come out squeaky clean.

When I think about the early Zionists, I often make a comparison to the Americans colonizing the frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of the Zionists, incidentally, made that same comparison to the point that the American cowboy esthetic actually became popular among the settlers for a while. Obviously, there's a million differences between those two sets of circumstances, but I make the comparison because the bottom line in both of those situations was this there was no way to turn North America into a European state and maintain good relations with the Native Americans. That was just not going to happen. It was not possible.

And there was no way to transform Palestine into a Jewish state without coming into conflict with the Arabs who lived there. That was not possible.

And so the people who came to settle America were not exactly a random cross section of European society. These were a lot of bold people, a lot of desperate people, fanatics, zealots, adventurers, soldiers, some criminals. And then the Americans who went out into Indian country to colonize the frontier, they were self selected to be an even harder group of people. Just imagine taking your family out into the middle of nowhere to build a cabin out of trees that you cut down with an ax in a place where there are no police to come to your rescue, and the natives come knocking, wanting to know why your home is on their hunting ground. It wasn't just anybody going out there.

It was hard people who had an idea of what they were getting into and thought that they could handle it. Sort of a similar situation with the Zionists. You know that kibutz where that young lieutenant I mentioned a moment ago was killed? It's called Nahal Oz. Go find that on a map.

It is less than half a mile from the border with Gaza. And then, as now, Gaza was full of a lot of very unhappy Arabs, many of whom had been recently driven out of their homes by the Israelis. And there was no wall surrounding Gaza yet, no surveillance drones, no remote controlled robot machine guns like they have today. None of that existed. And so what kind of people are you going to get to go live in a place like that?

Because somebody's got to go live there. Because if your people don't go live there, then the Gazans are going to start to spread out, and they're going to take that territory back just by osmosis. So you got to go settle that land if you want to keep it. Who are you going to get to do it? And when the Arabs do attack and Jewish blood is spilled, who are you going to get to go across the border, into their towns, into their villages, into their neighborhoods to take revenge?

Today, in a place like America, we say, well, you send in the know, send in the Navy Seals, and then this massive bureaucratic apparatus kicks into gear to go deal with whatever it is. But institutions like the army in Israel at this time had not really developed into much more than a militia. And while the average soldier might be brave, might be prepared to handle a rifle and stand firm at his defensive position if the Arabs attack, not everybody is cut out to go into hostile territory beyond the range of any rescue or reinforcement, to go carry out assassinations or sabotage. And so who are you going to get to do it? There's only one answer to that question.

There's only ever been one answer. You're going to get people like Ariel Charon. You don't do something like what the Zionists were doing or what the Americans did on the frontier, for that matter, without people like that. And those people often have a character that makes them heroic when the shit hits the fan, but makes them a dangerous liability in any situation short of that. Kind of like that tough guy friend that you always want to have your back in a bar fight, but for some reason, every single time you go out with them, you seem to get into a bar fight.

Well, with men like Sharon at the business end of Israel's relations with the Arabs, it was easy to see how things were going to turn. And of course, Sharon would say they were always going to turn out that way. Only without men like him, the whole Zionist project would have gone under. It's like Dion said in that eulogy. How could they ever come to terms with a people whose land they had taken by force other than by giving their land back?

You remember at this time we're talking about, this was not something that had happened a few generations ago. It wasn't something that had happened to your grandparents or great grandparents. It happened to you. Seven to 800,000 Palestinians were living miles away in squalid camps while Jews slept in their beds in their former homes. That is not something that can be fixed with words.

And the more ruthless and practical Zionists like Sharon and Dion knew that there was no way to make that right, because they knew how men like them would react if that had happened to them. And so unless they wanted to just give up on the Zionist project and at this point, where could the Jews go, even if they wanted to? In the wake of World War II. They were just going to have to forget about questions of right and wrong and just get ready to fight.

Now, the Palestinians were not only a problem for Israel, anytime you uproot 700,000 people, throw them out of their homes with what they can carry on their backs and send them off to live anywhere but here, that population is going to present problems for any country. Where they end up where they ended up was in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Gaza borders Egypt and fell under Egyptian military control after the 48 war. The West Bank, which is on the western bank of the Jordan River that the Israelis hadn't taken, had been under the control of Jordan since the 48 war. The influx of so many destitute refugees was very difficult on these countries.

It was economically burdensome, it was socially disruptive, politically destabilizing for sure. In all the countries that received them, jordan, Syria and Lebanon, these were all very young states themselves. Until the First World War, they'd been Otoman empire provinces and then France controlled what would become Lebanon and Syria, while Britain controlled Jordan. And these countries only really acquired independent statehood in the mid 40s during and after World War II, and so they're just a few years old. Aside from Egypt, these young states were held together with string and Silly putty.

And actually, even in Egypt, the government wasn't really stable. In Lebanon, for example, around 100,000 Palestinian refugees entered a state with a total population of only about 1.3 million. And those people weren't distributed evenly throughout the country. They were concentrated in certain areas in the south, which meant that certain portions of the already fractious Lebanese population felt the brunt of the consequences. The Lebanese government was totally out of its depth trying to deal with that situation.

And so the various ethnic and religious communities started taking matters into their own hands. Intentions started to build and Lebanon started down its path to disaster. 100,000 people is a lot in any case, but that's one 13th of the population of Lebanon at the time. So just imagine something like 25 million people coming into the US all at once with little or nothing to their names and essentially taking over a region of the country.

Oh, and by the way, they're at war with the country next door. And the country next door is going to hold you responsible for anything those people do.

The largest group of refugees ended up in Jordan. And ever since the founding of Israel, the Jordanian monarchy has had to walk a tightrope with provoking Israel by its support for the Palestinian cause on one side, and inviting accusations of being a collaborator and a stooge of the Zionists on the other side. They still walk this tightrope. And just now, in the last few weeks, a record number of Palestinian protesters, hundreds of thousands of protesters, flooded the streets of Aman, the capital of Jordan, to denounce the Israeli assault on Gaza and call for action from the Jordanian government. This is not a small concern for a monarchy that is not even native to the region of Jordan.

The Hashemites who ruled Jordan came from the Arabian Peninsula. At the time we're talking about, they had only been imported and installed by the British barely 40 years earlier. So it's not as if they had some deep claimed legitimacy. Palestinians made up over half the population of Jordan. They still do the overwhelming majority of the urban population, which is to say the politically significant population.

From the very beginning, whenever the subject of a Palestinian state came up, the worry of Jordan's monarchy was that someone was going to say, excuse me, why shouldn't Jordan be the you know, the Palestinians are the majority there after, you know, the Hashemites who rule that place are not even from the area. Why shouldn't that be Palestine? And so, in fact, a lot of the secular Arab leaders around the region, meaning the leaders of countries that had presidents, not kings like Egypt and Syria, they were asking exactly that question. Why shouldn't Jordan be the Palestinian state?

The retreat of the European empires from their former colonies after the Second World War gave rise to a generation of charismatic nationalist leaders in the Third World. This was something you were seeing happen in Africa, it was happening in Asia, it was happening in the Middle East, in North Africa. The people were swept up in the enthusiasm that comes with fresh independence and charismatic leaders were rising up to represent those people and also to take advantage of that energy. The thing is, in many of these countries, the Europeans had pulled out their colonial administrations and pulled out their military forces, but they didn't give up ownership of the resources and the infrastructure in those countries. So that's just a recipe for conflict.

In fact, many of the post colonial conflicts in the Third World throughout the 20th century were the result of exactly this dynamic. And so, for example, the British and the French still held a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, which is really Egypt's chief infrastructure asset, chief strategic asset. The Suez Canal runs right through Egypt. It's all on Egyptian territory, connecting the Red and Mediterranean seas, and it's still owned by the French and the British. At the time, the Arab nationalists who were leading these new republics were not happy about the lingering foreign control in their countries.

But it wasn't an easy thing to do something about it. The biggest problems the Arab nations have faced then, and that they still face, is that they've just never been able to cooperate with each other. Not for any length of time anyway. Some Arab countries are ruled by monarchies, others call themselves republics. Some are religious and sectarian.

Others are secular and socialist. The leaders of each Arab country competed with each other as much or more than they did against outside powers, including Israel. And so they've always been easy marks for Israel and the west to play off against each other. These secular Arab leaders, they all wanted some form of pan Arab unity, whether that meant political unification, as in like an Arab Warsaw Pact, or just a lighter alliance like an Arab NATO. They wanted that kind of organization, but they all meant pan Arab unity under their leadership.

And so they could never quite agree on how to get it done. After the humiliation of the Arab armies in 1948, one of the ways to bolster popular support for you being the one not only among your own people, but throughout the region, was to promise that you were going to be the one who was going to confront the Zionists and get justice for the Palestinians.

By the mid 1950s, over a million Palestinians were now living in squalor, mostly in squalor in neighboring countries, with no end or change in their situation in sight. Israel was a constant reminder of the years of European domination. Actually not just a reminder to the Arabs. It represented the continued presence of European imperialism in the Arab world.

While the Israelis saw themselves, especially after World War II, essentially as a nation of refugees themselves, that is not how the Arabs experience them. The Arabs experienced them as invaders and colonizers. That's not exactly new in history. That's often how it goes. The Turks who conquered the Byzantine Empire were only there because the Mongols had driven them off the step.

The Visigoths, who sacked Rome in 410, they were being driven deeper into the Roman Empire because they were trying to get away from the Huns. Hell, a lot of early Americans believed that they were refugees from persecution, but that did not soften their impact on the Native Americans. And so promises by the Arab leaders to drive out the Zionists were of a peace with their more general commitment to extirpate European influence, political and economic control from the Middle East.

How you see the Israelis behavior, both toward the Palestinians as well as toward the surrounding Arab countries really depends on how broad a view of the situation you want to take. Or maybe a better way to say it is, it depends on when you want to start the historical clock. Somebody taking a close in view would say, well, look, the Israelis are being attacked, so they're within their rights to retaliate. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Just let people attack them?

Answer to that seems pretty obvious, right? But someone taking a 30,000 foot historical view is going to say, wait a second, the Israelis were the ones who seized this land and drove these people out of their homes. And so the Palestinians are surely within their rights to fight back. What are they supposed to do? Just accept their ethnic cleansing and move on.

The answer to that seems pretty obvious too, and you still see people throwing these lines at each other with full earnestness as people debate the topic today. Now that Israel's been around for 75 years, people on the outside tend to have a different view of the situation than when it had only been around for a decade or so. Today, many people look at Palestinian terrorism the way they would look at it if the American Indian movement here in 2023 started lighting off bombs, started a campaign of mass terror to take back North America, just anachronistic, pointless violence, even if their original historical grievances were totally legitimate. But most of us view Indian attacks in the 17 and 18, hundreds during and just after European settlers were driving them out of their homes and colonizing their land. We view that differently than if the aim started launching attacks today when the Israelis and Arabs were killing each other in the either or.

Both sides could be seen as acting in legitimate self defense or taking justified revenge, depending on how you want to frame the question. But like Moshe Daiyan said in that eulogy for the Israelis, these were going to have to be moral quandaries for their children to debate and judge, hopefully in Israeli universities, in Israeli cities. But that was only going to happen if this generation, this first settler generation, put those quandaries aside and acted ruthlessly and decisively. This was in the wake of World War II, and so the Zionists were not in a mood to take moral advice from anybody, nor to listen to anyone's lectures on the laws of war. The attitude of many Israeli leaders was the same as that of many Palestinian militants.

If America can nuke Japanese cities and the Soviets can massacre their way through Eastern Europe, if millions of German civilians can be ethnically cleansed from European countries they lived in for centuries, then given the existential danger they faced, both Israelis and Palestinians felt that any means were justified in pursuit of their victory. It really is important to remember that historical context, meaning the fact that the initial acts which set off the cycle of violence happened right around the era of World War II. Not because the context justifies anything, but because it affected what people thought of as normal, what people thought of as being within the bounds of what was normal in war. The world had spent the last few years of World War II engaged in total, unrestrained violence against civilian populations, both sides, the Axis and the Allies. When the Zionists expelled the Palestinians in 1948, the Soviet Union, a world power, a member in good standing of the UN Security Council, legitimized by the other allies who had allowed Soviet butchers to sit as judges of war crimes at Nuremberg.

At the same time the Zionists were carrying out those expulsions, the Soviet Union was engaged in extraordinary violence against millions of people in the parts of Europe that it had conquered in the Korean War. A few years later, in the early 50s, we killed something like 20% of the entire population of North Korea, a lot of it by using heavy bombers against an enemy that had no air force. And so that's the state of the world, the state of international affairs in the there's another point about the historical context which is good to keep in mind actually. I guess I've already kind of touched on this, but it's worth bringing into the foreground. And it's that in these early days israeli government institutions were still in their infancy.

I mean, they were just being put together hear about like an Israeli intelligence agency and a lot of times it just meant a shabby building with a few desks thrown in it. Today, when we say Mossad or Israeli Defense Forces, people picture this hyper efficient, high tech organization with elaborate bureaucracies to handle everything from recruiting to training to pensions to propaganda and legal questions. Back in the early days, none of that existed and the Israelis were flying by the seat of their pants a lot of the time, often building out these institutions as it became necessary in the course of operations. And so they were carrying out very bold operations, operations that would never make it past legal review today in the modern world, it would often carry out operations in one part of the government that the rest of the government knew nothing about. Just like Sharon's Unit 101 picking its own fights in Gaza.

Half the time the Israeli Defense Forces sent in to reinforce them. They just thought it was an Egyptian attack, which is what was intended by Sharon's Unit. Take an example from 1954. Famous example in 1954, Israeli military intelligence recruited a handful of Jews who were living in Egypt at the time and got them to agree to plant bombs in movie theaters, libraries and education centers owned by Britain and the United States and where British and American people frequented. Two American libraries in a British theater were bombed by these terrorists working for Israel.

They called it Operation Susanna. It's come down. Better known as the Levan affair after the Israeli Defense Minister. At the time, the plan was to blame the attacks on the Egyptians to incite the British and the Americans against Israel's main enemy. Just a straightforward dictionary definition false flag.

Fortunately, the operation was poorly planned and sloppily carried out. So the Egyptians caught on and eleven Israeli agents, both Egyptian Jews and undercover Israeli officers were captured. They were tortured and except for two who managed to escape, sentenced to long prison terms or death. Israel of course, denied involvement in the Levan Affair, continued to deny involvement until 2005 when the government finally dropped the charade and officially honored the surviving agents of the operation. So that's the kind of thing that was going on.

Two years later, 1956, the Israelis engaged with Western powers against Egypt more directly. Jamal Abdul Nasser had taken over as President of Egypt in 56 and he was positioned as the natural leader of the Arab world. He was also Israel's number one nemesis from the mid 50s until the late 1960s.

Nasser was a complicated figure in many ways. In some ways, I would say he was a great man in political sense, great man of 20th century history. He was tall, he looked the part, he was a very good orator very inspiring figure.

But sometimes, let's just say his appetite was a little bigger than his stomach and that brought some disaster onto his country. Eventually, Nasser championed the Palestinian cause, as all Arab leaders did, and he did it for his own reasons, as all other Arab leaders also did. Nasser wanted to bring the Arab countries under a single political authority, under his leadership. And so, aside from questions of justice or law or religious obligation, israel was just in the way. It was literally a physical impediment to his plans.

It was separating Egypt from the rest of these Arab countries. All the secular Arab leaders in the region favored some kind of pan Arab cooperation, if not outright political unification like Nasser wanted. All the republics wanted that, but none of the Arab monarchies wanted that. The Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdams, the Moroccans these countries were the personal possessions of their monarchs and they were not going to allow their personal possessions to be absorbed into some pan Arab socialist republic. Many of these monarchies had been put in place by the British Empire and they continued to have chummy relations with Britain and the west.

Now, the Prime Minister of Jordan, who served King Hussein in the late 60s, for example, that guy had served in the British navy. And so, from Nasser's perspective, and that of the Syrians and the Baptists as well, these monarchies were illegitimate. They were pawns of Western powers. More importantly, they stood in the way of Arab unity. And so they were all right next to Israel on the list of things that had to go.

Egypt had for a long time been close to the British too, but neither the British nor any of the Western powers were in favor of Arab unification. And so once Nassar came to power in 1956, he began to pull away from the west and started seeking friendship with the Soviet Union, which was looking for allies in the region and making big promises of funding and engineering support and military training. And so 1956 was going to be the year of the second Arab Israeli War, the first being 1948. It's usually called the Suez Crisis over here, but it was the second Arab Israeli war and this time there was no question about who had started it. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, egypt was a sovereign, independent nation now, but British and French investors still held the controlling interest in the Suez Canal, which ran right through Egypt.

The French and British reaped a majority of the profits from shipping that passed through the canal. And so Nasser decided that had gone on long enough and that the canal properly belonged to the Egyptian people, that Egypt should be the one deciding whether and whose and how much shipping would pass through their territory, and that the Egyptian people should be the ones benefiting from it financially. And so he nationalized it. Well, the British and the French were not prepared to just let such an important strategic asset, not to mention cash cow, go without a fight. The French and British wanted to take military action against Egypt, but someone was standing in their way.

That someone was U. S. President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was focused on the broader cold war with the Soviet Union. He was not interested in the petty financial interests of the French or the British, and he was interested in asserting America's authority in the post war world.

He was much more concerned with the possibility of alienating all the countries of the Middle East and losing them to the Soviet Union and what that might mean in the context of the Cold War. A global propaganda war was being waged in the Third World in non aligned countries. Soviet messaging was very simple. It practically wrote itself. They were saying to the Third World, look, yeah, sure, we joined the France, you know, America, we joined the Allies to fight the fascists during World War II.

But then what happened? Your colonizers, backed by the Americans, went and allied with Japan and even Germany, and they're still trying to control your countries. We support your movement for national liberation. We're with you. They want to retain their empires.

Just look at the French in Vietnam and Algeria. Look at the British in Kenya, still asserting control over the vital resources and assets in your countries, threatening you with violence if you try to take back what's rightfully yours. Now, you can poke holes in that narrative if you want, but that's very powerful propaganda for newly independent countries whose core infrastructure and natural resources are in fact still owned by their former colonizers. And so, while the British and French were concerned with trying to keep their assets, at least some American leaders had their eye on a bigger picture. And they knew that France and Britain bullying countries in their former colonial stomping grounds, made for very bad propaganda.

And so Eisenhower vetoed any military action by the French or British against Egypt, which was the most populous and in the terms that mattered to Cold War planners, the most important Arab power in the Middle East. And so the French and the British got together with the Israelis. They huddled together and came up with a plan. Again, this was 1956, so the Soviet Union was busy putting down a revolt in hungary. They weren't going to be available to bail Egypt out of a military crisis.

And so the three devised a secret plan in which the Israelis would attack Egypt unprovoked, with the goal of provoking an Egyptian counterattack, which would then allow Britain and France to move in and occupy the area as peacekeepers, reclaiming the Suez Canal in the process. And so that's what happened. And it all went according to plan. Israel invaded Egypt, retaliated France and Britain moved in, seized the Canal, and Israel was rewarded for its role with control of the Sinai Peninsula. Now, they knew that the Americans were going to figure out what happened right away, but they figured that Eisenhower would just accept the facts on the ground once the deed was already done.

But they were wrong about that. Eisenhower was not happy. It didn't help that David Ben Gurion gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, crowing about how the Suez crisis had had made the 1949 peace with Egypt dead and buried, and that Israel would no longer be constrained by the terms of that deal. There were calls for a UN peacekeeping force to separate the Israelis and Egyptians at Suez. But Bengurian said that under no circumstances would UN forces ever be allowed on any territory controlled by Israel.

So Eisenhower was pissed and he wanted to make it absolutely clear who was calling the shots in the non communist world. He ordered the French and British to get out. He made the Israelis give back to Sinai Peninsula and then Nasser allowed UN peacekeepers to be stationed near the Canal. It was probably the moment you can mark in the history books as the official end of France and Britain as real great powers on the world stage.

Well, so Egypt had lost that war militarily. It lost it badly. But Nasser was still able to brag. Nasser had only been in office a few months. He came in in 56 and that's when this happened.

And he was able to brag that he stood up to not just Israel, but to the two European powers that had dominated the Middle East since the Turks left and at least ended up no worse than he'd started off. So his popularity around the Arab world skyrocketed two years later, 1958, he formed the United Arab Republic with Syria, a first step toward political unification. And while Syria remained nominally independent for the few years that it lasted, nasser was making most of the important decisions for both countries, taking an important first step toward fixing the Arab's traditional problem of never being able to cooperate with each other. Nasser was so popular that Nasserite factions formed in other countries, usually led by military officers who wanted to model their own country's government and foreign policy on Nasser's Egypt. Nasserite factions gained momentum in Lebanon, Yemen and especially Iraq.

Iraq again was controlled by a monarchy from the same Hashemite family as the monarchy that ruled Jordan. Pro Nassar military officers in Iraq wanted to overthrow that monarchy and institute a secular government along the lines of Egypt and Syria. And in 1958, the year NASA formed the UAR with Syria the plotters launched a bloody coup d'etata which reduced Iraq to chaos for a while. My wife's mother was actually a little girl living in Baghdad at the time of the revolution 58 and even though she was very young she remembers tanks pointing their cannons at her family's apartment building and seeing cars dragging bodies through the streets. This is from Jillian Becker's book on the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Quote in the 37 years since the British had created the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq there had been 57 ministries a history of instability with numerous uprisings, massacres and barbaric assassinations. The regent, Abde Ala, the uncle of the young king, Faisal II, had ambitions of his own for Iraq to dominate an Arab unity embracing Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. In February 1958 he achieved a union between Iraq and Jordan the two remaining Hashabite kingdoms. This was as intolerable to Nasser as the union of Egypt and Syria was unbearable to Abde Ala. Under Pro Nassarite leadership a contingent of Iraqi troops dispatched by the region to help quell a pro Nassar uprising in Lebanon turned instead on their own ruling house.

At dawn on 14 July 1958 Faisal was murdered along with his grandmother, his aunt and others in the palace including an orphan boy. His uncle, Abde Ala was dragged through the streets of Baghdad tied with ropes to the back of a truck. Then his body was dismembered with axes and his limbs and head tossed about by the hysterical mob. The torso was hung from a balcony and chunks of its flesh were sliced off and thrown to the crowd below. The prime minister, Nuri al Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape.

But he was found and instantly killed and his body was left lying on the road to be driven over and squashed and broken by the cars of exalting motorists. He was succeeded for a brief period by General Abdel Kareem Qasim who led the revolt and the massacre and who favored friendship with the Soviet Union. After five years, Qasim, too, was murdered and his body was devoured by dogs. End quote.

Now, I should mention that Gillian Becker's book on the PLO definitely has an angle. It is not a neutral book. It's got an agenda to the point that you would be justified calling it a polemic against the Palestinian groups and their supporters and an apologia for Israel. But it's got a lot of good information. Sometimes you just have to work through biased sources and account for the bias because sometimes they provide information that is not spelled out well in other sources.

And in her book, there's particularly good information about how Arab leaders around the region used the Palestinian cause to jockey for position among themselves.

Now Iraq was just first on the list. Nasser wanted to see all the monarchies toppled. In 1960, his agents killed the Prime Minister of Jordan with a bomb that had been intended for the King. In 1962, he took the side of revolutionary forces against the monarchy in Yemen and fought a proxy war there against Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, there was another coup d'etan syria.

And that country pulled out of the United Arab Republic in order to start reasserting its own leadership position in the region. Hopefully you're starting to get a picture of why the Arab nations were never able to organize and cooperate to keep from being pushed around by little old Israel.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian issue festered and relations between Israel and its neighbors continued to deteriorate. In 1964, with the Egyptians fighting in Yemen and Syria reasserting itself, nasser had a clever idea. He called a meeting of all the Arab heads of state as well as some important factional leaders to see if the one issue on which they all agreed the Israel Palestine issue, could bring them together. Under Nasser's leadership of course, he proposed to create a political entity to organize and represent the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people were scattered in many countries.

They didn't have a national government of their own to speak for them. And so the Arab League approved the plan. They voted to fund this new organization and thus was born the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. Again, this was a clever idea by Nasser. He had called the meeting.

He chose the President of the PLO and he expected that it was going to organize the Palestinians into an Egyptian proxy that he could then put to use in the countries where Palestinians lived. Later in the year, the PLO President was invited to represent the Palestinians at a meeting of the Arab League and he was treated like the leader of a proper national state. Well, this was welcome to most of the participants, but not to King Hussein of Jordan. Again. Most Palestinians lived in Jordan.

Most Jordanians were Palestinian. So an organization whose purpose was to politically organize and represent the Palestinian people would amount to forming an alternative state structure within his country. And worse, the PLO had already started behaving like a state demanding the right to levy taxes on Palestinian citizens in Jordan, to fund its operations and even to raise a Palestine Liberation Army that would operate independent of the Jordanian military. These are things no sovereign country could tolerate. Naturally, the actual government of Jordan saw this as a threat to its authority and legitimacy, which it was and which is exactly what Nasser had intended it to be.

So all political energy, most political energy around the Palestinian question started flowing into the PLO at this point. But not all Palestinians were enthusiastic about it. Some of them did not trust the Arab states to stand for the Palestinians when the chips were. Down in 1948. They had fled as soon as they had done enough to say they'd done something.

These people didn't trust international organizations to take any meaningful action on their behalf. They believed that only Palestinians could liberate Palestinians, that their liberation could only be achieved through armed revolutionary struggle, in keeping with the spirit of the age. One of those who thought this way was George Habash, a young Palestinian Christian who would later found and lead the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP. Habash was born in 1926, making him 22 at the time of the 1948 war in a town called Lidda. During the war, the new Israeli army had moved into Lidda and forced virtually every Arab resident out of the town with whatever they could carry, driving them out into the desert on foot in July to live or die however they could, while Israeli soldiers looted their homes and stripped them of valuables on their way out.

And hundreds of them did die out in the desert, especially old people and children, before they were able to reach the next safe haven.

The cleansing of Lidda and a simultaneous identical operation in the town of Ramla resulted in some 50,000 Palestinians being driven out into the desert on foot as a result of one operation.

For people who were there and for people who heard the stories of those who were, this act of ethnic cleansing and look, there's some dispute over whether that term is appropriate here, but there's no controversy as far as I'm concerned, so I'm going to use it. The order was given by the Israeli government to drive the residents of Lydda and Ramla out. Israeli military communications were already referring to the people as refugees while they were still in the cities. Look, that's a debate we can have another time. The bottom line is, one way or another, tens of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of the two cities at gunpoint, and many of them died on their long walk through the desert.

And to the people who went through that, to the people who went through that, it left a permanent impression of what the Israelis were actually all about, whatever they might say.

Another young man who thought like George Habash was Khalil al Wazir Namdaguer Abu Jihad, born in 1935 in the Palestinian town of Ramla, the other city whose population was driven out during the operation I just mentioned. Khalil was twelve or 13 years old in 1948 when the Zionist terrorist group known as Irgun exploded a bomb in Ramla's main marketplace, killing 18 civilians and wounding another 45. And then later that year, he and his family and everybody he knew were driven out of Ramla at gunpoint by Israeli forces and never allowed to return. Khalil and his family ended up in Gaza, and just three years later, when he was 16 years old, he was already leading a Palestinian militant group. 16 years old he and his friends sought out men who'd gained experience fighting in the 48 war.

And those men taught Khalil and his friends what they knew. And then Khalil's group went out and recruited and trained more fighters. And by the time he was 18, 1953, khalil commanded some 200 young fighters, 18 years old, operating out of Gaza. They launched operations against infrastructure and against people in southern Israel. And they were encouraged and supported by the Egyptians, who used them as expendable proxies to harass the Israelis.

The Egyptians would send Palestinian students from Cairo as reinforcements for the group. One of the young men they sent was an electrical engineering student from the University of Cairo named Mohammed Yasser Abdelrahman Rauf Arafat al Kudwa al Husseini, better known to all of you as Yasser Arafat. Arafat and NABU Jihad immediately recognized the other's talent and they took a liking to each other. And the two formed a partnership that would completely change the nature of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. After a few years, Arafat, Abu Jihad and another friend who had become important to their organization, salah Khalaf, traveled to Europe to go to an international student congress sponsored by the Soviet Union in Prague.

Many prominent Palestinians and other Arabs who could afford to do it would send their kids to school in Europe. And so the three guys made important connections with a lot of these expats during their visit. And then instead of going back immediately, they moved on to Stuttgart in West Germany to go sound out the student movement there. This was still 56, 57, so there's not a whole lot going on internationally with the Palestinian movement outside of the Arab Emigrace students groups. Arafat had become accepted as the leader of their little group by this point.

And since he was an engineer, he applied for and got a job in Kuwait. And once he got there, he got work permits for his friends to come and sent for them. Well, when Abu Jihad arrived, he had brought along a new friend that he had acquired in Europe. The man was a Palestinian, but he had spent the previous few years fighting for the National Liberation Front, the FLN, against the French in the Algerian War of Independence. The Algerian War was a savage affair that officially began in 1954.

That year, the French had just been humiliated at Dmbm Fu and driven out of Vietnam. And revolutionary nationalists in Algeria thought, hey, if the Vietnamese can do it, we can do it too. Algeria was very different from Vietnam, though. There were over a million French living in Algeria, many of whom had been born there. And many in the French establishment considered losing Algeria to be akin to losing a province in mainland France.

So it was a very ugly affair. It ran for eight years from 54 to 62, and the French went out kicking and screaming. The success of the Vietnamese was proof that the determined national insurgency could defeat a European power. But the Algerians provided a demonstration of a whole new kind of war, a people's war, designed for the mass media age. A very dark and ugly kind of war, but one that tries to answer the very hard question of how a far weaker force can defeat a vastly superior force in a prolonged conflict.

The problem all these anticolonial movements faced was simple and similar. There is a much more powerful military force in your country. They don't want to leave. It is up to you to change their minds. So how are you going to do that?

The Vietnamese show that under certain conditions, as long as you're tenacious and well equipped and willing and able to take casualties, and as long as you have a safe haven, you can retreat to to lick your wounds, you might actually be able to defeat that military in a war of attrition. But most of these resistance and revolutionary movements were working with far less in the Vietnamese. Yet they still had to solve that same problem. How do you make the stronger force want to leave? Well, it's a method with which we're all now very familiar, because it's arguably the mode of warfare that has most defined the post World War II era of combat.

In simplest terms, the insurgents engage in acts of terrorism that are not intended to harm the capacity of the other side to fight, but to provoke the stronger side into retaliating in a way that will not play well in the media and on campuses and in parliaments back home and around the world. And that's what happened in Algeria. The FLN engaged in wanton acts of violence, the French responded with their own brutality, and the left wing and anticolonial activists back in France, they took it from there. By the end, by 62, the French military was not about to give up Algeria. In fact, there was almost a military coup against the French government over it.

But by the early sixty s, the French people and the French political establishment had had enough. Again, this makes for a very ugly war where when the enemy responds to one of your operations by massacring some civilians, maybe some women and children on your side, or by torturing some of your people who were held prisoner, then that's actually a successful operation. That's actually the point to get the other side to do those things to your own people so that you can use it as propaganda, knowing that over time, at least when you're fighting a western country, it tends to have its effect. Well, it had its effect in Algeria, and the Algerians drove the French out, and that made a huge impact on revolutionary movements around the world. Arafat and his friends took that lesson to heart.

Palestine would not be liberated by Arab armies. It would only be liberated through the armed struggle of a Palestinian people's. War along the lines of the one that had returned Algeria to the Algerians Arafat, Abu Jihad and Khalaf. They self consciously separated themselves from Palestinian elites and the Arab regimes. They presented their group as coming up from the people.

They wanted to differentiate themselves not only from the Arab regimes who had lost the 48 war, but also from the Palestinian elites who were perceived by many regular Palestinians as having sold the people out. These people who could afford to just move to Beirut and buy a nice villa for their family that they had left the poor Palestinians, the rural Palestinians hanging out to dry. Arafat himself was a cousin of the very prominent Husseini clan. But he often denied or downplayed that connection publicly. He wanted to be seen as a man of the people.

They emphasized their lack of dependence on the Arab states for anything except places to train and to conduct their operations. They called themselves the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine. Unfortunately, after they had settled on the name and started publicizing it and operating under it for a little while, somebody noticed that the Arabic acronym of the name spelled out Hataf, which in their language means something like Quick Death. And so one of them had the idea to switch it around from Movement for the Liberation of Palestine to the Palestine Liberation Movement, reversing the acronym to a word that translates to something like Glorious Victory. And that is the name by which we all know yasser Arafat's organization today fatah.

Fatah started gaining momentum around the time that the alliance between Syria and Egypt broke up. Already by 1961, Arafat NABU Jihad had been making a lot of moves. They had managed to insert their activists into student groups in Europe and throughout the Arab world. They picked up a decent number of recruits, including a couple hundred Palestinians from European universities who actually went and traveled to the Middle East for training in guerrilla warfare. And they were forming alliances with like minded organizations.

After the victory of the Algerians in 62, the new government there turned Algiers into a headquarters for the world revolution. They provided subsidies to foreign revolutionary groups. They gave asylum to foreign revolutionaries who were on the run from their home countries. The Algerian government recognized groups like the North Vietnamese and the Black Panthers as the legitimate representatives of their people and set up embassies for them. And so Arafat met with the new President of Algeria and came away with offices and a stipend for Fata.

But then in 1964, Nasser called that conference that created the PLO and activist and political energy surrounding the Palestinian cause all began flowing into that channel. And the Algerians gave fata's offices to the PLO. They weren't actually called Fata yet. I'm just using it to avoid confusion. And Algeria redirected the subsidy and the other support that they had been giving to Fatah to the PLO as well.

And so Fata basically collapsed all the way back down to its original core just Arafat, Abu Jihad, Salah Khalaf and a few others about eight people. Arafat and his friends were sort of at a loss for how to proceed. But help was on the way because, as fate would have it, they were not the only ones looking for an alternative to Nasser and the PLO. The Syrians were back on the scene and looking to make their own bid for leadership of the Arab world. The head of Syrian Army intelligence at the time, Major General Ahmad Swedani, said in an interview, quote I believe Israel is not a state, but serves as a military base for the imperialist camp.

We must not take the line of conventional warfare using conventional weapons. We must take the line of the popular liberation war. Should Israel react to the popular liberation war by conventional warfare, the Arab armies must be ready to enter the battle in order to safeguard the bases of the fedeen who are the basic elements of popular warfare. Arab unity is a necessity. We believe that unity born in battle is the unity we long for.

He who liberates Palestine will be the one to lead the Arab nation forward to comprehensive unity. He who ignites the fire of popular liberation war can throw all the reactionary regimes into the sea. The sons of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other reactionary countries will overthrow the kings as traitors and join the liberation march. End quote.

Arafat and his buddies were in Lebanon when they got word that Syrian army intel agents were working the refugee camps looking for recruits to train as fedeen fighters. Fedeen translates as self sacrificers, but we're not talking about suicide bombers or anything like that. That comes quite a bit later. Fetain is the common word for guerrilla fighters in the Arab world, especially in the context of Palestinians fighting Israel. Two years after the coup d'ETA that had led to Syria pulling out of the United Arab Republic, there was another coup in 1963, this time by Baffist military officers.

And they immediately went to work trying to reestablish their country as a powerful independent player in the region, not playing second fiddle to Egypt anymore. Syria had surrendered the initiative to Nasser when he'd formed the PLO. But the Syrians began working immediately to secretly build up a rival organization to counter the PLO, to counter Nasser's play for leadership of the Palestinian cause. And so Arafat and his friends approached one of the Syrian agents and right away the Syrians realized that they had something very useful on their hands. Fatah hadn't just brought them eight new recruits, but eight tightly knit operatives with experience recruiting, organizing and leading others, a few with combat experience, people who did not need a lot of handholding or preparation before they could be put to work.

And so the Syrians put them to work right away for their first operation. It was decided that they were going to bomb Israel's national Water carrier, this huge system of pipes and canals delivering water from the Sea of Galilee down to the dry areas in the south. The attack was meant to be more symbolic than anything else. The teams didn't go in with enough explosives to do any damage that couldn't be repaired very quickly. But the symbolic value was still significant, not only to Fatah, but to their new Syrian sponsors.

The water carrier was one of the most important infrastructure projects in the early development of Israel. It was a vast project and its construction was seen as a marker that was being put down by the Zionists to say, we are here to stay. This is the new world, it is a permanent arrangement and so just you better get used to it. Well, the Arab states, especially Syria, had been blustering on about how they would never allow this project to come to completion. But no one had actually done more than talk.

Well, the bad news for Arafat and his buddies was that the attack failed miserably. The good news is that that really didn't matter. Again, this is a new kind of war with different measures for operational success or failure. The first group of Arafat's men were caught before they ever laid their explosives. The second group laid their explosives, but they didn't go off and then they were all caught.

A couple weeks later, a group managed to plant some bombs and they did go off, but they didn't do any damage of any real significance in any traditional mode of warfare. That operation was a complete and total disaster. But this was not any traditional mode of warfare. The group released a communique and sent it to several Arab media outlets crowing about the great blow struck against the Zionist beast by the Fedeen, who, with God's help and permission, had struck fear into the heart of the colonizer. Well, that's what the Arab papers printed and words spread that a great blow had been struck against Israel, not by the Arab states, but by common people willing to give themselves over to the cause.

Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan all officially denounced the attack. Egypt, because they wanted Palestinian political energy flowing into the PLO, lebanon and Jordan because the last thing they needed was their Palestinian population starting to think about the possibilities presented by infrastructure terrorism. But Syria applauded and promoted it. That attack signaled the beginning of a shift in strategy for the Palestinian militants. They had been relying on the Arab states to rescue them in 1948 and they didn't come through.

They'd been waiting ever since. But they didn't have to wait. They could take matters into their own hands now. The Israelis hardly paid any attention to the attack, had no idea that it was the first shot on a newly opened front in their long war against the Palestinians. The Israeli security establishment was, for good reason, totally focused on the threat from neighboring Arab militaries.

And they considered these student groups and other young radicals like Arafat NABU Jihad to be a nuisance at most. It was only in 1965 that anybody in the Israeli security agencies was even assigned to the issue of monitoring and countering Palestinian terrorism. A three man committee was set up to identify and eliminate targets. And when they came up with their list, arafat and Abu Jihad were right at the top of it. The committee was going to have to be very creative with their methods.

After a couple high profile failures by the Mossad had caused the government to lose confidence in that intelligence agency. There are actually more than a couple disasters within the Mossad. There was this tier one special ops unit called Kasaria, which specialized in assassinations. The unit's top spy in 1965 was an Egyptian born Jew named Eli Cohen. And Cohen was assigned to go into Syria posing as an Arab merchant who had been away for years in Buenos Aires and to work himself into the elite social circles of Damascus.

His Israeli handlers recognized his value, especially as he started to make connections. And they didn't want to waste him on anything worth less than he was. And so the official order was to act as a pure sleeper agent, just go be this prominent Arab businessman that's it only activate. If you hear that the Syrians are planning a surprise attack, then you let us know and you come back to Israel. That was his only job.

In case of an impending attack, he would send a message alerting Israel to what was happening. Otherwise, he was to keep a low profile as a Syrian merchant. Unfortunately, Cohen got too comfortable, too confident in his cover story, and he began transmitting back all kinds of low level information, including simple gossip he was picking up at parties and other places. His handlers should have told him to cut it out, but they didn't. And eventually, the Syrians caught on.

Cohen was arrested. He was tortured. He was hanged in Damascus central square and left hanging, covered in a white sheet with the text of his death sentence written on it as a message to other Israeli spies.

The savagery of his torture was evident on his face, but the torturers had also pulled out his fingernails and electrocuted his testicles. The Masad worried that he must have broken under that strain, and it turned out they were right. Cohen had given up secret encryption codes. He had deciphered hundreds of secret messages for the Syrians, told them everything else that he knew about how Israeli intelligence operated. Well, just after this debacle, an Israeli agent was uncovered in Cairo by the Egyptian government.

He would have suffered the same fate as Cohen, but the government of West Germany agreed to help Israel by telling the Egyptians falsely, that he was also working for them. And so, pretty please, don't kill him. And we'll owe you one. And so this spy and his wife were not hanged, but they were sentenced to life in prison.

So 1965 was a tough year for assad. This is from a book by Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman. Quote prime Minister Eshkal regarded the downfall of the two spies as a national disaster. But despite the bad state the Mossad was in, eschal decided to approve a special targeted killing mission by Kasaria in Uruguay anyway. Two months prior, a conference attended by representatives of the various intelligence agencies had been held to discuss the state of the hunt for Nazis, a matter that was not high on the list of priorities.

Rafi Madan, deputy chief of the Amal unit, which handled the issue, surveyed the possible targets for assassination on the list. When he came to the name of Herbert Kukurz, a Latvian war criminal who, as an aviator had volunteered to assist the SS and the Gestapo and began describing his horrific acts, a loud thud was heard. The head of Aman, the Military Intelligence Directorate, major General Ahran Yarev, had collapsed, and it took some time before he came too. Kukurs, it emerged, had burned alive some of Yarev's relatives and friends. After the conference, amit Meyer Amit He's, the head of Masad at the time.

Amit, who was very close to Yarav and was deeply affected by the incident, went to see Prime Minister Eshkal and received permission to have Kukur's eliminated. Holocaust survivors called him the Butcher of Riga, and his name came up frequently at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as directly involved in the murder of some 15,000 Jews and indirectly in the killing of 20,000 more. But after the war, he had managed to escape and find refuge in Brazil, where he developed a tourism business, surrounding himself with security guards for fear of the same fate. That befell? Adolf Eichmann Jakov Midad a Cassaria operative.

Who spoke Spanish and German posed as an Austrian businessman seeking openings in the tourism industry in South America and managed to persuade Kukurz to go to Uruguay to meet a group of developers at a luxurious mansion outside Montevideo. At the mansion, three assassins would lie in wait. The plan was for Maidad to enter first, followed by Kukurz. One of the assassins would shove him inside and close the door behind him. Then, when the Masad team was out of the line of fire, he would shoot him.

The job, however, did not go as smoothly as planned. Kukurz was alert and feared a trap. The moment he entered, he grasped what was happening and made a break for it. Yarev tried to get a stranglehold on him as another Israeli dragged him inside. The fact that Kukurs was frightened to death, said Medad, and had lived in dread of this moment for 20 years, gave him superhuman strength.

He managed to knock the guy down. He grabbed the doorknob and had it not been for the three of us, including me, holding the door shut, he would have been able to get out. Kukur's bit hard into one of Yarav's fingers, cutting off the tip which remained in his mouth. Yarev screamed in pain and had to loosen his grip on Kukur's neck. He almost broke free.

But at the last moment, one of the hitmen, Zevameet, a cousin of the Masad director, who had not been able to fire because of the danger to his comrades, picked up a hammer and smashed it into Kukur's head again and again until he passed out. Then the third assassin, Eliezer Sodits, formerly the chief hitman for the Ergun, fired two shots into the mass murderer. Assuring that he was dead, the operatives put the body into a suitcase, which they left in the mansion and added, on top of verdict, a sheet of paper inscribed with the words, in consideration of his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 Jews with horrible brutality, the condemned man has been executed. Signed, those who will never forget. End quote.

Now, within Mossad, this operation was considered a success. They had been told to kill a man and the man was dead. But everybody else knew that it had been very sloppy and could have led to disaster. And then, finally I'm actually not done. I told you.

1965 was a very rough year for the Mossad. There was this. Israel had been cultivating a relationship with Morocco, a relatively prowestern Arab regime with which Israel had no territorial disputes. And in the fall of 1965, the Moroccan king had allowed Mossad to bug all the meeting rooms and private suites of the Arab leaders and military commanders who were going to be attending a summit at Casablanca. The subject of the summit was what to do about Israel and how to proceed in doing it.

So this was one of the great intelligence coups in history, handed to him on a silver platter by the King of Morocco. The catch was that the Moroccans were not running a charity and they had a little ask of their own. A few years back, the King of Morocco had exiled his main political opponent, a man named Medi Benbarka. Ben Barka was an intellectual and a political activist who had briefly been a professor teaching his future persecutor King Hassan II. But he was not a terrorist.

He was not a militant of any kind. He'd been living in Europe since his exile, continuing to agitate for reforms in Morocco. And so the king marked him for death. And he wanted the Israelis to kill him, or at least help his own men do it. And so the Israelis agreed.

They started investigating Ben Barca and before long discovered a kiosk in Geneva where he would have his magazines delivered. They waited until he showed up and then placed him under surveillance. Mossad devised a plan to lure Ben Barca to Paris, supposedly to meet a documentary filmmaker who was interested in making a film about his life. The Israelis provided the Moroccans with safe houses and vehicles in Paris, as well as fake passports, poisons and shovels, and other equipment to dispose of the body. Ben Barka took the bait, and when he got to Paris, the Moroccans kidnapped him, took him to one of the Mossad safe houses and went to work torturing him until he died from asphyxiation after being submerged again and again in a tub of filthy water.

Masad claims its agents were not present at their own safe house during the torture or killing. And who knows? It could be true that they excused themselves temporarily while the actual deed was being done. But it was Maasad agents who took care of the body. They took the corpse to the Saint Germain Forest, threw the body in a hole and covered it with chemical powder to dissolve the remains.

That disposal site was chosen on the fly. So a short time later, Israeli agents moved the body. And according to some of the agents who were involved, ben Barca's remains are still buried beneath the Louis Vuitton Foundation Art museum in Paris. Well, given his status as an exiled foreign activist, the French had been keeping an eye on Ben Barca themselves. And it did not take them long to figure out what had happened.

The story exploded like a bomb in the French media and government. President de Gaulle actually disbanded his intelligence agencies for letting it happen and prosecuted the corrupt French police officers who had helped with the assassination. France cut off all diplomatic relations with Morocco and the incident left a shadow over relations between the two countries that really hasn't fully cleared to this day. The Israelis denied involvement and outwardly presented a united front. But behind the scenes, there were severe recriminations and opposing political factions within Israel tried to use the incident to damage and extort their opponents.

And so, in the wake of all this, when it came time to kill Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, the Israeli government was not prepared to hand the operation to Mossad assassination squads. Instead, the three man committee recommended that the Israelis pull an old trick out of the hat and use letter bombs. So they tried, but they didn't achieve much. A few Fatah operatives were injured, but nobody important and nobody was killed. This was the first of many, many attempts on Arafat's life by the Israelis.

The Israelis were already feared as legendary operators with a carefully cultivated reputation of being able to find and kill anyone anywhere in the world. And soon the elimination of Yasser Arafat would be the focus of whole departments of Israeli military and intelligence services for many years. And yet, Arafat would die an old man in 2004. Not an easy thing to do without a state apparatus protecting you.

In 1966, Fatal was able to carry out dozens of attacks. They were becoming more sophisticated and audacious. The Syrians had set up training camps in the. Jordanian controlled West Bank very close to the Israeli border. Jordan, the government of Jordan, registered protest, but it was very difficult for them to do anything about it without alienating Jordan's.

Palestinian majority attacks were emanating from those camps. And after three Israelis were killed in a Fatah attack, israel attacked and destroyed two of those camps. The Jordanians had sent secret messages to the Israelis saying, look, we're against these camps. We're not responsible. They might have even been happy that the Israelis took them out.

But the Jordanian government, again, was in a very tricky situation. Arabs everywhere supported the Palestinian cause. The Jordanian government was already looked at by many in the region as an archaic monarchy, as a Western puppet, weak on Zionism. And if enough of the Palestinian population got really riled up and started looking at the Hashemite regime as an obstacle that had to be cleared before their struggle could move forward, then he and his family could end up like his cousins in Iraq. And so King Hussein did his best to play both sides, doing what he could to provoke, to avoid provoking the Israelis, trying to keep the Palestinian militants under control while still trying to maintain a pose of being down for the cause.

It was always a very hard line to walk and it was only going to get harder as things heated up. In the second half of that year. Again, we're in 66. Fata got the gumption to start attacking Israeli military targets. And in November, 3 Israeli soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a mine Fatah had planted on their patrol route.

This time, the Israelis sent a strong force into a nearby Palestinian village for a punitive operation. But a Jordanian military unit happened to be in the area conducting exercises. The two sides got into a firefight, but the Jordanians were outnumbered and outgunned and 16 of them were killed by the Israelis. On one hand, the incident bolstered King Hussein's reputation because at least his forces had opposed the Israeli incursion. But now the Israelis were pissed because one of their own had been killed and several wounded.

And Jordanians were now looking to King Hussein to retaliate, to get one back. And so tensions increased between Israel and Jordan, between Jordan and the Palestinians, between Jordan and Syria and Egypt. Well, this was to the liking of the Syrian Baptists. And so they pushed Fatah to turn up the heat even more. In early 1967, Fatah launched over 100 attacks on Israeli soil, coming across all four major borders from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Many of the attacks were inconsequential or only damaged property. But nine Israeli civilians and four soldiers were killed. Israel retaliated in the directions that the attacks came from, but these responses were necessarily imprecise and more often than not came down on people not directly involved with the attacks. So just imagine that you're just a normal Palestinian trying to get by with your family and one day the Israelis show up and start shooting and a couple of your kids get killed. You know there's a conflict going on.

You know that the Israeli raid has something to do with that. You may have even heard rumors that Abdul down the street had a cousin staying with him who was supposed to be fediyin, but your kids are dead and you didn't do anything. And the people who killed them are the same ones who put you in this refugee camp. To the innocent people caught in the crossfire, these attacks by the Israelis just seem like terrorist attacks. They experienced them the same way the Israelis experienced the things we traditionally call terrorist attacks in their country.

And so the Arab governments were coming under increasing pressure to do something about this. Tensions mounted, and in May 1967, Israel released an official warning to Syria that if it did not get the insurgents under control, it would take large scale military action against them. Instead of backing down, Syria, Egypt and Jordan formed a joint military command and increased the concentration of forces on their borders with Israel. And the Israelis did the same in response. War seemed to be in the air.

The UN peacekeepers who had occupied the Sinai, standing between Egypt and Israel for the last decade, got out of the way.

We know now that the Arab states, as usual, were mostly posturing. The Israelis knew it at the time. They knew it from the recordings they'd gotten with the help of the Moroccans, on which they'd heard the Arab heads of state discuss how unprepared they were for another war with Israel. Israel's own intelligence assessments estimated that they could win the war in less than two weeks if the Arabs attacked, and in less than one week if Israel attacked first. Nasser and the others moved forces up so they could beat their chests on the border.

But there were nowhere near enough forces for an invasion, and the ones that were present were still deployed in depth in a defensive posture. Unfortunately for them, the Israelis were not just posturing. They were not just beating their chests. And if the Arabs weren't prepared for war, the Israelis were not going to wait around until they were. And so, on the morning of June 567, israel launched a massive surprise attack.

And despite their deployments, the Arabs were caught completely off guard. The Israeli air force destroyed virtually every combat aircraft the Egyptians and the Syrians had on the ground in a matter of hours. And then, with total air superiority, israeli planes picked off targets at will, while the IDF chased the enemy through the Gaza Strip, across the Sinai Peninsula and into the West Bank in the Golan Heights. And when the Six Day War was over, the territory under the control of the Jewish state had increased more than 300%, placing more than a million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.

There were prominent Israelis, including right wing hawks, who were warning at the time that it was a bad idea to bring a million Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction. Even if they weren't Israeli citizens or technically within Israel's official borders, they were going to be held responsible for these people. That other Israeli officials were enthusiastic. They pointed out that they would no longer have to rely on the Arab regimes to control the fedeen and that their own forces would no longer have to make incursions into neighboring countries to go attack the terrorists. They were right here.

Instead they could place garrisons in Palestinian areas. They could set up checkpoints and patrol Palestinian villages and towns and treat it like a proper counterinsurgency. Others saw a historic opportunity to forge a permanent peace. Israel at this point looked completely unbeatable and they held a mountain of bargaining chips. A top military intelligence official circulated a top secret paper to other government and military leaders saying we should not look like braggarts, mocking a defeated enemy, debasing him and his leaders.

Instead, he said, Israel should use the opportunity to be magnanimous and call for negotiations with the Arab states from a position of strength and offer to return conquered territory in exchange for a lasting peace. Which all sounds great, but in reality that would be a tough sell in any country under the circumstances. It's very rare for nations to call for peace during the exhilaration of finding out that they're invincible. And instead of thinking about peace, many Israelis were looking forward to what victories it might score next. One month after the war, a coalition of Israeli politicians, activists, writers, poets created the Movement for Greater Israel and began pressuring the government to take advantage of the smashing victory to support the establishment of Jewish settlements in newly conquered territories.

There are passages in the Hebrew Bible in which God promises that the Jews will inherit all the territory from the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq to the Mediterranean coast and from Lebanon all the way down to Egypt. And many Zionist romantics and religious zealots believe that after 2000 years of exile the new state of Israel had an obligation to fulfill that prophecy in more modern times. Supporters of the Greater Israel Movement don't take things quite that far, at least publicly and mostly restrict their ambitions to annexing the West Bank and to a lesser extent, Gaza. The Movement for Greater Israel had the support of many prominent Israelis and diaspora Jews as well, and the movement exerted influence on the rising right wing in Israeli politics. The head of the Mossad, Myra Meit, was one of those who was in favor of using the opportunity to make peace.

And he wrote in his diary what's happening now is a disappointment, a painful disappointment. I am apprehensive and worried at this fearful waste of a victory. When I see how matters are being conducted, my hands go limp and I get a terrible feeling the leaders of the Arab countries involved were completely humiliated, totally delegitimized. Those who had placed their hopes with them were all now looking for alternatives. And this was the opportunity Fatah had been waiting for.

And they were ready to take advantage of the opportunity. They realized that while the destruction of the Arab militaries made another full scale military conflict unlikely in the near term, the new occupation regime in Gaza and the West Bank actually provided the perfect environment for guerrilla war because now they could attack the Israelis without even having to cross the border into Israel. So while the Arab states licked their wounds, fatah just kept doing its thing. Carried out dozens of attacks from Gaza and the West Bank in the second half of 1967. They bombed factories, houses, movie theaters, infrastructure, reaching for targets of symbolic importance when possible, but settling for targets of opportunity most of the time.

With Israeli assassination squads constantly on his trail, missing him by moments on various occasions, arafat continued to increase the frequency and intensity of attacks. Over the next ten months, Fedeen attacks killed 65 Israeli soldiers and 50 civilians, wounding another 249 soldiers and 295 civilians. The period from 1967 until Nasser's death in 1970 is known as the War of Attrition. There were no pitched battles in the War of Attrition, only continual, small scale hit and run attacks to wear the Israelis down and stretch out their defensive commitments. You remember their territory had tripled in size after the 67 war.

And the military and security forces that they had going into that war were not built to control or protect that much territory. So the Israeli security apparatus had to expand and adapt on the fly, as the Arabs were constantly probing, harassing, attacking. Because of the success of the FLN in Liberating, Algeria from France, the tactics and strategy of the FLN were taken up by national liberation movements around the world. In many places, given enough time, it ended up working. They were able to make things hard enough on the colonial regime and to score enough propaganda victories to SAP morale back in the colonial regime's homeland.

Then eventually, they decided that it wasn't worth the effort and they went home. Arafat was committed to this strategy, but for some reason he never accounted for a simple and pretty obvious fact that although Israel was a colonizing regime like French Algeria, the Israelis didn't have another country to go back to. They had no choice but to keep fighting. And in a way, it's hard to blame the Palestinians for taking that path. The whole global left was going in that direction.

Militant groups that adopted that strategy got funding and recognition from the Soviets and from nonaligned countries. And again, they'd seen it work. And plus, when you place more than a million people under military occupation, the young men in that population are going to have something to say about it. The task of protecting israeli Jews from terrorist attacks was becoming more complicated by the day. Israeli soldiers patrolled the roads, towns and villages of the West Bank in Gaza, which gave the Israelis options that they hadn't had before, but also created risks that hadn't existed before.

Also, Israeli civilians began making their way into both territories to establish heavily armed garrison communities in the heart of Palestinian territory. The vast majority of the Zionists who chose to do that, the settlers, as you can probably imagine, were driven strongly by religion and ideology, and many of them were real fanatics who saw themselves as soldiers in something like a holy war. Problems with their new Palestinian neighbors began almost immediately, and when things escalated to violence, israeli military forces were called in to reinforce the settlers. The Israelis were having particularly tough problems in the Gaza Strip, which today is one of the most densely populated urban zones in the world. One Saturday morning, a 30 year old advertising executive named Bob Arroyo and his family went for a hike in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean and the Sinai Peninsula on the far side of Gaza from Israel.

Arroyo and his wife and his two children, five and seven years old, finished their hike and they got into the car to go home again. Arroyo was an advertising executive and his two kids were adorable, and their faces were very well known in Israel because Arroyo had used both of them in popular ad campaigns. And so as they were driving home on a main highway, they passed Palestinian villages and refugee camps. At a certain point, they were halted at a roadblock, and as soon as they stopped, a teenager ran up into their car and threw in a grenade. Arroyo was severely wounded, managed to crawl out of the car.

There were two young men nearby, and Arroyo started begging them to call for help for his family, which was trapped in the car, and the car was burning. He said the boys just laughed at him. His five year old daughter died in the car, and his seven year old son died soon after at the hospital, and his wife was severely handicapped for the rest of her life. Tens of thousands of Israelis attended the children's funeral in Jerusalem. When Israeli intel caught the people who had done this, it turned out to be three boys acting on their own, aged 1516 and 17.

Many of the attacks originating in the West Bank seemed to be coming from a place called Karame, where the Palestinians had set up a base in the southern region of the Jordan Valley. Every time there was an attack, the Israelis would retaliate, often attacking not only the Palestinians, but Jordanian forces. And their retaliations were taking a toll. In March of 68, an Israeli school bus ran over a landmine, killing two adult chaperones and wounding ten children. I've also seen another source that 28 people were wounded.

I'm not really sure where the two different figures come from. The IDF prepared a large scale helicopter borne daylight assault on the Fatab base in Karame. Arafat himself was believed to be there at the time, and the Israeli soldiers had orders to kill every young male they found. But the Israeli mechanized support units got bogged down in thick foliage around the Jordan River and poor coordination cost them the element of surprise rather than try to run, which is what Fedeen always did when the Israelis came in force. Fatah prepared to dig in and repel the assault, while Arafat was taken away to a safe location on a motorcycle.

Meanwhile, King Hussein reluctantly dispatched a contingent of the Jordanian army. There was a battle and 33 Israeli soldiers were killed. 61 Jordanians and over 100 Palestinians had been killed. But that did not matter. The Israelis had taken a lot of casualties and they were forced to withdraw under conditions that they had not chosen.

And word went out that for the first time, the Palestinians fatah, to be specific, had stood their ground in direct combat with Zionist forces. The word Karameh means dignity, which only helped propel the incident to mythical status. There were public celebrations in refugee camps around the region. Arab leaders, including Nasser, came out in public support of the Fedeen. Within two days of the battle, thousands of recruits showed up to be trained as fighters.

And not only Palestinians, but Arabs from other countries as well.

After Karame, Arafat became a folk hero, and not just locally, not just in Palestine, not just in the Arab world, but in the radical era of the increasingly around the world. His organization had originally been set up to be a rival of the PLO, but now Fatah managed to take control of the PLO and before long, virtually all Fedeen groups had been brought under its control. The charter of the PLO was changed to match the mission of Fatah to wage armed struggle against Israel until the Zionist entity was completely defeated.

With the Arab militaries in shambles and Palestinian insurgents still causing trouble, the Israelis scrambled to reorient their focus in that direction. The military and intelligence agencies were furious at Arafat's narrow escapes and they wanted his blood so bad, they were willing to try just about anything in keeping with the times, even a little MKUltra mind control action. A psychologist in the Israeli military told his superiors that he had devised a series of methods that would allow them to turn a captured Palestinian into a Manchurian candidate who could be released back into the wild with subconscious orders to kill Yasser Arafat or do anything else. Well, apparently the Israelis were very desperate or maybe they just said, screw it, let's just give this quack a shot because they actually approved this plan. The doctor provided an ideal profile.

The prisoner he was going to need, and one was selected from among the thousands of Palestinians being held in israeli jails. The doctor and his team were given a building in which to conduct their work, and the doctor spent three months using various techniques designed to brainwash his guinea pig. In the third month, the man was placed in a room where pictures of Arafat would pop up, and it appeared that he'd been programmed to shoot them immediately without a thought. A senior military intelligence official told Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman what he saw when he'd gone to observe, quote Fatki that's the code name given to the Palestinian prisoner. Fatki stood there in the middle of the room, and Shalit, the doctor spoke with him as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation.

Suddenly, Shalit banged his hand on the table and Fatki began to run around the table. He reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit. Then he put him in a room and showed us how Fatqui raised his pistol to a firing position. Every time Arafat's picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive.

End quote. When the doctor decided Fatqi was ready and in an ideal hypnotic state, they sent him back across the Jordan River to rejoin his comrades in Fatah. After about 5 hours, Israeli intelligence got word from one of their people in Jordan. Some Palestinian guy had shown up to a police station in Karame saying that the Zionists had tried to brainwash me into killing Yasser Arafat. So that didn't work, but you got to give them an A plus for effort and creativity.

Israeli intelligence drew up kill lists of wanted terrorists, and as the list grew, it was obvious that Mossad assassination squads were not going to be enough and they were going to need military support. Ariel Sharon was now a major general and commander of IDF Southern Command, and he was happy to help. As always, he took an extremely aggressive approach to the point that he drew criticism from others in the government. Israel's military governor responsible for civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip, complained that Sharon was making his job completely impossible. He said that he was, quote, killing for the sake of killing.

Moshe Daiyan was the Minister of Defense, and he and Sharon did not see eye to eye on what had to be done in the Strip. From Bergman, quote dayan wanted contacts and connections with the population, whereas Sharon was hunting the terrorists and could only see them through the sights of his rifle, and the population did not interest him at all. I heard Sharon declare in front of all the officers, whoever kills a terrorist will get a bottle of champagne, and anyone who takes a prisoner will get a bottle of soda. I said, Good Lord, what kind of policy is this? Who speaks like this?

After all, if we do not give them a little assistance, a little prosperity, they'll all turn to the path of terror, end quote. At Southern Command, Sharon created a special assassination squad that reported directly to him and only to him. The unit had lists of names some terrorists, others suspected of knowing about or supporting terrorists. They kidnapped and interrogated these people and often tortured them if they failed to cooperate. Sharon's men infiltrated Gaza neighborhoods dressed as Arabs and if they saw someone who fit the description of a wanted terrorist, they just killed him on the spot.

The commander of the unit told a reporter, quote we exploited the main weak point of these terror cells because of their Marxist background. They practiced a very high level of need to know compartmentalization. Each man knew only the members of his own cell and not those of other cells. If you appear as an armed local and you can speak the target's language, he has no way of knowing that it is in fact a trick until it's too late. End quote.

The murder of the Arroyo children marked a sea change in how the Israelis were going to respond to terrorist attacks. Meyer de Gan, the commander handpicked by Sharon to lead his death squad, said after those kids were murdered, ariel Sharon took the matter of terror in the Gaza Strip personally. In the past, Sharon would let the unit develop its own intelligence and come to him with suggested targets and operations when they were ready. But now he started coming down to the villa where they were based on the regular to participate directly in selecting targets and planning missions down to the small details. The Arroyo killings also effectively ended the debate inside the Israeli defense establishment about how to handle the Palestinian population in the conquered territories.

The Israeli politicians and security officials who were interested in trying to win hearts and minds were shouted down as terrorist appeasers and Sharon's approach triumphed. Massive forces poured into the Gaza Strip. On Sharon's orders, they demolished rows of houses in order to create wide access roads through the crowded refugee camps. The people whose houses were destroyed were not compensated or provided with any alternate accommodations. They were just thrown out and left with nothing.

One night in January 1972, Sharon ordered the expulsion of thousands of bedouin from a 2500 acre area south of Rafa. The Israeli general in charge of government activities in the occupied areas was outraged by this. He even threatened to resign. But he was talked out of it and did nothing. Sharon was given free rein to use Special Forces and other clandestine units virtually without restraint to find and kill terrorists before they could do any damage.

Meanwhile, Dagon and his assassination squad continually devised new methods for finding and disposing of wanted Palestinians. One tactic was to ambush them in brothels. Another was to hide in trees in the citrus groves. When they knew that terrorists were planning to meet there, they'd hide up in the branches communicating with each other by pulling on fishing cords stretched out between their trees to maintain silence. When the militants turned up, no attempt was made to detain them.

They were just shot and killed without warning. Of course, these methods often lead to mistakes. When you're targeting people before they can launch an attack, by definition, you're hitting them before they've launched an actual attack. Sometimes random Palestinians would happen by and notice the Israelis lying in ambush, and the Israelis were not about to let them run off and raise the alarm. And there were times when they simply murdered innocent people to prevent that.

Another thing they'd do is use Arab collaborators to sell booby trap grenades to the Palestine Liberation Army. The fuses would be clipped from the usual three second delay to a half second, ensuring that whoever used them would blow himself up. On one occasion, they borrowed an idea from Britain's famous Ploy before the invasion of Italy called Operation Mincemeet. Meyer de Gan, the commander of this unit, pretended to be a corpse and was carried by his comrades, two of them Palestinian collaborators and the others disguised as Arabs, into a militant hideout. And once they were all inside, dagon rose from the dead and the team threw down and killed everybody in the room.

Pretty incredible. About a month after the arroyo killings, two jeeps under Dagon's command were moving down a road that ran between the Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City. Jabalia refugee camp, by the way, is the one that was recently bombed. It was in the news. Along the way, the jeeps encountered a local cab that was loaded with passengers driving in the opposite direction.

And Dagon thought he recognized two targets among the passengers, and so he ordered the jeeps to turn around and chase the cab down. The jeeps caught up and then passed the cab and then cut off the road, and Dagon's soldiers jumped out and surrounded the car. Dagon approached the vehicle with his pistol drawn. One of the targets, Abu Nimr, jumps out holding a hand grenade. The pin is already drawn.

He says, if you get any closer, we all die. And so Dagon paused for a second or two, and then he yelled, Grenade. And he charged abu Nimr. And he grabs the hand holding the grenade to keep the guy from releasing the trigger and starts headbutting Abu Nimr with his helmet until he went unconscious. Dagon's men neutralized the rest of the passengers, and Dagan kept hold of Abu Nimr's hand as he went to the ground and found the grenade pin and put it back in its slot.

After the operation, Sharon said of Dagan, his greatest expertise is separating an Arab from his head. Well, thanks to the tactical leadership of Dagon, Yitzak Pundak, the IDF military governor who had clashed with Sharon in the past, could not deny the effectiveness of Sharon's tactics. But he had other concerns than just military effectiveness. He had to worry about political implications and how these operations were affecting Israel's foreign relations. And the long term relationship with the local population.

Sharon was making those parts of his job practically impossible. Bergman again quote Pundak later recalled reading a report filed by the unit that read our detail was chasing a wanted terrorist in Al Shati, a refugee camp in Gaza. He ran into one of the houses. The unit broke in after him, disarmed him and killed him in the house. Pundak says he drew the attention of an intelligence officer to the possibility that if such a report reached the UN or the Red Cross, it would cause an international scandal.

So what's the problem? Said the officer, according to Pundak, destroy the report? Pundak took this story to Sharon, and when he refused to investigate further, Pundak recalled, he told Sharon, you are a liar, a crook and a knave. Sharon rose and raised his hand as if to slap Pundak. But Pundak wasn't scared.

If you do that, I'll break your bones right here in your office, he said. Sharon sat down. Pundak says he saluted and declared, now I know you're also a coward, and left the room. Several journalists have collected accounts from Dagon's unnamed men saying they shot people after they surrendered their hands in the air. One was quoted as saying that he and other soldiers had apprehended a Palestinian man who was wanted for murdering an IDF officer.

A Shin Bet agent who was with them purportedly said that the man could never be brought to trial because the Secret Service would be forced to name the collaborator who had provided the information that led to his capture. The soldiers let their captive escape and then shot him as he ran. Another unit veteran said the captive would be led from the house he was captured in into a dark alley off to the side, where the soldiers would leave a pistol or a grenade in a way that made it very tempting for him to reach out for it. When he did, they'd shoot him. Sometimes they'd tell him, you have two minutes to run, and then they'd shoot him on the grounds that he tried to run away.

Other former members said that when it came to the list of targets, Degon had unilaterally annulled the IDF's rule that suspects be given a chance to surrender before being killed. Under Dagon's command, a target was assassinated on site. All the complaints, rumors, testimonies, to say nothing of the many dead bodies, were swept into a closet, locked tightly to prevent any outside inquiry, end quote.

The aggressive Israeli tactics were making it harder to hit targets inside Israel, and so the PLO reached out to new friends willing to help carry out operations elsewhere. Europe was a very juicy target. Israelis came and went often, and European security procedures were insufficient, to say the least. The was in full swing, and the PLO shaped its message to attract the support of left wing and would be revolutionary movements around the world. Like this PLO statement, quote the Palestinian national struggle and the Arab national democratic struggle are an integral part of the militant movement against imperialism and racism and for national liberation throughout the world.

Mutual solidarity and support between the Arab national struggle and the world revolutionary struggle are a necessity and an objective condition for the success of our Arab struggle. The Arab Palestinian national struggle is decisively and firmly on the side of all world revolutionary forces. End quote.

Well, you know, that kind of thing is catnip to Western radicals, of course. And so militant left wing movements in Germany and Italy and radical groups across the continent adopted the Palestinian cause as their own. The PLO brought European radicals to Lebanon and Jordan for military training in the camps, and the Europeans helped the PLO with messaging and logistics and even operations in Europe. On several occasions throughout the 1970s, major PLO operations targeting Jews overseas turned out to have received direct support from European leftists. In the summer of 1968, as protests and revolutions rocked capitals around the world, palestinian militants adopted a new tactic that would become one of the hallmarks of the era.

They hijacked Flight 426 of the Israeli airline El Al. The plane was on the way from Rome to Tel Aviv when three men took it over and ordered the pilot to divert to Algiers. There were 38 people on board, including twelve Israelis and another twelve Israeli crew members. Once the plane landed in Algeria, all the nonisraelis and all the women, children and elderly, regardless of whether they were Israeli, were all released, leaving seven crew members and five passengers as hostages, all Israeli men. They were moved to a building where they were kept under guard by Algerian government security forces for three weeks.

When the Israeli government finally agreed to free 24 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages release, the Ll flight 426 Skyjacking was carried out by George Habash's outfit, the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine PFLP, which was formed separately from Yasser Arafat's Fatah, but came under the PLO umbrella with everyone else after Arafat took it over. The PFLP was a Marxist organization popular with the educated middle class, which opened a lot of doors into the Eastern Bloc and the West European left. The success of the El Al Hijacking was pretty much total. No one had been hurt. Leftists had no problem defending the operation, since the hijackers had wisely decided to let everybody but the men go and 24 Palestinian militants had been freed from Israeli dungeons.

What's more, the Israelis had been forced to negotiate with a group that they officially refused to recognize and said was a gang of criminal terrorists. For years, the official policy of the Israeli government was to never negotiate prisoner exchanges with hostage takers, since doing so would only encourage more hostage taking operations. But now that policy had been put to the test and the Israelis had buckled and so hijacking became a regular thing. About a year after Flight 426, a TWA flight from La to Tel Aviv was jacked by four Palestinians. Two of them forced a stewardess at gunpoint to open the door to the cockpit, and when the pilots looked up to see what was the matter, they had gun barrels in their faces.

To their surprise, one of those guns was being held by a woman dressed all in white, with a white floppy hat and a white tunic and white trousers. Her name was Layla Khalid, and for a time she would become an international symbol of Palestinian resistance. Khalid and the others ordered the plane to land in Damascus, and Israeli air traffic control tracked the plane the whole way. But they had no choice but to just watch as this aircraft made its way over Israeli airspace to land in the capital of their Syrian enemy. Once the plane was safely on the ground, all the hostages were released, except for two Israelis, who were held for three months until another prisoner exchange was negotiated.

Now, the thing about the Palestinian movement is that just like today, it was a very mixed bag. Most groups fell under the banner of the PLO, but that didn't mean that the PLO had chartered those groups or handed out their missions. Most of these groups formed on their own and then declared allegiance to the PLO. But the PLO leadership wasn't always exercising operational control. And so you had some groups, usually the more educated secular ones, that had a nose for the global propaganda environment, and they would do things like release women and children and try to negotiate prisoner exchanges without hurting anyone.

Other groups were not like that at all and were just all about violence in mayhem as the conflict dragged on. And this is one of the things that happens as conflicts drag on into real blood feuds. The mutual savagery of both sides allowed the ultraviolent extremists to pull pretty much everybody down to their level. There was a palpable sense that things were spinning out of control. In the late sixty s and early 70s, that sense existed even in Europe, in the United States, and it was amplified in a country where two peoples were fighting what each of them saw as an existential war for survival.

In Rome, a team of Palestinian terrorists went through an airport terminal shooting at people, and then they went out onto the tarmac, started shooting and throwing grenades into a taxiing airplane, set it on fire and killed 30 people. And then they commandeered another aircraft with hostages and threatened to crash it into central Athens before making their way to the Middle East, where after some wrangling, they faced no punishment and got away. That sounds like a crazy, crazy incident, but I'm dedicating just a few lines to it, because things like that happened all the time back then. Between 1968 and 1972. Okay, just a couple of years, 68 to 72, literally hundreds of passenger planes were hijacked, only some of them by Palestinians and other Arabs.

It was just a thing to do. You had French Canadian separatists jacking planes and flying them to Cuba. Some people were doing it just because they were crazy and wanted to be famous. There were 82 attempted hijackings of American aircraft in 1969 alone. That's like one every four days.

Just imagine that most were just taking hostages and making demands. They weren't flying them into buildings or anything like that. But the Israelis realized that they couldn't keep negotiating prisoner exchanges with these people. Every time they did, it validated the tactic practically guaranteed the next hijacking or hostage taking. And so the decision was made at some point that there would be no more negotiations, and instead they would use special forces or other operatives to attempt assaults and rescue missions.

As Israeli strategy changed, the terrorists adapted and became much quicker to start shooting hostages. When things went sideways. The next fall, Khaled and one comrade kicked off a string of what would be five attempted hijackings, each carried out by a separate team in very quick succession. Khaled's group failed when this badass pilot purposely sent the plane into a nosedive, sending the hijackers tumbling onto the floor. There was an undercover Israeli agent on board, and he drew a concealed pistol, shot one of the hijackers, and a bunch of the other passengers piled on top of Khalid.

The plane finished its scheduled trip to London, and Khaled was detained by British authorities. But three days later, there was another skyjacking, another British flight coming in from the Middle East. In exchange for the hostages, the PFLP demanded the release of Khaled and three other prisoners being held in West Germany and Switzerland. And so, over Israeli protests, they were howling in protest. The British, the Germans and the Swiss complied and released the hostages, including Leila Khaled.

This was followed almost immediately by three more skyjackings, and then all four of the commandeered aircraft were brought to Jordan. The passengers were released, other than 55 Jews and one crew member, who were taken to a hideout in a Palestinian neighborhood of Aman. As news cameras sent the images around the world, the four planes were blown up as the terrorists made their getaway. For King Hussein of Jordan, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. The Israelis were surely going to retaliate.

And what could he really say after it had been revealed in front of the whole world that he had no control over his Palestinian population? The PLO had been treating Jordan as if it already owned the country, and even Hussein's supporters were starting to doubt his leadership. He knew that he risked backlash if he moved on the PLO, but at this point, he really felt like he had no choice. It was September 1970. Becker writes, quote the Fedeen had defied King Hussein's authority beyond a point that was politically tolerable for several reasons.

The king judged the time to be right, to crush the organizations. Peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel were underway, initiated by the American Secretary of State, William Rogers. The Rogers Plan proposed that Israel withdraw behind her pre 1967 boundaries and that the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 be implemented. But the PLO rejected resolution Two four Two on the grounds that it referred to Palestinians as refugees and not to the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland, and because it required the recognition of Israel. And so the Rogers Plan was also rejected.

But Egypt and Israel did sign a ceasefire agreement. Hussein wanted peace too. The impediment was the PLO. Within Jordan, the Fedeen groups had been encroaching even further on the state's prerogatives. They had formed their own police force.

They had initiated armed clashes with the army. They had started their own radio station. They had organized mass demonstrations and a strike to stop the king receiving an envoy from the United States. On that day, every driver on the roads of Amman, even army drivers, had stopped their vehicles for an hour when the Fedeen asked them to. The Fedeen were appealing to the people over the head of the government with alarming success.

They had even interfered successfully to prevent the king dismissing two officers and sending two others into exile. Hussein had reason to fear that his power was being usurped and his government destroyed. It seemed plain enough that the intention of the Fedeen was to take over the country. His mind was made up for him. After the Dawson's Field episode before Skyjacking, he was carrying out a formal inspection of his Bedouin troops.

Hussein, remember, came from Arabia and was installed by the British and ruled over a majority Palestinian population. The Bedouin were like his cossacks, his most loyal troops and his regime's enforcers. And so he's carrying out a formal inspection of his Bedouin troops when he noticed, as he was intended to, that one of the soldiers was flying a brazier from the antenna of his radio. The hint was not to be mistaken. The Bedouin were telling the king that he had turned them into women, keeping them passive in the face of Palestinian provocation, end quote.

Hussein knew that he risked an uprising if he attacked Arafat and his people. If he was going to go in, he knew he had to go in heavy with the element of surprise and not surrender the initiative. He had to keep the PLO on its heels and destroy them before they had a chance to organize a resistance. In September 1970, he ordered his police, military and intelligence forces to attack Arafat's people, which was a more complicated operation than it might sound like. The PLO was not located in any one place.

It was distributed in communities throughout the population. Hussein's forces massacred people indiscriminately. They killed thousands of Palestinians PLO groups, especially the PFLP responded as well as they could. But they were being slaughtered. The Syrians sent a small contingent of tanks into northern Jordan to support the Fedeen but they were pushed back.

Jordan requested Israeli air support against the Syrians and the Israeli cabinet debated whether to intervene and ensure that the Palestinians were crushed once and for all. When Syria massed more tanks on the border israel massed forces on its side of the northern Jordanian border and Syria backed down. Now naturally, these massacres did not play well in the Arab press to the point that King Hussein was actually hemorrhaging senior military and government officials who were defecting to the other side or resigning in disgust. The Jordanian Prime Minister went to Egypt for an emergency meeting between the Arab states about what to do. And while he was there he had a discussion with Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi after which he resigned his post and defected Libya.

His fight could not go on if Hussein wanted to keep his head on his shoulders. But fortunately for him the PLO had already been dealt a devastating blow by the end of the month a month that would come to be called by Palestinians. Black September arafat and the rest of the remaining PLO leadership left Jordan through Syria and eventually relocated to Lebanon to try and rebuild. It didn't take them long to do it. Despite the damage they'd taken the PLO launched a new wave of attacks not only in and around Israel, but in Europe as well.

In November 1971 the Jordanian Prime Minister who had ordered the assault on the PLO was assassinated in Cairo. Two weeks later gunmen nearly assassinated the Jordanian ambassador to Great Britain. Two months after that Palestinian militants executed five Jordanians in Germany then bombed the offices of a Dutch gas company and a German electronics firm that was engaged in trade with Israel. These attacks were all carried out by a group no one had ever heard from before. Though it went by a name that had become very familiar elul Alaswad or Black September.

Black September was a faction of Fatah led by former PLO intelligence boss and it redefined and widened the war being fought by the Palestinian resistance. The center of focus was no longer Israel. Israel was to be seen merely as the forward operating base of U. S. Imperialism passing through the Arab regimes tied to it and ending with Israel.

In May 1972 a group of Black September terrorists jacked an airliner with 94 passengers and seven crew members. The plane landed in Tel Aviv and the hijackers demanded the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Now, I don't know what possessed them to try to pull this off on Israel's home turf but that's what they did. Defense Minister Moshe Daiyan approved a plan devised by future Prime Minister Ahud Barak who was commanding an Israeli special operations unit. His team got close to the aircraft by donning, white overalls and posing as an airport ground crew.

Each man was carrying concealed 22 Barretta, and when they were close enough, they rushed into the plane and eliminated all the terrorists. Only one female passenger was killed in the firefight. Two more were injured. The only Israeli commando hurt was a young man named Benjamin Netanyahu, lightly wounded in the hand by an errant bullet from his own side. Well, now it was the Israelis'turn to celebrate, because instead of capitulating, they had shown potential hijackers around the world.

What could be waiting for them if they tried it again? But again, this was a new kind of war, and the militants still considered the operation a success, since it had brought the attention of revolutionaries from all over the world to focus on Palestine for an entire day. Applications to join the resistance flooded in, and one member of Black September said that nearly every one of them said something like, at last, you have found a way of making our voice heard in the world. Recruits came from all over the world. The PFLP made contact with a band of revolutionaries out of Japan, led by a woman named Fusako Shiganobu, calling themselves the Japanese Red Army.

The JRA was an avowed Maoist organization which took things a bit too far, ideologically speaking, for the merely Marxist socialist PFLP. But the Japanese radicals were committed and apparently willing, and some said eager to give their lives for the cause. Fusako's Cadre was trained by the PFLP. First in North Korea and then in Lebanon. According to a few sources, the Japanese militants were actually the first ones to raise the idea that rushing to certain death in battle was not suicide in the regular sense of the term.

The Japanese kamikaze who flew their planes into American ships were not suicidal. They gave their lives heroically for their country, and a soldier who rushes into a hopeless situation to do damage to the enemy is no different. This is the case they were making. Their Arab compatriots were skeptical. Suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam, and even the more secular militants wondered how they would ever recruit fighters if they thought that they'd be sent off on suicide missions.

And so the Japanese Red Army decided to provide a demonstration of how effective a few militants could be when they acted without concern for their own lives. On May 30, 1972, three JRA men pulled AKS and hand grenades from their bags in the main airport of Tel Aviv and began firing indiscriminately. One witness said, I saw 25 people piled up in a pool of blood near conveyor belt number three. One man stood near the belt with a submachine gun and fired across the entire length of the room. Another lobbed hand grenades whenever he saw people in large groups.

Two of the attackers fought to the death, and another was badly wounded and captured. 26 innocent people were dead. Another 78 lay bleeding with shrapnel and bullet wounds. 17 of the dead were Christian pilgrims who were visiting the Holy Land from Puerto Rico. At a Beirut press conference, the PFLP spokesman, who was actually married to Fusako Shiganobu and fathered a daughter with her openly defended the massacre made no apologies for the non Israelis who were murdered.

Even he said not one of those people in the airport that day were innocent, since not one of them had cared or lifted a finger to object to the brutalization of the Palestinian people. The sight of Japanese Marxists killing Puerto Rican Christians in support of Palestinians in their fight against Jews was as shocking as it was strange. And both Israelis and Palestinians understood that the war had just escalated to a new level. Within a few months, the whole world would know it. Eight Black September militants had been training at a camp in Libya for months.

Arafat's old friend Salah Khalaf met them there, along with the founder of Black September. And the group were told that they had been chosen for a very important mission in Libya. They were trained to proficiency with handguns, submachine guns and grenades, and they underwent training and hand to hand combat and physical fitness. They were also trained in disguise with a focus on how to pass unnoticed in a foreign country. A few of the trainees spoke German and were familiar with major German cities, which might have given the militants some hint of where they were headed.

It was 1972 and the Summer Olympics were underway. In Munich. On July 7, a Mossad agent filed a report warning that Black September is planning an attack in Europe. And again, on August 5, black September is preparing an operation of an international nature. But the reports were ignored.

They were lost amid the flood of other reports just like it. On September 3 and Fourth, the eight Fedin flew separately into West Germany and made their way separately to Munich. The PLO had asked for permission to send a Palestinian team to participate at the Olympic Games, but the Olympic Committee had said no. And Salah Khalaf later said, apparently, from the point of view of this reputable body which pretends to be apolitical, we didn't exist. The leadership of Black September decided to take things into its own hands.

Now, although the group might have put two and two together by now, it was not until the night before the operation that they were informed of the plan. All eight of them drew up their last will and testament. They picked up their weapons and they made their way to the Olympic village. Aided by left wing German militants, they climbed the fence and made straight for the building where the Israeli Olympic team was staying. At about 04:00 A.m.

On September 5, the eight men stormed the Israeli dorms. The team's wrestling coach and one of their weightlifters put up a fight, but they were shot and killed. The rest of the team was held hostage in the same room with the two bodies. Anyone anywhere in the world who was not already watching the Olympics was now watching the most audacious and high profile terrorist attack in history unfold on live television. The terrorists demanded the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Mayer made the decision early on that there would be no negotiation with Black September or else Israel would never see the end of these attacks. Israeli Special Forces began preparing a rescue operation but the West Germans refused to let them carry it out. This was Germany, so the Germans called the shots. The Germans were so adamantly pacifist in the post war era that they hadn't even armed the guards at the Olympics because they didn't want the world to see uniform Germans walking around with guns. The 72 Olympics was supposed to be Germany's big coming out party 27 years after World War II a giant show to demonstrate to the world that Hitler and the National Socialists all that was part of the distant past and now Jews were dead and more were in danger of being massacred.

And worse, they'd been helped by German radicals who, ironically, were convinced that they were acting in the name of antinazism. The German state would not let the Israelis run the operation. They feared a televised bloodbath. But the Germans themselves had no experience with this kind of thing and they were completely unequal to the task. The two Israeli agents who were allowed to observe from a distance had to watch helplessly with the rest of the world while the rest of the Israeli Olympic team was led at gunpoint to two German military helicopters.

One of the Israeli observers said the sight of the athletes being led to the helicopters I will never forget until the day I die. On both sides of the pathway, which was a kind of lawn stood tens of thousands of people from innumerable countries. Deathly silence. I stood alongside German Interior Minister Hans Dietrich Gencher and Franz Joseph Strauss victor at my side. And we watched the Israeli athletes with their hands tied.

Flanked by the terrorists and all in step, they marched toward the helicopters. It was an appalling sight, especially to a Jew on German soil in Munich. Bergman picks it up from here. The helicopters took the hostages to a nearby military airport where a plane was supposed to fly them out of Germany as soon as the deal for the release of the Palestinian prisoners had concluded. The terrorists and the hostages were followed by additional helicopters.

With the Israeli observers and the German officials on board germany devised a rescue operation at the military airport. But the forces they deployed were untrained and disorganized and they lacked the required intelligence on the terrorists sniper equipment and support for such a mission. They opened fire in an uncoordinated manner and did not hit or kill enough terrorists to neutralize the squad. The terrorists fired at the building where we were. Zamir said he's one of the observers.

Victor and I ran down the stairs, groping in the dark, looking for the commanders of the operation. With firing going on all the time, we saw that the terrorists had shot the helicopter pilots and they fell on their faces. When we located the German commanders of the operation, I demanded to go up onto the roof to speak to the terrorists and warn them that if firing continued, they would not get out alive. The officers refused, and we insisted until they agreed, on condition that we speak Arabic and not German. Cohen took the megaphone and began trying to persuade the terrorists to surrender.

But it was too little, too late, and all I got was a burst of fire that nearly killed us both. Zamir and the German asked the Germans why there wasn't a force storming the terrorists. He was told that the police were waiting for armored vehicles that were stuck on the way to the airport in a traffic jam created by all the curious onlookers, zamir watched the terrorists lob grenades into the helicopters where the Israelis were being held. He saw them go up in flames after the grenades exploded. When he ran to the Smoldering aircraft, he found only the nine Israelis bodies, handcuffed to one another, charred and some still burning.

To Zamir, the Germans'conduct in the hostage situation was telling. They did not make even a minimal effort to save lives or take minimal risks to rescue people, neither our people nor their own. He said he had seen one of the German pilots crying out for help. I told the German police, For God's sake, there are people bleeding in the helicopter. A wounded crewman has crawled 200 meters.

Get him out of there. He crawled on all fours, wounded, and no one made a move to rescue him. Just after 03:00, a.m. Barely 23 hours after the initial terrorist assault, zamir phoned Israeli Prime Minister Golda Mayer, who congratulated him on his success. She had been misinformed by a German source that all the Israelis were safe.

I'm sorry to tell you this, Golda, he told her, but the athletes were not rescued. I have seen them all. Not one of them survived. The Palestinians saw the operation as a success, as their cause had taken center stage in world opinion. One PLO organ wrote, a bomb in the White House, a landmine in the Vatican, the death of Mao Zedong, an earthquake in Paris could not have had greater resonance with every person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in Munich.

It was like painting the name Palestine on a mountain visible from all corners of the globe, end quote.

Well, the Israelis, as you can imagine, went absolutely ham on the PLO. The Mossad sent teams around the world, hunting everyone they could find with any connection to the attack. They bombed a dozen bases. They attacked villages. They assassinated people across Europe and the Middle East.

This revenge operation eventually wound down. But the lesson that the Israelis took from Munich was that they could no longer restrict their operations to Middle Eastern countries. Operations spring of Youth, as it was called, had also shown the Israeli government how much their intelligence and special operations capabilities had improved since the disasters in 1965 showed them that they had the capability to strike anyone anywhere in the world with or without the permission of local government. It also hardened their outlook, radicalized them, instilled a certain cavalierness to the operations they chose and how they were executed. One time, when they were hunting a suspected terrorist in Lillahammer, Norway, mossad agents identified the wrong man and just straight up murdered an innocent Moroccan in front of his pregnant Norwegian wife.

Quote all of a sudden, my husband fell. I did not understand what had happened. And then I saw those two men. They were three, 4 meters away from us. One of them was the driver of the car and the second was his passenger.

They stood outside the car on both sides, firing pistols. I fell flat on the ground. Sure, they wanted to kill me too and that I would die in a moment. But then I heard the car doors slam and it drove away. My husband didn't shout.

I got up and ran as fast as I could to the nearest house and told him to call the police and an ambulance. When I got back, there were already people around my husband trying to help him. An ambulance came and I drove with my husband to the hospital and there they told me he was dead, end quote.

The massage chief at the time just waved this incident off. He said, not one of us has the means of only making correct decisions. Wrong identification of a target is not a failure, it's a mistake. The man behaved in a manner that seemed suspicious to our people who were following him. He made a lot of journeys, the aim of which was difficult to know.

But as Bergman writes, quote in truth, the man had no connection at all to terrorism and the Lillahammer affair was nothing but the cold blooded murder of an innocent pool attendant. End quote. Even worse than that, as far as the Israelis were concerned several members of the hit squad were caught by the Norwegian police who quickly figured out what had happened. Documents found on the agents revealed the locations of safe houses and collaborators, communications channels and operational methods that the Israelis used all over Europe. The men were sentenced to short prison terms for the murder, but they were released after a secret agreement was reached between Israel and Norway.

When they got off the plane back home, the murderers were greeted as returning heroes by a crowd of cheering Israelis.

Nasser died in 1970 and he was. Replaced as Egypt's President by Anwar Sadat. The first years of Sadat's rule were very bad ones in Egypt. The country was demoralized after its defeat in 67 and now the death of Nasser. The economy was in a toilet.

Sadat had been making noises in global media and through diplomatic channels that he was willing to recognize Israel's sovereignty, which would have made Egypt the first Arab state to do that in exchange for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Sinai. But so far, he hadn't gotten anywhere. And so, in 1972, with Egypt in a bad place and his rule unstable, he decided to take bold action to shake things up. The 67 war had left the Israeli security forces stretched to their limit, while at the same time instilling a sense of arrogant invincibility that led them to underestimate what the Arabs were capable of. After making a final offer for a lasting peace treaty delivered to the Israeli Prime Minister Goldemair by U.

S. Secretary of State Kissinger, and being flatly rejected, sadat began making preparations for another war. With the help of the Soviet Union, he began a massive rearmament program, stocking up on MiG fighters and air defense systems, tanks and anti tank weapons and bringing Egypt's recruiting and training of its soldiers up to modern standards or something close to it. Sadat ordered a series of military exercises on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal with Israeli forces watching from the other side. He kept doing this, and each time the Egyptians got moving, the Israelis had to respond.

But eventually they got tired of it and their responses started to slacken. Each time the Egyptians launched another exercise, they were convinced that the Egyptians, who had been beaten so badly in 1967, would not dare try again, especially since now it would involve an opposed amphibious attack across the Suez Canal, something they did not think the Egyptian army was remotely capable of. As a result, the Egyptians were essentially making war preparations within visual range of the Israeli military and the Israelis weren't really doing anything to prepare for it. Saddat called on Syrian President Hafez Assad to join the upcoming war with Israel. Jordan refused to participate.

Other Arab countries sent small expeditionary forces, mostly as a symbolic gesture. In the first days of October 1973, general Ariel Sharon was shown photographs of Egyptian forces massing on the far side of Suez in much larger numbers than in any of the previous exercises. And so he called up the co of IDF Southern command and told him that he thought that the Egyptians were planning to attack. Prime Minister Mayer also got word from separate sources that a Syrian attack may have been imminent. All of these warnings and many others actually were ignored.

On October 4 and fifth Soviet advisers and their families began leaving Egypt and Syria at the same time that fleets of Soviet transport aircraft laden with military equipment started landing in Cairo. In damascus. On October 6, 1973, the Egyptians sent five divisions comprising 100,000 soldiers, 1400 tanks and 2000 pieces of heavy artillery and mortars across the Suez Canal on a massive surprise attack. And despite all the warning signs, they caught the Israelis mostly off guard. Israeli forces tried to counterattack the bridgeheads established by the Egyptians, but they were repulsed.

Israeli forces looked for a time like they were about to be overwhelmed, and the Prime Minister ordered nuclear bombs and missiles prepared in case they were. There were real concerns at the time that if Israel did start nuking Arab cities, the Soviets might nuke Israel, leading to the very real possibility of nuclear war with the United States. But none of that would be necessary. The Egyptians didn't try to move out much from the narrow strip surrounding their bridgeheads for fear of leaving the protection of their air defense systems and becoming vulnerable to Israeli airstrikes. By October 13, IDF Northern Command had successfully driven the Syrians back and fortified the northern front so that Israeli artillery was now only three to 5 miles from being within range to target Damascus itself.

Knowing that the US and the UN were going to be forcing a ceasefire within the next 48 hours or so, there was a lot of pressure within the Israeli government to do something now drastic now against Egypt before that, before the ceasefire, in order to secure a better negotiating position. In the aftermath, there were calls to make a bold push across the Suez Canal to the Egyptian side to threaten Cairo. But the Egyptians were too well prepared and no one saw a way to do that that would guarantee success. The Israelis had lost over 400 combat aircraft. The Defense Minister informed the cabinet that the air force only had enough resources to support one more major attack.

With Israeli artillery almost within range of Damascus, assad panicked and begged Sadat to order an Egyptian attack eastward to take pressure off the Syrian front. Now the Egyptians were in a very strong position and they knew it was a bad idea to push out. But Sadat felt that he had no choice but to support Assad, lest Syria pull out of the war and leave Egypt one on one against the Israelis. On October 13 and 14th, the Egyptian tanks began trying to push out from their secure positions, inviting a headon confrontation with Israeli forces. IDF's Southern Command was ordered to take up defensive positions and prepare for a fight.

But Ariel Sharon had his own ideas. Disregarding orders, he took 750 troops, 20 tanks and seven APCs across the Suez Canal into Egyptian territory on ferries. He caught the Egyptians completely off guard and some units broke and ran, thinking that this must be a larger Israeli invasion that was imminent. The disorder in the Egyptian forces caused by Sharon's maneuver opened up opportunities for air and artillery strikes against their exposed positions and left Egyptian tank forces vulnerable to counterattack. Sharon's maneuvers had cut off the Egyptian Third Army from resupply or reinforcement.

It was basically trapped. Some Israeli officials wanted to destroy the entire force, but others thought that it was best to preserve his a bargaining chip. The Americans supported the latter idea, and the Americans had a lot of influence by this point. 73 war was in part a proxy war between the US. And the Soviet Union.

Nixon at first had refrained from throwing total US support behind the Israelis when the war started. But once it was clear that the Soviets were committed to helping the Arabs win, the US. Decided that it couldn't let Soviet support be the determining factor in such a high profile conflict. And so the US. Got fully involved.

The Israelis had been running out of supplies and equipment, and the American support was desperately needed. So what the Americans wanted was not something that could be ignored. And what the Americans wanted was a ceasefire. NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces had come nose to nose for the first time in a decade, and neither side wanted to test the sensitivity of the other's trigger finger. So in fact, pressure was coming from both the US and the Soviet Union to their respective proxies.

To wrap this up, by the last week of October, a ceasefire was in place, although fighting would continue sporadically until the following January. The 1973 war, the fourth Arab Israeli war, or the Yom Kippur war, ended up signaling a sea change in Arab Israeli relations. It was in fact the last time, even to this day, that Israel was in direct combat with Arab military forces. Although Israel had managed to gain the upper hand by the end, everybody knew that it had been by the skin of their teeth. If the Egyptians had improved this much in six short years after their devastating defeat in the Six Day War, what were things going to be like in another six years?

The sheen of Israeli invincibility was gone from the Arab side. The 73 war actually opened doors to peace that had been slammed shut by the 67 war. That earlier war had left the Arabs so humiliated that it was basically impossible for any leader to make a lasting peace with Israel without looking cowardly. But now that Egypt could say that it really had dealt a serious blow to the Israelis and shown that they mean business and were no longer to be taken lightly, that actually gave Sadat the confidence and the room to start working toward peace. The Israelis suffered almost 11,000 casualties in this war.

They lost 400 tanks, another 700 damaged or captured, as well as over 400 armored vehicles and 400 aircraft destroyed. The Jewish population of Israel at the time was only about 2.7 million. You always have to keep that in mind when you hear casualty numbers like this. 11,000 casualties in a society with 2.7 million people is the equivalent of the US. Taking 1.21.3 million casualties in a war that lasted just over two weeks.

The 73 war might have been good for Sadat's popularity and it was good for Egypt's position in the region but it had accomplished nothing for the Palestinians. While the Egyptians got to rest once the fighting came to a halt in early 74 there would be no rest for the Israelis. The fourth Arab Israeli war might have been over but the long war with the PLO only intensified. In May of 74, three Fedeen who were part of a PLO splinter group sneaked into northern Israel from Lebanon. At night.

They started toward a border town called Malot and on their way, they ambushed a vehicle carrying several women. Returning home from work, the terrorists killed one of the women and shot and wounded another. And then in the early morning, they arrived at Malot. Two of them spoke Hebrew, so they knocked on the door of a house and announced that they were there looking for terrorists. When the door opened, the three men crashed through it.

Inside was Yosef and Fortuna Cohen and their four year old son, Moshe and their daughter, Bibi and a 16 month old baby. The terrorists murdered the parents and the four year old and shot and wounded the little girl. They didn't notice the baby. As they left the house, they came across a local man and asked him in Hebrew for directions to the school. The man told him and they shot him.

They got to the school with the intention of hiding out and waiting for the children to arrive in the morning. But when they broke in, they found that there was already a large group of teenagers and ten adult chaperones who were already there sleeping. It was a group from another part of the country on an overnight field trip to Malo. When Israeli security forces arrived the men announced that they would kill all their hostages at 06:00 a.m. If 20 Palestinian prisoners were not released.

So a rescue operation was quickly thrown together. But it was botched, and the terrorists began shooting and throwing grenades at the hostages. It only took the Israeli force about 30 seconds to correct their early errors and kill the terrorists. But in those 30 seconds 22 children and four adults were killed. Every surviving hostage was at least wounded.

Another attack, this one also originating in Lebanon led to a hostage situation in a hotel right in Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital. Israeli security forces again tried to rescue mission but the militants had adjusted their tactics to the Israelis'more aggressive posture. They were always ready to just start killing hostages at a moment's notice. Before all the terrorists were neutralized eight civilians and three soldiers had been killed. One of the Israeli special forces soldiers assigned to that hostage rescue team later he'd be the commander of the unit.

He said it was a terrible time. Every few weeks we scrambled to the scene of another terror attack. You know that in the few hours you had before dawn, you had to eliminate the problem. Although it was all happening inside Israel, the nature of the operations was different from what the unit was used to. All the initiative, all the element of surprise, all the planning was the other sides.

Terribly scary. This went on throughout the 1970s, and that is very important to understand about this conflict. The kinds of attacks that were introduced to most Western countries after 911 and with the rise of ISIS. Israel had already been dealing with that for decades. The longtime mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Koleck, was once asked by a reporter what he thought should be done about the problem of terrorism.

He said problem. We don't have a problem. Problems have solutions. We have a condition, and conditions can only be managed. That's not an exact quote.

I have never been able to find it again after I read it, but that was the gist of it. Regular acts of appalling savagery, followed by savage Israeli reprisals became part of the background noise of the 1970s. Things would go at a certain pace and intensity for a while, and then something would happen that captured the public's attention, like the killing of the arroyo children, and things would go up a level to a new intensity and stay there. As the attacks became more savage and nihilistic, the Israelis were becoming a more hardened people under the pressure. From Bergman quote on March 11, 1978, at 02:30 p.m..

Eleven fata men landed on the beach near kibutz Magan Michael, south of Haifa, in a nature preserve bounded by fish breeding ponds, where flocks of migrant birds stop on their way to and from Africa. An American nature photographer named Gail Rubin was taking pictures of the birds when the raiding party stumbled upon her. The Palestinians were close to despair after the three exhausting and hazardous days at sea during which two of their number had drowned. Because the waters were so stormy and they had been washed miles out to sea, they lost their bearings and thought they landed in Cyprus. They were relieved when Reuben told them that they were in Israel, halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv.

They thanked her and shot her dead. Then the attackers made for the coastal highway, the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. At gunpoint, they hijacked a taxi and then a bus, and took the drivers and the passengers hostage. They ordered the driver of the bus to head south toward Tel Aviv. Abu Jihad, that's Khalil al Wazir had instructed them to seize a hotel.

But the raiders, now in bold high spirits because of the dozens of hostages in their hands, decided to change the nature of the operation. The IDF's classified report on what followed noted the terrorist improvisation led to a new method of assault an attack on the move along a route of over 50 km which was a surprise and against which there was no deployment at all on the part of the security forces. The terrorists fired from the bus windows, at vehicles on the road, and stopped another bus, taking its passengers hostage as well. Because of the novel nature of the attack, security forces found it difficult to read the situation, to maintain an updated evaluation, and to take the initiative which affected the course of the incident and its results. Although the police managed to stop the bus at the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv, the confusion led to utter chaos.

The predominant factor was the lack of central control, both among the terrorists, who were trying to defend themselves by firing in all possible directions, and among the security forces. One of the terrorists rested the hand holding his pistol upon the head of the daughter of one of the hostages, Avraham Shamir. Shamir saw the man was wounded and he charged at him, grabbed his gun and shot a terrorist in the front of the bus. Then he fired three shots at another terrorist behind you warned a female hostage, and Shamir turned to see one of the Arabs aiming his weapon at him. They both fired at the same time and wounded each other.

The courageous Shamir, still functioning, saw that the man whose gun he had grabbed was lying on the floor, muttering, his face covered in blood. He had a grenade in his hand, the safety pin removed. Shamir tried to stop him from dropping it, but he failed, and the grenade rolled onto the floor. He tried to use the terrorist body to block the blast, but that didn't work either. The grenade exploded, seriously wounding Shamir's eyes and killing the terrorist and five hostages.

The blast set the bus on fire. Some of the terrorists and hostages managed to escape, but most were burned alive. In all, 35 Israelis, 13 of them children, were killed and 71 wounded. Nine of the terrorists died, one was captured at the scene, and another was found in a hospital where the casualties had been taken. I see him lying there, said Arya.

Hadar, the top Shinbet interrogator, lightly wounded, but with a feeding tube and IV infusion mocking us right in our face. The doctor understood what was up and turned his back to us and said, you'll do what you do, and I'll do what I do. We pulled out the tubes, end quote.

The coastal highway attack was one of those attacks among the thousands that the Israelis have experienced that really stuck in the collective memory, and the nature of Israeli responses would change afterward. The year before it happened, the Labor Party, which was born out of the mainstream Zionist movement before the state of Israel was founded, had lost an election for the first time to a newly formed right wing party called Lekud, which was descended from the Zionist Revisionist Movement. The first lakud prime Minister Manakam Began was a leader of the Irgun terrorist group that targeted Palestinian civilians with bombs and shootings in the 1940s. A few years later, the Israelis would elect Yitzak Shamir, a former leader of the Stern Gang, a terrorist organization that had perpetrated dozens of massacres against Palestinian civilians, including probably the most famous at Dairy Yassin. It's another one of those situations where I try to step outside myself and imagine this from the perspective of the Palestinians.

Not a fetain fighter, forget about them. But an average Palestinian who maybe isn't particularly comfortable with the behavior of the fetayeen and isn't sure if the Israelis are really as bad as they say they are, that terrible things happened in the previous generation, but that these were their children and maybe it was possible to come to some sort of agreement. But then the Israelis start electing governments run by literal terrorists, people who have committed mass murder against Arab civilians, to the point that even the mainstream Labor Zionist movement had outlawed and attacked those groups, those terrorist groups. But now the Israelis are putting them in charge of the country. Of course, if I'm born in Israel and I'm an Israeli politician and something like that coastal highway attack happens, I know for sure I wouldn't be getting all historically philosophical about it.

I would be looking for somebody to kill. Under Lakud, the security forces began to move away from focusing on clandestine raids and assassinations in Palestinian areas and border countries, and began to turn to the military itself. No more ducking and weaving in the shadows at night. Now heavily armed soldiers would march in and lay down the law. After the coastal highway attack, they launched Operation Litani, sending armored forces and paratroopers into southern Lebanon to take revenge on the PLO.

They killed some 300 fedeen, destroyed many of their bases, but there were also murders and looting by Israeli soldiers. Military intelligence cultivated ties with Lebanon's maronite Christians, who hated the Palestinians and were their most bitter enemies in Lebanon. I mentioned at the beginning of the show that the influx of Palestinians was tough on every country that absorbed them. We saw what happened in Jordan. Well, of all the countries, lebanon was the smallest and the least able to deal with the fallout.

It was a very diverse and fractious society to begin with, with a very slight Christian majority that was held together with string and bubble gum. There'd been a brief civil war in 1958 when nassarite elements got worked up and began agitating for union with Syria and Egypt in the UAR. After the PLO got run out of Jordan in 1970, they set up shop in southern Lebanon and essentially turned the place into their own little fiefdom. People even called it Fatah land. The PLO started staging most of its operations from Lebanon, inviting Israeli retaliations and pissing off the people of Lebanon, the Lebanese Christians, who were again around half the population, a little, very slightly more they were largely urban and a relatively prosperous population, and they demanded that the government get these PLO people under control.

Well, the PLO warned the government that if it interfered with its operations, it would declare itself an enemy of the people and be targeted as well. And so the government was in an impossible situation. If they allowed the PLO to continue what it was doing, it would show itself as a false government and risk an Israeli invasion. If they tried to intervene, they risked an uprising among Lebanon's Muslims in a civil war with the PLO, which might give neighboring Arab countries like Syria and Iraq an excuse to invade in order to keep the peace, a prospect that was particularly daunting because the Syrians in particular had never accepted Lebanon's independence in the first place. The situation continued to escalate throughout the first half of the 1970s until in 1975, everything fell apart and the country descended into one of the most savage civil wars of the 20th century.

Lebanese Christians and the government fought PLO forces and other fedeen being shipped in from other Arab countries. Now, this was not a civil war like we're used to hearing about in America. What we had in America in the 1860s was not really a civil war. That was a situation where we broke up into two countries and then had a regular old war. There was a bit of civil war out in the west in a few places, but civil wars like the ones in Lebanon or the Balkans or Northern Ireland are not fought by armies on battlefields.

They're fought by gangs and militias in neighborhoods and villages, captured enemy when they're allowed to surrender at all. They don't go to POW camps. They don't benefit from the Geneva Conventions. They go to some basement in the enemy's neighborhood where they're tied to a chair and someone who's lost a friend or a relative in the war goes to work on them for as long as they want. From Becker quote in the first week of the civil war, some hundreds of motorists halted in a traffic jam in Beirut witnessed the execution of a man by the PLO.

The captors and their victims stood on a piece of open ground at the side of the Avenue Sami. Also, some Lebanese, probably Maronite, were guarded by fedeen. The captives'hands were tied behind their backs. One was singled out for special attention. Round his neck, the PLO militiaman tied sticks of explosives.

People in their cars looked and waited uneasily for the arrival of the special police and Red Berets, whose business it was to deal with violent incidents in the streets. But they did not appear. The victim stood still with strange quietness and dignity, as one witness said, while the fedeen literally prepared to blow his head off, they set a fuse and ran back from the man, who continued to stand where he was quite still until the explosion came. Not only was he decapitated, but the rest of his body was blown to pieces. The nationalist movement was openly joined by fata.

The carnage was massive. Deaths from the fighting averaged about 50 a day. National movement fighters and youths from the camps looted and destroyed stores in the heart of Beirut. Dead and mutilated bodies lay everywhere in public places corpses of sexually violated women and children and of men with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Shop windows were shattered and their contents looted by a multitude of beggars, many of them small, ragged boys out of the camps who would offer the goods for sale on the streets, wildly setting their own prices on items whose value they could not imagine.

Garbage piled up in the streets, piped water and electric power were cut off. More often than not, people were afraid to leave their apartments and seek safety elsewhere, knowing that they would lose everything to the looters who would even tear down window frames and plumbing fixtures out of the walls. To add to the terror and destruction, the Syrian PLO group Sayqa began its own campaign of bomb explosions in the commercial center of the city. As this was a mixed area, its targets were indiscriminate. PLO offices and men were hit.

It was the COVID beginning of a direct Syrian assault on the weakening Lebanese state. Snipers on roofs or at high windows picked off unidentifiable victims in the streets, in their rooms, in shops and offices. Everywhere in the city, armed elements sauntered in public wearing masks, balaclavas or squares of cloth covering all their features, or carnival paper machete faces, comic or grotesque under cowboy stetson, hats, helmets, any kind of headgear. Feather boas were seen draped around necks and shoulders, under masked faces and bits and pieces of all kinds of uniforms were worn jungle camouflage fatigues, jeans and T shirts. Guns were carried as an indispensable necessity, even in restaurants and on beaches, by women as well as men.

Many a frank tereur toted his gun in the ranks of the Fedeen and the Marxists, also bourgeois idealists youths from Europe. Most of them diehards of the New Left's militant peace movements of the late 1960s and now playing at revolution. And some of them neo Nazis were drawn here from the safe societies of the west to revel in the real thing. The PLO parasite in Lebanon was a subversive honeypot. Here they had license to shoot and kill in an alien world with no consequences to themselves would be heroes of the revolution.

Playboys and playgirls of terrorism from West Germany, Italy, Scandinavia and the Netherlands came to dress up strut, blow up, gun down. It was a masquerade with a cruelty all too real. The adventure required the suffering and dying of multitudes of helpless people. It was a carnival of death, end quote.

Weapons flowed into Lebanon from all over the world. Supposedly, people could get RPGs for $25. According to one maronite militia leader. The main Maronite militia was called the Phalange. Its fighters were called the Phalangeists.

They viewed the fight as a war for their existence, and so they acted with a savagery that matched that of the Palestinians and their backers. After one Phalange leader's son was killed, he led a force that massacred some two or 300 Muslims in Druze in Beirut, in an incident that became known as Black Saturday. Earlier in the year, 27 Palestinians traveling by bus from Beirut were attacked and massacred by a falange unit. About a month after that, Muslims kidnapped and murdered between 30 and 50 Christians for months in 1975 and 76 Muslims and Christians based out of hotels and fought it out in central Beirut. If you were on the street, which few people ever dared to be because there was a good chance of being picked off by a sniper from one side or the other, you could literally look up at these high rise hotels and see rockets and mortars flying overhead between the hotels, mounted machine guns firing into the buildings from rooftops.

It was absolute chaos. No distinction whatsoever between combatants and civilians. Zero distinction. About a month after that Black Saturday massacre, phalanges attacked a Muslim district in West Beirut and killed 1500 people. Two days after that, PLO forces targeted the Christian town of Damor for destruction.

As the PLO force approached the outskirts of the town, the local Christian priest, Father Labaki, called the Muslim sheik in the district and asked him, as one religious leader to another, to intervene and tell these people that Damor was a peaceful town. The sheik told him that, this is the Palestinians. There's nothing I can do. And so Labaki managed to get hold of one of Arafat's aides and Pled with him to call off the attack. The Palestinians are shelling and shooting at my town.

I can assure you, as a religious leader, we do not want the war. We do not believe in violence. The voice on the other end replied, father, don't worry. We don't want to harm you. If we are destroying you, it is for strategical reasons.

PLO forces invaded the town just after midnight. Quote the Sayika men stormed into the houses. They massacred some 50 people in one night. Father Labaki heard screaming and went out into the street. Women came running to him in their nighttresses, tearing their hair and shouting.

They were slaughtering us. The survivors, deserting that end of town moved into the area round the next church. The invaders then occupied part of the town that had been taken. In the morning, the priest managed to get one house, despite the shelling, to bring out some of the corpses. And I remember something that still frightens me.

An entire family had been killed. The Canon family. Four children, all dead. And the mother, the father, the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children and she was pregnant.

The eyes. Of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No arms and no legs. It was awful. We took them away in a banana truck.

And who carried the corpses with me? The only survivor, the brother of the man. His name is Samir Kanan. He carried with me the remains of his brother, his father, his sister in law and their poor children. We buried them in the cemetery, under the shells of the PLO.

The town tried to defend itself. 225 young men, most of them about 16 years old, armed with hunting guns and none with military training, held out for twelve days. The citizens huddled in basements with sandbags piled in front of their doors and ground floor windows. Father Labaki moved from shelter to shelter to visit the families and take them bread and milk. He went often to encourage the young men defending the town.

Only three more townspeople were killed between the first night and the last day, January 23. But on that day, when the final onslaught came, hundreds of Christians were killed. The attack took place from the mountain behind. It was an apocalypse. They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting, Allahu Akbar, god is great.

Let them attack. For the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Muhammad. And they were slaughtering everyone in their path men, women and children. Whole families were killed in their homes. Many women were gang raped and a few of them left alive afterwards.

One woman saved her adolescent daughter from rape by smearing her face with washing blue to make her look repulsive. As the atrocities were perpetrated, the invaders themselves took photographs and later offered the pictures for sale to European newspapers. Survivors testify to what happened. A young girl of 16, Sumaya Ganame, witnessed the shooting of her father and brother by two of the invaders and watched her own home and the other houses in her street being looted and burned. As they were bringing me through the street, the houses were all burning around me.

They had about ten trucks standing in front of the houses and were piling things into them. I remember how frightened I was of the fire. I was screaming, and for months afterward I couldn't bear for anyone to strike a match near me. I couldn't bear the smell of it. She and her mother Maryam, and a younger sister, an infant brother, had been saved from being shot in their house when she ran behind one Palestinian for protection from the pointing gun of the other and cried out, don't let them kill us.

And the man accepted the role of protector, which the girl had suddenly assigned to him. If you kill them, you'll have to kill me too, he told his comrade. So the four of them were spared herded along the streets between the burning houses to be put into a truck and transported to Sabra camp in Beirut. Some 500 gathered in the Church of St. Elias father Labaki went there at six in the morning when the tumult of the attack awakened him.

He preached a sermon on the meaning of the slaughter of innocents, and he told them candidly that he did not know what to tell them to do. If I say flee to the sea, you may be killed. If I say stay here, you may be killed. An old man suggested they raise a white flag. Perhaps if we surrender, they will spare us.

Father Labaki gave him his surplus. He put it on the processional cross and stood it in front of the church. Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Three quick wraps, then three, lots of three. They were petrified.

Father Labaki said he would go and see who was there. If it was the enemy, they might spare them. But if they kill us, at least we shall all die together and we'll have a nice parish in heaven. 500 persons and no checkpoints. They laughed and the priest went to the door.

It was not the enemy, but two men of Damor who had fled the town and had seen the white flag from the seashore. They had come back to warn them that it would not help to raise a white flag. We raised a flag in front of Our Lady and they shot at us, end quote. The two men and Father Labaki then led the whole group of 500 people down to the seashore while their teenage defenders held off the attackers. They made it to the beach and moved along the shore until they reached the palace estate of a wealthy Muslim.

As it happened, he was not a supporter of the PLO, and so he took the people in and he gave them shelter. Approximately 500 civilians had been massacred. The name of the town, Demor, it means destruction, and it was probably that that has caused it to be remembered as well as it has, because there were a lot of massacres around this time.

After about 18 months, there was a pause in the fighting and an uneasy quiet fell while all sides caught their breath. The country was informally divided up into four zones, with the PLO controlling the south of the country, which was very poor and where most of the Shiites lived. The people who had been through the inhumanity of the war were in a very dark place, and PLO gunmen oppressed and terrorized the locals, including Palestinian civilians. These were young men who had been born and brought up in refugee camps, taking in with their mother's milk nightmare stories about the evil people who put them there. They'd been given a gun early and raised as fighters, and now they're 17, 1825 years old, and that has been their whole life.

In most of their adult lives, they have been spent in an environment of escalating, violence and then absolutely unrestrained civil war. You saw something similar in the reversion to savagery in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, where child soldiers were put to use heavily in their civil wars. As the wars dragged on, those child soldiers became young men. They became the commanders and local chiefs and know it's. Like a writer for the New Yorker, I can't remember his name at the top of my head who was reporting in Liberia at the time of their war.

He said it was as if the whole country had been taken over by a serial killer. He tells stories about groups of armed children taking bets on the sex of a baby in the belly of a pregnant woman walking by and then just cutting her open to see who won, and laughing and feeling nothing. Humans are very pliable creatures. A lot of what we talk about on martyrmaid is all the different directions that people can go in extreme circumstances. When you raise children in an environment of unstructured barbarism, you're going to get barbarians.

And the truth was that even Arafat, world famous as he was by now, was only able to exercise occasional and temporary control over these people. Becker writes, quote in this guun, every individual group member in possession of his own kleschen that's an AK was a danger to the civilians. If in addition, he was intoxicated by drugs and the fedeen were notorious for their hashish smoking, he was even more likely to shoot and kill for the pleasure of it, as many stories in the camp confirm. Typical of these stories are the following an illiterate Palestinian hospital reporter, Walid A, who lived in the Sadan camp of Ein Hillway, told the story, weeping as he told it, of how his little sister, aged ten, was killed. She came home from school, she put her bag in the house, took a sandwich and went out to play one afternoon and a few hundred meters from the house walked past a little hill where stood a band of PLO people who were completely drugged and were known to be very dangerous people.

They used to break into offices, banks, businesses, and take whatever they wanted and frighten people. And if anyone tried to stop them, they used to shoot him and go away, and nobody dared to do anything or complain. As the little girl passed them, these PLO people just shot all over the place just as a game into the camp where people were walking, and one of the bullets hit my little sister. They hit her in the kidney and she died at once. A member of Fata, also from Einhilway, tells a similar story.

A boy, aged twelve, Abdullah Hussein AYUD, went up the hill to play with the other boys, and they met a group of PLO people. These people were drugged and they just shot him dead. They put him in a truck and took him to the PLO hospital at Saidan. On the way, one of his sandals fell off his foot. The PLO washed the car to remove all traces of what had happened.

But the family found the sandal stained with blood, so they knew their son had been hurt. They went to the hospital and found him there, dead. There was nothing they could do. None of us could ever do anything. There was no one we could go to.

I couldn't go to my superiors in the organization because they wouldn't listen to me. And we're afraid that if we complain, they'll shoot us. There's nobody but Allah who's looking after us. The Fedeen did not have to be drugged to kill at Whim or to avenge some slight, or to make sure that even their most trivial and unreasonable demands were obeyed. A laborer told this story.

My sister is the mother of five children. She was on her way home from the market in Einhilway one week before this last war started, when she was stopped by the people of the Muslim Brotherhood, and with them was Sheik Ibrahim, who was the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in Aynhilway. They told her that she could not pass. She said she would go anyway and walked on. They threw a hand grenade after her.

Her little boy, Ahmad, two years old, was killed immediately. Another boy, Hussein, seven years old, lost a leg. And so did Fatima, a girl aged six. End quote.

It got to the point that the Shiites and even many Palestinians began to turn on the PLO hard. But there was very little they could do, because the PLO was the only organized armed force in that southern part of the country. One sliver of the south and a chunk of the east were under the control of the Christians, who were able to keep the PLO out of their areas. The north was under Syrian military occupation by now. There were intermittent atrocities and battles, but the intensity of the first stage of the war started to die down.

And it was right at this time that that coastal highway attack occurred and the Israeli military began to involve itself directly in the conflict. As I said, they made common cause with the Phalangests, who hated the PLO, but whose hands were caked with innocent blood. Bergman writes, quote this partnership came at a moral price. The Phalanges were exceptionally brutal. A fundamentally corrupt gang of murderers that reminded me of a pack of wild dogs, said Uzi Dayan Moshe Dian's nephew and commander of Syaret Makal at the time.

They adorned their belts with ears severed from the people they killed. Gruesome trophies of war. They boasted of the massacres they had carried out in the Palestinian refugee camp of Telazatar, the Hill of Time, in August 1976. 1000 Palestinians in the ocean is pollution, the Philangest said, almost as a war slogan. But 5 million Palestinians in the ocean is the solution.

The Philangest didn't limit their brutality to Palestinians. Their chief executioner, an Israeli trained Maronite Militant named Robert Hatem, said he personally killed or oversaw the killing of some 3000 people. The Phalanges had commandeered an old cow slaughterhouse in Beirut's Tarantino quarter, where prisoners were taken. Almost no one who came there to be questioned left alive, Hatem said. We used to shoot them in the head and dump their bodies into lime pits.

Syrians and Shiites and Palestinians and son of a bitch officers in the Lebanese army. Everyone who wanted to kill us, we killed them first. Hatem said that Mossad officers approved the killing of a few prisoners, including four Iranian diplomats who were tortured before being shot and dumped into the pits. The Phalanges'wider rampage was carried out with the strong backing of the Israelis. At the outset of our relationship with them, I took a pill against nausea and carried on, said Ruvin Merhov, a Mossad official heading the unit that liaised with the Phalange.

Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend and they really helped us against the PLO. But the more the days went by, I reached the conclusion that linking up with people like these could only lead to disaster. Merhov left the Maasad as a protest against the continued relationship. But the agency's strategic alliance with the Maronites only deepened, end quote, as would the Israelis involvement in Lebanon. One night in April 1979, a PLO squad landed a rubber boat near the town of Naharia a few miles south of the Israeli border with Lebanon.

One of the terrorists was just 16 years old. They tried to break into a house, but they were shot at and they ran away. When a policeman came for them, they killed him, and then they broke into the apartment of a sleeping family. They took the father, Danny Haran, and his four year old daughter hostage and dragged them to the beach at gunpoint. Soldiers and police were already waiting for them there.

So as soon as they realized that they were trapped, the 16 year old shot Danny Hadar and then grabbed the four year old girl and started smashing her face against a rock over and over and over until her head broke and he killed her. The mother of the family was back in the apartment. Danny had managed to hide her and their two year old daughter in a crawl space before he was taken. The child didn't know that their lives depended on her being quiet and her mother was terrified that the noise of the crying child would give them away. So she covered her mouth, the baby's mouth, with her hand and in her frantic state, she accidentally smothered her own little girl to death.

From infrastructure sabotage and roadside mines and occupied areas, the shape of Palestinian terror had transformed into something unrecognizable. They seemed to have no point except venting their hatred and frustration on the closest and easiest target they could find. The horror was the point. The pain was the point. Incidents like this one against the Hadar family seemed less like a traditional terrorist attack than having Michael Myers or some serial killer come into your house while you slept.

From Bergman, the head of IDF's Northern Command, major General Avignor Janosh Bengal, arrived at the scene shortly after the incident. He saw the little girl's shattered head, the two year old's lifeless body, and their mother screaming with anguish after realizing she had lost everything dear to her. You cannot imagine the dimensions of the atrocity, Bengal said. At the funeral for Dani and his two children, prime Minister Beggin quoted a line from Israel's national poet, Hayam Nachman Bialik satan has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a little child. The horrendous murder in Naharia was to become yet another milestone in the degeneration of the conflict between Israel and the PLO into total warfare.

Chief of Staff Aitan gave Bengal a simple order kill them all, meaning all members of the PLO and anyone connected to the organization in Lebanon. Meyer de Gan, the operational commander when Ariel Sharon had pacified Gaza a decade earlier, was brought in and told, from now on, you are emperor here. Do whatever you want to. He was given free rein by IDF Northern Command not only to hit PLO operatives and bases, but to intimidate and attack anyone who gave aid or support to the organization. David Agnon, head of Northern Command staff, said the aim was to cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon without leaving an Israeli fingerprint.

To give them the feeling they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity. General Bengal said, I used to okay missions with a wink. I used to tell Aitan we've got an op to do. He'd say, okay, but nothing in writing. It's between you and me personal.

I don't want it to become known. We didn't act through the military bureaucracy because we both did and did not carry out these actions. We used locals as proxies and mercenaries. We put motivation into them, christians and Shiites and Sunnis, and we played them against one another. They began to manufacture bombs, some smaller IEDs, but many larger devices as well, in oil drums, barrels and other nondescript packages.

They used them to blow up the homes of people suspected of collaborating with the PLO and in Palestinian neighborhoods, in Lebanese towns and cities, killing many people and causing massive damage. Other elements in the security establishment complained that Northern Command had launched an unsanctioned campaign of violence on foreign soil. The head of military intelligence said there was a constant struggle with Northern Command. They bypassed us, worked behind our back. Bengal lied to us all the time.

We did not believe any of their reports. What made it even more grave was that it was being done with the approval of the Chief of Staff, who kept the activity a secret from the General Staff. This was one of the ugliest periods in the history of the country. End quote. And so Northern Command had essentially just gone rogue.

It was fighting a covert war in Lebanon without the permission or the involvement of the Israeli government. Military Intelligence tapped Northern Command's phones to try to get a read on what they were doing. But Northern Command caught onto that, and they set up a separate encrypted system to protect their communications from their own government. Not long after that, Military Intelligence went to Prime Minister Beggan to complain that Bengal had told Dagan to start booby trapping the corpses of dead terrorists to kill their friends and family who came to retrieve the body. And when Begging confronted him about it, this clued ben galin that Military Intelligence had managed to tap his encrypted system too.

Bergman quote early in 1980, various elements in the IDF, headed by Segoy, the head of Military Intelligence, began informing Deputy Defense Minister Zippori that Bengal was conducting rogue ops inside Lebanon. They turned to him because they knew that he was the only politician who dared to speak out about what was going on there. They tell me about the explosions in Lebanon, and even that Yanosh was mining roads taken by IDF troops to make it look as if the PLO was behind it. In June, Zippori heard that women and children had been killed in an operation two months earlier when a car bomb was exploded on a main road in the western sector of southern Lebanon with the aim of hitting PLO personnel. The operation had not been submitted upstairs for approval because we feared that we wouldn't get authorization for a thing like that, said Bengal.

Both in internal army reports and publicly. The Northern Command claimed that the operation had been carried out by one of the local South Lebanese militias, something that was feasible but was in fact totally untrue, end quote. The Defense Minister called Bengal into his office and accused him to his face of killing women and children in an unauthorized operation. Bengal just blew him off. He said that those people had been out at 02:00 in the morning.

They were probably terrorists anyway. And so the Defense Minister, Zapori, went to the Prime Minister and demanded that Bengal be dismissed immediately. But a few months later, instead of replacing Bengal, the Prime Minister replaced the Defense Minister with, of all people, Ariel Sharon. Sharon did not accept Teddy Koleck's assessment that the Palestinian situation had no permanent solution. There was a solution.

It would just take an iron will and ruthlessness to see it through. Once in office, Sharon had his officers draw up plans for an invasion of Lebanon all the way up to Beirut. Then he had them extend the plans to occupy all of Lebanon and parts of Syria. But despite the free hand Beggan was giving, Northern Command, which now reported to Sharon, international events made it so that he wouldn't be able to simply start a war without a pretext. The US had recently brokered a ceasefire with the PLO and made it clear that it would not support an Israeli attack except in the event of some extreme provocation.

And so Sharon decided that he had to create that provocation. Bergman quote by mid September 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities. One went off in the Fakani quarter of Beirut on October 1, killing 83 people and wounding 300, including many women who were trapped in a fire in a clothing factory owned by the PLO. Another one exploded next to the PLO headquarters in Saidan, killing 23 in December 1981 alone, 18 bombs in cars or on motorcycles, bicycles or donkeys blew up near PLO offices or Palestinian population concentrations, causing many scores of deaths. A new and unknown organization calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners took responsibility for all these incidents.

The explosives were now packed in aerial, laundry, powder bags, so that if the cars were stopped at roadblocks, the cargo would look like innocent goods. The Israelis, in some cases, enlisted women to drive to reduce the likelihood of the cars being caught on the way to the target zone. The car bombs were developed in the IDF's special Operations Executive. Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Falange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians. The Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners also began attacking Syrian installations in Lebanon, and it even claimed responsibility for operations against IDF units.

Yasser Arafat was not hoodwinked by this Ploy. He accused the Mossad of being behind the blasts and the Front. With Sharon's backing, one Mossad officer of the time said terrible things were done. I'm no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations that Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing's sake to sow chaos and alarm among civilians.

Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces? Another Mossad man who was in Lebanon at the time I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened. After these operations, Arafat realized that Sharon was trying to goad the Palestinians into breaching the ceasefire so that he could launch his invasion.

And Arafat made a genuine effort not to oblige him, including a partly successful attempt to stop violence in the occupied territories. End quote.

Unfortunately for Arafat, one of the downsides of having a decentralized organization is that it can be difficult to exercise control over everyone operating under your banner. But you still have to take responsibility for anything done in your name. In June 1982, in London, israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom was leaving a black tie dinner event for ambassadors and business leaders. Israel's security services weren't permitted to work in the UK, and so he was assigned a British bodyguard who shepherded the diplomat outside to a waiting armored car. He didn't see the assassin until it was too late.

And as the bodyguard opened the door, a Palestinian approached and opened fire with a submachine gun. The ambassador was not killed, but he was paralyzed and suffered from severe health problems due to his injuries that led to an early death in 2003. The Israelis soon learned that the assassination attempt had been ordered by Abu Nidal, the terrorist leader who was a sworn enemy of Yasser Arafat. It was done at the urging of Iraqi intelligence. Saddam Hussein had ordered the operation in the hope that it would ignite a major war between Israel, the PLO and Syria and if he was lucky, maybe even Iran.

Well, as it happened, Sharon and his loyalists in the Israeli government wanted the same thing. The Mossad and other intelligence personnel tried to explain to Prime Minister Began that Arafat had nothing to do with this attack, that it was carried out by a fringe terrorist cell that had Arafat himself marked for death. And the PLO had actually been behaving itself for the entire last year. But Bagan was not listening. So the Israeli air force began bombing Beirut and PLO bases elsewhere.

Arafat had no choice now but to respond. And soon communities in northern Israel came under PLO bombardment. So this wasn't the way that he had planned. But Ariel Sharon now had his war. Sharon had big plans in Lebanon, but he didn't reveal them right away.

At first, he presented a plan to make a limited incursion to eliminate the artillery threat to Israeli communities on the border. The PLO's longest range guns could reach about 40 km, so that's how far the IDF would penetrate. But there were Syrian forces in Lebanon and others in the government worried about the possibility that the Israelis would come into conflict with them. Sharon was not worried about that. In fact, he was counting on it for the excuse to begin his much more ambitious plan.

Quote along with his chief of staff, Sharon had a secret agenda that was far more grandiose. He intended to use the IDF's tanks to remake the whole of the Middle East. In his vision, Israeli forces and their Phalange allies would conquer Lebanon from the border to Beirut, destroying all PLO forces and inflicting serious damage on Syrian units deployed there. With the capital secure, the Israelis would install the Phalanges leader Bashir Gamayal as president, thus transforming Lebanon into reliable ally. Next, Gemael would expel the Palestinians to Jordan, where they would be a majority able to establish a Palestinian state in place of the Hashemite Kingdom.

This, Sharon reckoned, would eliminate the Palestinian demand for a state in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, which would thus become part of Israel, end quote.

His actual plan, just to repeat what I just read, his actual plan was to use the Christian militias in Lebanon to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, driving them into Jordan with the expectation that they would spark a revolution in Jordan, overthrow the Jordanian government, create a Palestinian state, and then they could stop bothering about Israel. That's why his forces had been doing everything they could to increase tensions between Palestinians and other groups in Lebanon by executing again, plain and simple, terrorist attacks against civilians on all sides. That's why he needed a war in Lebanon. He knew, of course, that nobody in the government would ever approve such a thing, and so he just did it himself from his post as defense minister. And now almost 80,000 Israeli troops and thousands of tanks and armored vehicles were on the march into Lebanon.

Sharon's chief of staff led a portion of the Israeli force directly towards Syrian positions, drawing the Syrians fire and giving them an excuse to launch a massive counterattack against the Syrians. Almost immediately, Sharon, unilaterally overrode the commitment to a 40 kilometer incursion, ordered his forces to keep going. Prime Minister Bagan's military secretary said, I very quickly saw that the 40 kilometer plan was melting away and the IDF was penetrating deeper into Lebanon. Sharon lied and misled Beggan and the cabinet. Sharon's greatness was that he knew how to describe in the most vivid way why it was necessary to advance another few kilometers, because otherwise, tomorrow morning, the Syrian army would be sitting on some hill and endanger our troops.

That's how he managed to extract authorization from the cabinet for the creeping invasion. By the end of June, the IDF had encircled Beirut, closed it off under siege, and began shelling the city's western districts. The Israeli government did not plan on taking and occupying Beirut, but Sharon and the Phalange were secretly planning how to do it anyway. Quote israel's cabinet ministers heard only afterward about Sharon's orders to conquer, for the first time in Israel's history, the capital of another sovereign state. Indeed, all throughout the war, Sharon never stopped assuring the cabinet, the Knesset, and the nation that there is no intention to enter Beirut, repeating this promise many times.

But the command Sharon gave to the IDF was perfectly clear. We have to finish off the southern part of Beirut, where the refugee camps and PLO bases are located, he said at a meeting in his office. To destroy whatever can be destroyed to raise it to the ground.

The war in Lebanon turned into a disaster for Israel. The insurgency created a quagmire and led to an ugly occupation of the southern part of the country that lasted for 18 years. It turned out that while Sharon's plan was to move in and let the Phalange do a lot of the dirty work, the Phalange had similar ideas. In the opposite direction, and they were content to let Israel conquer territory for them. Images and stories began emerging that brought the whole world, even the United States, out against Israel.

Ronald Reagan, outraged, told Baghan that you were causing a holocaust in Beirut. Bergman again quote, the full extent of the deception that Sharon perpetrated against the government and the public of Israel emerged only gradually. But the steadily increasing Israeli casualty count, the indistinct and fluctuating goals, and the stories of destruction and suffering in Lebanon, sharon's chief of staff, Aitan, realized that most of the IDF's moves in Lebanon were being made without the approval of the cabinet. So he deliberately absented himself from the meetings of that body, claiming that he was with the fighting forces. He left the job of compartmentalization and concealment to Sharon, who simply ignored all the opposition and pressed ahead.

He doesn't stop. On Red was a song written about him by Israel's leading rock musician, Shalom Hanak. It is unclear exactly how much Beggin knew about Sharon's complicated plan. In time, Sharon would sue a journalist who wrote that he had lied to began and concealed information from him. Sharon lost the case, end quote.

So with Israeli forces in control of half of Lebanon, the leader of the Phalange was installed as president of the country. Sharon expected him to hold up his end of the bargain and expel the Palestinians from the country. But he knew that time was of the essence, because already there were talks about a UN peacekeeping force being deployed in Lebanon, and once that happened, no ethnic cleansing operation would be possible. But three weeks after taking office, the Falange leader was killed by the Syrians in a bomb blast that demolished the Phalange headquarters building. The Phalange wanted revenge for that, and they looked to the Israelis to give him the green light.

An Israeli commander present at the new Phalange headquarters said that on the morning of September 16, quote, all of a sudden, I saw the boys of Eli Hobeka, the Phalange military chief, sharpening their knives. And they tell me today it is the turn of Silla al Abiyad, the white weapons, which is what the Lebanese call slaughtering with knives. They didn't say against whom exactly, but it was clear to me they were going to cut throats. I didn't inquire any deeper. I was just a guest of theirs when they were prepared.

And with Sharon's blessing, the Phalange force set out for two Palestinian refugee camps known as Sabra and Shatila. Robert Hatem, Hobekah's executioner, recalled that when the Phalanges set out on their mission that Hobeka had told them, fuck everybody there, erase the camp. He said they took a D Nine bulldozer to demolish the entire thing. He said the camp was made up of shacks and tin shanties, and they went in and just started firing in all directions, and things were so unstable, they just started coming down. He said, we didn't check to see who was behind those walls.

Many of the Phalange partisans took a lot of drugs before going in to get hopped up to get through the night. Journalist Robert Fisk, who lived in Lebanon for many years and reported on scene during this incident and throughout the war, writes quote there was shooting in the camps. In the Commodore Hotel I found Lauren Jenkins of the Washington Post a bearded man with a huge head of black hair and an even fiercer temper at the Randalls. He was a hard, tough man from Colorado who believed all politicians were liars. He was leaning across the reception desk, talking on the telephone.

When he put the phone down, he turned to me without a word of greeting. It was 17 September. I'd not seen him for weeks. Fisky we got something going on in the camps. The Israelis had brought the fucking Phalanges with them.

I've just been down to Syed Salam's place and this woman turned up and said she saw some fucker cut her husband's throat in Shatila. Wanna come with me in the morning? Well, Fisk needed sleep, and so he went back to the hotel room for the night. But he couldn't sleep. There was commotion down in the two refugee camps.

All night. He didn't know what was happening. But all night he saw Israeli jets flying over the area lighting off flares to provide light for whoever was doing it. The next morning, he and Jenkins went down to the camps to see what had happened. Quote it was the flies that told us there were millions of them, their almost as eloquent as a smell.

Big as blue bottles. They covered us unaware at first of the difference between the living and the dead. If we stood still, writing in our notebooks, they would settle like an army, legions of them on the white surface of our notebooks hands, arms, faces always congregating around our eyes and mouths moving from body to body from the many dead to the few living, from corpse to reporter. Their small green bodies panting with excitement as they found new flesh upon which to settle and feast. At first we did not use the word massacre.

They were everywhere in the road, in laneways, in backyards, in broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. The murderers, the Christian militiamen whom Israel had led into the camps to flush out the terrorists had only just left. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway there were corpses women, young men, babies, grandparents lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies.

The patients at a Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli Defense Minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. Sharon.

He shouted. That fucker sharon. What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp did not quite beg her description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been massacres before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale, and never overseen by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country, but these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed.

This was a mass killing, an incident. How easily we used the word incident in Lebanon. There was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances, called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.

There were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waist and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies, blackened babies, because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier, and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition, tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US. Army ration tins, israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whiskey. Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death.

All had been shot at point blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open, and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only twelve or 13 years old.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and seven children. The women were middle aged, and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open, and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark, curly hair. Her eyes were staring at us, and there was a frown on her face.

She was dead. Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body.

The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slid open the woman's stomach cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror. End quote. Fisk's account goes on for many pages like this.

When he returned from surveying the camps to the Israeli positions a short distance away, he found Phalange militiamen there with the Israelis working together. Of course, not every Israeli who was present was okay with what had happened. And some of them were soon speaking anonymously to the press, saying that everyone knew what was happening in Sabra and Shatila. The Labor Party was in opposition at the time and tried to use the massacres against Sharon. But he warned them that if they tried then he was going to tell the world about the actions of the labor government during another massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon just a few years earlier.

And so the Labor Party backed down. But world opinion came down hard on Israel at this point. And even within the country, politicians turned against the war and public protests started to break out and began realized that Ariel Sharon had hoodwinked him. He sank into a deep depression and his health began failing rapidly. You know, I remember back in 2001, a few months before 911 during the second hint of Fada, when Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israel.

I was up in Montana at the time, and my grandpa was in his fundamentalist phase of his Christian journey. And he and all his friends, they loved Israel. They loved Ariel Sharon. On one hand, it's easy enough to know by then Hamas was suicide bombing busses in Tel Aviv. And as crazy as hostage taking and car bombs are, there's something foreign to an American about blowing yourself up to kill a bunch of civilians.

But when I think back on it now, neither my grandfather nor any of his friends really had the first clue about the history of the conflict. When they heard that the Palestinians called Ariel Sharon the Butcher of Beirut, it just sounded to them like left wing propaganda calling American soldiers baby killers. In Vietnam, they were very much your typical normie conservative American old guys, most of them alive, some of them serving in World War II. And they saw history as a battle between good and evil, order and chaos. Sometimes the good guys get carried away.

Sometimes they hit the wrong targets. Sometimes a few of them even cross over to the dark side. But those are aberrations. And when they happen, we hold people responsible. At least we have enough shame to try to cover it up.

We don't celebrate in the streets when one of our units goes off the reservation and kills a bunch of villagers. And the Israelis, well, they're like us. And we've been attacked by terrorists too. The Israelis wear uniforms. Bad soldiers can be court martialed.

Sure, they might get carried away a little more often than our troops my grandparents, my grandpa and his friends would have said. But considering what they're facing, they've shown far more forbearance than anybody has a right to expect. The other side's blowing up random people, shooting up schools, flying airplanes into buildings. Now, that's all true enough as far as it goes, but what do you do with someone like Ariel Sharon? The term war criminal gets tossed around a lot.

But with Sharon, we are talking about the real deal. A war criminal, even by his own country's laws, his people were lighting off car bombs in civilian areas of a foreign country that had just been through an insane civil war in order to reignite the conflict and hopefully see the whole Palestinian population ethnically cleansed. And he was doing it on his own, without the knowledge of his superiors in the Israeli government. And when he got his war, he dragged his country further and further into it by design and through deception, all while hiding it from his political leaders, hiding from them what he was really up to. And he conducted the war.

barbarically. Israeli soldiers were not shooting and cutting the throats of the people in Sabra and Shatila, but they knew the deal when they sent a bunch of phalanges into that place. They knew the deal when they were providing flares overhead all night to provide light for them. It would be like sending ISIS into a refugee camp full of Jews and then saying, well, we didn't know what's going to happen. It's not like we shot them.

No, but your jets lit off flares all night to provide light for the killers during the massacre.

And not only is Ariel Sharon never punished, but 20 years later he's elected prime minister. And so if you're a Palestinian, you're thinking, these people are crazy. They're as crazy as our craziest terrorists. They drove us out of our homes in 1948. They've terrorized us for fighting back.

They invaded even the lands we ran away to, and we've been under military occupation for decades. Now it looks permanent. They elect terrorists, people who massacred villages in bombed civilian areas as their prime ministers, and now they've elected the butcher of Beirut to run their country. They're never going to stop. And if you're an Israeli lakudnik, of course you say, who but someone like Ariel Sharon should we elect when these animals are murdering families and blowing up school busses, and around and around we go, well, I'm going to stop there for now.

Israel would get bogged down in Lebanon for years, but the conflict marked a transition to a new phase of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In 83, the year after the massacres at Sabran Shatila, Iran. Now the revolutionary Islamic Republic would give Hezbollah its start in Lebanon. And Hezbollah has replaced the Palestinian groups, probably as Israel's most fearsome enemy in 2006, actually defeating an IDF ground invasion in their country. In the late eighty s, the first Intefada the first truly popular uprising of the Palestinians occurred, and it was put down with extreme force.

But out of that conflict was born Hamas, a Palestinian group in Gaza aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that has gone to war, at times, with the PLO. By the 1990s, Yasser Arafat was ready to talk peace and absurdly, got a Nobel Prize for it, but his health and influence were being degraded, and Hamas, as well as right wing elements within Israel, made sure that the peace came to very little. Under Benjamin Netanyahu's governments, israel began launching full scale air and land military operations against Palestinian areas to deter terrorist attacks. In a 2014 attack on Gaza, israeli planes and artillery killed thousands of Palestinians, at least half of them, probably more like 70% of them civilians. There are pictures and videos of Israeli civilians setting up picnics on the heights above Gaza City, cheering as their jets launch missiles into civilian neighborhoods.

And there are videos of Palestinian street celebrations after another massacre of Jews in Israel. The situation has fallen into a very dark place, and right now it's perhaps at its darkest place it's been maybe ever. A few years back in 2015 and 16, there was the brief knife in Tefada, where Palestinians who had been pretty successfully disarmed by now regular Palestinian civilians, would just attack random Israelis with kitchen knives and screwdrivers and even shards of glass. Israeli civilians were all encouraged to carry guns to shoot these attackers on the streets. Some of them were were kids.

I remember one story of a little girl who was on her way to school, and apparently on her way because she had her backpack with her school supplies in it. But on the way she took a screwdriver and stuck it into the side of an Israeli on the street, and she was gunned down by another Israeli. And this happened hundreds of times.

So I don't have a lot of hope to leave you with. I don't really see a solution. I don't really think that either the one state or two state solutions that have been talked about for decades are remotely plausible anymore, if they ever were. At this point, I just worry for the souls of everybody involved. Thanks for listening.

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