JCSS Study no. 6

The International Dimension of Palestinian Terrorism

Ariel Merari and Shlomi Elad

First published 1986 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright © 1986 Tel Aviv University Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies

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ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29314-7 (hbk)

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Palestinian Impact on International Terrorism

Chapter 2 Terrorist Activity Outside the Target Country: The Palestinian Approach

Chapter 3 Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel, 1968-84: Data and Trends

Chapter 4 International Reaction

Chapter 5 Conclusion: A Cost-Benefit Account

Epilogue

Tables

1. Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel as Percentage of International Terrorism

2. Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Perpetrating Organization

3. Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Type of Target

4. Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Perpetrating Organization and Type of Target

5a. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Israel & the West)

5b. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Israel & the West) Palestinians)

5c. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Latin America, Africa, & non-Arab Asia)

6a. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Europe)

6b. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Arab countries)

6c. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (North & South America)

6d. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (non-Arab Africa)

6e. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Australia and non-Arab Asia)

7. International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Type of Attack

8. International Palestinian Terrorism by Organization and Type of Attack

9. Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel Compared to Activity Inside Israel & Along its Borders

Appendices

1. Palestinian Terrorist Organizations: Explanation of Abbreviated Names

2. PLO Representations Worldwide

3. Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents Carried Out by the Palestinian Organizations Outside of Israel, 1968-1985

Notes

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Palestinian Impact on International Terrorism

Chapter 2 Terrorist Activity Outside the Target Country: The Palestinian Approach

Chapter 3 Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel, 1968-84: Data and Trends

Chapter 4 International Reaction

Chapter 5 Conclusion: A Cost-Benefit Account

Epilogue

Tables

Appendices

1. Palestinian Terrorist Organizations: Explanation of Abbreviated Names

2. PLO Representations Worldwide

3. Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents Carried Out by the Palestinian Organizations Outside of Israel, 1968-1985

Notes

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Guide

Cover

Title

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Start of Content

Tables

Appendices

Notes

Series Page

Preface

Terrorism, by its very nature, is a dynamic and rapidly changing phenomenon. This is particularly true of Palestinian terrorism: it is pluralistic in composition, flourishes in a highly volatile region, and is affected by numerous external actors and elements. Hence any attempt to produce research on Palestinian terrorism of a completely up-to-date nature is doomed to failure. The production of such a work cannot possibly keep up with the pace of events. Further, as these lines are written the Palestinian terrorist organizations are going through one of the most stormy periods since their founding: the resultant shockwaves affect not only political and strategic developments in the Middle East, but, in particular, the specific topic of this work: international Palestinian terrorism.

Most of the work on this study was completed by the fall of 1985, and the statistics presented generally cover the period 1968-1984. But 1985 and the first half of 1986 were characterized by intensive terrorist activity, and by events whose projected ramifications went far beyond the short term, such as the collapse of the Jordan-PLO rapprochement, the American Middle East peace initiative, the reexpulsion of the PLO from Jordan and the additional schism within its ranks, and the American bombing of Libya in reprisal for that state's involvement in international terrorism. In order to cover this critical period in Palestinian international terrorist activity, and to assess the background factors, an epilogue has been appended to this study. Obviously, such an essay in updating suffers from all the drawbacks of contemporary history. At best we can hope to present a precise review of the facts, and to distinguish between significant and insignificant events and developments. The overall significance of these events for the future remains a matter of speculation.

Many people have assisted in the writing and editing of this study. Particularly, Major Danny Laish of the IDF Spokesman's office provided extensive data on Palestinian terrorist attacks; the research staff of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies ran the drafts of this work through a highly exacting critical process, and offered suggestions for improvements; and Miriam Cassuto word-processed the entire manuscript. The professionalism, patience and positive approach of Joseph Alpher, Deputy Head of JCSS and editor of its research publications, were critical in bringing this study to print. Finally, a special thanks to Tamar Prath and Anat Kurz, who helped with advice, criticism and organization of the data of recent years.

Ariel Merari
Fall, 1986

Introduction

One of the assessments to emerge in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon War was that the shattering of the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon would precipitate changes in its pattern of activity against Israel. One possibility to be mooted in this regard was a large scale renewal of terrorist actions against Israeli and Jewish targets outside of Israel, and possibly against countries which provided Israel with support and assistance.¹

In all of these calculations, the precedent of the events of "Black September" of 1970 — the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan —played a significant role. It was postulated that a renewal of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel might be on the same intensive scale of the Black September period — from late 1971 until early 1974 — or on that of the 1968-70 period, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was in its heyday.

The Lebanon War of 1982 dealt a serious blow to the PLO in Lebanon, particularly insofar as its capacity for direct action against Israel was concerned. Terrorism across the border (in the form of rocket attacks and commando infiltration) became almost impossible as terrorist concentrations were pushed northward by advancing IDF forces, and as other Arab states refused the organizations access to their own borders with Israel. By the same token, the destruction of the terrorist logistical infrastructure in Lebanon resulted in a depletion of arms supplies and sabotage material, compromised command and control networks and provided the IDF with an intelligence windfall in the form of captured documents — all seriously undermining the PLO's potential to organize renewed attacks within Israel.

At the same time, overall PLO morale suffered a serious blow, particularly in the wake of the evacuation from Beirut in September 1982. Not only had the organization suffered a major military defeat, but as a direct consequence of that defeat its forces were dispersed throughout the Arab hinterland — from Tunisia to South Yemen — and there placed in the humiliating position of being "unemployed" and of having to depend on the charity of the host countries.

Even before the war in Lebanon, radical elements within the PLO had opposed the organization's official line and insisted on the renewal of activity outside of Israel—which had officially ceased in 1974. Against this backdrop, the altered circumstances in Lebanon gave added impetus to an assessment that the organization would change its policy of refraining from activity abroad.

Yet from mid-1982 until mid-1985 there were no distinctive shifts in terrorist activity outside of Israel. Most of the Palestinian terrorist incidents in 1983-1984 were directed against Arab, rather than Israeli/Jewish targets. One possible reason for this phenomenon was the time needed for the reestablishment of a logistical and operative infrastructure for implementing operations outside the base state. True, the Palestinian organizations had always maintained a permanent infrastructure abroad, despite the decrease in the scope of their activity. But an intensive terrorist campaign requires specific deployment, including the recruitment or training of operatives with characteristics necessarily different from those of regular fighters, the smuggling of arms to target countries, and the collecting of intelligence on intended targets. For example, it took the Fatah about a year after the events of Black September 1970 before the organization bearing that name staged its first operation (the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo in November 1971).

Another explanation for the fact that Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel had not been fully renewed prior to mid-1985, involves the changes wrought by the Lebanon War and its aftermath in the internal balance of the organizations comprising the PLO. These were most apparent in Fatah, where a rebellion erupted against Arafat's leadership. In December 1983, following fighting in Tripoli between the Fatah rebels and those Fatah forces loyal to Arafat, the loyalists had to evacuate the city. This internal organizational instability did not facilitate any sort of decision-making within the PLO regarding a radical change in strategy; no doubt it also affected the ability to prepare the necessary infrastructure and to plan and execute operations.

During 1984 and in the first half of 1985, the terrorist organizations were also busy attempting to reestablish themselves in southern Lebanon and in Beirut, where they fought against Christian and Shi'ite militias.

Against this backdrop, there arises the basic question of the value of resorting to terrorist activity outside of Israel, and the most advisable ways to implement it. This major dilemma has confronted Palestinian organizations since July 1968, when an El Al plane was hijacked by a unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and landed in Algiers. From then until the end of 1984, about 435 terrorist incidents were committed outside of Israel by most of the Palestinian organizations — PLO as well as non-PLO members (the latter include Abu Nidal's group and the Wadi Haddad factions) — and an effective response has not yet been found.

Acute disagreements within the PLO organizations, and especially between the PFLP and Fatah, can be traced back to the early 1970s. Then the debate focused on conceptions such as the Palestinian revolution, armed struggle, and the search for the most appropriate means to advance the Palestinian cause. The PLO decision in 1974 to cease operating outside of Israel is both significant and theoretically meaningful. Rarely do terrorist organizations decide to refrain from activity. When they do, this decision is probably linked to an agreement with a government which promises them fulfillment of part of their political demands. Such "truces" are not frequent, but they are not impossible — a recent one was the agreement signed between the government and terrorist organizations in Colombia in mid-1984. In the PLO's case, we confront a unique example of an organization which has unilaterally accepted a policy of abandoning one arena of activity while maintaining other courses. This, not in accordance with an official or under-the-table agreement, but as a result of weighing the future prospects of various aspects of its activity. This unique phenomenon is most interesting in and of itself.

Before concentrating on the specific characteristics of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel, three conceptual definitions are in order.

Political terrorism is "the systematic use of violence by individuals or a group in the pursuit of political aims, with the violence directed at a wider target population than that of the immediate victims."²

International terrorism is terrorism "involving, in some way, more than one state."³ (The American Central Intelligence Agency, whose data are included in the statistical material used in this work, distinguishes between international terrorism, which is defined as terror exercised by individuals or groups dominated by a sovereign state, and transnational terrorism, which is defined as terrorism perpetrated by autonomous individuals or groups;⁴ for the sake of convenience, both of these types of data are listed in this work under the single "international terrorism" category.)

Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel is defined as terrorism perpetrated outside the territory of Israel by Palestinian organizations; it includes terrorist acts in Arab states directed against Arab or western targets. It does not include terrorist acts committed on Israeli frontiers or hostile acts against the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon.

The study relates to three principal aspects of the issue:

— A discussion of Palestinian terrorist organizations and the strategy of terror outside of Israel;

— A quantitative description and presentation of trends in Palestinian terrorist activities outside Israel during the period under study;

— A survey of attitudes toward Palestinian terrorist activities in affected countries — Israel, Arab, and non-Arab.

By analyzing these three components, and by weighing the gains and losses to the Palestinian cause in consequence of the Palestinian movement's recourse to terrorism outside of Israel, it is hoped that this study can also shed some light on future trends in international Palestinian terrorism.

1. The Palestinian Impact on International Terrorism

Since 1967, Palestinian terrorism has had a fundamental impact on the world's political consciousness. This has stemmed not so much from the proportion of acts carried out by Palestinians within the total framework of all international terrorist activities —between 1968 and 1984 this was only 4.6 percent—but from the innovative nature of the acts themselves. Table 1 compares the annual number of Palestinian terrorist incidents with overall international terrorist incidents in the period 1968-1984.

Aircraft hijacking is probably the most notable example. While Palestinians were not the first terrorists to hijack an airplane for political purposes (this distinction belongs to a group of Colombians, who on March 5, 1968 hijacked an airplane to Cuba as a means of securing political asylum), the Palestinian hijacking of an El Al plane to Algiers on July 22, 1968 was the first time hijacking was used for the express purpose of political blackmail. In exchange for the release of the passengers, the hijackers demanded the freeing of jailed Palestinian terrorists within Israel. Again, in September 1970, Palestinians carried out the simultaneous hijacking of TWA, Pan Am and Swissair aircraft. What is important in these episodes is the assumption that by striking boldly in the international arena, and by linking their actions directly to specific political demands, the Palestinians could call world attention to the Palestinian political problem.

Hijacking also came to be used by the Palestinians as a means to win the release of terrorists arrested in previous activities. The first episode of this kind occurred on July 22, 1970 when an Olympic plane was hijacked; in return for its release, the perpetrators demanded the freeing of Palestinian terrorists then held in jails in Greece. The speedy submission of the Greek authorities in this instance encouraged a number of similar occurrences of this kind, and the use of the tactic quickly spread to non-Palestinian terrorists as well.

It is interesting to note that in the years 1968-82 only 29 (about 24 percent) of all terrorist-related hijackings were carried out by Palestinians. Nevertheless, so innovative was their style, that in the popular consciousness the phenomenon came to be viewed as almost exclusively Palestinian.

In addition to hijacking, the Palestinians introduced two other types of action against civil aircraft: one involved attacks against aircraft and their passengers on the ground; and the other, the blowing up of aircraft in the air. On December 26, 1968, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attacked an El Al plane on the tarmac in Athens, causing heavy material damage and killing one of its passengers. In the years that followed, numerous attacks were mounted along this pattern against planes on the ground; even anti-tank missiles were employed. Passengers were also attacked inside airport terminals. The stratagem of the mid-air bombing of aircraft first appeared when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) blew up a Swissair plane en route from Zurich to Tel Aviv on February 21, 1970, and made a similar but abortive attack on an Austrian Airlines aircraft that same day (it was forced to make an emergency landing after an explosion in its luggage compartment}. Stringent security measures had a certain salutary impact on subsequent sabotage attempts though the terrorists did register some additional successes, most notably when a TWA flight from Athens to New York crashed after a mid-air explosion on September 8, 1974.

Another method the Palestinians pioneered in worldwide terrorism was that of taking hostages in non-aircraft related situations. The first such episode occurred on July 9, 1970, when the PFLP seized hostages in the Philadelphia and Intercontinental hotels in Amman, and successfully demanded that the Jordanian government cease military operations against Palestinian forces and replace the Jordanian armed forces' commander in the Jordanian capital. As with aircraft hijacking, many terrorist groups followed the Palestinian lead in the application of this new tactic; but here too it was always the Palestinians who were the most spectacular in its execution.

The Palestinians were also among the first to employ hostage-taking against specifically diplomatic targets. (Pioneers in this regard were Croat terrorists who, on February 10, 1971, occupied the Yugoslav Consulate in Goteborg, Sweden.) On December 28, 1972, members of Black September occupied the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok and on March 10, 1973, they undertook similar action against the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum. While Palestinian seizures of diplomatic premises hardly constituted the majority in this category of terrorist activity — out of the 48 incidents of forcible occupation of diplomatic premises in the years 1971-80 the Palestinians accounted for only 13 (27 percent)² — theirs were the instances that grabbed the lion's share of international attention.

In addition, Palestinian terrorists also left an imprint on the conduct of international terrorism through the dispatch of letter bombs — hundreds of which were sent to addresses in Israel, to Israeli embassies, and to other Jewish and non-Jewish destinations in the early 1970s — as well as through the poisoning of Israeli oranges in Europe in 1978. Though this latter episode was a one-time operation, it could still emerge as a precedent for other international terror groups.

Aside from example, Palestinian influence on international terrorism has been brought about through the provision of training, arms and, in some cases, operational assistance, to international terrorist counterparts. In this sense Palestinian terrorist groups have had a significant impact on the capabilities of other terrorist organizations and the scope of their activities.

On the other hand, when carrying out their own terrorist activities the Palestinians have benefited from the direct provision of training, arms supply, transport of equipment, operational intelligence and refuge and accommodation by a number of sovereign states in the Arab world. Moreover, Arab governments have provided the Palestinians with almost unlimited political support, and in many instances have exerted pressure on other governments to refrain from retaliating against Palestinian perpetrators of terror. This kind of assistance is unique in the annals of international terrorism and has probably contributed substantially to the influence of Palestinian terrorism on international terrorism overall.

2. Terrorist Activity Outside the Target Country: The Palestinian Approach

A terrorist organization decides to operate outside the borders of the country that it has targeted for primary action, when it concludes that such activity will serve its interests. In some instances, an assessment that internal terrorism alone is insufficient to achieve the organization's goals serves as a catalyst for this decision; in others, additional factors are involved.

Assuming that terrorist organizations reach decisions rationally, let us consider the possible arguments for and against international terrorist activity, from the standpoint of a terrorist group.

Arguments in Favor of Acting Outside the Target Country

Propaganda benefit. Terrorist activities outside the target country have a greater impact than internal activities, as they reach a wider audience. An internal terrorist incident will receive international attention only if it is particularly gruesome and causes a great number of casualties, while an external action constitutes, by definition, an international problem, and thereby increases the potential publicity benefit.

Security benefit. Terrorist activities outside the target country are less prone to be foiled by security authorities. As the awareness of the threat of terrorism increases in the particular target country, that country's security procedures become more sophisticated, and targets outside the target country appear more attractive to the terrorist contemplating action. When operating abroad, target country security forces lack both absolute area knowledge and absolute freedom of movement. In addition, the target country is normally unable to dispatch sufficient forces to protect all potential targets in the host country. Finally, host country security forces do not usually share the target country security forces' level of dedication in defending target country installations and nationals within their own borders.

Element of surprise. International terrorism invests the terrorist organization with an element of surprise, as it expands the geographical area exposed to a terrorist strike and widens the organization's range of targets. This is particularly true regarding activities against persons and facilities of the target country located abroad.

Ease of escape. Not only does the terrorist outside the target country have a lighter security burden, he also has an easier time escaping from his pursuers. Particularly in Western Europe, with its open borders, rapid transport and communication systems and general ease in securing accommodation, getaways are a relatively easy matter. In addition, the presence of target country emigrants, as well as host country terror groups and sympathetic nationals, provides supplementary getaway assistance.

Lightness of punishment. In normal circumstances, neutral countries have little incentive to burden terrorists with heavy prison sentences, and are often willing to commute whatever sentences they might give. According to Robert Fearey, former Special Assistant to the American Secretary of State and Head of the Office for Combatting Terrorism, less than half of the terrorists captured between 1971-75 completed their prison sentences — sentences which in any event averaged only 18 months in duration.¹

Ideological attraction. Extremist Marxist terrorist organizations see the entire world in ideological terms as a legitimate arena for terrorist activities against the "imperialist" countries. In consequence, the normal restraints imposed by national frontiers cease to exist, and terrorists see themselves as both entitled and duty bound to operate wherever they think their actions will be effective.

Arguments Against Acting Outside the Target Country

Political damage. Terrorist organizations interested in legitimizing their cause in the court of world public opinion must consider the possibility that international terrorism will work against their interests. Public opinion, particularly in the West, exerts considerable influence on the shaping of policies with regard to terrorist organizations. Given that terrorist acts committed in neutral countries are generally regarded as inconsistent with legitimate international conduct, the danger exists that such acts will provide the opponents of the terrorist organizations with substantial ammunition to undermine the terrorists' quest for political legitimacy.

Confrontation with friendly countries, Many terrorist organizations enjoy the support and help of countries which, in addition to publicly championing their struggles, are willing to supply them, either clandestinely or openly, with material aid. Terrorist activities abroad may at times harm the interests of these countries and in some cases lead to open confrontation between the supporting country and the "offending" terrorist organization. In extreme cases such a confrontation may be engineered intentionally by an interested third party, and result in a total cessation of support to the terrorist organization in question.

Heavy organizational and manpower investment. Terror abroad requires heavy investments in both organizational infrastructure and manpower. Terrorist organizations must determine whether these lie within their capabilities. In terms of organizational infrastructure, requirements include a logistical framework for weapons procurement, documentation and safe houses, and an infrastructure for intelligence gathering, operational planning and escape arrangements. In terms of manpower investment, terrorism abroad requires training of special cadres. These need a foreign language capability — to allow them to carry out the technical steps necessary for the mission, if not to mingle with the local population completely. They must be flexible and possess both a certain sangfroid and a well developed operational imagination. In addition, they must be proficient in the use of different types of arms and explosives.

Ideology. While some terrorist organizations are internationalist in ideological orientation, others possess a distinctly nationalist bent, and focus almost exclusively on the struggle within the target country. In the case of the latter, resorting to terrorism outside the borders of the host country is likely to be seen as a deviation from their central objective — a deviation which either wittingly or unwittingly may involve injury to both people and property in neutral countries.

Clearly, the decision to launch terrorist activities outside the target country is an important step in the strategy of any terrorist organization. While the advantages of this tactic would, on the surface, seem to outweigh the disadvantages — particularly in view of target vulnerability, getaway possibilities and the relative lack of punitive disincentives — in practice the decision to enter the international terrorist arena appears to be related mainly to an assessment of the costs and benefits of two specific factors: actual security disincentives in the target country, versus potential political and propaganda advantages accruing to acts outside the target country.

With regard to the first consideration, an organization which operates successfully in the target country is seldom called upon to act on other fronts; only when the opportunity for widespread activity within a target country is denied is it likely to contemplate the initiation of a terrorist campaign outside the target country.

With regard to the second, two factors appear to be particularly influential: one is the degree of legitimization the organization would acquire internally — that is, among its members and the population it claims to represent; the other is the degree of legitimacy the organization would acquire internationally, both in friendly and unfriendly countries.

Internal legitimacy depends on the ability of the terrorist organization to provide a framework for meeting the aspirations of its members to engage in the armed struggle and so advance their political cause. If such legitimacy can be obtained without recourse to engaging in international terrorism, then the latter option may not be contemplated. On the other hand, the decision to undertake terrorism outside the target country is sometimes taken to comply with extremist demands from elements within the organization who are not content with the current level of armed struggle.

Legitimization from friendly countries is related to the organization's ability to satisfy these countries in return for their political assistance and material help. Because some of them view international terrorism as a useful instrument in the pursuit of their own policy goals, while others oppose it and are likely to be harmed by identification with it — any terrorist organization contemplating international terrorist activity must weigh this factor carefully.

Finally, international legitimacy outside of friendly countries depends on an awareness both among the public-at-large and among decisionmakers of the cause for which the organization is operating. At the same time, it ultimately requires that the international community support the organization's methods and conduct. In deciding whether to embark on a program of international terrorism, terrorist organizations must take this factor into account as well.

The Palestinian Ideological Debate

The various Palestinian terrorist organizations differ in their conception of the armed struggle; it is therefore not surprising that they also differ in their approach to the strategy of carrying out terrorism outside the borders of Israel. Their debate on this question has taken account of both ideological and practical considerations and has frequently been connected to either conflicts within a particular organization or conflicts within the overall framework of the PLO. It is not possible within the scope of this study to examine all the intricacies of PLO internal politics and the impact they have had on the different terrorist strategies adopted; rather, we shall concentrate on deliberations directly related to the application of terrorism outside Israel.

In was in the early 1960s that the Palestinian movement first took up the question of resorting to international terrorism. At the time, the Palestinian organ Filastuna ran a detailed analysis of the advisability of both striking at Israeli targets outside of Israel and interfering with the flow of oil to the West.² However, it was not until the Six-Day War and its aftermath that the PFLP made the decision to carry the terrorist struggle outside of Israel, thus initiating the era of international Palestinian terrorism.

To be sure, these actions were seen first and foremost as a means of striking at Israel, at Jews, and at countries which supported or maintained ties with the Jewish state. At the same time, however, it was understood that Palestinian terrorism also provided the opportunity for striking at selected Arab targets — either out of revenge, as was the case with Black September vs. Jordan, or on behalf of specific Arab states, as was the case with Abu Nidal acting at the behest of Iraq or Syria.

Although the majority of Palestinian terrorist organizations have engaged in terrorism outside of Israel, most of the ideological and practical controversy attending such action has involved, on the one hand, the PFLP, which pioneered the use of terrorism outside Israel and which emerged as its staunchest protagonist, and Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian organizations, which both championed the notion of armed activity inside Israel and emerged as the principal representative of the political approach to the Palestinian problem. (In the case of Black September activities, some individuals who were later identified as Fatah leaders took a more militant approach.) Other groups, notably the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) under the leadership of Naif Hawatmeh, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) under the command of Ahmed Jibril, have also taken part in the debate and have adopted, by and large, the positions of Fatah and the PFLP respectively.

Other organizations identified with terrorist activity outside Israel, such as Saiqa, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (ANYO), the Wadi Haddad factions and Abu Nidal's group, have taken little part in ideological discussions, although they have carried out international terrorist activity.

By and large, the debate has been influenced by three temporal and fluctuating factors: the assessment of the state of the armed struggle against Israel; the evaluation of the PLO's international standing; and the fundamental inter-organizational dispute regarding prospects for achieving a political solution of the Palestinian problem.

The PFLP — 1968-70

As the PFLP formulated the issue, the most important aspect of international terrorism lies in its ability to inflict political and psychological shock on world opinion. At the same time, this strategy accords with the PFLP's general conception of armed struggle both ideologically and as a solution for the shortcomings of alternative strategies. That is to say, behind the PFLP's arguments in favor of international terrorist activity, are additional ideological as well as practical considerations. To understand these, we must look into the military developments of the immediate post-Six-Day War period.

Military Background

In the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, Fatah sought to lead the Palestinian struggle along classic guerrilla warfare lines patterned on doctrines practised in Algeria and Vietnam. It envisioned three distinct stages in pursuit of its goal of "liberating" Palestine. The first stage, consisting of hit and run type activity, was intended to lower the morale of the Israeli population and boost the spirits of the Palestinian people and Palestinian fighters. The second stage was to involve the occupation of territory held by Israel. The third stage envisioned a popular uprising in the occupied territories.³

In the event, an energetic reaction by Israeli security forces interdicted guerrilla infiltration across the Jordan River, and prevented the establishment of guerrilla cells on the West Bank, thereby rendering the Fatah program effectively stillborn. Fatah leaders then turned to the use of cross border shelling, and launched sporadic guerrilla raids against both military and civilian targets inside Israel and the administered territories. Here, too, the Israeli security forces were equal to the task, sending infantry and armor units into Jordan, attacking by air, and shelling Palestinian positions within Jordan. As a result of this response the guerrillas suffered heavy casualties and their relations with the Jordanian government — which theretofore had sponsored them — came under increasing strain.

It was at this point that the PFLP came out with a detailed critique of the Fatah policy of direct confrontation with Israel. Specifically, the Front said, such action was unwise for three reasons: a) Arab states were not permitting the terrorist organizations unlimited opportunity to launch attacks from their territory; b) there was no point in attempting to engage superior Israeli forces as long as such limitations prevailed; and c) the heavy casualties suffered by the Palestinians in confronting Israel were eroding the guerrillas' already strained manpower resources.

With this assessment in mind, the PFLP came to the conclusion that any Palestinian program based on a strategy of direct confrontation with Israel was doomed to failure. Alternatively, it suggested that Palestinian resources could best be employed in terrorist strikes at selected targets within Israel and, rather more significantly, at Israeli targets in the world at large.⁴ Here the PFLP in particular had to take into account the relatively limited resources it had at its disposal. Unlike Fatah, the Front did not receive substantial assistance from Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; nor did its limited manpower base permit the establishment of a large scale organization to carry out guerrilla activities according to the Fatah proposal.

While terrorist attacks within Israel are not the subject of our study, it is important to remember the emphasis that the PFLP has placed on this type of activity in its overall operational strategy.

In 1970 George Habash claimed that 85 percent of ail Palestinian military actions in Israel had been carried out by his men, and not by Fatah.⁵ While this claim is groundless, it nonetheless reflects the importance Habash attached to activities within Israel; indeed, he never concealed his view that the principal struggle against Israel was inside the conquered lands, and that all other activity was intended to assist in this struggle, and not replace it. For example, after the PFLP had bowed to pressure by Fatah in 1975 and ceased hijacking aircraft, Habash declared: "Our military action abroad is auxiliary action, compared to our military action in the occupied lands, which forms the basic and principal focus of our revolutionary struggle."⁶

In Habash's view, action outside of Israel was desirable in the military sense because it permitted the PFLP to utilize its manpower in the most effective way possible and underscored its emphasis on the quality of actions, rather than on their quantity. In essence, the idea was to exploit to the maximum the characteristics of terrorism as a mode of warfare, avoiding direct confrontation with the enemy by choosing an arena in which he was weak. In Habash's words:

The main point is to select targets where success is 100% assured.... Brute force is out: this is a thinking man's game, especially when one is as poor as the Popular Front. It would be silly of us even to think of waging a regular war: imperialism is too powerful and Israel is too strong. The only way to destroy them is to inflict a little blow here, a little blow there; to advance step by step, inch by inch, for years, for decades, with determination, doggedness and patience.⁷

In the final analysis, it appears that the failure of the guerrilla warfare tactic and the consequent losses in manpower that developed in the wake of the Six-Day War were significant factors in later calls for stepped up Front activity outside of Israel. Clearly, the leaders of the PFLP came to the conclusion that a combination of activities both within and outside the borders of Israel constituted the correct organizational response to the new military situation. As Saleh Saleh, one of the PFLP's leaders put it: "The Popular Front has a perfect conception which it has demonstrated more than once in operations abroad, as a part of its complete military strategy."⁸

The Propagandist-Psychological Effect

We have noted that the declared aim of the use of terrorism for the PFLP was propagandistic and psychological. Its leaders realized the media potential of terrorism and concluded that acts perpetrated in Israel or along its borders would not, by themselves, be sufficient to capture the attention of a generally disinterested world. In effect, their reasoning fit in well with Wilkinson's definition of political terrorism as the use of violence or the threat of resorting to violence in order to frighten individuals, groups, nations or governments into submission to the political demands of the terrorists.⁹

Following the 1967 war, and in the wake of the failure of the PLO's military strategy, came the realization that any solution to the Palestinian problem depended on a growth in world awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people. In explaining the Front's decision to attack an El Al aircraft in Zurich, Habash openly admitted that such attacks, even if repeated a thousand times, would not bring about the liberation of Palestine; rather, he said, the action was justified primarily in terms of the attention for the Palestinian cause that it had engendered throughout the world.¹⁰ Six years later, Habash returned to this theme when he replied to a question about the efficacy of hijacking aircraft: "There was a time when we thought that this was a legitimate means to bring about a feeling in the world that a great crime had been committed in history."¹¹

In 1970, Habash explained this theme in detail in a well publicized interview with Oriana Fallaci: "The world has been using us and has forgotten us. It is time they realize we exist, it is time they stop exploiting us....You have to be constantly reminded of our existence....Through sabotage we want to remind the world that a catastrophe has taken place here and that justice must be done." In a related vein, Habash pointed out that the actions of his group were intended to influence populations far beyond the immediate victims, and to draw maximum attention to their perpetrators: "We believe that to kill a Jew far away from the battleground has more effect than killing 100 of them in battle; it attracts more attention. And when we set fire to a store in London, those few flames are worth the burning down of two kibbutzim because we force people to ask what is going on."¹²

Political and Ideological Significance

But Habash's view of the international use of terror went considerably beyond its purely propagandistic element. In one of his interviews, he explained that his aim was not only to stun an indifferent world into attention, but to arouse an oppressed Palestinian people into realization that the only solution to the Middle East problem was a Palestinian return to Palestine. Habash claimed that his organization had no intention of acting directly against Arab regimes, unless they stood in the way of the Palestinian struggle. Yet, already at this early stage, he expressed the idea that terrorist activity might serve as a tool to embroil the Arab states directly in the struggle against Israel. Referring to Israeli retaliation raids on Arab territory, he said: "This is exactly what we want. These actions might narrow the prospects for a peaceful solution which we cannot accept."¹³

Moreover, PFLP interest in entangling Arab states in the Palestinian conflict was linked directly to the organization's Marxist-Leninist ideology — an ideology which aimed at fighting not only Zionism, but imperialism and the reactionary Arab states as well. In Habash's view, the struggle for Palestine was seen as an integral part of his generation's world revolution: "We must recognize that our revolution is a phase of world revolution: it is not limited to recognizing Palestine."¹⁴

For precisely this reason Habash ruled out the possibility of cooperation with most of the existing Arab regimes. Indeed, the ideology of Habash, like that of Naif Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front, held that Palestinian aims could not be achieved until social and political revolutions had taken place in most of the Arab world. According to the PFLP publication Al Hadaf (The Goal): "The Palestinian revolution will become an Arab revolution before it reaches the stage, many years from now, of building a state."¹⁵

Moreover, we have noted that the Front's activities were also aimed at persuading both the Palestinian people in particular and the Arab world in general that the only solution to the Palestinian problem was the return of Palestine to the Palestinians, and that such a development would, of necessity, have to occur within the ideological context of the world revolution. In this view the Palestinian revolution was sui generis, its specificity deriving from the origins of the struggle and from the fact that the Zionist movement was worldwide, which seemed to provide additional legitimization for terrorist activities outside of Israel. In the words of George Habash:

On the basis of this uniqueness we have reached the conclusion that a specific line is legitimate — namely the right of the Palestinian revolution to strike specific military blows at the enemy — blows which need not be restricted to the occupied territory....The fact that the enemy relies on a worldwide Zionist movement means that it is the legitimate right of the Palestinian revolution to strike blows at the enemy outside of Palestine.¹⁶

Definition of the Enemy and Selection of Targets

Within the context of employing the strategy of terrorism outside of Israel, Habash took special care to define his enemy: "The enemy includes not only Israel, but also the Zionist movement, world imperialism led by the USA and reactionary powers bound to imperialism.¹⁷ Obviously, this definition provided the PFLP with practical legitimization for activities outside the borders of Israel. In Habash's view imperialism, with the United States at its head, assists Israel, and is therefore a legitimate target for Palestinian actions. Similarly, conservative Arab regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, are perceived as allies of imperialism and are therefore also legitimate targets for Palestinian attack.

At the same time, Habash tried to use the image of the very size of his enemy to gain sympathy for his movement, portraying the Palestinians as a sort of latter day David, fighting in the shadow of a gargantuan and multi-faceted Goliath:

In this war Israel is not our only enemy. Our enemy is Israel, plus the Zionist movement that controls many of the countries that support Israel, plus imperialism....If we had to face Israel alone the problem would be a simple one. But we have to stand against whoever supports Israel, economically, politically or ideologically.¹⁸

Clearly, this sort of formulation can lead directly to indiscriminate use of terrorism, with no distinction drawn between military and civilian targets. In Habash's view, legitimate targets include everything within Israel, every Israeli installation abroad, all foreign companies dealing with Israel, American installations in Arab countries, and those Arab countries which he considers to be agents of the US.

Among all the targets Habash sanctioned, he detected a particularly weak link in Israel's geographical isolation from its international supporters, and he gave special emphasis to exploiting it: "Israel is an island isolated from its friends and surrounded by enemy lands....its communications with friendly nations can take place only by air and sea; therefore, it becomes imperative for us to block these avenues."¹⁹ In this view El Al aircraft emerge as a preferred target as they belong directly to the enemy, link it with other countries, and can serve as equipment and troop transports. By extension, European airports where El Al planes land also become legitimate targets for attack.

PFLP Splinter Groups

Intra-group pressures and factional strife are a problem in any terrorist organization and in this regard the Popular Front is no exception. The most noteworthy rifts within the organization occurred with the secession from it of the Popular Front-General Command (PFLP-GC) in 1968, the Democratic Front (DFLP) in 1969, and the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1972.

While it is usually difficult to assess the significance of internal strife within any terrorist organization, the disputes within the PFLP developed in an unmistakably public fashion. Thus, during a meeting of the organization's leaders in February 1972, an argument arose over the value of aircraft hijacking as a tactic. In the process, the faction opposed to hijacking gained the upper hand, threatening Habash's status as the Front's leader. In March of that year, however, Habash called another meeting of the Popular Front leadership and succeeded in overturning the previous policy. As a result, the anti-hijacking faction seceded from the organization and set up a separate, rival body.²⁰ This event, and the instances of factional strife that followed it, suggest that one of the purposes of resorting to terror outside of Israel is to resolve organizational problems, because catering to extremist demands can release internal pressure.

Black September, 1971-73: Total War to Regain Lost Honor

There were many similarities in the situation of the Palestinian people following the end of the Six-Day War in 1967 and after the Black September operation of 1970. Despair, disappointment with the conduct and capabilities of the Arab states, a need for revitalized organizational structures, forebodings about the future of the Palestinian struggle — all of these were common threads.

Two differences, however, had a significant impact on the course of terrorist history. The first lay in the fact that, unlike in 1967, the later defeat had come not from Israel, but from the Arab army of King Hussein; the second was related to the relative maturity of the Palestinian movement—by 1970 it was no longer a political infant, but a significant force in inter-Arab politics and in the overall struggle against Israel. The first distinction bore associations of Arab betrayal; the other crystalized the disappointment of shattered expectations. In combination they had a profound effect on the attitudes of Palestinian revolutionary organizations in general, and led directly to Fatah's decision to establish Black September, which adopted a strategy of total terror. The Black September Organization (BSO), while sharing many of the tactical proclivities of the PFLP, differed in one important way. Rather than operating within the overall ideological framework of world revolution, the new organization swore to regain the "lost honor" of the Palestinian people.

The Operational Arena

As a result of their expulsion from Jordan in September 1970, the Palestinian terrorists were left without a significant base area from which to launch operations against Israel. The Israeli-Jordanian frontier had already been sealed in the wake of the abortive Palestinian guerrilla campaign in the West Bank and contiguous territories, while Syria, to which many of the Palestinians repaired, refused to permit them to launch anti-Israel operations from its territory. Only in Lebanon was there a modicum of maneuverability; but at that point the Palestinians had not yet established solid bases of operations there.

This reduction in territorial sanctuary, combined with the massive loss in prestige that resulted from the events of September 1970 and July 1971, were the principal factors that led Fatah to initiate a strategy of terrorist activities outside the borders of Israel. According to Abu Daoud, a Black September operative captured in Jordan following an abortive attempt to seize the prime minister's office, the loss of the Jordanian sanctuary presented the terrorist organizations with a very serious problem: "Fidai [martyr] actions should be directed at the occupied land. Because it lacks this ability at the moment, its description as Fidai action, its original raison d'etre, no longer applies. Fidai action has lost its major arena — Jordan. No Fidai action can be carried out without this arena."²¹

Given the fact that operating from other fronts — that is, from other areas on Israeli frontiers or from within Israel itself — had been effectively foreclosed, an alternative strategy became necessary. Abu Iyad, a Fatah leader considered to be one of Black September's leaders, referred to this problem obliquely, when he defined the recourse to terrorism outside of Israel as a substitute for other strategies which could not be implemented in the early 1970s: "Black September was never a terrorist organization, but has acted as an adjunct to the resistance movement when the latter was unable to fulfill its full military and political tasks."²²

There is an essential difference between this view and the PFLP conception. George Habash sees terrorism outside of Israel as an integral part of the armed struggle; in Abu Iyad's view it is no more than a substitute for temporarily untenable political or military activity from the Arab confrontation states: "we are not permitted the honor of fighting on Arab fronts and...there are some who would make us prisoners of a logic which we ourselves created; the bases which gave us access to the occupied territories are surrounded, pounded or paralyzed, and thus there can be no struggle...."²³

The Objective: Regaining the Initiative

Although this motif also appeared — implicitly — in declarations by the leaders of the PFLP, it was identified particularly with the thinking of Black September. In the Black September view, the Palestinian people had suffered a crippling blow; in its wake Jordan, Israel and imperialism had conspired to sweep the Palestinian problem under the carpet. Therefore, went the argument, it became the immediate task of the revolution to restore to the Palestinian people the honor and the fighting spirit that had been lost on the battlefields of Jarash and Ajloun. Within this context, the seizing of Israeli sportsmen at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 was an event of special significance, and one which gave Black September spokesmen — albeit without personal identification — an unusual opportunity to make their point in public:

This action influenced the Palestinian struggle by putting a halt to Palestinian decline and frustration and at the same time serving as a reminder to all those who have forgotten that at its core, the Palestinian identity is a fighting identity. The Palestinian guards his identity only by bravery and action, and not by holding a Palestinian birth certificate or an identity card in one or another organization. It became necessary to say 'no' to the Palestinians who advocated a political and bureaucratic line and to the advocates of fossilized traditional military action. It was necessary to revive in them the spirit of the revolution and to break through the ice which had frozen and petrified the spirit of the revolution.²⁴

How, Black September seemed to be asking, could the Palestinian identity be redeemed? Its answer was clear: through armed struggle, through total terror, through spreading slaughter and destruction everywhere and through undermining the enemy's confidence in his ability to defend himself. Precisely because the events in Jordan had so convincingly revealed the weakness of the Palestinian people, Black September argued, it had become the duty of the revolution to show the people that the source of its strength lay in its bravery and in its readiness for action against the enemy: "One of the objectives of the [Olympics] operation was to return the Palestinian to the source of his strength....The resistance says to the Palestinian: you have nothing except what you can obtain through your heroism. Your wealth and your strength are what you acquire by self-sacrifice."²⁵

This revival of the Palestinian identity was directed not only at the Palestinian people itself, but also at the world at large, since, in the words of Black September, "only the strong gain the sympathy of the world."²⁶

In effect, the Black September conception was even more radical than the line of the PFLP: while the PFLP spoke of showing the world that the existence of the Palestinian people was a fact, that they had suffered a great deal and that they deserved justice, Black September spoke in terms of holding the world hostage to Palestinian demands. By invoking acts of violence and slaughter, it was not simply presenting the world with a problem, but insisting it find a solution: "We shall be strong only when we regard death as we regard life and turn the honor of commitment into the honor of practice...that would make our enemies...eventually believe that they had no alternative but to meet our just demands."²⁷

In 1981, seven years after Black September ceased activities, Abu Iyad put some of the organization's activities into a broad, historical perspective. After years of representing the strategy of terror outside of Israel as a strategy of enforcement, he moderated his fervor and returned to the political and propaganda phrasing used by George Habash: "The Palestinian revolution cannot be left in a position where it merely reacts to events. While it is true that our basic arena is the occupied land, at times the Palestinian rifle has to operate outside it, in order to make the world feel that there exists a people....From time to time we must prove our existence in the international arena."²⁸

In sum, despite its earlier determined opposition to the use of terrorism outside of Israel, Fatah could not ignore the political and emotional aspect involved in such activities in the wake of the events of September 1970. With this in mind, it depicted the Munich operation as a total propagandistic success. Its description echoes George Habash's ideas regarding the impact of terrorism on a population far beyond the immediate victims:

A bomb in the White House, a mine in the Vatican, the death of Mao Tse-tung, an earthquake in Paris, none of these could have produced the far reaching echo to every man in the world like the operation of Black September in Munich....The choice of the Olympics, from a purely propagandist viewpoint, was 100 percent successful. It was like painting the name of Palestine on the top of a mountain that can be seen from the four corners of the world.²⁹

Political Significance

We have noted that Fatah's decision to embark on a policy of terrorism outside of Israel was essentially a consequence of its expulsion from Jordan and the subsequent constraints on its ability to act within Israel. In this sense, the decision was not the result of free choice, but a necessary response to reduced alternatives for action. This theme is reflected in a speech delivered by Abu Iyad to a political symposium organized by the Union of Palestinian students in January 1973: "We shall find the enemy everywhere and we shall define our theater of operations not as the Palestinian theater of operations, not as the lands surrounding the Palestinian arena, and not in the Arab arena. We shall pursue the enemy in every place where we can hunt him down."³⁰

At the same time, an attempt was made to put this shift in the focus of terrorism in a practical political light. Unlike the Popular Front, whose advocacy of terrorism outside of Israel was a function of what it regarded as the ideological imperative of world revolution, Black September referred to the practical imperative of unifying all possible forces in order to achieve victory:

As was the goal of Fatah when it began to act, the primary result of the [Olympics] operation was to pull both the Arab people and the Arab governments into battle. It was never our intention to involve the Arabs in a lost war; rather, we wanted them to realize that unless the Arab peoples succeeded in calling on their governments to join our struggle, there would be no hope for its victory.³¹

In a broader sense, the activity of Black September—like that of the PFLP — was also intended to foreclose the possibility of a political solution to the Middle East conflict. Fatah feared that through the auspices of western mediation, the Arab states might make a deal with Israel — one that circumvented a Fatah-approved solution to the Palestinian problem. Because it believed that the only proper solution to the Palestinian problem was the return of Palestine to the Palestinians, it saw any solution along a western-sponsored pattern as a betrayal of the principles for which the Palestinians were struggling. In the words of the organizations' leaders:

The Munich operation was vital in order to undermine the texture of relations developing between the Arab regimes and the West. We had recently witnessed the removal of barriers between the Arab regimes and the western countries and a return of relations to the status quo that prevailed prior to the 1967 war. We are witnessing the phenomenon of numerous declarations, visits and contacts with the West aimed at solving the Palestinian problem in a western style way; indeed, the Arabs had almost forgotten that between them and the West stands a complex, insoluble problem, which was created and augmented by the West. It was therefore necessary to act on the scale of Munich to loosen the ties between the Arabs and the West and to reinvest the Palestinian problem with its proper air of seriousness.³²

In addition to the consideration of undermining relations between the Arab states and the West as a way of supporting its own struggle, Fatah also sought to raise morale among the Arab people and intensify their support. The intention was to enlist Arab youth in the Palestinian struggle, in order to erase the humiliation of the Arabs in 1967 and the Palestinians in 1970, and to bring about a general Arab uprising. In this respect, the Fatah organization hinted that a distinction should be made between the Arab people and the Arab governments. In its view, the people were willing to act and were inspired by the actions of the terrorist organizations, while the governments were more interested in restricting such activities. In sum, Black September believed that its actions were stimulating an Arab national movement and hoped that in turn this would exert pressure on the Arab regimes:

We should never forget the need to activate the Arab movement; it is energized whenever Fidai activity is on the rise. We expect that the Arab popular movement will make use of this opportunity in order to gain vigor in confronting the Arab regimes and that it will help us in eliminating errors and shortcomings in Fidai activity.³³

Organizational Dimensions

In an organizational sense, the emergence of Black September was a classic example of a terrorist group deciding to embark on terrorist activities outside of the target country as a way of catering to extremist demands within its ranks. In effect, the Fatah leadership was forced to convene a general congress, in Damascus in August-September 1971. There, a dissenting current demanded that the organization abandon its policy of peaceful coexistence with Arab regimes and stress the goal of toppling the Hashemite regime in Jordan. While the conference communique reflected these demands in only the most oblique way,³⁴ it now appears that a secret decision was taken there to create what became known as Black September and to permit the security and intelligence apparatus of Fatah to operate at its disposal.

That this decision was a difficult one is underscored by the fact that Fatah leaders consistently disavowed any connection between themselves and Black September — even after the link was confirmed by Abu Daoud's confession on Jordanian television in March 1973. While they understood that an open declaration in favor of the use of terror outside Israel could damage the organization's quest for international legitimacy and lead to problems with the more moderate Arab states, they also realized that a refusal to do so could result in the mass defection of radical elements from the Fatah fold, thereby weakening the organization's claim as the most important element in the overall PLO constellation. Within the context of this dilemma, they concluded that the establishment of Black September as a "deniable" satellite organization offered a timely and effective solution: not only did it keep the extremists in the Fatah fold, but it also permitted the organization to exercise control over certain terrorist actions which would have been carried out in any event. By the same token, it served to demonstrate the vitality of the concept of armed struggle at a time when that concept was at a low state. At the same time, it made it more difficult for Israel to retaliate against a supposedly uninvolved Fatah when new terrorist attacks were carried out.³⁵

At the outset, this safety valve apparatus worked well, satisfying the demands of radicals and moderates alike. With the passage of time, however, as more extreme elements began acting without any recourse to Fatah guidance and the real character of the Fatah-Black September link became manifest, pressures against Black September began to mount — particularly from Saudi Arabia — and in 1974 its existence was terminated.

Ideological and Practical Opposition, 1968-1973

As early as the first international terrorist attack in July 1968, the desirability of the use of terrorism outside of Israel was a serious bone of contention within the ranks of the PLO. While Fatah and the Democratic Front vigorously opposed the international terror option, the PFLP insisted on its right to pursue an independent policy, and resisted Fatah attempts to curb its activities, even when faced with expulsion from the Executive Committee of the PLO. It was only later, when doubts about the efficacy of the use of terrorism outside of Israel rose within the ranks of the PFLP itself, that it foreswore its recourse to aircraft hijacking, and its high international terror profile began to recede.

In 1969 Yasir Arafat first voiced the essential practical argument of those within the Palestinian movement opposed to the use of terrorism outside of Israel. In his view international terrorist acts were causing the movement serious political damage, particularly in Europe, where terror was beginning to be perceived as a basic threat to domestic tranquility.³⁶

It was only later, however — after it became clear that international terrorist attacks were the product of a well conceived strategy and not merely random tactical acts — that coherent ideological arguments were brought to bear on the question. Not surprisingly, this task fell to the Democratic Front (DFLP), whose self-image as true practitioners of Marxism-Leninism — as opposed to what it itself characterized as the "tactical Marxism-Leninism" of the Popular Front³⁷ — gave it the requisite ideological legitimacy. The Democratic Front wanted to establish a movement based on mass participation, rather than on a small elite. In the words of DFLP spokesman Abu Adnan:

[Terrorist actions outside of Israeli are based on a temporary sensation and the display of personal bravery, instead of participation by the masses....Such acts are perpetrated by individuals instead of by the masses which, in such situations, cannot but display enthusiasm and admiration for the heroes who carried out the actions.³⁸

In the long range conception of the DFLP, revolution without mass mobilization was an impossibility, and mass mobilization required a considerable temporal investment, with patience, persistence and energetic persuasive effort on all levels. It opposed terrorism outside of Israel — and particularly aircraft hijacking — precisely because, in its view, such actions furthered individualism and created personal myths, in the process leaving the masses in the position of mere onlookers:

Operations of this kind are...destroying the numerous armed and mass struggles in the occupied territory and the endurance of the revolution in the places where it exists, and weakening the collective tendency toward wider enlistment in the ranks of the revolution....From the organizational point of view, these actions encourage a spirit of individualism and do great harm to the task of preparing the masses for organized collective action of all kinds.³⁹

This view was further reinforced by Farouk Kaddoumi, a Fatah leader and head of the political department of the PLO: "These [international terrorist] actions have damaged national unity and caused friction between units of the revolution."⁴⁰

The tenacity of these ideological arguments notwithstanding, the opposition to the use of terror outside of Israel was mainly pragmatic, and linked directly to the international image of the Palestinian movement. According to Abu Adnan, "[Terrorism outside of Israeli creates an extremely bad impression of the Palestinian revolution in world public opinion, presenting it in the form of piracy and highway robbery."⁴¹

A similar attitude was expressed by a faction that opposed international terrorism at a PFLP general convention in March 1972. The hijacking of aircraft, this group claimed, created the impression that the Front was connected with Trotskyists and the European "New Left" and damaged its links with real revolutionaries."⁴² In a similar vein, Abu Iyad thought that the danger posed by hijacking lay in the fact that "such operations will turn the Palestinian cause from revolution to unprofitable violence."⁴³ In essence, the opponents of international terrorism believed that the Palestinian revolution stood in danger of losing its revolutionary image and becoming, in the court of world public opinion, a mere terrorist organization, devoid of political direction. In the words of Yasir Arafat, "We are opposed to acts which bring no benefits to the revolution. We are against aircraft hijacking as this has brought no gain to the revolution. On the contrary, the hijackings have brought about the loss of sympathy in world opinion — a sympathy which we have worked so hard to foster."⁴⁴

As the vehemence of these statements suggests, there was also within the Palestinian movement a significant body of opinion which took the opposite view, i.e., that international terrorism, far from damaging the Palestinian cause, could only enhance it. In addressing those who saw international terrorism as a means of heightening public consciousness of the Palestinian problem, Abu Adnan said, "Our propaganda is intended to gain the support of the people and to persuade them, so that the meaning of the act is more important than the act itself. It is true that these actions bring our message to the attention of select sectors of world opinion, but it can be said with certainty that we shall not gain the support of these sectors but lose it."⁴⁵ Moreover, the opponents of the use of terrorism outside of Israel claimed that such activities were providing Israel with a pretext to react forcibly against the Palestinians, and permitted Jordan to slaughter them and expel the PLO from its territory. In the words of Farouk Kaddoumi:

As a result [of the use of international terrorism) countries [opposed to it] adopted a hostile attitude to the revolution and found a justification in public opinion to conspire against it....These misleading actions inspired a most negative reaction and made it easier for the imperialist forces and Zionism to lay siege to the revolution and to help the conspirators in Jordan to harm the Palestinian revolution under the pretext of liquidating the terrorism and sabotage evidenced in the hijacking of aircraft.⁴⁶

In the final analysis, it was evidently pragmatic considerations more than anything else that led the PLO leadership to come out publicly against the use of terrorism outside of Israel in the years 1968-74. During this period the major international political thrust of the PLO was to obtain the imprimateur of international legitimacy, and it eventually came to the conclusion that international terrorist activity did not serve this end. No doubt with this in mind, the organization took to publicly condemning international terrorism outside of Israel, particularly if innocent civilians were harmed, or if world public opinion appeared to be especially outraged. The usual verbal formulation it used was something on the order of: "This action is contrary to the interests of the Palestinian people." Yet this public position did not prevent Fatah from clandestinely carrying out international terrorist activity under the cover name Black September.

Even in the Popular Front, a bitter dispute erupted over the question of the use of terrorism outside of Israel. The resultant rift precipitated the creation of an ephemeral organization called the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1972, and the secession of the Wadi Haddad group at a later date. In the PFLP, opposition to international terrorism, particularly after 1974, was based on an appreciation that such activities could no longer be justified and that the time was ripe for other means to advance the revolution.

The Suspension of Terrorism Abroad, 1974-82

The war of October 1973 had a far reaching impact on the leadership of the PLO; in its wake the dominant actors within the organization decided that the only hope for the success of the Palestinian revolution lay in the creation of a coherent political strategy. With this in mind, Fatah began a campaign aimed at obtaining recognition from both the Arab states and the international community as a whole for PLO participation in any international negotiations that might eventually be conducted on the Palestinian problem.

At a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Cairo in June 1974, Fatah tabled a proposal to establish a "National Authority" in "every part of Palestine which could be liberated." While intended to foster a more moderate image of the PLO and allow it to take part in negotiations over less than the whole of Palestine,⁴⁷ the proposal created a serious rift within the organization. It led to the establishment of a "Rejection Front"comprised of the Popular Front, the Popular Front-General Command, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front and the Arab Liberation Front. Significantly, even within the principal "moderate" current of the PLO there was no renunciation of the concept of armed struggle in the liberation of "occupied lands; "indeed, at this very juncture in time, all of the organizations under the PLO umbrella intensified their military efforts and carried out spectacular hostage-taking operations within Israel. Nevertheless, eventually all organizations, including the Popular Front, agreed that terrorist activities outside of Israel had become counter-productive. In the words of PFLP spokesman Abu Adnan, such activities, while occasionally justifiable as a means of drawing world attention to the Palestinian cause, could not be sanctioned "as a fixed line in the policy of an organization calling for revolution."⁴⁸

The actual timing of this shift in the role of international terrorism in the PLO's overall strategy is a matter of some debate, particularly with regard to George Habash's Popular Front. Habash is quoted by one source as having told a 1972 Beirut news conference that "because the friendly socialist countries did not manifest an understanding for the hijacking of aircraft, the Popular Front had decided to suspend the practice forthwith."⁴⁹ While this declaration appears to be at odds with Habash's subsequent assertion of support for the Popular Front's prohijacking wing, the fact remains that when a Japanese jumbo jet was hijacked by men under the command of Front Operations Officer Wadi Haddad in July 1973, Habash ordered an investigation. As he explained at the time,

There is a great difference between regarding this line [aircraft hijacking) as a part of the strategy of the people's war of liberation...and its being seen and implemented in an erroneous and non-political manner which can only do harm to the revolution...particularly at an international level.⁵⁰

Two weeks later, when Israeli combat aircraft intercepted the plane which they believed — erroneously — to be carrying Habash, the Popular Front leader had an additional opportunity to amplify his position on the subject of aircraft hijacking:

We discovered that our friends in the world did not understand us, and did not understand our right to make use of such methods in view of the special conditions and the special struggle of the Palestinian people, and eventually we ceased to do it. In effect we looked critically at ourselves and were true to ourselves.

Oil the same occasion, Habash was asked if he could envision circumstances under which his organization might return to a policy of aircraft hijacking:

In the foreseeable future — no. But perhaps when our revolution will be better understood in the world. We feel that war is war and we are entitled to carry out any operation which could serve our victory. Still, since world opinion is at present not capable of understanding our special cause, we want to ensure that people all over the world should understand us, and help us, so that our victory can be assured.⁵¹

Although Habash expressed this sort of opposition to aircraft hijacking on many occasions, at the beginning of 1974 Bassam Abu Sharif stated that Habash advocated merely a change of tactics rather than a complete cessation of the acts: "Airplane hijackings are old hat. Our methods have changed."⁵² Habash, too, emphasized that the issue was not opposition in principle to international terrorism. In an interview in 1979, he stated that while no decision had been reached to stop terrorist activities outside of Israel, the Palestinian revolution had reached the stage where priority should be placed on action within Israel and on its frontiers.

From ail organizational standpoint we ceased our hijacking operations and announced the reasons for this decision more than once. There has been no decision, however, to cease attacks against Israeli and Zionist targets, or imperialist targets linked to Zionism and Israel. As to the question why we do not do it in the same manner and the same scope as before, it is only natural that the Palestinian revolution, having struck roots in occupied Palestine, and in the Arab region, namely Lebanon, has become more interested in direct confrontation with the Zionist enemy, in the first place inside it, and in the second, on its frontiers.⁵³

For their part, Habash's adversaries, and most notably Arafat, continued to denounce the principle of terrorism outside of Israel. In an interview with an Austrian journalist in March 1974, Arafat said: "We are against such actions. We must struggle for the liberation of our fatherland, but within the occupied territories, not outside them."⁵⁴ At the same time it was reported that Arafat, having been informed that various Palestinian groups were planning international terrorist attacks, appealed to all PLO constituent bodies to refrain from carrying out hasty operations outside of Israel without first receiving direct authorization from the PLO leadership.⁵⁵

After the approval of its political program by the PNC in July 1974, Fatah officially committed itself to abstaining from terrorist activities outside of Israel, calling instead for an escalation of activities within Israel. As Saiqa leader Zuheir Muhsein put it at the time: "We have passed the stage of operating from outside."⁵⁶

In this vein, the PLO began to mete out punishment to its members who had committed terrorist acts outside of Israel. In July 1975 the organization declared in Damascus that aircraft hijackers whose actions had resulted in loss of human life would be executed; even for those whose action had not caused physical harm terms of up to 15 years imprisonment were mandated.⁵⁷ As Abu Iyad explained: "The question of aircraft hijacking has been put off now, in the present stage reached by the Palestinian revolution. This has been done out of Palestinian, Arab and international considerations."⁵⁸ In his memoirs, Abu Iyad wrote that Fatah had come to reject operations that, rather than serving the Palestinian cause, damaged it.⁵⁹

Despite the clear bias against the wisdom of initiating terrorist actions outside Israel that was now coming from Arafat and his partisans — as well as from George Habash — other voices expressed reservations. Asked at the beginning of 1976 whether he was opposed to commando activities outside the immediate area of Palestine, Abu Jihad, then head of the Fatah military arm, replied: "Not if this activity is directed against Israel and its interests. Israel has taken the whole world as its arena so why don't we strike at it everywhere?"⁶⁰

Interestingly, it was just at this time that Palestinian terrorism began to have an important impact on inter-Arab relations, particularly with Jordan. In late 1974 security forces in Morocco captured a large terrorist contingent that had been planning to assassinate King Hussein, then attending a conference in Rabat where it was decided to name the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian cause. Conceivably, the wave of attacks against Jordan which culminated in the assassination attempt influenced this decision. The terrorists claimed that they were members of Black September; subsequently it was revealed that Abu Iyad had taken a hand in the operation. For his part, Abu lyad justified the assassination scheme on the grounds that the overthrow of the Jordanian regime had been mandated by a Fatah decision: "If the accusation levelled against us is that we aimed to kill Hussein, then we are proud of it....We will continue to carry out other attempts, because we are implementing the decision of the Fatah Revolutionary Council which calls for the toppling of the Jordanian regime."⁶¹

Like Jordan, Egypt also became a target of Palestinian anger: the visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in November 1977 — and the resulting American sponsored Egyptian-Israeli negotiations —brought about a spate of Palestinian threats against Egypt and even some action against Egyptian targets. However, apparently the real significance of the peace trend was understood only after the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty in March 1979. Focusing on the treaty's proviso for Egyptian-Israeli negotiations on the Palestinian problem — and its obvious implications for the PLO's Rabat endorsed role as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people — Abu Iyad warned that a new terrorist organization would be established on the model of Black September.⁶² Other threats followed. In a speech at a conference of Arab foreign and economic ministers in Baghdad, Farouk Kaddoumi said that Fatah would strike at American installations and interests everywhere if no decision were adopted to launch a total boycott on Egypt and the US.⁶³ While ruling out attacks against Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil installations on the grounds that they were Arab targets, Hani al-Hasan, Arafat's political advisor, told the weekly Monday Morning that American and American-connected installations would be attacked.⁶⁴ Finally, Majid Abu Sharar told the Popular Front organ Al Hadaf that "an escalation of military activity will continue against our enemy Israel, against all its allies in the region and against American imperialism."⁶⁵

There was, indeed, a significant resumption of terrorist activity outside of Israel in 1979, but this trend quickly faded. By mid-1980 Na'im Hader, the PLO representative in Belgium, disclaimed any responsibility for actions attributed to the organization outside of Israel, explaining that the PLO's interest lay solely in conducting a war of resistance within the occupied lands.⁶⁶

The spirit of Hader's assertion was echoed by additional Palestinian leaders. In January 1981 Yasir Abed Rabu, assistant to the secretary general of the Democratic Front, suggested that only terrorist activities within Israel could ultimately benefit the Palestinian revolution:

We can say that all locations of the Zionist enemy are a target for the Palestinian revolution. It is, however, proper that we should make a distinction between those places where attacks will serve the political and military interests of the revolution and those places where attacks would damage the revolution's standing and reputation.⁶⁷

Abu Iyad took up this same theme at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Damascus in April 1981, but equivocated enough to suggest that what might seem appropriate for one audience, was not for another. In a public forum he called for immediate action against American interests worldwide; in a private session with journalists, however — in remarks presumably intended for a western audience — he distinguished between military attacks and those of a purely political nature: "To us now it's not a matter of planting a box of explosives in an American building or something like that....When we talk about hitting American interests we are talking in political terms, not about grenades."⁶⁸

In July 1981 Saudi and American mediation brought about a ceasefire between the PLO and Israel. According to pronouncements of Palestinian leaders at the time, this agreement extended only to the Lebanese theater. At the same time, however, the possibility of resuming attacks against Israel abroad was not even broadened. Here the PLO's decision to refrain from international terrorist operations was put to a critical test. Significantly, it did not resort to such activity even though its attacks against Israel across the Lebanese border were practically barred. Indeed, even the most enthusiastic past supporters of international terrorism among the PLO leadership no longer suggested a resumption of such operations — an indication that at this stage attacks outside Israel were, indeed, perceived as damaging to PLO interests.

Developments after the Lebanon War

In June of 1982 Israeli forces entered Lebanon, initially with the declared intention of removing PLO artillery from within range of Israel's northern settlements. As the broader objectives of the operation became clear, however, IDF forces continued their northward push and within several days had reached the outskirts of Beirut. The ensuing siege forced the PLO to evacuate the city. It had already lost its territorial base in the south; it now lost its headquarters. PLO fighters were dispersed throughout the Arab world, from Tunisia to South Yemen, and the organization's link with its greatest source of strength — the large Palestinian community in Lebanon—was severed.

But the Palestinian leaders succeeded in turning the military defeat into a propaganda victory. They boasted of the weeks it took the Israeli army to force their evacuation from Beirut, as against the days this army needed to subdue the combined might of Arab armies in 1967. Western media coverage of the bombing and shelling of Beirut, the cutting off of electricity and water and the civilian suffering there were exploited for propaganda objectives. World attention was once again drawn to the Palestinian problem.

In retrospect, it was this propaganda victory more than anything else that led the PLO leaders not to change their declared strategy of refraining from launching terrorist attacks outside of Israel. Contrary to what might have been expected following the military results in Lebanon, and despite the fact that it was now virtually impossible for terrorists to operate either across Israel's northern border or from within Israeli territory, even the most radical elements in the PLO did not significantly increase their activity abroad. In this regard the reaction of the PFLP was particularly significant. Interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America" at the end of August 1982, George Habash reaffirmed that the PLO would continue the armed struggle only within Israel and had no intention of resuming terrorist attacks outside its borders: "Regarding armed struggle or terrorism outside Palestine I can assure you that the PLO and also the PFLP will not follow this line."⁶⁹

A year later, spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif reiterated his organization's intention to intensify the armed struggle against Israel within its territory and disclaimed the possibility that it might resume terrorist operations outside its borders. Speaking at a press conference in Algiers, he characterized a recent spate of attacks against Jewish targets in Western Europe as Mossad-inspired, and claimed that since 1971 the official policy of the PFLP was that "operations [would] be carried out only against Israeli forces."⁷⁰ While this was, in fact, a blatantly inaccurate representation of the PFLP's policies, it nevertheless stands as an indication of its thinking on the efficacy of international terrorism even after one year had passed since the Palestinian defeat in Lebanon.

In May 1983, a group of Fatah members — acting with Syrian support — rebelled against the leadership of Yasir Arafat. In November 1983 Arafat and his supporters took up positions in the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli and, after heavy fighting, decided to evacuate the city. By now, Fatah was split into two groups.

The program of the Fatah rebels was clear. They declared themselves against Arafat's "moderate" line and his control over Fatah and the PLO, against his policies and inclination toward Jordan and Saudi Arabia — states that might, according to Arafat's perception, advance negotiations on a political solution to the Palestinian problem. Nor did the rebels conceal their (Syrian-guided) extremism; but even they stated that they viewed terrorism outside of Israel as harmful to the Palestinian cause. Nimr Salah, one of the leaders of the rebels, declared: "We should use both political and military means to regain the rights of our people. Attacks on targets outside the occupied territory do not serve our cause."⁷¹

Another extremist leader, Nagi Aloush, a former adherent of the extremist camp within Fatah who joined Abu Nidal in 1979 and apparently left following differences of opinion, declared in an interview at the beginning of 1983 that anyone advocating a return to Palestinian international terrorism was "but a part of the attempt to diminish the Palestinian cause, to damage the Palestinian resistance, to deprive it of the support of world public opinion and to direct it from the path of actual and effective struggle."⁷²

Implicit in these statements is that the question of whether to revert to the strategy of international terrorism still preoccupied segments of the Palestinian leadership. Since the defeat in Lebanon had left the Palestinian revolution with a substantially diminished capability for action, a number of possibilities for activities against Israel were clearly being examined. After the war Ahmed Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC which had operated outside of Israel since the early 1970s, expressed a conviction that the struggle should be continued in any arena:

Our objective at the present and the next stage is to intensify our military activity. This escalation will not be confined to only one theatre, and not only in the occupied Arab lands, but in all international arenas, wherever institutions and interests of the enemy and his allies — of whatever kind and scope — are to be found.⁷³

In a similar vein, the Voice of Palestine quoted Abu Iyad as saying after the evacuation from Beirut that the war against Israel would be waged throughout the world: "What has happened in Beirut does not permit us to curb the extremists in our midst, to muzzle our secret order that will engage in an underground war devoid of all restraints."⁷⁴ Referring to the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Abu Iyad went on to tell his followers that one motive for terrorism was revenge, and that there were now many in the Palestinian ranks who felt themselves motivated by just such a desire: "Those whose families were killed and whose children and wives were slaughtered — who can restrain them if they should carry out extreme acts anywhere in the world? I want to see leaders anywhere in the world who can curb them."⁷⁵

Nevertheless, Abu Iyad was careful to emphasize his own continuing negative attitude toward terrorism outside of Israel: "I still think that the true vengeance will be the continuation of the revolution as a revolution, and not the carrying out of operations in foreign countries."⁷⁶ When asked in another interview why the "terror"⁷⁷ was not renewed following the massacre in the refugee camps, Abu Iyad had an opportunity to express the conception shared by most of the Palestinian leaders, at least when speaking in public: the war in Lebanon had been a military and political success, and there was no need for operations potentially harmful to the cause:

The Palestinian people have sufficiently matured and the Palestinian leadership is opposed to the growth of terrorist phenomena. A distinction should be made between our exodus from Jordan and the evacuation from Beirut. After Jordan we felt defeated, but after Beirut we feel victorious. We are now carrying out an extensive guidance campaign to explain to our people and to our fighters that vengeance will come through the continuation of the revolution and through the safeguarding of the Palestinian rifle — and not through individual acts of a terrorist character that lead nowhere.⁷⁸

Taken together, these statements appear to indicate that various PLO leaders had come to realize the double-edged nature of the terrorist weapon. Despite the attention the Palestinians gained as a result of the war in Lebanon, the organization had suffered militarily and its international status was reduced. Even the most extreme elements within the movement — including those who objected unconditionally to a political solution of the Palestinian problem — understood the significance of the damage that the Palestinians had sustained as a result of the Israeli operations in Lebanon, and realized that immediate recourse to terrorist actions outside of Israel was not a positive option. At the same time however, the door to the resumption of such activities was kept open for the future. In the words of Hani al-Hasan, "military actions as a Palestinian option will continue to exist in the occupied land and wherever Zionist targets are to be found abroad."⁷⁹ In retrospect, it appears that the immediacy of contemporary events had a profound impact on the tone and content of at least some of the Palestinian declarations: the threats of Abu Iyad to unleash a new wave of international terrorism were made in the politically emotive atmosphere of the Israeli siege of Beirut in August 1982, and again in October 1982 — after the slaughter of Sabra and Shatila. Ahmed Jibril's declaration was also given at the time of the siege, in September 1982. In both cases the statements may have reflected primarily feelings of rage and frustration, and were meant to answer the need to reinvest PLO ranks with a coherent sense of direction. Nevertheless, not all Palestinian leaders responded to the Beirut siege and the slaughter of Sabra and Shatila in the same way. George Habash's promise to refrain from international terrorism was made just prior to the evacuation from Beirut in August 1982. And a statement by Yasir Arafat emphasizing the need to concentrate resistance activities within Israel was given in the wake of the PLO's expulsion from Beirut: "I oppose terrorism in all its forms, everywhere...in the future we will limit ourselves to resisting Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, nothing more, nothing less. And in parallel we will continue our battle on the diplomatic front."⁸⁰ Several months later, Abu Iyad also declared his opposition to international terrorism.

Notably, most of the statements against a resumption of international terrorism were directed at the western media while those holding open this possibility were issued to the Arab media. In this regard, a comment by Fatah's Hani al-Hasan is particularly revealing. In early 1984 — several weeks after the evacuation from Tripoli and two years away from the dramatic events of the summer of 1982 — Hasan emphasized that the international terror option still existed. The significance of this statement lies not only in the timing, but also in the fact that it was given by Hani al-Hasan, one of the central decisionmakers in Fatah, and one who has been considered a supporter of the political option.

We may assume, therefore, that the possibility of resumption of terrorism in the international arena has not been completely discarded, even within Fatah. Internal differences do exist over the subject, and strategic decisions are likely to be influenced by diverse factors — such as Israel's ability to restrain terrorism within its borders, assessments of the prospects of the political process, and pressure within and among the Palestinian organizations.

3. Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel, 1968-84: Data and Trends

During the period between 1968 and 1984 the various Palestinian terrorist organizations were involved in hundreds of terrorist actions – some actually carried out, others foiled – against a wide range of Israeli, Jewish, western and Arab targets in dozens of countries outside of Israel. The following analysis categorizes those actions with respect to organization, type, nationality, location of target, and terrorist method involved – all within the framework of the overall Palestinian armed struggle.

Scope of Actions and Organizations Involved

The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies recorded a total of 435 Palestinian terrorist acts outside of Israel in the 1968-84 period (see Table 2). Of this number, organizational responsibility could not be determined in about 90 cases; while it is possible that some of these cases were not, in fact, carried out by Palestinians, they are included in the total because intelligence, media and other sources point to their provenance as being Palestinian. At the same time a number of incidents specifically directed at Israeli and/or Jewish targets have been omitted from the list because Palestinian involvement could not be proven. Provenance for attacks against specifically Arab targets is an additional complicating factor: in many instances the intelligence services of one Arab state take action directly against another Arab state without recourse to Palestinian organizations; only when Palestinian involvement is clearly proven have such attacks been included on the list. It remains possible, however, that some incidents were mistakenly included or omitted.

Another source of possible inaccuracy in the statistics is that, while it is almost impossible to prevent the reporting of an event after it has actually occurred, not all intercepted or foiled incidents are reported – due to political or security considerations. As mentioned above, the organizational responsibility of about 90 incidents, or 20 percent, could not be determined. It is therefore difficult to analyze the full meaning of one-fifth of the incidents, and data and their interpretation should be considered with this reservation in mind. Finally, the dispatch of letter bombs and the poisoning of Israeli oranges in Europe have been grouped as single incidents to avoid inflating the total artificially.

The organizations whose abbreviations appear in Table 2 are listed in Appendix 1. See Appendix 3 for a chronology of significant terrorist incidents that were carried out by Palestinian organizations outside of Israel.

Table 2 presents Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel according to year and perpetrating organization. The table indicates that 15 Palestinian terrorist organizations carried out actions outside of Israel through the year 1984. Three of them – (the original) Black September, ANYO, and the Action for the Liberation of Palestine Organization – no longer exist. Two carried out only isolated acts, in accordance with a declared policy which opposed terrorist activity outside of Israel (DFLP), or due to a lack of operational capabilities (PSF). Two organizations began operating in late 1984: the Fatah Rebels, and a shadowy terrorist apparatus which acted under the name Black September and was most probably sponsored by Syria. One – the Lebanon Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) – is of uncertain national provenance, but on the basis of the best available indications is listed here as Palestinian.

Of all the organizations under study, the most active has been the Abu Nidal group. But in terms of concentrated activity over a limited period of time this distinction belongs to the now defunct Black September organization. Not including the spate of attacks carried out against Jordanian targets in 1971 – attributed to Fatah but very possibly executed by the organization's intelligence arm which served as a nucleus for Black September – BSO was responsible for 66 (or 19 percent) of the 343 attributable terrorist attacks outside of Israel registered during the period under review. This means a most intensive terrorist campaign conducted over the short period of three years. Black September enabled Fatah to conduct clandestine terrorist operations without having to answer to world public opinion. Still, it apparently was a joint project of Fatah and the Popular Front (PFLP), rather than an exclusive apparatus of Fatah, for there was much circumstantial evidence that linked leaders and members of the PFLP with its activity. According to Abu Daoud, the Black September leader captured in Jordan in 1973: "Coordination between Fatah and the PFLP is secret and complete though signs prove the opposite to serve political, financial and ideological objectives, particularly in the Gulf area and in Saudi Arabia."¹

In terms of terror volume, the PFLP, with 63 operations (or 18.4 percent) out of the total of attributable incidents, ranks third among the 15 groups under review. Unlike Black September, the PFLP was active throughout the period under review. Nevertheless, most of its operations – 51 out of 63 – were carried out before the end of 1974, when it joined Fatah in a decision to moderate terrorist activity outside of Israel. At about the same time, Wadi Haddad – PFLP's operations officer in charge of activity outside of Israel – left the organization. According to some sources, this secession occurred earlier, in 1972,² and the attack at the airport in Athens (August 5, 1973) as well as the hijacking of the Japanese plane (July 20, 1973) were carried out by Haddad's dissenting faction.³ In any event, it appears that some of the operations attributed to the Front in 1973 and 1974, including those carried out in cooperation with the Japanese Red Army and the Mohammed Bodia Commando in Europe, were initiated under the direct aegis of Haddad and did not carry the personal imprimatur of Front leader George Habash.

Thirty-five attacks or 10.2 percent of the total were attributed to two groups, the PFLP-Special Operations (based mainly in South Yemen) and the Arab May 15 Organization (sponsored mainly by Iraq), both created by the same pro-Haddad dissidents in the wake of Haddad's death in 1978. The first Haddad dissident action is given as the occupation of OPEC headquarters in Vienna in December 1975; while there are some indications of Haddad-dissident participation – together with that of PFLP regulars and members of the Carlos Network – in a number of attacks which occurred before that date, these mixed actions have been credited to the PFLP, in whose name they were carried out.

From 1981 until the end of the period covered, eight attacks were carried out – all against American or Israeli targets in Europe – by an organization calling itself Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions (LARF). Given circumstantial evidence suggesting that the group has cooperated with the French "Action Directe," and given Action Directe's known links with the PFLP, it is possible that either the Popular Front itself or one of its dissident splinter factions is, in fact, behind the activities of LARF. Three members of LARF were arrested in 1985 – all apparently members of Salim Abu Salem's PFLP-Special Operations. Nevertheless, since there is no additional concrete evidence connecting this group to LARF, it is considered as a separate entity.

Fatah has 36 known operations to its credit, or 10.5 percent of the total. Many of these were undertaken after 1974 and directed at Arab targets – a possible explanation for the fact that Fatah continued to operate outside of Israel despite its late 1974 decision to refrain from such activity directed against Israel. Still several actions, all unsuccessful, were directed against western and Israeli targets in the wake of the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in March 1979. Here one cannot discount the possibility that Fatah moderates deliberately tipped off host country security services, even if this meant the arrest of members of the organization. After all, these events occurred against the backdrop of already existing tensions within Fatah. In 1978 Israel invaded southern Lebanon and Arafat promised UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to cease attacking Israel from there if Israel would evacuate the area and UN troops were positioned there. This move brought about an open revolt, led by the extremists Abu Iyad, Abu Daoud, Nimer Salah and Majed Abu Sharar,⁴ against Arafat's leadership. Arafat and Abu Jihad succeeded in suppressing the revolt, but the signing of the Israel-Egypt treaty probably again stimulated the extremists to launch a renewed campaign outside of Israel. These frictions within Fatah might had also been linked with an attempt on the life of Abu Daoud carried out in Warsaw in August 1981.

Three other Palestinian terror groups active outside of Israel are also worthy of special mention: Al-Saiqa carried out a total of 24 operations, a few of which were directed against Soviet immigrants to Israel in 1973 and 1975, while the remainder came in the wake of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty; ANYO, consisting in the main of disaffected members of other organizations and operating under Libyan sponsorship, carried out 15 strikes in the 1973-74 period; finally, the PFLP-GC initiated 13 actions, mainly between 1970 and 1972.

Since 1976 the most active Palestinian terrorist organization outside of Israel has been the Abu Nidal group. Abu Nidal, who left Yasir Arafat's Fatah in 1973, established his own organization under the patronage of Iraq and has often worked "freelance," switching loyalty between Iraq and Syria or serving as an agent of both. In all, Abu Nidal and his cohorts were responsible for 72 actions during the period under study, a significant 21 per cent of the total.

Another relatively recent addition to the Palestinian terrorist firmament is a group that calls itself Black September, but which is totally unrelated to the original organization of that name, which operated in 1971-1974. The new Black September accepted responsibility for the murder of a Jordanian diplomat in Bucharest on December 4, 1984, and the assassination of PLO Executive Committee member Fahd Kawasmeh in Amman on December 29, 1984 and may also have been responsible for the planting of a bomb near the Amman home of Arafat advisor Hani al-Hasan on December 29, 1984. Its exact provenance is still a matter of some speculation; it may be a cover name for one of the aforementioned organizations or for Syrian agents. Certainly the selection of targets is consistent with the political program of the Fatah Rebels, Abu Nidal and the PFLP-GC, all of which function at present under Syrian sponsorship. Interestingly, on February 16, 1985 Abu Haled al-Amla, one of the leaders of the Fatah Rebels whose bombing attack at the parking lot of the Israel Embassy in Nicosia on October 4,1984 marked their entry into the international terror arena, announced that a joint command with Abu Nidal had been formed.⁵

A few days later, a rare interview given by Abu Nidal on February 6-7,1985 to Lucien Bitterlin, member of the Franco-Arab Solidarity Association, was reported by AFP. Here Abu Nidal appeared to confirm the Fatah Rebel statement, adding that he was "acting as a deputy to a secretary general whose name would be announced in a short time," and threatening a series of attacks against Palestinians and Arabs who sought to negotiate with Israel, as well as against American interets in general.⁶ Certainly from a logistics standpoint a Fatah Rebel-Abu Nidal partnership would make good organizational sense: the Fatah Rebels have abundant manpower but lack an international terrorist infrastructure, while Abu Nidal possesses an infrastructure but lacks manpower.

With regard to specific periods of activity, most of the 15 groups studied are identified with a particular terrorist time frame; only the PFLP was active throughout the entire 1968-84 period, and even in its specific case many of the activities carried out were concentrated between 1968 and 1970.

Chronologically, the active periods of Palestinian terror groups operating outside of Israel break down as follows: Black September was active from 1971-74, and the PFLP-GC from 1970 to 1972. The activities of the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (ANYO) during 1973-1974 were actually a Libyan-sponsored attempt to frustrate peace negotiations in the Middle East. A lull occurred in 1975 as a result of the PLO decision to refrain from international terrorism and the dislocation caused by the civil war in Lebanon, while in 1976 only the Wadi Haddad factions and Abu Nidal were active. Another lull – again occasioned by the Lebanese civil war – occurred in 1977, but was broken over the next two years by Saiqa and Fatah, which acted against Egyptian targets in the wake of President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and the subsequent signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty (16 out of the 21 unclaimed incidents occurred in November-December of 1977). In 1978 Fatah also attacked Iraqi targets.

Targets for Attack

Turning now to a more intensive analysis of target identity, we find that from 1968 to 1970, consistent with the ideological conception of PFLP leader George Habash, only Israeli, Jewish and western targets were attacked by Palestinan terrorists acting outside of Israel. Only after the Palestinian expulsion from Jordan in September 1970 was the circle expanded to include Arab targets as well; indeed, from 1971 on, a gradual increase can be discerned in the proportion of Arab targets in the overall terrorist total. Specific years in which this tendency was most noteworthy were 1971 (against Jordan), 1976 (against Syria), 1977 (against Egypt), 1978 (against Iraq), 1982 (against Gulf countries) and 1983-4 (against Jordan and Arafat loyalists) (see Table 3).

Of all the targets selected by the Palestinian terrorists, those with a specific Israeli identity were the most prominent, accounting for 131 out of 399, or 32.8 percent of the accountable targets. There was no year in which no Israeli target was hit.

Among the Israeli targets, diplomatic ones were preferred, followed by transport company offices, Israeli aircraft and passengers, and finally economic installations and civilians. This order would seem to be explained by the ready availability of diplomatic premises and transport offices and their symbolic value as state-controlled institutions. In the early part of the period under review, Israeli aircraft were particularly favored George Habash, for example, viewed them as a distinctly military target, as they connect Israel with other countries, have been used to transport arms and forces, and have been flown by IAF reserve pilots.⁷ But with the implementation of strict security measures by Israeli and other national authorities, their proportion in the overall total of terrorist activities drastically fell.

After those identified with Israel, Arab targets were the most popular objects for attack by the Palestinian terrorists during the period under review, accounting for 121 incidents, or 30.3 percent of the total. From 1971 onwards Arab targets were hit every year. Closely paralleling the Israeli example, the preferred Arab targets were diplomatic missions (more Arab than Israeli diplomatic missions were attacked), followed by Arab civilians (including members of rival terrorist groups), aircraft and economic installations.

The principal reason for the relatively high incidence of attacks against Arab diplomatic missions appears to lie in the fact that Arab states sometimes made use of Palestinian terrorists to strike at their rivals. With respect to the civilian category, much of the damage appears to have stemmed specifically from rivalries among the various'terrorist groups, particularly that between Abu Nidal and Fatah. Transport companies and aircraft were selected largely because of their availability and high symbolic value.

Targets which were neither Israeli, nor Arab nor Jewish were the third most frequent object of attacks by Palestinian terrorists during the period under study, accounting for 104 incidents or 26 percent of the total. Economic installations were the most popular object for attack in this category, followed by diplomatic missions, aircraft and passengers, and transport companies. The emphasis on economic installations appears to stem from the fact that many of those attacked had connections with Israel, and this suggested a symbolic and practical value; in the same vein, aircraft constituted an important communications link with Israel and helped it overcome the sense of siege imposed by the Arab countries.⁸ Foreign diplomatic missions were also hit in this period; most heavily targeted among them were the American, which symbolized imperialism or its connection with Israel and Zionism.

Jewish targets occupy fourth place as an object of attack by Palestinian terrorists, accounting for 43 incidents or 10 percent of the total, mostly in the individual and organizational category. Except for the years 1970-71 they were hit every year, largely on the assumption that by striking at diaspora Jews, Palestinians were hitting indirectly at Israel. The antisemitic atmosphere in some European states made attacking Jewish targets appear legitimate; not until recent years did Jewish organizations and institutions in such countries receive special protection. In some cases, it has been difficult to separate the attacks that were carried out by Palestinians from those committed by local antisemitic elements.

On a transnational basis, the single largest target category selected by the Palestinian terrorists during the years under study was diplomatic premises, accounting for 132 incidents or 33 percent of the accountable total. (A US State Department study, using separate data, indicates that international terrorists prefer targeting diplomatic objectives and put the figure at 38 percent.)⁹ In second place came individuals, with 91 incidents or 22.8 percent (Jews and Arabs were attacked in almost equal measure), followed by economic installations with 68 incidents or 17 percent (half of these were neither Israeli, nor Jewish nor Arab, and a quarter were Israeli). Afterwards came aircraft and transportation: aircraft and passengers suffered 55 incidents or 13.8 percent, while transport companies were victims in 53 incidents or 13.3 percent of the total.

Table 4 shows the distribution of terrorist incidents by perpetrating organization and type of target, and presents the targeting preferences of the various Palestinian groups.

By and large, Palestinian terror organizations with a relatively small scope of activities, such as the PFSF, the DFLP, the PFLP-GC and ANYO, did not act against Arab or Jewish targets but rather against Israeli or western ones. Exceptional in this regard was the Syrian controlled Al-Saiqa which hit four Arab and eight Jewish targets and is suspected of involvement in a number of attacks against Egyptian objectives during the 1977-79 period – attacks for which no responsibility was claimed.

Among the organizations with a wide range of activities, the Popular Front was the only one not to hit Arab targets – this despite the PFLP's unambiguous identification of reactionary Arab regimes as enemies of the Palestinian revolution, and its call for far-reaching changes in the Arab world. The apparent contradiction here may be explained with reference to Front ideology, in which the Palestinian-nationalist current was always more important than the revolutionary-internationalist current. Moreover, PFLP leader George Habash has undergone a tortuous trail of ideological affinity – from the quasi-fascist nationalism of Kataib al-Fidai in the late 1940s and early 1950s through Nasserite Pan-Arabism, until he reached "Asian Marxist-Leninism."¹⁰ Throughout this journey, the only consistent element was pure Palestinian nationalism, suggesting that PFLP ideology is best understood as a kind of tri-partite construct: the soul is Palestinian nationalism; Arab nationalism provides the body; and the clothing is a product of the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism.

Another explanation for the PFLP's reluctance to strike at Arab targets may lie in the source of its financial support. Within the framework of the PLO, the PFLP received aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Habash conceivably feared that by biting the hand that was feeding him he would put himself at the mercy of Iraqi and/or Syrian sponsorship – something that he was most reluctant to do. By the same token, the fact that the Front had received aid from Egypt – and perhaps was continuing to receive it, even if at a lower level after the signing of the Israel– Egypt Peace Treaty in 1979 – may also explain why it never attacked Egyptian targets. The Front's attitude toward Jordanian targets is some-what more complicated: while not identified directly with attacks against Jordan in the wake of the Palestinian expulsion in 1970 (a process that was stimulated by the PFLP's skyjackings in September 1970), it may have acted indirectly against the Jordanians through the auspices of Black September, in whose operations it was an active partner. In all, activities of the PFLP focused on western countries (32 incidents), Israel (22 incidents) and Jewish targets (5 incidents).

Two organizations which did act against Arab targets – albeit to a limited extent within the overall context of their activities – were the Wadi Haddad factions and Black September. In the case of the Wadi Haddad factions, most attacks were in the Gulf region and financial extortion was probably the overriding motive; in the case of Black September, attacks were concentrated on Jordan, primarily to avenge the Palestinian expulsion from that country in 1970. However, almost half of the operations that were carried out by those two organizations targeted Israel (Haddad factions in 14 cases; Black September in 28 cases); the rest were aimed at Jewish targets. Their least preferred objectives were Arab targets.

The main Palestinian terrorist campaigner against Arab targets was the group affiliated with Abu Nidal, more than two-thirds of whose actions – or 39 percent of the Palestinian total – were aimed in that direction. Out of 69 operations carried out by the Abu Nidal group whose target could be identified, only 4 (5.8 percent) were aimed at Israeli and 6 (8.9 percent) at Jewish targets. The first operation against an Israeli target – a bombing attack on the Zim office in Nicosia, was carried out in September 1981, and a month later 'a synagogue was attacked in Vienna. The organization carried out 12 attacks (17.4 percent) against non-Israeli, non-Jewish or non-Arab targets, ten of these in 1984. Five of these attacks targeted British objectives (with the intention of forcing the United Kingdom to free group members imprisoned there following the attempt on the life of the Israeli ambassador in June 1982) and were carried out under the name of the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims. Most of the others were carried out in Jordan as part of the attempts to frustrate the joint Jordanian-PLO political initiative.

Abu Nidal's emphasis on Arab targets was motivated by the group's position in the forefront of the rebellion against the Fatah leadership of Yasir Arafat (it calls itself Fatah Revolutionary Council – FRC – or The True Fatah) and by the fact that a number of its actions were carried out for Iraq – and later Syria – within the context of the struggle between these two states and the PLO. In 1976, under the name Black June, it was responsible for a number of attacks against Syrian targets on behalf of Iraq, and in 1978 it operated under Iraqi inspiration against PLO activists. With the improvement in relations between Iraq and the PLO, the group moved to Syrian patronage, though its involvement in the attempted murder of the Israeli ambassador in London in 1982 – an attack which was planned in Baghdad and was carried out with the assistance of Iraqi intelligence – suggests that the link with the Iraqis was never completely severed.

In June 1982, the Abu Nidal group embarked on a series of actions directed at Gulf countries, principally Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, apparently on behalf of Syria, which as a supporter of Iran in the Iran-Iraq War opposed their support for Iraq (although conceivably these attacks were executed as a simple exercise in financial extortion or with the intention of bringing about the release of jailed members). By 1983, however, the group's Syrian connection was clear, since it implemented the Syrian-sponsored attack on PLO leader Sartawi in April and was subsequently involved in a number of attacks against Jordanian targets.

Nationality of Targets

In all, our survey identifies 405 attacks carried out by diverse Palestinian organizations against targets of 28 different countries. Western targets head the list with 143 incidents (or 35 percent of the total) and are followed by Israeli and Arab targets with 131 incidents or 32 percent, and 94 incidents or 23 percent of the total respectively. Other countries accounted for a total of 10 incidents (see tables 5a, 5b, 5c).

Within the overall list, one point is worthy of special mention: of all the attacks mounted by the Palestinian terror groups, not a single one has been directed against a communist country target. It might also be pointed out that while Lebanon does not appear on the list of target countries, this absence is deceptive: throughout the Lebanese conflict, many of the Palestinian terror organizations actively undertook operations for one side or another, and undoubtedly struck Lebanese targets in the course of their activities; but because of the difficulty in assigning specific responsibility, these attacks have not been recorded on the list.

It is also interesting to note that despite the sustained involvement of both Libya and Algeria in PLO politics, no targets in either country were hit.

Within the western bloc, the United States was the leading target, accounting for 36 percent of the western total. The Palestinian reasoning is obvious: as Israel's principal foreign supporter and the source of the lion's share of foreign assistance that it receives, the United States is, in the Palestinian view, a symbol of consummate evil and, as such, deserves particular terrorist attention. Most attacks against American targets occurred during the years 1969-75, when the terrorist activities of Black September and the Popular Front were at their height. Thereafter American targets were hit at the rate of about two a year, though there was a certain rise in 1979 following the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, and again in 1984 when American involvement in trying to arrange an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian settlement came to the fore.

The American element within the western component is also noteworthy for its distinctly political emphasis. While attacks against European targets were frequently undertaken not as part of a direct campaign against those states, but in order to secure the release of Palestinian terrorists held in European jails – or to strike at European Jews – those undertaken against American targets were conceived against the backdrop of America's close identification with Israel and were aimed directly at American symbols: aircraft, embassies, representative companies or facilities. Some-times this American identification worked indirectly against European countries: for example, in hijacking a British aircraft in March 1974, ANYO claimed it was doing so because in the course of the October 1973 war, American planes had flown out of (London) Heathrow airport on spying operations against the Egyptian forces.¹¹

After the US, West Germany was the most popular target within the western bloc, with German targets attacked every year between 1972 and 1979. Apparently following an agreement between the PLO and West German authorities under which the Germans would allow Palestinian activists to operate in Germany provided they ceased terrorist activities there and broke their links with German terrorist organizations,¹² there was only one incident after that. Among the factors involved in the Palestinian proclivity for German targets prior to 1979 are the close political and logistical links forged between the Palestinians and homegrown German terror groups. At the same time, the large Arab and Palestinian community within Germany could have provided the Palestinian groups with important assistance in their activities. The fact that German policy has been more or less sympathetic to Israel may also have been a factor in the relatively high percentage of German targets selected by the Palestinians.

In addition to West Germany, France and Italy also reached political agreements with the PLO; in their cases, however, these agreements do not appear to have had a particularly salutary impact. Italy is particularly interesting in this respect: its PLO agreement was supposedly reached in 1973,¹³ but fully half of the incidents involving Italian targets were recorded after that date.

Other important targets for Palestinian terrorism in Europe included Britain, Holland and Austria, all of which adopted reasonably conciliatory attitudes toward Palestinian activities. Chronologically, Palestinian actions against these targets were at their height between 1969 and the mid-1970s, with some minor resumption aimed at British targets in 1983 and 1984. In this regard, the PLO decision to moderate its international terror profile, and the adoption of stricter security measures by the countries in question, were probably the main restraining factors.

Among the seven Arab countries targeted for Palestinian terrorism, Jordan with 31 incidents or 33 percent of the total, and Egypt with 24 incidents or 29 percent, were the clear leaders. Syria, Iraq and Kuwait followed in that order. Distinctly Palestinian targets accounted for 27 incidents or 23 percent of the total.

Attacks against Jordan came in two principal waves:

– Between 1971 and 1974 Fatah and Black September acted in response to the Palestinian expulsion from Jordan;

– In 1983 and 1984 Abu Nidal and the new, Syrian-sponsored Black September acted to disrupt contacts between Jordan and Yasir Arafat over joint negotiations with Israel.

Activity against Egypt was connected with President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in 1979. In the main, it was carried out by the Syrian controlled Al-Saiqa organizations. Syrian targets were in turn hit mainly in 1976 when Abu Nidal acted under Iraqi sponsorship, while Iraqi targets were struck in 1978 by Fatah in response to assassination attempts on Fatah members carried out by Abu Nidal from Iraq.

Kuwait and United Arab Emirates targets were hit in the early 1980s by the Wadi Haddad factions and the Abu Nidal group, either under Iraqi or Syrian sponsorship and within the context of the Iran-Iraq War, or as a means of extorting protection money.

Palestinian targets have been attacked only since 1977, principally by Abu Nidal. Here a significant problem exists in distinguishing between attacks carried out against Palestinians by other Palestinians, and those carried out by intelligence services of foreign countries, including those of Israel, Egypt and Jordan, as a reaction to Palestinian activity against them.

One major Arab country that was virtually free from Palestinian attack was Saudi Arabia – victimized only twice, both times in 1973. The Saudi exemption appeared to stem from the country's consistent policy of not taking sides in inter-Arab disputes, and from its widely recognized role as paymaster to a broad variety of Palestinian terrorist groups.

Geographical Area of Operations

The fifteen Palestinian terrorist groups were active in 62 countries on five continents during the period under study. The principal venue of activity was Western Europe, where 60 percent (293 incidents out of the total of 487) of all incidents were recorded. Four countries – West Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – accounted for half of the European total¹⁴ (see tables 6a-6e). A few incidents were carried out in Eastern Europe – against PLO or Jordanian targets.

As outlined in the preceding section, a combination of good relations with local terrorist groups, a large Palestinian and Arab immigrant population and the host country's relatively good relations with Israel probably explain the Palestinian terrorists' proclivity toward West Germany. Palestinian terrorist activities were carried out there primarily between 1969-79; the six attacks during 1982-1984 have been attributed to a Wadi Haddad faction that had historical connections with local terrorists, and thus could take advantage of an established infrastructure. In Italy and France the Palestinians were active throughout most of the period under review, benefiting from the Arab immigrant factor and from relatively high levels of support for the Palestinian cause among both the peoples and the governments involved, as well as by a marked government tendency – especially in France – to avoid confronting the terrorists directly. Continuous terrorist activity was carried out in the United Kingdom between 1969 and 1974 when Fatah and the PFLP temporarily opted out of the international terror arena; its renewal in 1978, primarily by non-PLO member groups, was greeted with a substantial official backlash, which became particularly pronounced with the assumption of power by the Thatcher government in 1979. In any case, measures taken by the British security forces brought about a decrease in this activity, though they did not terminate it.

With its Muslim population and high degree of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, Turkey was another important venue for Palestinian terrorism in Europe. The Palestinians were also aided in Turkey by social anarchy that prevailed prior to a military coup d'etat in September 1980, and by the many local groups that were willing to act on their behalf. (Thus for example, it is still unclear whether the kidnap and murder of Efraim Elrom, the Israeli Consul in Istanbul, in May of 1979 was carried out by locals, or Palestinians, or both.)

Among other countries in Europe, Greece was also a popular Palestinian terrorist venue. As in Turkey, there was considerable Greek sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

After Europe, the favorite venue for Palestinian terrorists was the Arab Middle East, where 26 percent of all recorded incidents were perpetrated. Lebanon, where there were impressive terrorist concentrations, was a natural arena of activity for years, and most of the international activity of the Palestinians in the region during the period covered in this study was based or carried out there.

The two other principal Arab venues were Jordan and Egypt. Attacks in Jordan came in two waves: the first, in 1970-1973, from the September 1970 events until the dismantling of the Black September organization; the second, in 1983-1984, when Abu Nidal conducted an anti-Jordan campaign under Syrian sponsorship. Attacks on Egyptian soil occurred from 1970-1974 with Jordanian targets as the main objectives; while from 1978 on-wards, Israeli and Egyptian targets were attacked, with the aim of disrupting the peace process between those states.

In general, Palestinian terrorism in the Middle East was sporadic, a function of both prevailing political developments and the great freedom of action enjoyed by Palestinian groups throughout the region.

Aside from Europe and the Middle East, Palestinian terrorists were also active, albeit to a more limited extent, in Asia, where relatively lax security arrangements, especially in airports, and a high degree of sympathy for the Palestinian cause – particularly in countries like India with its large Muslim population – contributed to the development of terrorism.

Throughout the period under review, only 12 incidents of Palestinian terrorism were recorded in the United States. This is surprising, given America's close ties and vital identification with Israel, and the Palestinian campaign against America in various parts of the globe. Six of these incidents were the dispatch of letter bombs. The others included the murder of an Israeli air attache in Washington in July 1973 (most probably carried out by a non-Palestinian hired killer), and the planting of a bomb (by unidentified perpetrators) in July 1977 in the Washington home of a prominent Jewish lobbyist. Thus, only one incident which was carried out in the United States was clearly Palestinian perpetrated – the placing of three cars loaded with explosives in New York in March 1973. The presence of a large number of Arab and Palestinian immigrants would seem to make the US an ideal arena for Palestinian terrorism. That this has not been the case is probably due to a combination of several factors: stringent border controls which complicate problems of entry and exit for prospective terrorist teams; the uncompromising opposition of a succession of American administrations to terrorism of any kind – both domestic and "imported," as well as a probable fear within the Palestinian organizations of a further loss of sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the US government and public opinion.

Categories of Terrorist Activity

Palestinian terrorists have tended to favor the more "routine" terrorist techniques such as bombing and arson, armed assault and murder, aircraft hijacking, hostage-taking, dispatch of letter bombs, kidnapping, and poisoning. Bombing and armed assault accounted for 73 percent of all Palestinian activity (attributable incidents) during the period under study. The various Palestinian groups placed an average of nine charges a year, refraining from the practice only in the years when overall Palestinian terrorism was at a low point (1973-1975) (see Table 7).

The planting of explosives as a terrorist tactic is generally favored because it is both low risk and attention getting. Over the years, Palestinians placed bombs in buildings and public places, concealing them through a variety of means so as to make their discovery more difficult. At the same time, bombs were also planted on aircraft, on ships at sea, and at oil installations – causing many fatalities and extensive financial damage.

For the terrorist, armed assault and murder – which includes assault with handguns, rifles, grenades and other explosive charges – constitute a more problematic activity than explosive sabotage, because the risk of capture is greater. Nevertheless, this was a favored method of Palestinian terrorism and was employed in all the years covered by this study. While the small scale nature of this type of activity did not necessitate special manpower requests, the introduction of sophisticated security procedures for such high risk targets as diplomats, politicians and senior businessmen meant that split-second timing and well-planned getaway arrangements had to be taken into consideration by the group executing attacks of this sort. The Abu Nidal group has specialized in this tactic and its extensive assassination campaigns contributed to the relatively high volume of armed assaults that have been perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.

Palestinian targets in this category were many and varied, and included aircraft passengers, embassy personnel, intelligence operatives and other terrorists.

Another favored tactic of the Palestinian terrorist groups was the dispatch of letter bombs. Here too the Palestinians were not innovators, though they achieved considerable notoriety. The Palestinian pioneer was the Popular Front-General Command, which employed the tactic against Israeli targets in February 1970 from Germany, and in December 1971 from Austria and Yugoslavia. In April 1972 the destination was the Israeli exhibition in the international fair in Hanover, Germany. Black September entered the picture in September 1972 and over the following 15 months sent a total of 300 letter bombs to addresses in Israel, to Israeli representatives abroad, to prominent Jews, and even to President Nixon. Subsequently, however, Israel evidently retaliated, launching a letter bombing campaign of its own, aimed primarily at PLO and Black September targets; in combination with greater postal security both within and without Israel, this contributed to the demise of the letter bombing tactic as a popular terrorist outlet.

Among all the terrorist tactics employed by the Palestinians, none had a greater impact on world consciousness than that of aircraft hijacking. In the early years of its employment (the first Palestinian hijacking occurred in July 1968), the tactic was largely propagandistic in value, and was aimed at bringing the Palestinian problem to the attention of the international community. The climax of the hijackings of September 1970 focused on a series of Jordanian aircraft, in reaction to Jordan's moves against the Palestinians. Now additional motives were introduced – including financial extortion, revenge and prison release. This trend reached a peak with the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane by the PFLP in October 1972, with the aim of convincing the West German government to release the Black September members imprisoned there after their barricade-hostage operation against the Israeli Olympic team. In all, Palestinian groups hijacked 29 aircraft between 1968 and 1977. Between 1977 and 1984, no Palestinian hijacking was attempted, the result of both greater airport security and the growing realization among the mainstream Palestinian terror groups that hijacking had become politically counterproductive.

Not surprisingly, those airports from which planes were successfully hijacked in the mid-1970s – including Athens, Dubai, Bombay and Beirut – were not known for the high quality of their security. Ever since, hijackings seem to be a function of the interplay between security measures in airports and the level of sophistication of the terrorists.

Another important tactic introduced by Palestinians into the international terrorist repertoire was hostage-taking. This tactic, initiated with the Popular Front's seizing of two hotels in Amman in 1970, reached its apogee with Black September's occupation of the Israeli quarters at the Olympic Village in Munich in September 1972. Other well known incidents in this category have included the occupation of the Israel Embassy in Bangkok, the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait, the seizure of a train carrying Israel-bound Soviet-Jewish immigrants in Austria, the occupation of OPEC headquarters in Vienna and the capture of a Greek ship in Pakistan.

While this high-risk tactic obviously required a high level of planning and organizational discipline, its attraction lay primarily in the media and public attention it drew to the Palestinian cause. With the strengthening of countermeasures among affected security services, however, it began to go into decline, and the occupation of the Egyptian Embassy in Turkey by Saiqa operatives in July of 1979 was the last time it was used during the period under study. Since the end of the 1970s, special agencies and commando units have been established by many states, thus creating a military option for dealing with operations such as barricade-hostage or hijacking (which is actually a barricade-hostage situation located in a plane). At the same time, the adoption of a no-negotiation posture by many affected governments and the meting out of heavy prison sentences to perpetrators may also have contributed to the demise of this tactic.

Palestinian terrorist groups also resorted to kidnapping, though never outside the Middle East. The only countries to be affected by this tactic were Lebanon and Jordan. Lastly, the poisoning of Israeli oranges in Europe in 1978 was an unprecedented, one-time campaign.

An analysis of all the different tactics employed by the various Palestinian terrorist groups shows some interesting correlations with respect to specific modes of operation favored by individual groups. In some cases, this distinctive terrorist signature has been used to identify the perpetrators in actions either where no group claimed responsibility, or where the use of an alias obscured the perpetrator's identity (see Table 8).

The Abu Nidal group, which carried out the greatest number of actions overall, has largely limited itself to armed assault; more than two-thirds of its actions, or 38 percent of all such Palestinian activity, were registered in this latter category.

The original Black September group involved itself in a wide variety of activities, including hostage-taking, hijacking and armed assault, though in the field of letter bombing it carved out a specialty for itself, accounting for 59 percent of the total in this category.

The PFLP made use of all the tactics with the exception of the dispatch of letter bombs. Its specialty was aircraft hijacking: 11 of the 28 attributable cases in this category (39 percent) were PFLP operations. Like the PFLP, the Wadi Haddad factions employed all of the known tactics except for letter bombing. Their specialty was planting bombs, and this accounted for 22 percent of overall activity in this category.

Terrorist Methodology: The Common and the Specific

There are a number of methodological features common to all terrorist organizations. One is their attempt to link actions to specific events in order to reinforce the propaganda value of the incident. For example, they act on fixed dates – the anniversary of the creation of the terrorist organization involved, revolutionary anniversaries, anniversaries of "oppressive events" or other important political occasions. In the Palestinian case this linkage has manifested itself in actions taken on or near Israel Independence Day or during special international appearances made by Palestinian leaders such as Yasir Arafat. Actions have also been linked chronologically to important internal developments within the PLO, such as meetings of the Palestinian National Council. The events in Jordan of September 1970, for example, were a direct outcome of a PRC meeting in June of that year which forbade Palestinian organizations in general, and the Popular Front in particular, from hijacking civilian aircraft. In response to this decision, Front leader Ahmed Yamani declared that his organization would continue harassing the enemy as it saw fit outside the Israel-administered territories and in all other arenas not covered by the decision¹⁵ – a declaration it shortly put into practice with the takeover of the Intercontinental and Philadelphia hotels in Amman. Three months later, three airliners were hijacked to Zarqa in the Jordanian desert – an act that impelled King Hussein to expel the Palestinian organizations from his country.

By the same token, Palestinian groups have also timed their actions to sabotage impending political developments not to their liking, or to register opposition to developments they oppose. An example of the former occurred after the October 1973 war, on December 17 of that year, when terrorists from ANYO seized a Lufthansa airliner at Rome airport and forced it to fly to Kuwait in order to pressure for the cancellation of a Middle East Conference due to open in Geneva the following day.¹⁶ Under interrogation, the terrorists admitted that the operation had been ordered by Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi. Again as part of the Libyan attempt to frustrate the peace process in the Middle East, members of the same organization hijacked a British airliner in Dubai on November 22, 1974. This incident was specifically meant to embarrass Yasir Arafat, whose speech at the United Nations a week earlier had alarmed Palestinian extremists by its allegedly moderate tone.¹⁷ Another instance occurred with the wave of Saiqa-engineered attacks against Egyptian, American and Israeli targets in the wake of American-Israeli-Egyptian peace efforts in 1978. Here Fatah too attempted several spoiler attacks, but all were foiled.

Another phenomenon common to many Palestinian terrorist organizations is their tendency to use aliases. In most case this has been done to obscure the identity of the group involved, while at the same time making some sort of ideological or political statement. The most noteworthy use of an alias occurred when Fatah took on the cover name of Black September in 1970 in order to distance itself from operations which otherwise might have damaged the international image it sought to cultivate. The connection between the two organizations was only revealed in 1973 when the captured Abu Daoud admitted its existence to his Jordanian interrogators.

Another example involved Wadi Haddad and George Habash's Popular Front. It now appears that the alleged rift between Haddad and the Front was a ruse designed specifically to allow Haddad to carry out operations which, from a public relations point of view, Habash found unseemly.¹⁸ A number of actions involving Japanese Red Army terrorists and Palestinians – which at the time were claimed by the "Organization of Sons of the Occupied Territories" – were in fact carried out by the Popular Front. The first operation implemented by Japanese terrorists on behalf of the PFLP was the assault at the Lod airport terminal on May 30,1972. Later incidents were the hijacking of a Japanese jet on July 20,1973; the attack on the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait on February 26, 1974; and the planting of a bomb in the office of a Japanese airline company in Berlin, on May 29,1974. The Front is similarly implicated in an attempt by the Mohammed Budia Commando – a known Wadi Haddad alias – against an El Al plane in Paris in January 1975. The Wadi Haddad group used other aliases as well. Its assaults at the December 1975 OPEC conference in Vienna and the hijacking of the Air France jet to Entebbe seven months later were both carried out under the alias "Arm of the Arab Revolution;" Haddad's hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu in October 1977 used the name "Struggle Against World Imperialism." After Haddad's death in 1978, his organization split into two groups: one kept the original "Wadi Haddad Faction-Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine" identification, while the other, in a reference to the date of Israel's establishment, became "The May 15 Organization."

Saiqa also made use of aliases. After the "Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution" took credit for the seizure of a train carrying Jewish immigrants to Israel in September 1973, Saiqa leader Zuheir Muhsein admitted that it and the Eagles were one and the same.¹⁹ The Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction may also be a cover name for a Palestinian organization, probably Salim Abu Salem's PFLP-Special Operations (which has cooperated with the French group Action Directe).

Outstanding in this" vein was the Abu Nidal group. Seizing the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Paris in September 1973, the group used the name "The Punishment." Three years later, operating against Syrian targets, it became "Black June" (a reference to the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in June 1976). Its assassination attempt against the Syrian foreign minister and murder of an Egyptian journalist were carried out under the name "Black June and September;" its numerous actions against Fatah members used the name "Fatah-Revolutionary Council" or "Fatah – The True Road;" activities in Jordan, against Jordanian diplomats or in Gulf countries went under the name "Arab Revolutionary Brigades;" and the name "Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims" was used when it attacked British targets in 1984.

Thus the use of aliases by Palestinian terror groups served primarily to conceal an organization's true identity, still revealing the national identity of the perpetrators. Yet of all the Palestinian terror actions registered, some 20 percent went unclaimed by any group. This phenomenon became particularly noticeable after 1974. It appears to be related to the fact that after that date few mainstream terrorist groups were active intentionally, and those that were tended to emphasize the armed struggle ideology rather than their individual identities. Moreover, a high proportion of Arab targets were then under attack, and the perpetrating organizations were probably not interested in severing the prospects of their future relations with the targeted states.

Beyond these general tendencies, a number of features can be discerned that are specific to particular terrorist groups. In certain incidents – including those where no organizational responsibility has been claimed – this individual signature has been useful in identifying the group involved (see Table 8).

In the case of the PFLP – and the Wadi Haddad factions which followed its line – the use of both foreign terrorists and highly sophisticated explosive charges were a fairly regular feature. The resort to foreigners – a step designed to confound security authorities – first surfaced with the arrest in London of two English mercenaries in December 1969 on charges of attempting to blow up an El Al plane. A Nicaraguan Sandinist, Patrick Arguello, was killed while participating in the Popular Front's hijacking of an El Al plane in September 1970. This organization also carried out attacks in cooperation with the Japanese Red Army and with the German Red Army Faction. Foreign terrorists also took part in events that occurred on Israeli soil: a Swiss, Bruno Bregeut, was arrested in June 1970 carrying explosives when he arrived in Israel; explosives were smuggled into the country in April 1971 by the "French Network" (the Bardley sisters, the Burghalter couple, and Evelyn Baij). All of these foreigners were dedicated terrorists who were conscious of their acts.

The PFLP-GC also tended to involve foreigners. Unlike the PFLP, however, involvement here was meant to be unwitting: for example, a favorite PFLP-GC tactic was to attempt to blow up El Al airplanes through the use of women bomb carriers who had been duped by Palestinian "friends." Wadi Haddad's 15 May faction was also reported to be using this tactic with a variation that involved the introduction of sophisticated explosive suitcases onto Israeli aircraft:²⁰ in one incident, in December 1983, such a suitcase was reported to have traveled from Athens to Tel Aviv to London and back to Athens without discovery.²¹

The use of specific types of weaponry has also served as a means of identifying particular terrorist groups. Wadi Haddad, when he functioned as the PFLP Operations Officer, was closely identified with the use of sophisticated specialty explosive charges: foreign terrorists who went through Haddad's explosives course at his South Yemen headquarters spoke of a degree of training that went beyond that available in other Palestinian terror groups.

The PFLP-GC is also known for the sophistication of its ordnance. This group was the first to use explosive charges attached to barometric fuses on board aircraft (in the episodes involving the blowing up of a Swissair plane and the attempt on an Austrian plane in 1970); at the same time it became an ardent devotee of the letter bomb tactic, possibly with the assistance of Syrian intelligence.

Most prominent in the dispatch of letter bombs was Black September which, as an extension of the intelligence arm of Fatah, possessed the appropriate logistical resources to obtain accurate information on potential targets. This intelligence capability soon emerged as a characteristic Black September feature; another was the wide range of its targets and action areas: they extended from Korea and Singapore to the United States.

We have already noted the Abu Nidal group's proclivity toward armed assault. Its spectacular attacks, aimed at mass killing as well as individual murder, have had several common trademarks: the use of small hit teams (usually about three persons) or a lone gunman, arms smuggled through diplomatic bags (usually Iraqi), and rapid and well planned getaways have all made the prevention of attacks or the subsequent capture of the terrorists extremely difficult.

The Function of International Terrorism in the Overall Palestinian Armed Struggle

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the resort to the use of international terrorism came as a result of the desire to expand the scope of the Palestinian struggle in a particularly conspicuous way. It was motivated primarily by the adoption of stringent security measures within Israel, and by the limitations posed by some Arab states on terrorist activities emanating from their territory. Within this context the question arises as to how the struggle inside and outside of Israel was divided within the overall terrorist complex; was there a direct connection between actions undertaken within Israel, in the administered territories and on Israel's frontiers on the one hand, and acts committed outside of these areas on the other (see Table 9)?

Between 1968 and 1984 only 3.9 percent of all Palestinian terror acts occurred outside of Israel. In the years 1971-1984 international incidents comprised 10.7 percent of total Palestinian terrorist activity. While this percentage too seems very low, three brief observations appear in order. First, after 1971 the bulk of Palestinian terrorism occurred within Israel. Many of these incidents were the spontaneous acts of individuals rather than carefully planned operations by terrorist organizations; as such, the data concerning the organized effort inside Israel as indicated in Table 9, are somewhat exaggerated.

Secondly, in general specific terrorist actions outside of Israel occurred on a more sophisticated and grandiose scale than their internal Israeli counterparts: while there is an obvious qualitative difference between leaving a small bomb near a bus stop in Jerusalem and hijacking an airplane in Rome, both appear without statistical distinction in the tables chronicling terrorist acts. Finally, there is a salient difference between the efforts of Palestinian terrorists acting outside of their target country and those of other organizations: even groups such as the Italian Brigate Rosse, the French Action Directe or the German Red Army Faction tend to restrict their operations to their home countries. Small separatist-nationalist organizations like the anti-Turkish Armenians or the anti-Yugoslav Croats, only operate outside their natural "base" countries because of the lack of infrastructure there or due to strict security measures taken by their target governments. Thus the resort to terrorism abroad in these cases is actually a matter of having no other option, though even here foreign operations usually take place in countries where exiles reside. Those terror groups which do possess an infrastructural base in the target country – for example, the Irish Republican Army, or the Basque ETA – tend to operate within that country (Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain) and only infrequently hit at targets in the "mother country" – England or non-Basque Spain. Unlike the Palestinians, they almost never operate in neutral foreign locales.

Palestinian organizations have been unique in the sense that their international activity occurs not only in the Arab world (their natural base) but, to a great extent, in neutral countries. In their case, and unlike other organizations, the launching of terrorist campaigns in the international arena stems from their strategic perception of the armed struggle. This policy (however facilitated by assistance given to the organization by Palestinians abroad or Arab diplomatic representations) has served as the basic explanation for the extended effort that Palestinians have invested in international operations, which is greater than those of other organizations.

Over the years, a number of important changes have occurred in the mix of Palestinian terrorist activity inside and outside of Israel. The Palestinian expulsion from Jordan in 1970 and 1971 brought about a sharp decrease in the number of terrorist incidents within Israel and the administered territories, and a parallel increase in the number of actions outside of Israel. In all, some 30 percent of Palestinian terrorist activity in 1973 took place outside of Israel – the highest proportion for any year under study.

In 1974, with the Fatah decision to abstain from international terrorism, the wheel turned again. In that year the proportion of international terrorist acts within the whole was only 7.8 percent and the next year it decreased still further. Then in 1976 the proportion rose again – to about 20 percent – largely as a result of a downturn in activity inside Israel occasioned by the Lebanese civil war and the Syrian invasion of that country, and due to international terrorist initiatives carried out by the Wadi Haddad factions and Abu Nidal. Subsequently, internal Israeli activity once again increased – "Chaging the international component to about 10 or 12 percent.

Terrorist activities outside of Israel increased in an absolute sense in the immediate wake of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement (mainly as a result of attacks against Egyptian, American and Israeli targets), dropped in 1980, then rose again in 1981, mostly due to a rise in the number of attacks against Arab targets. In a relative sense, its proportion of the whole in 1980 and 1981 was about 7 percent.

In 1982 there was a significant rise in international terrorist activity (carried out for the most part by the Abu Nidal and Wadi Haddad factions) directed primarily at Israeli and Jewish targets and presumably motivated by Israeli actions in Lebanon. In 1983 the PLO refrained from operations outside of Israel due to political considerations, accompanied by the need to reorganize, and again it was the Abu Nidal faction which carried out the lion's share of international activity – against Arab targets. In 1984 there was a further rise in international terrorism; but by then Fatah had managed to overcome some of the effects of the war in Lebanon and the rebellion of 1983, Fatah's western sector department reorganized in Jordan, and the significant increase in the volume of activity within Israel kept the international proportion relatively low.

While terrorism inside and outside of Israel are statistically separate, the latter has had a pronounced operational influence on the former. This was particularly true in 1974, when Fatah decided to employ attention-grabbing tactics inside Israel itself, partially in an effort to overcome the decrease in media attention that was expected to occur in the wake of the organization's decision to refrain from international terrorism. The specific tactic chosen – named "Leapfrog" – involved sea or land penetration of the Israeli frontier followed by large scale hostage taking.²³

During the first half of 1974, while the issue of activity in the international arena was still being discussed by the PLO, the PFLP-GC seized premises in Kiryat Shemona, the Democratic Front occupied a school in Ma'alot, and the PFLP-GC and Fatah took over buildings in Kibbutz Shamir and Nahariya respectively. Three similar operations were undertaken in the second half of 1974 and three more in 1975 – after Fatah managed to pass the resolution to terminate activity abroad. The last "Leapfrog" operation implemented before the Lebanon War occurred in April 1980, when terrorists seized hostages at Kibbutz Misgav Am. By then, as a result of Israel's efforts to seal its northern border and block the approach routes by sea, the number of foiled attempts significantly surpassed successful incidents.

In July 1981 an agreement was reached under which the PLO committed itself to refrain from further offensive operations within Israel in exchange for Israeli restraint in attacking the organization's installations in Lebanon. Despite the fact that the agreement was theoretically limited to the Lebanon theater, the PLO also refrained from attacking Israel via Jordan – not only because of the difficulty involved in circumventing Jordanian opposition to the launching of such attacks, but also because the PLO feared providing Israel with a pretext for hitting back at its Lebanon bases in a large scale land operation.

4. International Reaction

International reaction has been one of the factors which influenced the development of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. Of the many countries in which operations were carried out, some were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to the degree of providing direct support, while others were indifferent, and still others, unambiguously opposed.

The Arab countries, principal supporters of the Palestinian organizations, were themselves affected by terrorism directed at their representatives and their interests in diverse countries, sometimes to the extent of feeling compelled to react against the offenders. These reactions strained relations with Palestinian organizations, brought about internal organizational pressures for a change in the selection of targets, and even produced second thoughts as to the effectiveness of the use of terrorism as a tool for furthering the interests of the Palestinian revolution.

The reaction of Israel, the principal victim of Palestinian terrorism, was also an important factor in the development of Palestinian terror strategy. Israel displayed a more or less consistent policy of prevention, deterrence and reaction to Palestinian terrorism, and this contributed greatly to changes in the character of that terrorism outside its borders.

Most of the Palestinian operations outside of Israel were implemented in Western Europe. Hence this arena is of special importance in examining the patterns of reaction to the development of the Palestinian terror phenomenon. Enforcement disincentives, prevailing political attitudes and legislative processes all exerted a powerful influence on the Palestinians. Some of the measures taken served to deter terrorists and make them change their methods, while others encouraged the terrorist organizations in the pursuit of their international activities.

The Attitude of the Arab States

The Arab states displayed a twofold attitude to Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. The first aspect was defensive. Given the Israeli policy of placing responsibility for terrorist actions on the country from which they were launched, Jordan and particularly Lebanon had a greater problem because of their inability to prevent the organizations from using their territory as a base. Egypt and Syria, for whom the curbing of Palestinian activities was a matter of no great effort, displayed attitudes more or less unaffected by the pressure of direct Israeli threat – as did other Arab states that have no common border with Israel. The second problem faced by Arab states from terrorism outside of Israel involved their own interests. The high proportion of attacks on Arab targets in the overall complex of terrorist events reflects a significant deviation from the basic goals of the Palestinian resort to the international arena. Moreover, in most cases these actions occurred under the inspiration and guidance of other Arab countries; in exchange for such services, the perpetrators were provided with weapons, training and territorial sanctuary.

Opposition to Palestinian Terrorism – The Conservative States

Primarily because Jordan and Lebanon were the principal victims of the consequences of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel, they emerged as its sharpest Arab opponents.

At the end of the 1960s Jordan openly denounced the hijacking of aircraft by the PFLP, and while the triple hijacking to the Jordanian desert at Zarqa in September 1970 did not lead directly to the Jordanian decision to demolish the terrorist infrastructure in Jordan, it did exercise a certain catalytic effect.

Jordan also saw fit to condemn other Palestinian terrorist actions during the period, and in this regard its reaction to the Japanese Red Army massacre at Tel Aviv airport in May 1972 is particularly instructive: King Hussein himself decried the action, defining its planners and sponsors - the PFLP – as mentally deranged. The only other official condemnation of the raid in the Arab world came from the Lebanese foreign minister, Khalil Abu Hammad, who said that his country, "condemns every action, regardless of its nature or source, that may harm innocent civilians and outsiders."¹

Not surprisingly, Jordan also criticized the activities of Fatah/Black September which began in March 1971 with a series of attacks against Jordanian targets and culminated with the murder in Cairo of the Jordanian prime minister. The Jordanians' arrest of Abu Daoud in February 1973 permitted them to reveal the Fatah/Black September partnership and led to Amman's outright denunciation of the Black September leadership. Jordan also vigorously opposed demands made by the attackers of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum to free Abu Daoud and other Palestinian terrorists.

The cessation of Black September's activities, the transfer of Palestinian operations to Lebanon, and the diminution of fears concerning Israeli reprisals helped bring about a certain moderation in Jordanian reaction to Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel in the late 1970s and early 1980s; however, with the resumption of attacks on Jordanian targets by Abu Nidal in 1983 –probably under Syrian instigation – condemnation began anew.

While in 1970 and 1971 Jordan succeeded in liquidating the Palestinian threat, Lebanon found itself caught uncomfortably between the Palestinian hammer and the Israeli anvil and never quite succeeded in completely extricating itself. The Israeli operation at Beirut airport in December 1968, in which twelve civilian airliners were destroyed on the ground, made it clear to the Lebanese government that Israel was willing to act forcibly against countries from which anti-Israeli terrorist operations were launched. Consequently, the Lebanese press began to condemn all terrorist acts outside of Israel – playing down the fact that many of the most active terrorist organizations were headquartered in Beirut - and drew special attention to the decisiveness of Israeli reprisals for Palestinian terrorist acts.

After the PFLP attack on an El Al plane in Zurich in February 1969 – an attack which, with Israeli retaliation doctrine in mind, the PFLP was careful to portray as having emanated not from any Arab state but from territory held by Israel² – Lebanon expressed its outright opposition. As the newspaper Al-Jarida wrote: "Loyalty to commando activity prompts us to say that this raid at Zurich has been an embarrassment to the commandoes. It would have been better from the beginning to have placed civil aviation outside the terrorist realm." Similarly, even while praising the bravery of the commandoes involved, Al-Amal criticized the attack: "No matter how daring and courageous this attack is said to have been, there is no doubt that it exposes the legality and integrity of commando activity to a challenge."³

Well aware of the Israeli threat of retaliation, the Lebanese continued to condemn terrorism outside the borders of Israel throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Nevertheless, the IDF attacked terrorist targets within Lebanon in reaction to provocations, while repeated Lebanese claims that the Lebanese government was unable to prevent attacks originating in its territory may have spared Lebanese institutions from reprisals - but not Lebanese territory.

Saudi Arabia also condemned Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel, not so much out of fear of Israeli retaliation, but as a consequence of its generally conservative world view and concern for possible damage to Saudi economic interests. Because the Saudis have traditionally extended generous financial assistance to many of the terrorist organizations – particularly Fatah - they have normally been able to exert pressure on the PLO's operational stance and on its attitude to the development of terrorism outside of Israel.

The first experience of Saudi displeasure with Palestinian activities came in May 1969 when, in response to damage visited upon an oil pipeline, Saudi assistance to the PLO was frozen and the Saudi foreign minister demanded that a joint Palestinian military command impose its control on all PLO members. For his part, Arafat issued a communique denying PLO involvement in the pipeline episode and sent a delegation to Riyadh to try to appease King Faisal. Nevertheless, the affair did exacerbate relations between the Saudis and the PLO and ultimately made it more difficult for the organization to mobilize financial support from the wealthy Arab states.

An event of even greater significance in Saudi-Palestinian relations occurred with the Black September occupation of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum in March 1973 and the murder there of American and Belgian diplomats. This action brought immediate and sharp Saudi condemnation, together with threats to end financial support for the PLO in general, and for Fatah (which was directly accused of responsibility for the attack by Sudanese President Numeiri) in particular.⁴

Six months later a unit of the Abu Nidal group – using the alias "The Punishment Organization" - carried out the occupation of the Saudi Embassy in Paris, as a demonstration against both the Saudi attitude and Fatah submissiveness.

These two occupations of Saudi diplomatic premises brought great pressure to bear on the PLO to refrain from further international terrorist activity, not only from Saudi Arabia itself, but also from Jordan and Egypt. In the Khartoum incident, a Fatah operation undertaken by a satellite body was publicly exposed. and the significant financial benefits that the PLO as a whole garnered from the Saudis were consequently put into jeopardy. The resulting embarrassment, coupled with negative international reaction and the continuing threat of Israeli reprisals, led directly to Fatah's decision to cease terrorist activities outside of Israel.

For its part, Saudi opposition to international terrorism remained unchanged long after this decision was taken. When a West German plane was hijacked to Mogadishu in 1977, Riyadh exerted pressure on Somalia to allow a German commando team to overpower the hijackers at the airport there.⁵

In the final analysis, the attitude of Saudi Arabia greatly affected the development of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. As distinct from Lebanon, or for that matter Jordan, the Saudis could threaten Palestinian terrorist groups with the loss of important financial support and, at the same time, influence western governments attitudes on the Palestinian political question.

Support and Assistance: The Rejectionist States

The impact of Israeli reprisals on Lebanon was felt clearly in Syria which, though assisting the Palestinians throughout the years, restricted their activity within and from its territory. As far as is known, Syria has never condemned any terrorist action outside Israel, except those carried out against its own targets. The first such attacks occurred at the end of 1976 and were committed by the Abu Nidal group at the instigation of Iraq; ironically, Syria would later employ the Abu Nidal group for its own terrorist purposes.

On the offensive side, Syria established the Palestinian terrorist organization Al-Saiqa in 1967. This group carried out its first international operation in Austria in September 1973, seizing Jewish emigrants from the USSR as hostages. At the time, it was assessed that the real purpose of this attack was to divert Israeli attention from its borders on the eve of the Yom Kippur War.⁶ Al-Saiqa was particularly active as the Egyptian-Israeli peace process gathered momentum in the late 1970s. In 1979 it launched wide-ranging attacks against Egyptian, Israeli and American targets in Europe and the Middle East.

Even when Syria did not actually use terrorism for its own purposes, it refrained from acting against it. On two occasions hijacked aircraft were landed in Damascus. In the first – involving a TWA plane in August 1969 – the Syrians detained two Israeli passengers and used them as bargaining counters against the release of Syrian soldiers and civilians held in Israeli jails. In the second – in September 1974, involving the extortion of a million dollars by Japanese terrorists holding the French Embassy in the Netherlands - Syria allowed the fleeing Japanese to land in Damascus, freed them, took their booty, and sent the plane back to the Netherlands. In other incidents, Syria refrained from direct involvement.

The position of Iraq with respect to support for Palestinian terrorism was somewhat similar to that of Syria. In the early years, the Iraqis stood squarely behind the activities of such groups as the PFLP. The Ba'th regime provided the Front with substantial assistance; in appreciation, George Habash presented Iraqi President al-Baqr with the personal pistol of an organization member killed in a 1969 action in Zurich. Six months later, al-Baqr presented a combat uniform to the man who had tossed a grenade into the El Al office in Brussels.⁷ The cosiness of this relationship presumably fostered an assumption among the Iraqi leadership that it enjoyed a certain influence over the PFLP, and led it to ask the Front to free all the people kidnapped in the Jordanian desert aircraft hijacking of September 1970. When the Front refused, the Iraqis were offended and charged that "the detention of the hijack victims harms the Palestine cause and blackens the motives of the noble Fedayeen actions."⁸

This was, however, an unusual commentary; Iraq was traditionally one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Palestinian terrorism, particularly in its more extreme forms. When Wadi Haddad left the PFLP to protest its decision to refrain from aircraft hijacking, he initially set up headquarters in Baghdad before moving to South Yemen. After Haddad's death, one of the factions of his organization - the May 15 organization – relocated to his old base in Baghdad, while the other – the Popular Front-Special Operations – retained the headquarters in South Yemen. At the same time, Abu Nidal too established the infrastructure of his organization in the Iraqi capital. In both cases the resources of these terrorist groups were put at the disposal of the Iraqis and they eventually used them on an inter-Arab plane: the Abu Nidal group attacked Syrian targets in 1976, and the May 15 organization attacked Fatah members and legations in 1978.

With the rise to power of Muammar Qadhafi in late 1969, Libya, like Iraq, became an enthusiastic supporter of Palestinian terrorism. In 1972, following the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Libyan territory, the director general of the Libyan Ministry of Information stated that although his government opposed the hijacking of aircraft on principle, hijackings by Palestinians were justified.⁹ Thereafter, the Libyan regime allowed the Palestinians virtually free rein landing hijacked aircraft in Libya.

At the outset of 1973, Libya brought together disaffected Palestinians from the Black September and PFLP groups and established a new organization under the name "The Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine" (ANYO). The operations which this organization carried out over the next two years – there were some 15 in all – were among the most brutal and indiscriminate in the history of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. The organization disappeared in 1974, but Libya has continued to provide Palestinian terrorists with logistical assistance, including arms and a safe haven.

Following the rift within the PLO in the wake of the 1982 war, Libya actively sided with the radical anti-Arafat groups, which were generally aligned with Syria. These included the PFLP-GC – a long time Libyan protegé – the PFLP and Abu Musa's Fatah Rebels. Special operational relations were established between Abu Nidal's FRC and Libya. Abu Nidal was one of the key ANYO operatives in the early 1970s. His links with Libya continued after he founded his own group in 1974. Apparently, these links culminated in 1985 and early 1986 in direct Libyan involvement in Abu Nidal's operations against American and Israeli targets in Europe. The exposure of this operational cooperation (e.g., in the attacks in Rome and Vienna airports on December 27, 1985 and the bombing in La Belle discotheque in Berlin on April 9, 1986) precipitated the US punitive raid on Libya on April 15, 1986.

While Algeria did not go so far as to establish a terrorist organization of its own, it too has been an enthusiastic supporter of Palestinian terrorism. For example, the Algerians stood alone in the Arab world in praise of the sabotage of a pipeline in the Golan Heights in May 1969;¹⁰ they were the only country which defended the PFLP terrorists involved in the Jordanian desert hijackings; and they vigorously attacked Switzerland for trying the Palestinians implicated in the attack on an El Al aircraft at Zurich in 1969.¹¹ Algeria has also extended aid to Palestinian terrorists operating outside of Israel in the form of passports, arms, refuge and other logistical support (for example, in October 1972 a terrorist carrying an Algerian diplomatic passport was arrested in Amsterdam);¹² moreover, it is suspected that the European command center for Black September was located in the Algerian Consulate in Geneva.¹³

Algeria, like Syria, Iraq and Libya, believed in the concept of total struggle against Israel and accepted the notion that all measures hastening Israel's destruction were acceptable. As a whole, this Rejection Front of Arab states considered the Palestinian struggle as part of the general Arab struggle and viewed Palestinian terrorism as a substitute for direct warfare with Israel. At the same time, these countries realized the special use that could be made of Palestinian terrorist organizations on an inter-Arab plane and did not hesitate in its application; indeed, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s this resort to state-sponsored terrorism became one of Palestinian terrorism's more pronounced characteristics.

Egypt – Changing Policy

Before 1973 Egypt, the largest of the Arab states, took a fairly consistent position in favor of Palestinian activities outside of Israel, while at the same time criticizing specific actions as detrimental to the Palestinian cause. After the Yom Kippur War, however, and particularly in the wake of the interim agreements in Sinai, the Egyptians changed their policy and adopted a clear line against Palestinian terrorism - largely, it seems, because for the first time Egyptian targets began to be on the receiving line of Palestinian action.

In the late 1960s Egypt furnished integral assistance to the PFLP in accordance with its general support for Palestinian terrorism; in June 1969 President Nasser designated the PFLP as one of the four organizations toward whose support Egypt had committed itself.¹⁴ A few weeks later, the reliable Beirut newspaper Al Hayat revealed that Egyptian help had been instrumental in a number of spectacular PFLP operations, including the hijacking of the El Al plane to Algeria. According to this report, the hijackers' command post was in Cairo,¹⁵ and it was there that they held a press conference boasting of the success of the operation. (Interestingly, the Algerians apparently believed that the operation had been mounted by Egyptian intelligence to embarrass the Boumedienne regime.¹⁶)

In addition to the El Al aircraft hijacking, Egypt was also implicated in other terrorist activities. At the end of 1969, for example, a group of English mercenaries arrested in connection with an attempt to blow up an El Al plane said that both their training and the delivery of explosives had been carried out by the Egyptian embassy in London.¹⁷ Earlier that same year the semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper had expressed unqualified support for the attack on the El Al plane in Zurich, saying that it "proved that the will of the resistance will not falter despite all the enemy's counter-blows."¹⁸

In 1970 however, a slight shift in the Egyptian position became apparent. In reaction to the Black September triple hijacking in September of that year, Al Ahram commented: "One of the main goals of the battle is to gain world public opinion on the side of the Palestinian struggle and not to lose it. It is evident that the attack on international civil aviation does not encourage an international feeling of solidarity with the Palestinian course."¹⁹ However these reservations did not cover the entire gamut of terrorist actions. In reaction to the massacre at Tel Aviv airport in May 1972, Egyptian Prime Minister Dr. Aziz Sidki commented that the operation "proved that the Arabs [were] indeed capable of defeating Israel and it [the mission] destroyed the myth of Israeli superiority."²⁰

In March 1973, when Black September operatives took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Egypt was publicly silent, but a source in Cairo said that Egypt would be happy to provide asylum for the terrorists involved. According to a terrorist radio broadcast from Deraa, Egypt took no initiative in mediating the crisis; on the contrary, it was the terrorists who contacted the Egyptian ambassador in Khartoum, and asked for permission to fly to Cairo.²¹

Despite the generally pro-terrorist stand the Egyptians took on this and other operations, President Sadat soon began to understand the danger inherent in Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel and the damage that could be done to relations between moderate Arab states and the West – all the more so because the principal targets involved had been Saudi Arabian and Sudanese. The resultant Egyptian pressure on Fatah to moderate its acts, in combination with a number of other factors, evidently induced it to refrain from further terrorist activity outside of Israel.

The war of 1973 represented a major turning point in Egypt's attitude toward Palestinian terrorism. The interim agreements in Sinai, and the peace process which culminated in the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1979, exposed Egypt to direct action by Palestinian terrorists for the first time. In retaliation to verbal PLO attacks against it, Egypt closed the PLO radio station in Cairo and ultimately the PLO office there. At the same time it declared that physical attacks against Egyptian targets would affect Egyptian policy in the region.

Most of the terrorist actions against Egyptian targets were mounted under Syrian patronage either by Abu Nidal, or by the Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution – an Al-Saiqa alias. They caused the Egyptian minister of interior, Mohammed Nabawi Ismail, to warn the Syrians against further attacks on Egyptian targets: "We have our means and methods but they will not be carried out in the same inhuman and cheap way that you have planned against the Egyptian people."²² In fact, about two weeks after the Al-Saiqa attack on the Egyptian embassy in Ankara in July 1979, Saiqa leader Zuheir Muhsein was assassinated in Cannes. Al-Saiqa later accused the Egyptians of responsibility for the assassination, in collaboration with agents of Israel's Mossad.

Following these events, and the consequent cooling of relations with the PLO, Egypt moved firmly into the camp of the Arab moderate states and away from the rejectionist supporters of the use of terrorism in the international arena. The discrepancy between the rejectionist and the moderate states' attitude toward Palestinian terrorism grew deeper, with the latter becoming a preferred target for terrorism.

Israeli Reaction

Israel's reaction to Palestinian terrorism outside its borders was complex and multi-faceted. It involved diplomacy as well as overt and covert warfare.

At the end of 1968, Israeli leaders adopted a policy of deterrence and retaliation against Palestinian terrorism. It announced that the responsibility for Palestinian actions against Israeli targets would devolve on Arab governments which had assisted in their execution; this was, in effect, a continuation of an earlier policy which held Arab states directly responsible for terrorist activities within Israel which had been launched from their territory.

Following the hijacking of the El Al plane to Algiers and the attack at Athens airport, the Israeli authorities decided to undertake an operation which would make clear to the Arab states that further attacks on Israeli targets anywhere in the world would not go unanswered. In December 1968 Israeli commandoes raided Beirut airport and destroyed some 12 civilian aircraft there. International reaction was overwhelmingly negative, but Prime Minister Eshkol reiterated that countries supporting terrorists must bear responsibility for their actions.²³

In essence, the Beirut raid was geared toward deterring further attacks against civilian aircraft, and at the same time prodding Lebanon into taking steps to suppress terrorist activity launched from its territory. Replying to a question on whether the negative international reaction to the raid would influence the Israeli policy of retaliation, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban said: "We have no policy of retaliation. We have a policy of survival. If retaliation helps survival, we are for it."²⁴

When Golda Meir assumed the reins of government in 1969 following Levi Eshkol's death, she declared that the policy of holding Arab governments responsible for specific terrorist operations would continue.²⁵ Nevertheless, the negative international reaction following the Beirut raid had an important impact on Israeli policymakers: anti-terrorist operations of this kind were not repeated; instead, emphasis was placed on artillery bombardment, land raids in areas close to Israeli frontiers, and aerial bombing of terrorist headquarters and concentrations – rather than on non-terrorist targets in the host country. Israel adopted a policy of active self-defense which sanctioned attacks against terrorist concentrations unrelated to specific terrorist actions.²⁶ In this way, an attempt was made simultaneously to disrupt terrorist planning and to deter terrorists from undertaking future offensive operations.

The results of this new policy were mixed.²⁷ Jordan, for example, continued its policy of support for terrorist actions throughout the late 1960s despite the severity of Israeli military operations there. In Lebanon, weak central government control prevented Beirut from restraining the activities of terrorists even if it had wanted to do so. As for the terrorist organizations themselves, in some instances Israeli policy achieved a certain level of deterrence on Palestinian actions; in the main, however, the principal effect seemed to be on Israel's internal morale.

Nor did Israel undertake preventive measures inside Arab countries (except the commando raid against Black September leaders in Beirut in 1973); Israeli reprisals carried out in Arab states tended to be in response to particularly spectacular terrorist attacks.

In its battle against Palestinian terrorism, Israel also acted on the diplomatic plane. In the case of the El Al plane hijacked to Algeria, negotiations were held and the passengers eventually released in exchange for the freeing of 16 jailed terrorists by Israel. In the same vein, Israel returned two Syrian pilots in exchange for a pair of Israeli hostages held in Damascus following the hijacking of a TWA airplane there in 1969. The Israeli government handed over a number of bodies of terrorists to Arab countries several weeks after Thai authorities had intervened to halt the terrorist occupation of the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. This gesture to the Thai authorities was meant to appear unconnected with the terrorist incident.

At the time of the hijacking of the Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, Israel also appeared ready to negotiate and ultimately surrender to terrorist demands; only when convinced of the feasibility of a military option did the government leaders change their view.

In February 1970, following the blowing up of a Swissair plane, Israel called on foreign governments, airlines, and the Airline Pilots Association to adopt a firmer stance against Palestinian terrorism.²⁸ This demarche signaled the initiation of an Israeli policy to enlist the widest possible international cooperation in the battle against terrorism, in particular the Palestinian variety. Here Israel preferred not to initiate international anti-terrorist activities and legislation, but it firmly and systematically supported them.

Another important component in Israel's confrontation with Palestinian terrorism was its introduction of preventive security measures against possible terrorist attacks. The wave of aircraft hijacking in the late 1960s resulted in the placing of security personnel on El Al aircraft, the installation of electronic checking devices at Tel Aviv airport and the stationing of Israeli security men at foreign airports served by El Al. The attack on the embassy in Bangkok brought about the introduction of strict security arrangements in Israeli diplomatic establishments and other Israeli installations overseas. And the events at Munich in 1972 led to increased protection for official Israeli delegations traveling abroad.

This combination of enhanced technical means and increased vigilance foiled a number of terrorist attempts. But the main anti-terrorist development at the time took the form of a broad international effort to implement strict security measures at airports around the world and to establish intelligence links between security services in affected countries in order to make weapons shipments and getaways more difficult for terrorists. Still, Israel was one of the few states that stationed security personnel aboard its planes.

Nevertheless, Israel continued to place great emphasis on retaliation as a deterrent to future terrorist acts. In the wake of the Tel Aviv airport massacre in 1972, specific demands were voiced for the government to retaliate against leaders of terrorist organizations in order to make them pay personally for the activities of their emissaries. Writing in Ha'aretz, Dr. Eliahu Ben Elissar pointed out that according to the foreign press, in the 1950s Israel had taken reprisals against Egyptian intelligence officers responsible for introducing Fedayeen teams into Israel, and in the 1960s against German scientists working in Egypt. He concluded that a precedent existed for violent Israeli retribution against terrorist leaders.²⁹ (The only previous instance in which this was done took place — according to Arab sources — on July 5, 1970, when rockets were fired at the residence of Wadi Haddad in Beirut.)

Three weeks after the appearance of this article, PFLP spokesman and senior operational planner Ghasan Khanfani was killed when his automobile was blown up in Beirut. His successor, Bassam Abu Sharif, was badly wounded by a booby-trapped book several days later. Within the same month, Anis Sayagh, head of the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut was wounded by a letter bomb. Other letter bombs were sent to Shafiq al-Hut, head of the PLO office in Beirut and to a number of Fatah leaders including Marwan Dajani and Abu al-Hassan. Lebanese security officials claimed that Israeli intelligence was responsible for all of these attacks.

After the events at Munich in October 1972, the wave of letter bombing resumed. The PLO representatives in Algiers and Tripoli were wounded by letter bombs sent from Yugoslavia, other bombs blew up in a Beirut post office and still others were dismantled at the PLO office in Cairo. In all of these episodes, the propaganda organs of the terrorist organizations blamed Israeli intelligence.

By now it was clear that Israel had turned to a new policy of active warfare against the terrorists. In the words of Prime Minister Golda Meir, Israel would henceforth fight the terrorists on a "wide front" and would hunt them down wherever they were to be found.³⁰ Speaking to the Knesset, the prime minister emphsized that the war against terrorism could no longer be restricted to preventive and defensive measures: "Our war against the Arab terrorists...must be active in all that has to do with the detection of murderers, of their bosses, their actions and operations, to foil their designs and in particular, to stamp out the terrorist organizations."³¹ Major General (res.) Aharon Yariv was appointed advisor to the prime minister on combatting terrorism, and (according to non-Israeli sources) together with the Mossad director, Major General (res.) Zvi Zamir, was responsible for coordinating and conducting actions against PLO representatives in Europe — in particular the central figures involved in the planning of operations against Israeli targets.³²

In the years 1972 and 1973, a number of senior Fatah and PFLP representatives were assassinated and others wounded by sophisticated letter bombs. The campaign was halted only when Israeli agents, on the trail of Black September leader Ali Hassan Salameh, mistakenly killed an innocent Arab waiter in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer, and world public opinion reacted strongly. In the wake of this episode, Israel reverted to traditional diplomatic and defensive measures.

Before the Lillehammer fiasco, two spectacular operations were carried out against Palestinian leaders in 1973. In April that year commandoes raided a building in Beirut and killed Kamal Adwan, head of the international department of the PLO, Kamal Nasser, spokesman of the organization, and Yusouf al-Najjar (Abu Yusef), head of PLO intelligence and one of the leaders of Black September. In August, a civilian Lebanese plane thought — mistakenly — to be carrying PFLP leader George Habash, was intercepted and forced to land in Israel.

According to non-Israeli sources, Israel continued striking boldly at terrorist leaders long after the episode at Lillehammer; in 1979 Ali Hassan Salameh was killed by a car bomb in Beirut.³³ However, when other senior PLO leaders were struck down, it was often difficult to ascertain whether the perpetrators were Israeli, or belonged to the Abu Nidal group.

In the final analysis, it is difficult to evaluate the direct influence of Israeli measures on the conduct of Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. With respect to military retaliation, there is no doubt but that it failed to prevent terrorism launched from Jordan and Lebanon and that to a significant extent it played into the hands of terrorist leaders trying to involve Arab states in the anti-Israel struggle. On the positive side, diplomatic and political activity — aided by negative fallout from the terrorists' activities — brought about changes in the positions of many western countries, and these were manifested in improved anti-terrorist preventive measures and increased international cooperation against terrorism. Nevertheless, Israel's political offensive did not succeed in halting the PLO's growing international acceptance as a legitimate political entity. Ironically though, this failure worked indirectly to Israel's benefit: the more international recognition the PLO attracted, the greater the pressures within the organization to refrain from acts of international terrorism.

As for active countermeasures and selective assassinations, on the negative side, the Lillehammer fiasco produced widespread condemnation abroad and undermined Israel's international image, At the same time, the successful counterstrikes undoubtedly disrupted Palestinian terrorist organizations, and this led to a certain decrease in the number of terrorist attacks outside Israel.

Reactions in the West

The countries of Western Europe were the principal venues for Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel. Thus their reactions to this phenomenon are of special interest. At the same time, the United States, Israel's traditional close ally, served as a symbol of imperialism for leftist terrorists in general, and especially Palestinian terrorists. While the number of Palestinian attacks in the US itself was minimal, American representatives and installations abroad were frequent targets for attack.

In general, there has been a basic difference between the American reaction to international terrorism and that of other countries in the West. As early as 1972 the US declared itself unambiguously opposed to terrorism, and embarked on a number of diplomatic initiatives against countries which supported it; for their part, most of the Western European countries did little to combat Palestinian terrorism in its early years, and recognized only gradually that strong countermeasures would be necessary to combat it. Moreover, they were prepared to distinguish between the PLO's function as a purely terrorist entity and its self-defined role as a political pressure group — in the process granting it much sought-after legitimacy as the accepted representative of the Palestinian people.

American Reaction

The American reaction to Palestinian terrorism outside of Israel was consistent and uncompromising. From the very first, the United States condemned hijacking and all interference with civil aviation. It was an active participant in the activities of the International Civil Aviation Organization to put an end to such practices and to punish the perpetrators. While most of the American efforts in this regard were motivated by concerns stemming from the hijacking of US aircraft to Cuba, the American efforts also worked against Palestinian attempts. There were no Palestinian actions against American airliners inside the US, and no direct terrorist blackmail was ever employed by the Palestinians toward the United States.

Elsewhere, however, the US was a frequent victim of Palestinian terror. Numerous American targets were hit throughout the Arab world, mostly in Jordan in 1970 and in Beirut, in two waves: beginning in 1970 and peaking with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975; and in Lebanon as well as in Damascus — after the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1979. These actions included attacks on embassies, corporate bombings, and kidnappings of American diplomatic representatives and civilian nationals.

A number of American aircraft were also hijacked, but in no case were specific American concessions demanded by the hijackers. In fact, the only such demand occurred within the context of a non-US embassy takeover, when Black September gunmen holding the Saudi embassy in Khartoum in September 1973 demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian convicted of murdering Senator Robert Kennedy. At the time President Nixon reiterated that the United States would never bow to terrorist blackmail,³⁴ and he did so again at a memorial service for the American diplomats subsequently murdered by the Black September terrorists in Khartoum.³⁵ These assertions soon crystalized into a concrete American policy on terrorism: no negotiations with terrorists, and no concessions to terrorist demands. (The only exception to this policy occurred when food, clothing and building materials were distributed by local private suppliers among the poor of Beirut — as ordered by the Lebanese government, in order to obtain the release of an American military attaché kidnapped by the PFLP.)

In retrospect, the catalyst for the tough American policy on terrorism seems to have been the Black September action at the Munich Olympics. Although the United States was not directly involved, it responded by proposing an international anti-terrorist pact — considered by international law specialists as the best of its kind. This covenant was not accepted at the UN due to inter-bloc differences. But the US did then establish a Cabinet-level inter-departmental committee for combatting terrorism, to oversee the anti-terrorist struggle within the American government.

This rigorous American anti-terrorist attitude was not directed at Palestinian activity per se; rather, it was based on the United States' self-perception as defender of the free world. The policy has obviously been enhanced over the years by the fact that the US itself has served as a preferred target for terrorists all over the world: between 1968-1982, 43 percent of international terrorism was directed at American objectives.³⁶

This attitude — together with the special US relationship with Israel — had a profound influence on US policy toward the political aspects of the Palestinian problem. In 1975 Israel received a document signed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger committing the United States to refrain from all contacts with the PLO and not to recognize it until it accepted Israel's right to exist as well as UN resolutions 242 and 338.³⁷ Although there was some slight deviation from this commitment during the Ford presidency — US representatives conducted secret negotiations with PLO officials on the safety of US diplomats in Lebanon — it nevertheless set the official tone for US avoidance of contact with the PLO. In 1977 President Garter expressed his willingness to recognize the PLO if it accepted resolutions 242 and 338 without specifically committing itself to formal recognition of Israel,³⁸ and a month later this formula was further diluted when Carter proposed to upgrade the PLO's status in exchange for its acceptance of Resolution 242 alone.³⁹ Neither of these initiatives bore fruit — not a little because of the attitude of US public opinion toward the PLO. Nevertheless, they indicated a potential American willingness to accept the PLO as a legitimate partner in future negotiations.

The European Position

The European reaction to Palestinian terrorism differed substantially from that of the United States, primarily because of objective conditions which obtained in Europe. In the first place, Europe served as the principal venue for Palestinian action. Many of the attacks mounted there were extortionist in nature, and in coping with them the authorities were compelled to invoke procedures not used in the United States. In the second place, Palestinian terrorist organizations in Europe maintained close ties with a number of local terrorist groups. The existence of such links tempted some European governments to enter into secret arrangements with the Palestinians in order to forestall the possibility of local terrorists receiving Palestinian assistance. Thirdly, the Palestinian cause gained considerable sympathy in Europe, particularly after the 1973 war, and in consequence the PLO began to assume a measure of legitimacy as a purely political entity. The opening of PLO offices and information bureaux in a large number of European capitals made it possible for European leaders to maintain a channel of political and security contact with PLO leaders. Finally, because of the growing economic relationship between Western Europe and the Arab world during the 1970s, European countries began to fear antagonizing Arab opinion on the Palestinian question. Not only were large parts of Western Europe heavily dependent on Arab states for petroleum products, but the massive Arab wealth which the export of these products created, swelled a growing demand for sophisticated technological exports which the Europeans hoped to fill.

The sum total of these factors led the European countries to treat the Palestinian terrorist organizations with what can only be described as extreme indulgence. Terrorists captured enroute to missions were frequently released after interrogation. Those captured during or after the execution of missions were often jailed for brief periods of time, their release obtained by subsequent terrorist acts or motivated by European fears that continued detention would inevitably encourage such acts. In cases where prison sentences were actually imposed, they were usually light.

Secret contacts with the PLO were maintained by a number of countries with a view to permitting the Palestinians to engage in unrestricted political activity in exchange for pledges to refrain from engaging in terrorism. The countries involved in these deals felt that the Palestinian question did not affect them directly and believed that by adopting a position of flexibility they could prevent terrorist reprisals and so save the lives of their own nationals. The anti-terrorist measures that they adopted thus seemed almost contradictory: conventions were signed on the need to safeguard civil aviation, but captured hijackers were released; security measures were stepped up and special teams established to coordinate anti-terrorist activities, but the terrorists they exposed or captured rarely completed their prison sentences. The only exception occurred when a member of Black September was arrested in December 1972 in London, on his way to carrying out an attack in Scandinavia. He was released after serving two-thirds of his eighteen-month prison sentence.

It was the Black September action at the Munich Olympics that compelled European governments to reexamine their attitudes toward Palestinian terrorism. In the wake of this attack, Bundestag Chairman Heinz Kuhn stated that henceforth the West German government would move forcefully against all those involved in terror; he warned that Arab states supporting terrorism would no longer be entitled to receive German aid.⁴⁰ In the event, however, much of this new anti-terrorism effort concentrated on prevention rather than on punitive law enforcement. Emphasis was placed on aircraft and airport security — and with good effect, as the use of the hijacking tactic by Palestinian terrorist organizations began to fade. Use of electronic monitoring devices at frontiers was enhanced, computers were more frequently used for suspect identification, and intelligence cooperation among affected countries improved. Yet, despite these measures, most western countries still preferred to avoid the complications that might arise from holding Palestinian terrorists in their jails: according to a survey carried out by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, of the 204 terrorists arrested outside the Middle East between 1968 and 1975, only three remained in prison at the end of 1975.⁴¹

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the European effort to eradicate terrorism through preventive action continued. International conventions were signed within the framework of the European Council (1976) and the EEC (1979). Nevertheless, the impression persists that within the context of a general rise in opposition to international terrorism as a whole, Palestinian terrorism somehow remained exempt. (The only exception to this trend has been, again, the United Kingdom. There, while the political status of the PLO gained sympathy with the Foreign Office, since the late 1970s Palestinian terrorists have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, in accordance with the firm stance taken by Prime Minister Thatcher and the British legal system.) The special privileges that were granted to Palestinian terrorists contradicted the tough anti-terrorism policy conducted by European states, especially toward the domestic, non-international dimension of the phenomenon.

The central question to emerge from any study of European reaction to Palestinian terror is whether the policy of leniency adopted by most European governments succeeded in its principal aim of preventing or reducing terrorist activity within the affected territory. The answer is ambiguous. On the one hand the three European countries best known for their policy of leniency to Palestinian terrorists — France, West Germany and Italy — were precisely those countries hardest hit by Palestinian terrorism. On the other hand, the PLO's 1974 decision to refrain from international terrorism, as well as later decisions, was directly related to its growing political acceptance among the European countries: in the final analysis the PLO was able to reach such a decision because it felt that a continuation of terrorist activities would threaten political respectability and undermine the possibility that it might eventually be involved in the formulation of a comprehensive Middle East settlement. At the same time however, it must be pointed out that except for several incidents carried out in Europe by Fatah, the PFLP, and Al-Saiqa — all PLO groups — most post-1974 acts were perpetrated by non-PLO extremists like the Abu Nidal group and Wadi Haddad factions, who gained considerable comfort from the overall attitude of European appeasement of Palestinian terrorism.

5. Conclusion: A Cost-Benefit Accounting

In early June 1974 the Palestinian National Council adopted a decision to set up a Palestinian authority in all areas eventually to be freed from Israeli rule. This move signaled for the first time PLO willingness to retreat from the uncompromising demand for the liquidation of the State of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its stead. It hinted at a readiness to partition the territory of the Land of Israel into two states — even if only as a tactical stage toward the ultimate goal.

Three months later, on October 14, 1974, the General Assembly of the United Nations recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and invited it to participate in a discussion on the problem of Palestine. Yasir Arafat addressed the General Assembly on November 13, 1974; following the Assembly debate, a resolution was passed declaring that the Palestinian people were entitled to national independence and sovereignty, and recognizing the PLO as a party to any solution of the Middle East conflict. A PLO representative was granted the status of observer at the United Nations and, a year later, invited to take part in a UN Security Council discussion in connection with Lebanon's complaint against Israel Air Force raids on Palestinian concentrations in Lebanon.

This series of events reflected a marked change in the international status of the PLO. This change had in fact commenced after the 1973 war, when the Arab countries exploited their control of oil supplies and its associated threat to the western economy to call for recognition of the PLO and for the isolation of Israel.¹ At the Arab summit meeting in Algeria in November 1973, the Arab countries, with the exception of Jordan, recognized the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. At the Arab summit meeting in Rabat in October 1974, a decision was taken granting the Palestinians the right to set up an "Independent National Authority" in any part of the Palestinian land from which Israel would withdraw. These Arab efforts to grant the PLO international recognition — in parallel to the PLO's own signals to western countries — bore fruit.

Representatives of the PLO functioned unofficially in a number of European capitals from the early 1970s, but beginning in 1975 the international political position of the organization became even more firmly established: in July 1975 the PLO was permitted to open an office with diplomatic status in Cyprus; in October, an "Information Office" in France; and in November, a similar office in Sweden. A representative of the PLO began operating in Italy out of the Representation of the Arab League (in November 1976 an office was opened), and in Geneva, Switzerland, a PLO representative to international organizations took his place. In June 1976 an information bureau opened in Germany, and three months later, in Austria (where diplomatic recognition was granted in March 1980). In Belgium an office was opened in November 1976. Independent offices were opened in Spain and Luxemburg in 1977; in Malta and Turkey (both with diplomatic status) in 1979; and in Greece, in 1980 (it became an embassy in November 1981).

Official representatives of the PLO also functioned in Eastern Europe and throughout Asia and Africa. By 1985 the total number of PLO representatives worldwide exceeded one hundred (see Appendix 2, which notes the years when representatives began acting, not when official offices were opened).

Paradoxically, one of the central factors that led to the transformation of the PLO from what was seen as an out-and-out terrorist organization into a recognized political entity with a legitimate stake in the solution of the Middle East problem, was the Palestinian recourse to terrorism outside of Israel. It was precisely the wave of terrorism — beginning in the 1960s with the PFLP and continuing through the early 1970s with Black September — which succeeded in conveying the necessary political message. As George Habash reportedly said: the Palestinian people were oppressed and the world was not aware of their situation. After the Palestinian expulsion from Jordan in 1970 the message was amplified: in the conception of Black September the time had come to force upon the world recognition of the fact that the Palestinian people were suffering, and to demand that it do something to redress that suffering.

International terrorism has, in fact, succeeded for the Palestinians. Public opinion in the West has found it increasingly difficult to ignore the threatening poses of Palestinians carried in newspapers and on television, and traditional sympathy for Israel has been to some extent modified by calls for a peaceful solution of the Middle East conflict that recognizes the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In a way, the Palestinians have succeeded in using the media to transmit their message. In effect, they sold the world the notion that the Palestinian problem lies at the core of Middle East turmoil. This success, in combination with the growing economic power of Arab states in the early 1970s, resulted in international legitimization of the PLO.

This overall Palestinian success also suggests an Israeli failure to persuade international opinion that in fact the PLO was no more than an umbrella organization for an unholy coalition of terrorist groups bent on Israel's destruction.

Although the Palestinian organizations advanced their political struggle by means of international terrorism, the greatest boost to their status undoubtedly took place immediately after the drastic reduction in these activities that occurred in 1974: in other words, terrorism benefited its perpetrators not only through the continuity of terrorist acts themselves, but also by the perpetrators' decision to refrain from these acts. PLO leaders recognized that the cumulative effect of terrorist acts would result in the PLO being considered an irrational terror organization with which there was no point in talking. Since this was liable to torpedo their efforts to gain international recognition, they determined to refrain from such acts. They also forced their stand on more extremist groups within the PLO, particularly the Popular Front. In retrospect, this decision to call off the international terror campaign was a brilliant political stroke: it signaled the West that while terrorism was a permanent element of the Palestinian repertoire, the PLO had, at least for a time, decided to commit itself to a peaceful political path. The signal clearly got through: from 1974 onwards, the PLO was a political reality that the West could not afford to ignore.

At the same time, the impact of newly acquired Arab oil wealth cannot be ignored as a factor in Palestinian political success. Indeed, the fact that the deterioration in the PLO's position in the West following the Lebanon War was accompanied by a significant drop in the economic influence of the Arab oil producers, suggests that the Arab oil weapon may have been as important as the Palestinian recourse to international terrorism in bringing about PLO legitimization in the West.

While the Palestinian resort to international terrorism brought the Palestinian movement significant gains, it was also not without its debits and, needless to say, PLO leaders have been aware of this. Thus after 1974 they strictly maintained the policy of refraining from activity outside of Israel, even against the backdrop of internal conflicts within the organization. New guidelines presented the adoption of the political and diplomatic struggle as complementary to, and reinforcing, the armed struggle, as declared by Arafat when he addressed the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974.² The armed struggle option was not eliminated, and 1974-1975 witnessed repeated attempts at infiltration into Israel to perpetrate spectacular hostage-taking incidents. These operations, however, were presented as legitimate: according to the PNC resolution of March 1974, the struggle within the occupied territory in all forms — military, political and popular — constitutes the central link of PLO strategy. Simultaneously, this solution delegitimized the resort to armed activity in the international arena.³

The damage to PLO political prestige was only one of the negative effects that could be related to Palestinian terrorist activity outside of Israel. Thus, when Palestinian international terrorism targeted Arab interests, it sometimes caused deterioration in relations between the PLO and Middle East states. On such occasions, the organization was put under pressure, its activity restricted, assistance or funds frozen, and measures taken against the local Palestinian community. Palestinian and other Arab communities outside the Middle East were also hurt by terrorist action. Palestinian terrorist organizations relied on these communities for a variety of services — recruitment of cadres, mobilization of funds, general intelligence collation, smuggling and concealment of weapons, securing of escape routes, getaway assistance — and with the beginning of terrorist attacks they came under close scrutiny from local authorities. In Europe, where the Palestinian and general Arab community numbers in the hundreds of thousands — among them many respectable and prominent businessmen and intellectuals — considerable damage was done to the Palestinian/Arab image. In addition, relations between the PLO and European states — those which allowed it to conduct political activity as long as it refrained from terrorist operations within their territory — deteriorated. Terrorist incidents, even when perpetrated by non-PLO groups, reduced the validity of secret agreements and therefore disrupted PLO access to local financial and personnel resources. In some cases, such as in Munich following Black September's Olympic attack, young Palestinians in no way connected with terrorist activities were expelled. At the same time, Arab passport holders became subject to particular scrutiny — and sometimes harassment — at European airports. After the blowing up of a Swissair plane in February 1970 the Swiss government decided to grant visas only to those Arabs known personally to Swiss consular officials in the issuing countries, to Arabs seeking to enter Switzerland for humanitarian reasons, or to Arabs whose activity serves the Swiss national interest.⁴ The explosion aboard an Austrian Airlines plane, which occurred on the same day in February 1970, induced the Austrian authorities to invoke similar restrictions. In Sweden, in March 1973 the government enacted special legislation to prevent the entry of Palestinian terrorists to its territory.⁵ This measure was stimulated by the September 1972 hijacking of a SAS plane by Croat terrorists; it initially listed only Croats and Palestinians as potential terrorists, but was later extended to include Germans and Japanese, too. Even in countries which did not adopt special legislation, Arab travelers who could not provide proof that they were free from terrorist connections were sometimes denied entry at air and sea ports (a restriction which ultimately led Palestinian terrorist organizations to enlist non-Arab help in carrying out their operations).

Non-Israeli media sources reported on another problem created by Palestinian terrorism: the fear and disruption engendered by Israeli reprisal campaigns. As outlined above, after Black September's Munich operation Israel adopted a policy of striking directly at those responsible for international terrorism within the Palestinian movement, through the dispatch of letter bombs and by means of assassination. As a result of these actions, senior members of terror organizations were compelled to take special precautions: after the Israeli raid in Beirut in April 1973 and the assassination of three Black September leaders, the PLO command in Lebanon was dispersed to a number of countries and Fatah headquarters moved to Damascus.⁶ The terrorist organiations lost some of their best men in reprisal actions carried out in Europe; though world media sources reported that they tried to strike back by hitting at Mossad targets (in Spain and Belgium for example) the damage caused was significant. It was particularly reflected in the need to keep a low profile of presence and activity, and the constant atmosphere of fear and suspicion that prevailed among the organizations' operatives.

At the time however, the policy of retaliation produced a certain gain for the Palestinians, as its perpetrators suffered in the court of world opinion for what were viewed by some as actions characteristic of a terrorist modus operandi. In Europe in particular, the principal field of combat between Israel and the PLO, heavy losses in Israeli prestige were sustained.

Ail additional problem that terrorism outside of Israel created for the Palestinian movement was found in the internal conflicts that such actions engendered within and among the various Palestinian organizations. At the end of the 1960s, Fatah openly denounced the PFLP recourse to aircraft hijacking and similar tactics, and ultimately the debate spread to the ranks of the Front itself. Similar tensions arose within Fatah. Those who were in favor of activity in the international arena won, and the Black September organization was established. In the wake of the October War of 1973 and the spectacular terrorist actions which followed it — the attacks on passengers at the Rome airport in December 1973 and at oil installations in Singapore in January 1974 — a serious dispute again developed in the Executive Committee of the PLO.

The implication of all these arguments for Palestinian unity soon became apparent. The PFLP, the PFLP-GC and the PSF established the Rejection Front along policy lines in conflict with the general PLO policy; disunity was also apparent in the ranks of Fatah. After the expulsion from Jordan, a psycho-organizational dimension was added to the political considerations that led the PLO to resort to international terrorism: it had to prove to its own members that the defeat had not diminished its capacity to operate. It was not until the establishment of the Palestinian bases in Lebanon in the mid-1970s that this need was reduced, after which Fatah was able to enforce its policy — sometimes using violent means — on other PLO-member organizations. When the extremists within the PLO also abandoned terrorist activity outside of Israel, only the non-PLO Wadi Haddad factions and the Abu Nidal group remained in the international terrorist arena.

In totaling up the costs and benefits the Palestinian movement registered by practising international terrorism, there is a striking difference between the period 1968 to 1974 and that which followed. The earlier period saw a significant gain for the Palestinian cause. The struggle was transformed from a small local problem to a great international issue, largely as a propaganda by-product associated with a spectacular series of terrorist events. While restrictions on Palestinian populations in the West and in some Arab countries became more stringent and significant cracks began to appear within the facade of Palestinian unity — to say nothing of the disruption and fear engendered by reprisals against the terrorist leaders — on balance, the Palestinian cause profited. It was, in fact, precisely to safeguard the gains that had been registered until then that the 1974 decision to refrain from international terrorism was taken.

With the adoption of that decision, the Palestinian movement entered a distinctly political phase. Acts of international terrorism committed by extremist groups were condemned by the PLO as harmful to the Palestinian cause; because of the organizational distance the PLO had taken from the extremists, these acts did little to impair its political image. By the same token, spectacular acts of terrorism committed by the PLO within Israel came to be regarded as legitimate, and likewise did it little international harm.

Another interesting feature of the post-1974 period was the transformation — at least in part — of Palestinian terrorism from an expression of pure anti-Israel activity into a specialist tool for use by Arab states against their enemies in the Arab world. At times it almost appeared that the original purpose of Palestinian terrorism — recourse to international activity to call world attention to the Palestinian problem — was forgotten, as groups like Abu Nidal and the Wadi Haddad factions took up the sword on behalf of Syria and Iraq, and the level of Palestinian terrorist activity in the Arab world rose precipitously.

On balance, the post-1974 period saw a significant rise in the PLO's international standing and a similar strengthening of its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The groundwork for this gain was laid by the terrorist activities of the 1968-73 period; the superstructure was, ironically, a direct result of the decision to refrain from those same activities.

Epilogue

The 1982 Lebanon War was a cataclysmic event for the PLO. At the time of writing, the resultant shockwaves have not ceased. Indeed, they affected inter-organizational relations among the Palestinians, their geographic distribution, relations with Arab states, and international status, to say nothing of their actual terrorist activities. Perhaps these reasons provide a partial explanation for the fact that 1985 was a record year for international Palestinian terrorism: 73 separate events outside the confines of Israel and the administered territories. Nor does this figure include the armed conflicts between Palestinians and other militias inside Lebanon. Still, it constitutes a 100 percent increase over 1984, and considerably exceeds the figure for 1973, when 60 events constituted the pinnacle of Black September activity worldwide.

More important than the increase in the number of attacks was an escalation in their aggressive nature — for terrorism influences by means of a psychological shock effect rather than by virtue of aggregated physical consequences. A series of demonstrative attacks featuring indiscriminate murder began in the fall of 1985 and continued into 1986. It included a grenade attack on British tourists in Athens (September 4, 1985), a grenade attack on a cafe in Rome (September 16, 1985), the murder of three Israeli yachters in Larnaca, Cyprus (September 25, 1985), an explosion at a British Airways office in Rome (September 25, 1985), the Achille Lauro hijacking (October 7, 1985), the hijacking of an Egyptian passenger plane to Malta and the murder of several of its passengers (November 23, 1985), an explosion at a Frankfurt shopping center (November 24, 1985), murderous attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports (December 27, 1985), an explosion in a TWA plane (April 2, 1986), an explosion at a Berlin discoteque (April 5, 1986), an attempt to blow up an El Al passenger plane bound from London to Tel Aviv (April 17, 1986), and a similar attempt in Madrid (June 26, 1986). This escalation in the nature of attacks was reflected in a sharp rise in numbers of victims. In 1985, 105 persons were killed and 433 wounded by international Palestinian terrorism, compared to 10 killed and 8 wounded in 1984. Of the casualties, 30 were Israelis, 177 citizens of Arab countries, and 331 other nationalities, mostly from the West.

After 1984, too, Western Europe continued to be the primary theater of operations for international Palestinian terrorism: two-thirds of all incidents took place there. Of the remainder, most events took place in the Middle East. Interestingly, those Western European countries most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause constituted preferred sites for Palestinian terrorism. Thus, the three states in which the most incidents took place in 1985 were Cyprus, Greece and Italy (9 attacks in each). This phenomenon is best explained by virtue of these countries' close links with the Arafat PLO, while most of the attacks were carried out by the anti-Arafat organizations supported by Syria and Libya, and particularly the Abu Nidal group, which may have selected these target countries in the hope of embarrassing Arafat and compromising his relations with them. At the same time, however, the Arafat camp too carried out terrorist activities in these states. Here, then, we must conclude that these countries were selected primarily for reasons of convenience: a terrorist infrastructure can be relatively easily maintained there, and chances are good that local authorities will condone the deeds of captured terrorists.

Most of these incidents were carried out by organizations supported by Syria and Libya, and particularly by Fatah-Revolutionary Council, headed by Abu Nidal. In 1985, this group carried out 24 of the 61 Palestinian attacks whose perpetrators were identified (39 percent). In addition, the Abu Nidal organization participated in at least some of the 11 attacks carried out under the alias Black September. Thus this group was involved in some 57 percent of all international Palestinian terrorist incidents in 1985. This constitutes a sharp increase over 1984, when this organization carried out only 16 attacks. Presumably, the increase reflected enhanced Syrian and Libyan support. The rate of activity of the other organizations that belong to the pro-Syrian Salvation Front was far lower, although some of them may have been integrated in Black September activities. A team belonging to Jibril's PFLP-GC was captured in London in early 1985, Saiqa carried out three attacks in Cyprus in late 1985, and Abu Musa's Fatah Rebels were responsible for two attacks during 1986.

Two small groups that broke away from the Wadi Haddad network — Abu Ibrahim's May 15 Organization and PFLP-Special Operations led by Salim Abu Salem — have always operated only abroad, and they continued to do so in 1985/6, The latter organization presumably was behind LARF attacks in Europe, and in 1985 and early 1986 sponsored a series of attacks designed to pressure the French and Italian governments to release three of its members jailed in those countries.

The dramatic increase in Palestinian international terrorism derived from a number of factors, of which the most important was the effort made by those organizations supported by Syria and Libya to thwart any possible peace initiatives involving Jordan and the PLO. In this context numerous attacks were launched against both Jordanian and Arafat-PLO targets, most of which were credited to the new Black September. This terrorist wave ceased as if by magic the moment a dialogue was renewed, in September 1985, between Jordan and Syria — proof, certainly, of Damascus' influence, if not absolute control, over the terrorist perpetrators. Conceivably, too, the attacks against Israeli and American objectives were intended to serve this same goal by raising the general climate of tension. More likely, however, the fact that these attacks increased after the Syria-Jordan rapprochement indicates that they expressed a general anti-Israel and anti-US trend not necessarily linked to any specific political development.

Fatah, led by Yasir Arafat, was involved in 13 international incidents in 1985. These were mainly retaliatory acts for attacks on Arafat loyalists by pro-Syrian groups. Five of the 13 involved sabotage or attempted explosions directed against Syrian diplomats and legations in European capitals. Several Fatah attacks were also perpetrated against Salvation Front organization members in Europe. These activities, however unimpressive in quantitative terms, bear witness to Fatah's possession of an infrastructure and terrorist capacity in Western Europe, and perhaps elsewhere, that can be activated without long preparatory delays.

The Fatah retaliations against Syria and its proxies also ended upon the cessation of terrorist activities by pro-Syrian groups against Arafat loyalists in September 1985. At this point Fatah undertook two terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe: the attack on an Israeli yacht anchored at Larnaca and the murder of its three occupants, and the murder of two Israeli sailors in Barcelona, Yet more spectacular was the hijacking of the Achille Lauro by a branch of the Palestine Liberation Front, led by Abu al-Abbas, that maintains particularly close operational and political links with Arafat's Fatah. It is highly likely that the Achille Lauro attack was planned with the knowledge and perhaps even support of Fatah, particularly as the PFLP lacks an international terrorist infrastructure. Indeed, Hani al-Hasan, Arafat's close advisor, accompanied Abu al-Abbas to Egypt to negotiate a conclusion to the event.

This return by Arafat loyalists to the international terrorist scene is particularly significant. We recall that, with a few exceptions, Fatah avoided terrorist activity abroad, and particularly spectacular attacks, after 1974, and it sought to impose this policy on the other member organizations of the PLO. True, in 1984 two attacks were attempted by Fatah operatives against Israeli targets in Europe, but it was not entirely clear whether these were local or high level initiatives: the fall 1985 attacks left no room for doubt. Still, by the fall of 1986 it was not clear whether this resort to international terrorism constituted a change of strategy or merely an improvised and essentially local reply to specific and immediate problems.

Evidently the basic contributing factor to the Fatah return to international terrorism was competition among the Palestinian organizations over the leadership role. Fatah felt a need to disprove the accusations of the Rebels and other pro-Syrian groups that it represented a defeatist line and could no longer lead the armed struggle. Clearly, Fatah has throughout the years been the dominant actor in terrorist activity inside Israel and the territories, but this activity, characterized as it is by small-scale attacks such as laying small charges, does not achieve the high media profile which is a precondition for terrorism to attain public and political influence. Consequently, Fatah attempted repeatedly throughout 1985/6 to infiltrate into Israel terrorist teams trained to carry out spectacular attacks — mass murder or hostage/barricade operations. But all these attempts were thwarted by the Israeli security network.

To the loss of prestige associated with these Fatah failures must be added the Israeli success in capturing senior personnel of Fatah's Force 17 as they sailed toward Lebanon in Mediterranean waters. The desire to pressure for their release by hostage/barricade attacks, or at least to avenge their capture and restore the organization's honor in the eyes of members and opponents alike, was added to the other factors considered by the Fatah leadership. At this point, in view of Israel's success in sealing off its borders against terrorist infiltration, terrorist activity abroad remained the only theater where Fatah had a high probability of succeeding in carrying out a spectacular operation in the short term.

It is also likely that the resort to international terrorism, with all its inherent damage to the PLO profile in international public opinion, also reflected a low assessment by the PLO leadership of the chances of a political settlement. It is hard to believe that the PLO would have endangered the respectable image it sought so diligently to attain in order to take its place as an acceptable partner in a western-sponsored peace initiative, had it believed that the day was near when it could reap the fruits of this investment.

Future Prospects

After 18 years of international Palestinian terrorism, it appears a fairly safe assumption that in the near future it will continue. This assessment reflects the continued validity of the fundamental causes of the phenomenon, the persistence of the Palestinian national movement, and the fact that terrorism has taken root as a mode of struggle—with as much vigor today as two decades ago. To these considerations must be added the unique characteristics of Palestinian terrorism. More than any other sector of international terrorism, the Palestinian variety constitutes an instrument in the hands of certain states for the furtherance of their own strategic interests, thereby assuring the Palestinians a virtually unlimited reservoir of resources. Moreover, the movement's division into factions and sub-factions that represent a very broad spectrum of interests and ideologies in effect means that any radical attempt to deal with the roots of the problem is virtually doomed to failure. Even if a political solution can be found that will satisfy most of the Palestinians, there will still remain in the terrorist arena organizations like those of Abu Nidal, Abu Ibrahim and Salim Abu Salem, and these will have no difficulty in finding extremist states to support and exploit them for short term gains. Hence the question is not whether Palestinian terrorism will continue to exist, but rather its future sources and overall extent.

In recent years most international Palestinian terrorism has been associated with the extremist organizations that enjoy Syrian and Libyan support. On April 15, 1986 the United States delivered a punitive blow to Libya in retaliation for its extended and provocative involvement in international terrorist incidents in which American citizens were casualties. The US strike was accompanied by conflicting expectations: on the one hand, the hope that it would succeed in deterring Libya from a continued uninhibited use of terrorism, and on the other, the fear of a new reactionary wave of terrorism against American, Israeli and British targets. During the months after April 1986 the more pessimistic predictions were not fulfilled: a review of terrorist attacks through September 1986 appears to indicate that the American act succeeded in deterring Libya, and possibly Syria, too, and caused them to moderate their reliance on international terrorism. It is particularly significant that the Abu Nidal group — the principal exponent of international Palestinian terrorism over the two preceding years — remained inactive after April.

Nevertheless, it appears to be too early to draw firm conclusions. There is little reason to believe that the American action altered fundamental Syrian or Libyan interests or moral principles. These states' fundamental readiness to apply terrorism to realize their needs did not change: at most, it underwent a process of adjustment to a new reality. One may expect that as long as the United States maintains a firm and reliable policy of punishing states that support terrorism, the latter will seek to remain under the punishment threshold. To this end they will avoid involvement in the kind of terrorism that is likely to provide the US with the public and overt cause it requires to justify, domestically and to the world, an active punitive policy.

Current American criteria determine that such justification is the recognition of a direct link to specific terrorist acts. This does not prohibit the aforementioned states from granting terrorist organizations increased support in terms of funds, weaponry, training and shelter. Moreover, direct aid for Arab terrorists can also be at least partially transferred to local terrorist organizations if the price is right; accordingly, we may expect increased collaboration between the extremist Palestinian organizations and homegrown groups in Europe and Latin America. In any event, rather than decreasing, extremist Palestinian terrorism will probably change its modus operandi to some extent following a brief period of reorganization.

A second principal element in international Palestinian terrorism, whose potential importance is greater than its contemporary influence, is Fatah. A decision by the Fatah leadership to initiate widespread international terrorism would have considerable significance. It would mean at least a temporary return to an extremist line of armed struggle, with a complementary withdrawal from the political arena. It would also enhance the prospects for both a rapprochement between the Arafat loyalists and Syria, and reunification of the PLO factions. In terms of terrorist potential, a broad Fatah reentry into the international terrorist arena would considerably enhance the impact of Palestinian terrorism abroad from the standpoint of quantity and quality of attacks and geographic scope. Fatah possesses a manpower reserve greater than that of all the other organizations together. Fatah controls over 90 PLO legations worldwide, all of which can be used for logistics and intelligence support for terrorism. While Fatah would presumably seek to avoid involving these representations directly in terrorist activity, in order not to provide host countries with justification for closing them — even cautious exploitation would enable the organization to expand the Palestinian terrorist arena to areas, such as Latin America and the Far East, hitherto relatively untouched.

The possibility of a broad international terrorist campaign by Fatah depends on several factors, of which the prime consideration is, as we have noted, political. Hence such a decision would reflect an assessment among the Fatah leadership that it had nothing to lose on the political plane. By the fall of 1986 the PLO's prospects for participating in any sort of political settlement in the foreseeable future were extremely dim. The Hussein-Arafat agreement of February 1985 ostensibly laid the foundations for PLO participation, however indirect, in a political move backed by the United States. But from the start this was a marriage of convenience between rivals — in effect, a zero sum game. Moreover, even this pact was achieved only after a sharp struggle within the PLO leadership, in the course of which the radicals, and particularly Salah Halaf (Abu Iyad) and Faruq Qaddumi (Abu Lutf), sometimes joined by Halil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), considerably constrained Arafat's maneuverability. Further, once the agreement with Jordan had been signed, the internal opposition within the Fatah leadership held off Jordanian and Egyptian pressures for additional concessions by the PLO. Little wonder, then, that the Arafat-Hussein agreement became a dead letter only a year after its troublesome birth. By late 1986 there appeared to be little prospect of its restoration to active status, as the PLO remained caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: neither spearheading a political campaign nor leading the armed struggle. Clearly, it could not remain long in this position. Its dramatic attempt in late 1986 to reinstall itself in force in Lebanon provided at least a temporary respite from the dilemma.

An additional important consideration for the PLO is the possibility of reuniting the organization. Here the question is not merely one of reinstating dissident elements, but of achieving a fundamental measure of consensus as to principles and the strategy for realizing them. In the late 1986 constellation, the road to consensus still passed through Damascus, the radical organizations' main patron. Syria's conditions remained unacceptable to Fatah: besides foregoing its political orientation (by now paralyzed in any case) in favor of armed struggle, Fatah was also enjoined to remove Arafat from his leadership position and moderate its own dominant status within the PLO. Still, in view of the absence of prospects on the political front, and provided it reached agreement with Syria and the Fronts on organizational and personal issues, Fatah confronted a weighty inducement to make concessions in order to reunite the PLO. In this sense, in view of Fatah's limited success in carrying out terrorist attacks inside Israel and the territories, spectacular terrorist strikes abroad are likely to relegitimize it in the eyes of Syria and its proxy organizations. Syria, in particular, would be tempted to effect a rapprochement with Fatah if it assessed that this could weaken the prospects of PLO participation in any political negotiations for a Middle East settlement.

Against these not inconsiderable factors weighing toward a strategic renewal of international terrorism, other factors are working in the opposite direction. The first is the damage to the PLO's political status that would be generated by such a move. True, such damage is not irreversible — witness the fact that the greatest breakthrough in international recognition of the PLO, as symbolized by Arafat's UN address of November 1974, came but a year after Black September had ceased its activities. But 1986 was not 1974. Then, a united Arab world brandishing the threat of an oil embargo stood behind the PLO, whose authority as exclusive representative of the Palestinians had just been affirmed in an all-Arab summit at Rabat. In contrast, by 1986, more than ever before since 1967, the PLO was factionalized and dependent on a disparate Arab world embroiled in an economic crisis. Too many parties were looking for a replacement for the PLO as representative of the Palestinians in a potential negotiating process, for that organization's leadership to view its international status as an unassailable asset. In this sense, a decision to turn to international terrorism as a general modus operandi could not easily be contemplated.

An additional consideration touches upon PLO priorities. The organization's most pressing problem is the lack of an independent territorial base. Such a base is absolutely vital to the PLO if it hopes to maintain policies that are independent of Arab states' interests. The problem became even more acute with the expulsion of most PLO institutions from Jordan in the summer of 1986. One temporary solution — a move to Iraq — is unsatisfactory in the long run. Iraq is far from Israel and the administered territories — the main theater of the PLO's armed struggle; there is always the fear that the regime there will change its policy toward the PLO; and there is no large Palestinian population in Iraq that might serve as a reservoir for recruitment and a source of logistical and psychological support.

The only state that satisfies PLO criteria for proximity to the main arena of struggle and the presence of a large Palestinian population, and where, from a military standpoint, the PLO has a chance of succeeding in establishing an independent base, is southern Lebanon, For these reasons in late 1986 the PLO effected a major effort to gain control over Palestinian-populated regions there — an effort that drained many resources that might otherwise have been directed toward terrorist activities. Indeed, spectacular PLO operations abroad might also invite retaliation against the still shaky Palestinian strongholds in southern Lebanon.

Overall, in the foreseeable future Fatah will confront a considerable temptation to turn to international terrorist activity. It will almost certainly undertake at least some degree of activity in this sphere. Failure of the attempt to reestablish itself in Lebanon, and/or the advent of political negotiations in which non-PLO Palestinians participate, will hasten this development.

Tables

Table 1 Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel as Percentage of International Terrorism¹

Year
Palestinian Terrorist Incidents
Total International Terrorist Incidents
Palestinian Terror as % of Total International Terrorism

1968
2
142
1.4

1969
17
214
7.9

1970
28 (29) (6)
391
7.1 (7.1)

1971
22 (34)
324
6.8 (10.4)

1972
34 (265)
648
5.2 (40.8)

1973
60 (89)
564
10.6 (15.7)

1974
21
528
4

1975
13
475
2.7

1976
26
599
4.5

1977
23
562
4

1978
30
850
3.5

1979
36
657
5.4

1980
16
760
2.1

1961
23
709
3.2

1962
34
794
4.2

1983
18
500
3.6

1984
32
652
4.9

TOTAL
435 (650)
9369
4.6 (6.9)

Table 2 Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Perpetrating Organization

Table 3 Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Type of Target

Table 4 Incidents of International Palestinian Terrorism by Perpetrating Organization & Type of Target

Table 5a International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Israel and the West)

Table 5b International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Arab states and Palestinians)

Table 5c International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Nationality of Target (Latin America, Africa, & Non-Arab Asia)

Table 6a International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Europe)a

Table 6b International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Arab Countries)

Table 6c International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (North & South America)

Table 6d International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (non-Arab Africa)

Table 6e International Palestinian Terrorism by Year and Location (Australia and non-Arab Asia)

Table 8 International Palestinian Terrorism by Organization and Type of Attack

Table 9 Palestinian Terrorism Outside of Israel Compared to Activity Inside Israel and Along Its Borders²²

Appendices

Appendix 1
Palestinian Terrorist Organizations: Explanation of Abbreviated Names

Abu Nidal – Fatah-Revolutionary Council

ANYO – Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

AOLP – Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine

BSO – Black September Organization; BSO of 1984 is not identical to that which operated in the early 1970s

DFLP – Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

LARF — Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

PFLP – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

PFLP-GC – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command

PSF – Popular Struggle Front

Saiqa – includes Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution

Wadi Hadded factions – includes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations; the Arab May 15th Organization

Appendix 2
PLO Representations Worldwide

Country
Type of Representation & Status
Year of Opening

Arab League

Algeria
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1965

Bahrain
Official; no diplomatic status.
1974

Djibouti

1977

Dubai

Egypt
Official; diplomatic status until 1979, then closed. Frequently functions unofficially.

Iraq
Official.
1967

Jordan

1964

Kuwait
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1965

Lebanon
De facto diplomatic status.
1964

Libya
Official; no diplomatic status.
1965

Mauritania
Official.
1964

Morocco
Official; no diplomatic status.
1964

PDRY
Official; diplomatic status.
1974

Qatar
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1965

Saudi Arabia
Official representation of Fatah; no diplomatic status.
1975

Somalia
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1974

Sudan
Official; diplomatic status.
1965

Syria
Official; no diplomatic status.
1964

Tunisia
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1970

United Arab Emirates
Official (in Abu Dhabi); diplomatic status.
1967

Yemen
Official.
1965

Africa

Angola

Burundi
No diplomatic status.

Chad

Congo-Brazzaville
No diplomatic status.
1976

Ethiopia

1977

Gambia
Official; de facto diplomatic status.

Guinea
Official; diplomatic status.
1973

Guinea-Bissau
Official; diplomatic status.

Ivory Coast

Kenya
Official; status of embassy.
1972

Madagascar
Official.
1976

Mali

1980

Mauritius
Official.
1982

Mozambique

1978

Nigeria
Official.
1983

Senegal
Official; diplomatic status.
1973

Tanzania
Official; diplomatic status.
1974

Uganda
Official; diplomatic status.
1972

Upper Volta
Official.
1975

Zaire
Official.

Asia

Afghanistan
Official.
1979

Bangladesh
Official.
1979

China
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1975

India
Official; diplomatic status.
1975

Iran
Official; diplomatic status.
1979

Japan
Unofficial.
1977

Laos
Official; diplomatic status.
1979

Malaysia
Official; status of embassy.
1969

Maidive Islands
Diplomatic status.
1984

North Korea
Official.
1966

Pakistan
Official; diplomatic status.
1975

Sri Lanka
Official.
1979

Thailand

1983

Vietnam
Official.
1972

Eastern Europe

Bulgaria
Official.
1973

Czechoslovakia
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1973

East Germany
Official.
1973

Hungary
Official.
1975

Poland
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1974

Romania
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1974

Soviet Union
Official.
1976

Western Europe

Austria
Unofficial.
1971

Belgium
Unofficial.
1973

Cyprus
Official; diplomatic status.
1975

Finland
Official.

France
Unofficial.
1972

Federal Republic of Germany
Unofficial.
1972

Great Britain
Unofficial.
1976

Greece
Official; diplomatic status.
1980

Italy
Unofficial.
1974

Luxembourg
Unofficial.
1977

Malta
Official; diplomatic status.
1979

Netherlands
Official.
1972

Spain
Official.
1972

Sweden
Unofficial.
1975

Switzerland
Unofficial.
1965

Turkey
Official; diplomatic status.
1979

North America

Canada
Unofficial.
1973

USA
Unofficial.
1974

Latin America

Bolivia
Official.
1979

Brazil
Official.
1965 (?)

Cuba
Official; de facto diplomatic status.
1971

Ecuador
Official.
1981

Mexico
Unofficial.
1976

Nicaragua
Official; diplomatic status.
1980

Panama
Official.
1979

Peru
Official.
1979

Venezuela
Agreement on opening a representation reportedly reached in September.
1979

Australia
Unofficial.
1974

Appendix 3
Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents Carried Out by the Palestinian Organizations Outside of Israel, 1968-1985

Date
Event
Organization

23 July 1968
El Al plane hijacked en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and landed in Algeria.
Popular Front

26 December 1968
El Al plane attacked at Athens Airport.
Popular Front

18 February 1969
El Al plane attacked at Zurich Airport.
Popular Front

22 May 1969
3 terrorists arrested in Copenhagen; suspected of planning attempt on life of Ben-Gurion.
Popular Front

18 July 1969
Charges exploded in 2 stores owned by Jews in London.
Popular Front

23 August 1969
Premature detonation of explosives destined for Israeli pavilion, Izmir Trade Fair, Turkey.
Democratic Front

29 August 1969
TWA plane hijacked en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and landed in Damascus.
Popular Front

8 September 1969
Grenades thrown at El Al office in Brussels.
Popular Front

8 September 1969
Grenades thrown at Israeli Embassy in Hague.
Popular Front

8 September 1969
Grenades thrown at Israeli Embassy in Bonn.
Popular Front

9 November 1969
Time bomb discovered in Jewish Community Center in Berlin.
Popular Front

27 November 1969
Grenades thrown at El Al office in Athens.
Popular Struggle Front

21 December 1969
Three terrorists planning to hijack TWA plane arrested in Athens.
Popular Front

10 February 1970
El Al passengers attacked in Munich Airport.
Action for the Liberation of Palestine Organization

21 February 1970
Swissair plane en route from Zurich to Lod blown up in mid-air.
Popular Front-General Command

21 February 1970
Explosion in baggage compartment of Austrian Airlines plane en route from Frankfurt to Vienna.
Popular Front-General Command

24 February 1970
Letter bombs sent from Frankfurt to addresses in Israel.
Popular Front-General Command

24 April 1970 4 May 1970
Explosions in El Al office in Istanbul & Pan American office in Izmir. Consulate of Israel in Asuncion, Paraguay, attacked.
Popular Struggle Front

7 June 1970
US embassy employee in Amman attacked.
Popular Front

9 June 1970
Philadelphia & Intercontinental hotels in Amman occupied.
Popular Front

10 June 1970
US Assistant Military Attache in Amman murdered.
Popular Front

22 July 1970
Olympic plane hijacked en route from Beirut to Athens and landed in Athens.
Popular Struggle Front

6 September 1970
TWA plane hijacked en route from Frankfurt to New York and landed in Zarqa, Jordan.
Popular Front

6 September 1970
Swissair plane hijacked en route from Zurich to New York & landed in Zarqa.
Popular Front

6 September 1970
Pan Am plane hijacked en route from Amsterdam to New York & landed in Cairo.
Popular Front

6 September 1970
Foiled attempt to hijack El Al plane en route from Amsterdam to New York.
Popular Front

9 September 1970
BOAC plane hijacked en route from Bombay to London and landed in Zarqa.
Popular Front

14 March 1971
Oil tanks in Rotterdam port blown up.
Fatah

2 April 1971
Oil pipeline blown up in Jordan.

11 June 1971
Israeli oil tanker Coral Sun attacked in Bab al-Mandab Straits.
Popular Front

20 July 1971
Attack on Jordanian Alia airline office in Rome.
Fatah

23 July 1971
Molotov cocktails thrown at Jordanian embassy in Paris.
Fatah

24 July 1971
Attack on Alia plane at Cairo airport.
Fatah

28 July 1971
Attempt foiled to blow up El Al plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv.
Popular Front-General Command

24 August 1971
Bomb exploded in Alia plane at Madrid airport.
Fatah

1 September 1971
Abortive attempt to blow up El Al plane en route from London to Tel Aviv.
Popular Front-General Command

8 September 1971
Alia plane hijacked en route from Beirut to Amman and landed in Benghazi, Libya.
Fatah

28 November 1971
Wasfi al Tal, Prime Minister of Jordan, assassinated in Cairo.
Black September

15 December 1971
Jordanian ambassador in London shot.
Black September

16 December 1971
Bomb exploded in Jordanian embassy in Geneva.
Black September

28 December 1971
About 15 letter bombs sent from Yugoslavia and Austria to businessmen in Israel.
Popular Front-General Command

5 February 1972
Oil tanks blown up in Ravenstein, The Netherlands.
Black September

6 February 1972
Airplane generator factory damaged in Hamburg.
Black September

6 February 1972
5 Jordanians accused of spying for Israel, murdered in Cologne.
Black September

22 February 1972
Oil pipeline damaged near Hamburg.
Black September

22 February 1972
Lufthansa plane hijacked en route from New Delhi to Athens and landed in Aden.
Popular Front

11 March 1972
Attempted attack on residence of King Hussein in London.
Black September

29 April 1972
Letter bombs sent to Israeli pavilion, Hanover Fair, FRG.
Popular Front-General Command

8 May 1972
Sabena plane hijacked en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv and landed in Tel Aviv.
Black September

4 August 1972
Oil tanks blown up in Trieste, Italy.
Black September & Popular Front

16 August 1972
Abortive attempt to blow up El Al plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv.
Popular Front-General Command

5 September 1972
Living quarters of Israeli sports-men occupied at Olympic Games in Munich; sportsmen murdered.
Black September

10 September 1972
Assassination attempt on Israeli diplomat in Brussels.
Black September

18 September 1972
About 70 letter bombs sent from Amsterdam to Israel and Israeli representatives around the world. Agricultural Counsellor at Israel Embassy in London killed.
Black September Black September

4 October 1972
Letter bombs (11) sent from Malaysia to Israel & Jewish addresses around the world.
Black September

25 October 1972
Letter bombs sent from Israel to President Nixon, Secretary of State Rogers, & Defense Secretary Laird.
Black September

29 October 1972
Lufthansa plane hijacked en route from Damascus to Munich & landed in Libya.
Popular Front

30 October 1972
About 50 letter bombs sent from Malaysia to Israel and Jewish &Israeli organizations around the world.
Black September

10 November 1972
42 letter bombs intended for Jewish companies in Europe discovered in Bombay.
Black September (?)

13 November 1972
Syrian journalist murdered in Paris.
Black September

7 December 1972
Letter bombs sent from Singapore to public institutions in Israel.
Popular Front-General Command

20 December 1972
Rockets fired at US Embassy in Beirut.
Black September (?)

28 December 1972
Israeli embassy in Bangkok occupied.
Black September

9 January 1973
Damage to Jewish Agency building in Paris.
Black September

19-26 January 1973
Three terrorists arrested in Vienna & another 3 on Italian-Austrian frontier in attempt to attack Jewish immigrant camp at Schoenau near Vienna.
Black September

26 January 1973
Israeli diplomat murdered in Madrid.
Black September

29 January 1973
Letter bombs sent from Turkey to Israel.
Black September

15 February 1973
Abortive attempt to occupy Prime Minister's Office in Jordan.
Black September

1 March 1973
Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum occupied.
Black September

3 March 1973
Cyprus passenger boat sunk in Beirut port.
Popular Front

6 March 1973
Car-bombs found at El Al terminal at Kennedy Airport & next to Bank Leumi & Discount Bank branches in New York.
Black September

April 1973
Abortive attempt to attack El Al plane at Rome airport.
Popular Front

9 April 1973
Residence of Israeli ambassador in Nicosia damaged; hijacking of Arkia plane in Nicosia foiled.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

27 April 1973
El Al employee killed in Rome.
Black September

8 June 1973
Explosion in arms factory in Berlin.
Black September

13 June 1973
Car bomb explosion near El Al office in Rome.
Black September

1 July 1973
Israeli air attache murdered in Washington, DC.
Black September

20 July 1973
Japanese Airlines plane hijacked en route from Paris to Tokyo and landed in Libya.
Japanese Red Army & Popular Front

5 August 1973
Attack on passengers at Athens Airport.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

5 September 1973
Abortive missile attack on El Al plane in Rome.
Black September

5 September 1973
Saudi embassy in Paris occupied.
Abu Nidal

28 September 1973
Passenger train with Jewish immigrants from USSR occupied on Austrian border.
Saiqa

25 November 1973
KLM plane hijacked en route from Beirut to New Delhi and landed in Dubai.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

17 December 1973
Attack on passengers at Rome airport.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

30 December 1973
Attempted murder of Lord Sieff, prominent British Jew.
Popular Front-Carlos

24 January 1974
Explosive charge thrown into Bank Hapoalim branch in London.
Popular Front

31 January 1974
Shell oil tanks sabotaged in Singapore.
Japanese Red Army & Popular Front

2 February 1974
Greek ship occupied in Karachi Port, Pakistan.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

6 February 1974
Japanese embassy in Kuwait occupied
Japanese Red Army & Popular Front

3 March 1974
British plane hijacked en route from Bombay to London and landed in Amsterdam.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

3 August 1974
Car bombs blown up next to Jewish Welfare Office and editorial offices of 2 newspapers in Paris.
Popular Front

26 August 1974
Plot discovered to blow up TWA plane en route from Athens to New York.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization (?)

29 August 1974
Explosion in factory in Mannheim, Germany.
Popular Front

8 September 1974
TWA plane en route from Athens blown up in mid-air.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

1 October 1974
Terrorists planning to assassinate King Hussein arrested in Morocco.
Black September

22 November 1974
British plane hijacked in Dubai and finally landed in Tunis.
Arab Nationalist Youth Organization

13 January 1975
Rockets fired at El Al plane in Paris airport.
Popular Front

19 January 1975
Abortive attack on El Al plane in Paris airport.
Popular Front

29 June 1975
US military attache kidnapped in Beirut.
Popular Front-General Command

5 September 1975
Terrorists planning to seize train from Moscow arrested in Amsterdam.
Saiqa

15 September 1975
Egyptian embassy occupied in Madrid.
Fatah

21 December 1975
OPEC headquarters occupied in Vienna.
Wadi Haddad faction

25 January 1976
Abortive missile attack on El Al plane in Nairobi, Kenya.
Wadi Haddad faction

16 June 1976
American ambassador in Lebanon abducted & murdered.
Popular Front (?)

28 June 1976
Air France plane hijacked en route from Tel Aviv & Athens to Rome and landed in Entebbe, Uganda.
Wadi Haddad faction

2 July 1976
Incendiary bombs thrown at office of Syrian airline in Kuwait.

20 July 1976
Charge exploded near Syrian airline office in Rome.

11 August 1976
Abortive attack on El Al passengers in Istanbul.
Popular Front

4 September 1976
KLM plane hijacked en route from Malaga to Amsterdam and landed in Cyprus.
Palestine Liberation Front

26 September 1976
Semiramis Hotel in Damascus occupied.
Abu Nidal

30 September 1976
Incendiary bombs thrown at Syrian airline offices in Rawalpindi & Karachi, Pakistan.
Abu Nidal (?)

11 October 1976
Attempt to occupy Syrian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Abu Nidal

11 October 1976
Syrian embassy in Rome occupied.
Abu Nidal

17 November 1976
Attack on Intercontinental Hotel in Amman.
Abu Nidal

13 December 1976
Abortive attempt on Syrian legation in Ankara.
Abu Nidal

25 July 1977
Charge exploded at home of head of Israel lobby in Washington.

13 October 1977
Lufthansa plane hijacked en route from Malorca to Frankfurt and landed in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Baader Meinhof & Wadi Haddad faction.

25 October 1977
Attempted assassination of Syrian foreign minister, at Abu Dhabi airport.
Abu Nidal

17 November 1977
Two bombs exploded in Egyptian embassy in Damascus.

18 November 1977
Rockets fired at Egyptian embassy in Lebanon.

21 November 1977
Bomb exploded in Egyptian embassy in Jordan.

6 December 1977
Charge exploded next to Egyptian embassy in Venezuela.

1 January 1978
Bomb discovered next to oil tank of Egyptian embassy in Germany.

4 January 1978
Murder of PLO/Fatah representative in London.
Abu Nidal

8 January 1978
Abortive rocket attack against Israeli embassy in Brussels.
Wadi Haddad faction (?)

26 January 1978
Poisoned Israeli oranges found in Germany, Britain, The Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, & Belgium.

18 February 1978
Egyptian journalist murdered in Nicosia.
Abu Nidal

4 March 1978
Explosion in Iraqi embassy in Brussels.
Fatah

20 May 1978
Attack on El Al passengers in Paris airport.
Popular Front

15 June 1978
PLO representative in Kuwait murdered.
Abu Nidal

19 July 1978
Office of Abu Nidal organization attacked in Tripoli, Libya.
Fatah

20 July 1978
Grenade tossed at car of Iraqi ambassador in Paris.
Fatah (?)

31 July 1978
Iraqi embassy in Paris occupied.
Fatah

3 August 1978
PLO representative in Paris and his assistant, murdered in office.
Abu Nidal

5 August 1978
Attack on PLO office in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Abu Nidal(?)

17 August 1978
Iraqi diplomat murdered at embassy in Libya.
Fatah

20 August 1978
Bus carrying El Al crew attacked in London.
Wadi Haddad faction

15 October 1978
Explosive charges discovered next to Jewish Community Center and Jewish shop in Berlin.
Saiqa

22 March 1979
PLO representative in Islamabad, Pakistan, murdered.
Abu Nidal (?)

25 March 1979
Explosive charges thrown at American embassy in Damascus.
Saiqa (?)

27 March 1979
Bomb thrown inside Jewish restaurant in Paris.
Saiqa

29 March 1979
Bomb thrown into courtyard of American embassy in Ankara.
Saiqa

3 April 1979
Booby-trapped parcel to Israel exploded at Frankfurt airport.
Fatah (?)

5 April 1979
Bomb exploded in Israeli embassy building in Nicosia.
Saiqa

16 April 1979
Abortive attempt to attack El Al plane in Brussels.
Popular Front (?)

22 April 1979
Explosions in Jewish Community Center and synagogue, Vienna.
Saiqa

26 April 1979
Abortive attempts to sabotage oil installations and assassinate head of the Jewish community in Berlin.
Fatah

26 April 1979
Terrorist arrested at Rome airport.
Fatah

27 April 1979
2 terrorists arrested on the Austrian-German frontier en route to sabotage oil installations in Rotterdam.
Fatah

11 May 1979
Terrorist arrested at Paris airport with explosive-laden suitcase.
Fatah

13 July 1979
Egyptian embassy in Ankara occupied.
Saiqa

24 August 1979
Grenade thrown at German embassy in Beirut.

25 August 1979
Explosion in Lufthansa office in Beirut.

4 December 1979
Foiled attempt to smuggle 2 SA-7 missiles into Italy.
Popular Front

4 December 1979
Explosions in KLM & Gulf Air offices in Bahrain.
Wadi Haddad faction

17 January 1980
Director of Palestinian Library in Paris murdered.
Abu Nidal

21 April 1980
Abortive attempt to blow up El Al plane en route from Switzerland to Israel.
Wadi Haddad faction

20 June 1980
Abortive attack on El Al personnel in Copenhagen.
Popular Front-General Command

18 July 1980
Attempt in Paris to assassinate Shapur Bakhtiar, former prime minister of Iran.
Fatah

27 July 1980
Grenades tossed at Jewish children in Antwerp.
Fatah (?)

4 October 1980
Explosion next to reform synagogue in Paris.
Wadi Haddad faction

1 January 1981
Explosion in Jewish-owned hotel in Nairobi, Kenya.
Popular Front

5 February 1981
Jordanian chargé d'affaires kidnapped in Beirut.
Saiqa

1 May 1981
Chairman of Austria-Israel Friendship Association murdered.
Abu Nidal

1 June 1981
PLO representative in Brussels murdered.
Abu Nidal

29 July 1981
2 terrorists planning attack on President Sadat arrested at Vienna airport.
Fatah

1 August 1981
Attempt on life of terrorist Abu Daoud in Warsaw.

29 August 1981
Attack on synagogue in Vienna.
Abu Nidal

23 September 1981
2 grenades thrown at Zim office in Limassol, Cyprus.
Abu Nidal

28 October 1981
Car bomb blown up in Antwerp diamond district.
Wadi Haddad faction

12 November 1981
Attempt to assassinate American charge d'affaires in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

20 December 1981
Explosion on Greek ship about to enter Haifa Port.
Wadi Haddad faction

15 January 1982
Explosion in Jewish restaurant in Berlin.
Wadi Haddad faction

18 January 1982
American military attaché murdered in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

30 March 1982
Letter bomb sent to Israeli diplomatic mission in Athens.

31 March 1982
Attack on Israeli purchasing mission office in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

3 April 1982
Israeli diplomat murdered in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

3 June 1982
Israeli ambassador in London shot.
Abu Nidal

5 June 1982
Kuwaiti diplomat murdered in New Delhi.
Abu Nidal

9 August 1982
Attack on Paris Jewish restaurant
Abu Nidal

21 August 1982
Attempt on life of an American commercial attaché in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

26 August 1982
United Arab Emirates diplomat shot in Bombay.
Abu Nidal

15 September 1982
Explosion outside Great Synagogue in Rome.

16 September 1982
Kuwaiti diplomat murdered in Madrid.
Abu Nidal

17 September 1982
Explosion in an Israeli embassy car in Paris.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

19 September 1982
Attack on Great Synagogue in Brussels.
Abu Nidal

23 December 1982
Explosions in the Israeli consulate and in parking area & buildings of the Jewish Sports Club in Sydney, Australia.
Wadi Haddad faction

10 April 1983
PLO leader Issam Sartawi murdered in Albufeira, Portugal.
Abu Nidal

23 September 1983
Gulf Air plane crash in Abu Dhabi, following mid-air explosion.
Abu Nidal

18 October 1983
Explosive charges thrown at palace in Amman.
Abu Nidal

25 October 1983
Jordanian ambassador murdered in New Delhi.
Abu Nidal

26 October 1983
Jordanian ambassador shot in Rome.
Abu Nidal

31 October 1983
Car bomb exploded near officers' club in Zarqa, Jordan.
Abu Nidal

7 November 1983
Jordanian security man murdered in Athens.
Abu Nidal

2 December 1983
Charge exploded against wall of Israeli embassy in Bangkok.
Abu Nidal

3 December 1983
Shots fired at Israeli consul in Malta.
Abu Nidal

9-12 December 1983
Bombs discovered in various places in Amman.
Abu Nidal

25 December 1983
Explosion in shopping area in London, next to Marks & Spencer.

29 December 1983
Jordanian diplomat murdered in Madrid.
Abu Nidal

15 February 1984
Director of Multi-National Force in Sinai murdered in Rome.
Fatah

13 March 1984
Armed terrorist arrested near Israeli diplomatic mission in Athens; planned to assassinate head of mission.

24 March 1984
Explosion at Intercontinental Hotel, near press office for visit by Queen Elizabeth.
Abu Nidal

26 March 1984
Attempted assassination of American consul in Strasbourg, France.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

5 June 1984
Attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat in Cairo.
Abu Nidal

27 June 1984
Suitcases with explosives found in possession of 2 Palestinians.
May 15

25 July 1984
PLO office in Hanoi (probably under control of Fatah Rebels) attacked.
Fatah

31 August 1984
British journalist abducted in Beirut.
Abu Nidal

4 October 1984
Explosion in Israeli embassy parking lot in Nicosia.
Fatah Rebels

27 October 1984
Attempted assassination of a United Arab Emirates' diplomat in Rome.
Abu Nidal

27 November 1984
British deputy high commissioner murdered in Bombay.
Abu Nidal

29 November 1984
Bomb thrown into British Airways office in Beirut.
Abu Nidal

29 November 1984
Attempted assassination of Jordanian diplomat in Athens.
Abu Nidal

4 December 1984
Jordanian diplomat murdered in Bucharest.
Black September II

11 December 1984
Attempt on life of Syrian diplomat in Athens.
Fatah

26 December 1984
Bomb found near home of PLO official in Amman.
Black September II

29 December 1984
Fahd Kawasmeh (PLO official) murdered in Amman.
Black September II

20 January 1985
Abortive plan to kill PLO representative in London.
Popular Front-General Command

21 March 1985
Grenades thrown at Jordanian Alia airline offices in Athens, Rome, Nicosia.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

22 March 1985
French diplomat abducted in Lebanon.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

25 March 1985
French cultural attaché abducted in Tripoli, Lebanon.
Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions

27 March 1985
Explosive charge discovered next to Israeli embassy, Singapore.
May 15

3 April 1985
Anti-tank missile fired at Jordanian embassy in Rome.
Black September II

4 April 1985
Anti-tank missiles fired at Jordanian plane approaching take-off at Athens airport.
Black September II

22 May 1985
Abortive attempt to blow up US embassy in Cairo.
Abu Nidal

Notes

Introduction

1 Deputy Head of IDF Military Intelligence in an interview to Bamahane (IDF Magazine), quoted in Yediot Aharonot (Hebrew), August 25, 1982.

2 US Department of State, Terrorist Attacks Against Diplomats: A Statistical Overview of International Terrorist Attacks on Diplomatic Personnel and Facilities from January 1968 to June 1981 (Washington, DC, December 1981), p. 1.

3 Ariel Merari, et al., Database of International Terrorism in 1980, Center for Strategic Studies (Hebrew), p. 6, unpublished.

4 D. Milbank, International and Transnational Terrorism: Diagnosis and Prognosis, Central Intelligence Agency Research Study (Washington, DC, April 1976), p. 1.

Chapter 1

1 Based on "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1981," Department of State Bulletin, August 1982, pp. 9-21; "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1982," Defense & Economy, World Report and Survey, no. 899, issue 20 (May 14, 1984), The criteria for terrorist incidents in the US State Department's reports have been changed several times in recent years. We believe, however, that the general trend of a decreased percentage of Palestinian terrorism in overall international terrorism is reliable. "US Security: Shoring the Battlements," USA TODAY, January 29, 1985, p. 5. Figures inside brackets in Table 1 reflect a count of every single letter-bomb, as was probably done in the US State Department's statistics used in this table.

2 B.M. Jenkins, Embassies under Siege: A Review of 48 Embassy Takeovers, 1971-1980 (Santa Monica: The Rand Corp., January 1981), p. 6.

Chapter 2

1 US News & World Report, September 29, 1975.

2 E. Yaari, Fatah (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Levin Epstein, 1970), p. 224.

3 J. Amos, Palestinian Resistance: Organization of a Nationalist Movement (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), p. 192.

4 George Habash, interview in an-Nahar (Beirut – Arabic), January 17, 1971.

5 Interview with Oriana Fallaci in Life, June 12, 1970, p. 34.

6 Interview in al-Dustur (Beirut – Arabic), January 20, 1975.

7 Life, June 12, 1970, p. 34.

8 Interview in al-Yawm (Beirut – Arabic), January 1, 1974.

9 P. Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (London: Macmillan Press, 1971), p. 49.

10 Ha'aretz (Hebrew), March 2, 1969.

11 Interview in al-Birak (Beirut – Arabic), February 4, 1975.

12 Life, June 12, 1970, p. 33.

13 The Jerusalem Post, June 10, 1969, quoting Time, June 9, 1969.

14 George Habash interview with Oriana Fallaci, March 1972, quoted by C. Sterling, The Terror Network (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980), p. 121.

15 Al-Hadaf (Beirut – Arabic), vol. 1, no. 16 (November 8, 1969), p. 12, quoted by W.B. Quandt, F. Jabber and A.M. Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 100.

16 Interview in al-Ahbar (Beirut – Arabic), August 4, 1973.

17 Interview on August 29, 1969, in Arab Report and Record, 16 (1969), p. 353.

18 Life, June 12, 1970, p. 32.

19 Ibid., p. 33.

20 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, pp. 87-88; and J.K. Cooley, Green March, Black September (London: Frank Cass, 1973), pp. 151-152.

21 Amman Radio Report of Confession by Abu Dawud, Summary of World Broadcasts (British Broadcast Corp., ME/4255,/March 26, 1973), p. A/7.

22 Abu Iyad, Without a Homeland (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mifras, 1979), p. 147.

23 Voice of Palestine (Cairo – Arabic), January 21, 1973.

24 "Dialogue with Black September," as-Sayyad (Beirut – Arabic), September 13, 1972.

25 Ibid.

26 "Will of Munich Guerrillas," WAFA – Palestinian News Agency (Arabic), September 11, 1972, quoted by J. Amos, Palestinian Resistance, pp. 312-314.

27 Ibid.

28 Interview in al-Majallah (Saudi Arabia – Arabic), July 4, 1981

29 As-Sayyad, September 13, 1972.

30 Voice of Palestine, January 21, 1973.

31 As-Sayyad, September 13, 1972.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 An-Nahar, November 5, 1972.

35 B. O'Neill, Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978), p. 151.

36 Yaari, Fatah, p. 242.

37 R.A. Mertz, "Why George Habash Turned Marxist," Mideast Magazine 10, no. 4 (August 1970), pp. 31-36.

38 Abu Adnan, DFLP spokesman, interview in al-Yawm, July 31, 1973.

39 Nayef Hawatmeh, interview in an-Nahar, August 17, 1973.

40 Interview in Ahar Saah (Cairo – Arabic), December 16, 1970.

41 May-July 31, 1973.

42 J.K. Cooley, Green March, Black September, p. 151.

43 Interview in as-Sayyad, February 6, 1975.

44 Filastin ath-Thawra (Beirut – Arabic), January 1971.

45 Al-Yawm, July 31, 1973.

46 Ahar Saah, December 16, 1970.

47 A.D. Miller, The PLO and the Politics of Survival, Washington Papers, no. 99 (Georgetown University, Washington, DC: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1983), pp. 33-34.

48 Al-Yawm, July 31, 1973.

49 Middle Eastern News Agency, March 14, 1972.

50 Interview in al-Akhbar (Beirut – Arabic), August 4, 1973.

51 Ha'aretz, August 13, 1973.

52 Daily Express (London), February 11, 1974.

53 Interview in al-Usbu'al-Arabi (Beirut – Arabic), October 22, 1979.

54 Interview in Arbeiter Kalergi (Vienna – German), March 13, 1974.

55 Deutsche Presse Agentur (Bonn – German), March 19, 1974.

56 Interview in al-Akhbar, July 6, 1974.

57 C. Smith, Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist (London: Sphere Books, 1976), p. 63.

58 As-Sayyad, February 6, 1979.

59 Abu Iyad, Without a Homeland, p. 157.

60 Interview in an-Nahar Arab Report (Beirut), January 5, 1976.

61 Interview in Arab World Weekly, November 23, 1974.

62 Ar-Rai'al-Am (Kuwait – Arabic), March 29, 1979.

63 Ha'aretz, March 30, 1979.

64 Reuters, April 1, 1979.

65 Al-Hamishmar (Hebrew), April 24, 1979.

66 Radio Monte Carlo, July 30, 1980.

67 Interview in Ar-Rai'al-Am, January 7, 1981.

68 New York Times, April 16, 1981.

69 Associated Press, August 31, 1982.

70 Jerusalem Post, August 22, 1983.

71 Newsweek, November 21, 1983.

72 Interview in al-Mawqif al-Arabi (Beirut – Arabic), January 1, 1983.

73 Interview in al-Qabas (Kuwait – Arabic), September 30, 1982.

74 Associated Press, August 23, 1982; Ma'ariv (Hebrew), August 24, 1982, both quoting the Voice of Palestine.

75 Interview in al-Anbaa (Kuwait – Arabic), October 6, 1982.

76 Interview in al-Hawadeth (London – Arabic), January 28, 1983.

77 In PLO terminology, "terror" refers to an act performed outside of Israel. Acts performed within the borders of Israel are not considered terroristic, but revolutionary. Abu Iyad, on the other hand, makes a different distinction between "revolutionary violence" and "terror:" the latter is a private act which is performed outside an organizational framework and does not constitute a political deed; revolutionary violence is a political act coordinated with a broad and organized movement. Thus Abu Iyad was able to claim that Black September was never a terrorist organization. See his book, Without a Homeland, pp. 146-147.

78 Interview in al-Mawqif al-Arabi, December 27, 1982.

79 Interview in al-Majallah, January 12, 1984. Emphasis added.

80 Associated Press, September 10, 1982.

Chapter 3

1 "Confession of Abu Dawud," p. A/3.

2 An-Nahar Arab Report, March 25, 1974; Middle-East Intelligence Survey, July 1-15, 1976.

3 Jerusalem Post, August 12, 1973, quoting LeNouvel Observateur (French), August 11, 1973.

4 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, p. 66.

5 SANA, February 16, 1985.

6 AFP, in English, February 21, 1985.

7 George Habash in Life, June 12, 1970, p. 33.

8 Ibid.

9 "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1981," p. 14

10 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, pp. 71-78.

11 Jerusalem Post, March 5, 1974.

12 Ha'aretz, November 1, 1979.

13 Al-Hamishmar, November 4,1981; Ma'ariv, February 5, 1980.

14 "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1981;" "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1982."

15 Arab Report and Record, June 1-15, 1970, p. 344.

16 C. Dobson & R. Payne, The Carlos Complex (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1977), p. 140.

17 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, p, 229.

18 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, p. 233; Dobson & Payne, The Carlos Complex, p. 229.

19 Daily Star (Beirut), October 4-5, 1973; An-Nahar Arab Report, October 8, 1973.

20 Yediot Aharonot and Ma'ariv, May 20, 1984, quoting British newspapers.

21 Yediot Aharonot and Ma'ariv, June 29, 1984, quoting the Wall Street Journal.

22 IDF Spokesman, May 29, 1984.

23 Amos, Palestinian Resistance, p. 206.

Chapter 4

1 Ha'aretz, June 2, 1972; Jerusalem Post, June 1, 1972.

2 Ma'ariv, February 19, 1969.

3 Quoted in L.A. Sobel (ed.), Palestinian Impasse: Arab Guerrilla and International Terror (New York: Facts on File, 1977), p. 40.

4 Al-Hayat (Riyad – Arabic), cited by UPI, March 4, 1973.

5 Dobson & Payne, The Carlos Complex, p. 287.

6 The Times (London), December 9, 1973.

7 Ha'aretz, June 4, 1972.

8 L.A. Sobel, Palestinian Impasse, p. 101.

9 New York Times, November 2, 1972.

10 Cited by Arab Report & Record, June 1-15, 1969, pp. 233 and 250.

11 New York Times, December 23, 1969.

12 Ha'aretz, October 27, 1972.

13 D.B. Tinnin, Hit Team (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 49.

14 Ha'aretz, June 4, 1972.

15 Ibid.

16 J.K. Cooley, Green March, Black September, p. 147.

17 Ha'aretz, January 13, 1970.

18 Sobel, Palestinian Impasse, p. 40.

19 Ibid., p. 99, quoting al-Ahram (Cairo – Arabic), September 8, 1970.

20 Ha'aretz, June 2, 1972.

21 Ha'aretz, March 6, 1973.

22 New York Times, April 25, 1979.

23 New York Times, December 30, 1968.

24 Interview in Time, January 10, 1969.

25 Arab Report and Record, March 16-31, 1969, p. 132.

26 New York Times, March 2, 1969.

27 See P. Blechman, "The Consequences of the Israeli Reprisals: An Assessment," Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University (Washington, DC, 1971).

28 B. O'Neill, Revolutionary Warfare in the Middle East (Boulder: Paladin Press, 1974), p. 82.

29 Ha'aretz, June 12, 1972.

30 Cited in Newsweek, October 2, 1972.

31 Jerusalem Post, October 17, 1972.

32 The most detailed sources for Israeli activities are U. Dan, Terror Incorporated (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Masada, 1976), and D.B. Tinnin, Hit Team.

33 M. Bar-Zohar & E. Haber, The Quest for the Red Prince (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1984).

34 E.F. Mickolus, Transnational Terrorism (London: Aidwych Press, 1980), p. 376.

35 Ha'aretz, March 8, 1973.

36 "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1981;" "Patterns of International Terrorism: 1982."

37 See for example, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1981, for a typical American reiteration of the policy at a time of opportunity for US-PLO interests.

38 Time, August 8, 1977.

39 New York Times, September 30, 1977.

40 Ha'aretz, September 17, 1972.

41 C. Sterling, The Terror Network, p. 265, quoting A. Jarach, Terrorism Internazionale (Florence: Vallechi, 1979).

Chapter 5

1 Asher Susser, Between Jordan and Palestine (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1983), p. 170.

2 Y. Harkabi, ed., The Arabs and Israel no. 6 (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), p. 113.

3 Y. Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and Its Meaning (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Information Center, July 1977), p. 74.

4 Mickolus, Transnational Terrorism, p. 160.

5 J. Sundberg, "The Antiterrorist Legislation in Sweden," in International Terrorism in the Contemporary World, ed. M.H. Livingston (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 116.

6 An-Nahar Arab Report, April 30, 1973.

The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (JCSS)

The Center for Strategic Studies was established at Tel-Aviv University at the end of 1977. In 1983 it was named the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Mel Jaffee. The objective of the Center is to contribute to the expansion of knowledge on strategic subjects and to promote public understanding of and pluralistic thought on matters of national and international security.

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The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies Recent Publications in English

1985 Subscription Series

Study no. 1 | Nimrod Novik, Encounter with Reality: Reagan and the Middle East During the First Term.
Study no. 2 | Anat Kurz and Ariel Merari, ASALA: Irrational Terror or Political Tool.
Study no. 3 | Efraim Karsh, The Cautious Bear: Soviet Military Engagement in Middle East Wars in the Post 1967 Era.
Study no. 4 | Shemuel Meir, Strategic Implications of the New Oil Reality.

1986 Subscription Series

Study no. 5 | Abraham Ben-Zvi, The American Approach to Superpower Collaboration in the Middle East, 1973-1986.
Study no. 6 | Ariel Merari and Shlomi Elad, The International Dimension of Palestinian Terrorism.
Study no. 7 | Saul Cohen, The Geopolitics of Israel's Border Question.
Study no. 8 | Yehuda Ben-Meir, National Security Decisionmaking: The Israeli Case.

Books

Shai Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Mark Heller, A Palestinian State: The Implications for Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1883).

Zvi Lanir, ed., Israeli Security Planning in the 1980s (New York: Praeger, 1984).

Aryeh Shalev, The West Bank: Line of Defense (New York: Praeger, 1985).

Ariel Merari, ed., Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Frederick, Md: UPA, 1985).

Nimrod Novik, The United States and Israel: Domestic Determinants of a Changing US Commitment (Boulder: Westview, 1986).

Annuals

The Middle East Military Balance, published since 1983 for JCSS by The Jerusalem Post and Westview Press.

InTer, A Review of International Terrorism.