Speaker 1: Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you are about to hear a special episode of the Martyr Maid podcast. This
episode is
Speaker 3: meant to be a sort of addendum to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, my earlier series on the early
history of
Speaker 3: Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian
Speaker 4: conflict. If you've managed to find this episode
on
Speaker 4: Without having first listened to that earlier series, I recommend listening
Speaker 3: to that series first. I know it's a time investment, but it is very thorough. And there are going to be a lot of things in this episode that I'm going to glide past or maybe cover lightly. Because I'm going to be assuming that you're already familiar with that earlier material. I'll
try
Speaker 4: not to do that, but it's going to be inevitable.
This episode is
Speaker 5: going to cover the period from 1948...
the
Speaker 5: year of Israeli independence and the
Speaker 6: Palestinian Nakba, to
the Lebanon
Speaker 6: War of 1982. It
is not meant
Speaker 3: to be a thorough history of that period, the way fear and loathing was of the pre-1948 period. To
do justice
Speaker 3: to that story would require another ten episodes, not just this one. So this one has a narrower focus.
The story I
Speaker 3: want to tell today is not about
history,
Speaker 3: Every figure and every event and motivation Relevant
Speaker 7: to the conflict in those years It's specifically about How the level of savagery Has escalated over the years The steps
Speaker 8: by which those escalations occurred
To bring
Speaker 5: us up to the point where we are now With virtually unrestrained violence And dehumanization completely normalized on
Speaker 9: both sides
So it's not a
Speaker 7: pretty story
And
Speaker 7: several sections of this podcast are not going to be for the faint of heart. It's not something to listen to with your kids in
Speaker 5: the car. At
times when I was
Speaker 5: putting the notes together, it started to even feel
a
Speaker 10: bit voyeuristic. The violence started to feel sort of gratuitous and pornographic, you could say.
Speaker 5: Because, well, you
know, every time I tried to
Speaker 5: delete a passage, though, I thought...
Speaker 5: No. Well, this has to be in here.
And so I'd end
Speaker 5: up putting it back in. Because it's one thing to hear that there was a terrorist attack today and 14 people were killed. I
think it's really
Speaker 11: important to try to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who goes through something like that. To
see before
Speaker 11: our mind's eye what those people saw.
Speaker 11: Because only then can we even attempt to understand why people would react to these things the way they do.
That means
Speaker 11: imagining that it was your mother who was forced out of her home by Israeli soldiers after seeing your father killed.
And
Speaker 11: then your mother walking out in the desert carrying your baby brother collapses in the heat before she can make it to a safe place and she dies and the baby dies before your eyes. And now you're 19 years old living in a refugee camp and somebody comes along asking if you want to join the resistance against the people who did that to you. And
it means imagining
Speaker 11: that the families butchered by Palestinian terrorists were your family.
That
Speaker 12: your wife and children, or your husband and children, were brutally murdered in front of you.
And then you're
Speaker 13: offered an opportunity to vote for a politician who promises to take a savage revenge on the people who did that.
It's really hard for
Speaker 5: people outside of the region, or not from countries that have been engaged in serious local conflict recently...
To
Speaker 14: understand what being in a state of war for such a long time does to people. The
Palestinians
Speaker 15: have been living in degraded conditions, terrorized and
Speaker 5: controlled by Israeli security forces, subject to periodic military assault for many decades now. Decades. Most
Palestinians who
Speaker 5: are alive today, in fact virtually all of them at this point, have lived their entire lives under those conditions.
Thank you.
The
Speaker 5: Israelis, you remember a few years back, back in 2015-2016, when ISIS terrorism in Europe and the U.S. was at its peak. And
it seemed like
Speaker 5: an attack was happening somewhere practically every other week
for a while. I remember
Speaker 5: that time well, and it was nerve-wracking. I remember myself saying some things that, in retrospect, I probably didn't mean about what might need to be done to get that under control.
Well, the
Speaker 5: Israelis have been dealing with that kind of thing for many decades, as we'll see in this episode. Dealing with attacks every bit as savage as anything ISIS did in the U.S. or Europe. And all of it happening in a tiny country the size of a small U.S. state. War radicalizes and hardens people. And
prolonged war
Speaker 5: can corrupt the soul in profound ways that can be hard to see from the inside.
What I
Speaker 5: don't like is
Speaker 16: when people who are not a party to the war, you know, Americans and others, who do everything that they
Speaker 6: can to cheer on the conflict and intensify the level of hatred and dehumanization that's driving it. I understand why Israelis and Palestinians
Speaker 11: have gotten in that place. It's their families being killed. I'm not going to tell somebody whose family has been murdered how they're supposed to feel
about it.
But if you're
Speaker 11: on the outside looking in, you know, I think we all have an obligation to try to talk the two sides back from the brink, to
try to
Speaker 11: be peacemakers, rather than prodding them on like a group of middle schoolers yelling, fight,
Speaker 7: fight, fight.
Anyway, enough
Speaker 7: preaching. I will
try to
Speaker 7: avoid that in this episode. This topic makes me preachy, I know, and I hate when I get preachy as much as you do.
I just
Speaker 7: have a lot of... I'll just be
up
Speaker 17: front. I have a lot of personal connections to people on both sides of this conflict. And
I get
Speaker 18: agitated when I see people that I otherwise respect saying awful things about them.
Anyway, after this is
Speaker 11: released...
and
Speaker 11: I've had time to knock out a few other projects I've been
Speaker 7: keeping on the back burner. I will do a follow-up episode that will focus on the period from 1982 up to the present day, with a focus on the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah and other jihadist elements in the Palestinian movement, as
well as the
Speaker 7: profound impact caused by the Iranian revolution. Very
quickly, as many of
Speaker 5: you know, I have another podcast with my friend Jocko Willink.
Speaker 7: That podcast is called Jocko Unraveling, and we discuss historical topics and current events.
We try to tie the
Speaker 7: two together.
Most recently,
Speaker 7: we've done a couple episodes on the latest
Speaker 3: outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. Jocko
is pretty
Speaker 3: much the sole sponsor of the
Speaker 19: Martyr Maid podcast. So if you like this show, go check out Unraveling. Go check out Jocko Podcast, his main
Speaker 9: podcast feed if you haven't.
And
Speaker 16: head on over to OriginMaine.com. That's Maine with an E, like the state. O-R-I-G-I-N-M-A-I-N-E dot com. Where you will find super
Speaker 20: high-quality gear of various sorts. All made right here in America at the Origin Factory. They've got everything from buffalo hide boots, high-quality jeans, hoodies,
Speaker 11: jackets...
Speaker 11: martial arts gear they got a line of archery hunting gear now
you see when you
Speaker 11: go to the website the stuff is pricey but this is not something where the jocko name is licensed
Speaker 7: out or just slapped onto a product mass produced at some anonymous factory this stuff is all custom designed custom made and it really shows in the
Speaker 12: quality as
you will see so
Speaker 12: let's get to
it
You
Speaker 12: are about to listen to a special episode, War All the Time,
Speaker 21: Israel and Palestine, 1948-82.
Here we
Speaker 22: go. I'm
content to die for
Speaker 22: my beliefs. So
cut off my head
Speaker 22: and make
me a
Speaker 23: martyr.
The people
Speaker 23: will always remember it.
Speaker 24: No. They
will forget. Hell does
Speaker 25: exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It
is a
Speaker 25: place. It
Speaker 26: is somewhere. Hell does exist.
Hell does exist.
Speaker 28: April
Speaker 21: 1956
at a
Speaker 3: funeral in southern
Israel.
Eight
Speaker 3: years since the Israeli war of independence, or as the Arabs called it, the Nakba, the catastrophe. The Arab states had fought with the newborn Israeli defense forces in 1948, but Jordan, Syria and Egypt were not up to that task. They lacked the resolve and the coordination of the Zionists, and they lacked the investment
as well. And
Speaker 3: when they felt they'd done enough to save face, their forces withdrew, leaving the Palestinians to pay the price for their
failure. The Israelis
Speaker 3: invaded and took over parts of the country that still had large Palestinian Arab majorities. And in the process, they drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs out of their homes
for good.
Speaker 3: And for eight years now, in 1956,
Speaker 3: Those people had languished in squalid refugee camps ringing the borders of the new Jewish state.
Palestinians who
Speaker 15: still lived within Israeli borders were restricted in their
Speaker 21: movement and
Speaker 30: activities,
herded into neighborhoods
Speaker 30: surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards to keep the men.
No one, not the
Speaker 6: Israelis, not the Palestinians,
Speaker 3: not any country in the region, thought
that
Speaker 3: That 1948 was the end of the matter.
The secular
Speaker 5: rulers of Egypt, Syria, and a short time later, Iraq,
they all
Speaker 5: wanted
Speaker 3: to unite the Middle East into a pan-Arab national state. Of course, they all thought they should
Speaker 31: be the ones leading it.
And they saw
Speaker 31: Israel as an open wound in the heart of the Arab world that had to be healed before that dream could be realized.
Okay.
Arabs
Speaker 31: across the region were shocked and humiliated by the terrible performance of Arab forces in the 48 war. And
so leaders
Speaker 31: played on those feelings to bolster their credibility on the Arab street.
For the Palestinians,
Speaker 11: this wasn't just a political game. It was much more personal, much closer to home, obviously. And as far as
they
Speaker 31: were concerned, their resistance hadn't ended just because Syria, Egypt, and Jordan had thrown in the towel.
A
Speaker 31: swelling hatred grew in the hearts of humiliated men in the Palestinian
Speaker 11: refugee camps. Their mothers and their grandmothers were living in tents in tin and cinderblock shanties, living on canned rations delivered by the U.N. or the Arab states, while the homes and land that their families had lived in, sometimes for generations,
were
Speaker 11: now in the hands of Jewish occupiers just a few miles away.
And so raids and
Speaker 3: skirmishes never stopped when the 1948 war officially ended.
Some young guy
Speaker 3: in a refugee
Speaker 11: camp with no job and no future might not be able to give his mother her house back,
but he
Speaker 11: could burn that house
Speaker 32: down. That sounds irrational
Speaker 3: and nihilistic,
Speaker 3: but I would be slow to judge until you've seen your mother chased out of her home at gunpoint, forced to walk out into the
Speaker 32: desert with whatever she could carry and ending up in the state that the Palestinians now found themselves in.
The Arab
Speaker 33: governments were humiliated as well.
And so they
Speaker 33: provided
Speaker 19: supplies and training and intelligence and just general encouragement to any Palestinian militants who were eager for revenge.
Okay.
Speaker 19: Sometimes, those militants
Speaker 34: targeted infrastructure in Israel, and sometimes they targeted
Speaker 7: people. Their state sponsors were not picky about the targets, as long as they harassed and destabilized Israel.
In one
Speaker 3: attack sponsored by Egyptian intelligence, a dozen Palestinian and Bedouin terrorists slipped into southern Israel and intercepted a bus on
the road. They
Speaker 3: waved it down and stopped it
Speaker 34: at gunpoint,
and when it stopped,
Speaker 34: They opened fire at point-blank range and killed 11 people.
On
Speaker 5: board was a nine-year-old boy who had managed to avoid being shot by hiding under a seat. And after a while, after he
Speaker 7: thought that the killers had left, not knowing that every other person on the bus
Speaker 3: had been killed, he called out, "Have they
gone?" But they
Speaker 3: had not gone.
And
Speaker 3: one of the killers came back and shot the boy in
Speaker 36: the head. He lived a while longer, but he was paralyzed for 32 years, and then he died at
Speaker 37: age 41.
Now, the Zionists,
Speaker 37: after years of insurgent warfare and with the Second World War hardly in the rearview mirror,
these were a
Speaker 38: hardened bunch, and they were well prepared to defend themselves from Arab
Speaker 16: raids when the occasion arose.
But
Speaker 16: they couldn't defend everywhere all the time.
The Arabs
Speaker 11: inevitably chose the time and place to harass or attack, and the Israelis had
Speaker 37: neither the organization nor the manpower to cover the whole border and interdict every raid.
And so, Moshe
Speaker 5: Dayan, boss of the Israeli defense forces at the time, explained in a lecture
Speaker 3: what the Israeli strategy would be.
Speaker 39: Quote,
We
Speaker 39: cannot prevent the murder of workers in orchards or of families in their beds, but we have the ability to set a high price for our blood, end quote. In
April 1956, Dayan was
Speaker 40: standing over the grave of a young Israeli lieutenant who, by
Speaker 36: chance, he had just met personally the previous day.
A squad of
Speaker 33: Palestinian militants had opened fire on a kibbutz near the southern border with Gaza, and the lieutenant had ridden out to confront them,
Speaker 34: but he was outnumbered and the guerrillas killed him. And
then they
Speaker 34: gouged out his eyes. And
then they
Speaker 34: dragged his body through a field and left the mutilated corpse for people to find. And
Dayan was
Speaker 34: at his funeral to deliver the eulogy. Quote,
Let
Speaker 34: us not today cast
Speaker 41: blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For
Speaker 16: eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been turning the land
Speaker 19: and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance.
Speaker 11: End quote. Now, Moshe Dayan writes,
It
Speaker 11: was no softy. This is a hard
Speaker 3: man, a clear-eyed soldier. And
he was
Speaker 3: not suggesting that his people should take pity on those refugees, much less that they should forgive
Speaker 16: anybody who attacked Jews in Israel, whatever their reasons. What
he wanted was
Speaker 16: for his audience to
Speaker 11: see things clearly, as he did.
To not be
Speaker 11: delusional and understand that there could be no forgiveness from the
Speaker 16: Palestinians for what had been done to
them.
There
Speaker 16: could be no sufficient restitution short of
Speaker 11: giving back their homeland and abandoning the Zionist project. And so if the Israelis were not willing to do that, Dayan was telling them, then
they were
Speaker 11: going to have to put aside this false hope that some arrangement
Speaker 42: can be reached where both sides get enough of what they want. They
have to
Speaker 42: put that aside. And
they'd have
Speaker 39: to look squarely at what was going to be required of them.
Speaker 11: Quote,
We
Speaker 11: are the generation of settlement, and without steel, helmets, and the maw of the cannon, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns,
Speaker 16: we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water.
Millions of
Speaker 16: Jews annihilated because they had no country—
Speaker 16: gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people.
We must not
Speaker 11: flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us, and await the moment when
Speaker 43: they are strong enough to get our blood.
We will not
Speaker 7: avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak. This is our generation's destiny.
The Israelis had
Speaker 34: reason to believe that the attack that had led to the lieutenant's death had been organized by the same Egyptian
Speaker 43: intelligence chief who had been causing a lot of their other problems, and they wanted that guy dead. It
so happened that the
Speaker 44: dead
Speaker 45: lieutenant's cousin was a bomb maker for Israel's fledgling Special Operations and Military Intelligence
Speaker 3: branch, and so
Speaker 45: it seemed
Speaker 3: appropriate to make him the instrument of revenge.
And so
Speaker 3: what he did was hollowed out the pages of a book and filled it with explosives, rigged
to go off
Speaker 3: when the book's package was opened. That
part was
Speaker 3: easy enough. The hard part was making sure that it got to the right guy without being opened by some lackey working in the mail room.
And so the
Speaker 46: Israelis called on a Bedouin man who had been doing undercover work for Israel in Gaza. The
thing
Speaker 3: is...
The
Speaker 3: Bedouin wasn't actually working for the Israelis. Actually, he was a double agent working for the Egyptian intelligence boss that the Israelis were targeting.
Now, the
Speaker 3: Israelis had already figured that out.
But neither the agent
Speaker 19: nor Egyptian intelligence knew that the Israelis had figured it out. And so rather than cut that guy loose or just kill
Speaker 11: him, the Israelis thought this might
come in
Speaker 11: handy sometime. And so they kept him on the payroll until
it did.
well
Speaker 11: now his number had been called and so they give him this package
Speaker 18: with the book in it and they really like play it up you know they're like look we are trusting you with this because it's just so
Speaker 33: important I mean like if the Egyptians ever got a hold of this I mean that would be the end of us I don't know what we'd ever do just pray the Egyptian intelligence boss never gets his eyes on what's in this book I mean they got him real excited
They
Speaker 33: told him
Speaker 34: it was of the utmost importance that he bring this package to another
Speaker 44: Israeli agent in Gaza, hoping that instead he would rush to deliver the book to his Egyptian boss. And
that's
Speaker 47: just what he did.
When Colonel
Speaker 33: Mustafa Hafez heard what the book was supposed to contain...
He
Speaker 33: got so excited that instead of having the package checked by technicians,
he
Speaker 44: just tore it open on the spot and 300 grams of explosive
Speaker 43: blew up in his face and he died on the floor right there in the headquarters of Egyptian intelligence. A brilliant operation on the Israelis' part. And while that couldn't bring the young lieutenant back to life, it could, as Dayan said, send a clear message that a heavy price
Speaker 48: would be exacted for Israeli blood.
And that
Speaker 48: wherever you were, you might think you're safe. You
might
Speaker 31: think you're too high up the food chain to be vulnerable. You are not. Now,
intelligence and
Speaker 6: clandestine operations are an art, not a science. And
Speaker 3: sometimes bombs went off in the faces of the wrong people.
Other times,
Speaker 6: Israeli units sent on punitive raids into Palestinian villages killed innocent people.
or
Speaker 34: destroyed
Speaker 3: the homes, or the orchards, or the livestock or gardens of Palestinian families as punishment for the crime of a cousin, or a second cousin, or an even more distant relative. Prominent
targets were
Speaker 43: hunted individually, but the new state of Israel did not have the resources or
Speaker 49: the trained manpower for a whole lot of that kind of thing, so the explicit strategy in these
Speaker 3: early years...
Speaker 3: was deterrence through collective punishment, or as nationalists and other revolutionary thinkers in the 20th century called it, through terror.
These were not law
Speaker 43: enforcement operations to take down a perpetrator,
or even
Speaker 43: military operations
Speaker 3: to eliminate enemy personnel or resources much of the time.
The purpose,
Speaker 3: to put it very bluntly, was to terrorize and intimidate the Palestinian population—
So
Speaker 3: that they would put pressure on their sons and their brothers and cousins to stay out of the fight and don't piss the Israelis off because you're going
Speaker 42: to bring their wrath down on all of us. It
was to say,
Speaker 42: look, if you want to kill Israelis, people close to you are going
Speaker 50: to die. They're
going to
Speaker 50: get their houses blown up and their livestock killed and their
Speaker 51: orchards burned down. And
so think
Speaker 51: about that before you plan your next raid.
And you have to
Speaker 51: remember that back in these days, again, we're talking late 40s, early
Speaker 3: 50s, Israeli intelligence did not have detailed files on all the militants in a given region. They
didn't have
Speaker 3: electronic surveillance tracking their communications or high-altitude drones and satellites
Speaker 43: tracking their movements. Most
of the time,
Speaker 43: they wouldn't know their names or what they looked like.
Someone
Speaker 16: would take a few pot shots at a kibbutz, or an Israeli military patrol would run over a landmine, and
then whoever
Speaker 42: did it was gone.
And all the
Speaker 42: Israelis would know a lot of the time is that some eyewitness said they went that-a-way, towards some village, a refugee camp.
And they also lacked
Speaker 7: the resources to track all the movements of the regular military forces of the neighboring
Speaker 3: Arab states. And so sometimes when Israeli units were sent out on punitive raids,
They
Speaker 3: would encounter
Speaker 52: military units of the Jordanian or Syrian or Egyptian armed forces.
And when that
Speaker 43: happened, the Israeli forces did not avoid contact if they thought that they could handle it.
If they thought they
Speaker 53: could handle it, they would initiate contact. They would attack.
And it sent a message to
Speaker 3: those countries that
they were
Speaker 3: going to be held responsible for any trouble Israel had from the Palestinians coming from their direction.
Speaker 3: so that hopefully it would incentivize those other countries to get the
Speaker 54: Palestinians under control themselves in order to avoid Israeli retaliation.
As the Israeli state
Speaker 15: was built out, its intelligence and military capabilities matured
Speaker 3: and differentiated and specialized. In 1953, David Ben-Gurion, longtime leader of the movement and now Israel's first prime minister,
Speaker 3: Ordered the formation of a new special operations unit under the command of a 25-year-old soldier named Ariel Shinerman, sometimes called Arik and better known to most of you as Ariel Sharon. Sharon's
team essentially functioned as
Speaker 3: a targeted assassination squad, although they would sometimes conduct their own missions like infrastructure sabotage and other
Speaker 55: things.
It
Speaker 55: was called Unit 101 and these guys were real cowboys.
Speaker 19: Their first mission was really just Sharon and a bunch of his buddies sneaking into a Palestinian village to blow up the house of an alleged terrorist
Speaker 56: while the guy was asleep
inside.
Speaker 57: Very loose in terms of how they conducted
Speaker 36: their operations. Sharon had fought with abandon as a 20-year-old in the 1948 war and he was badly wounded
in it.
Speaker 16: Now as a commander,
he
Speaker 16: very quickly earned a reputation for always being out front of his men,
Speaker 6: always taking the most dangerous jobs and manning the most vulnerable positions, never asking his men to do anything that he wouldn't do himself.
He was a very good
Speaker 58: soldier, very courageous,
Speaker 59: extremely motivated,
sometimes too motivated. You see,
Speaker 59: officially, the
way the process
Speaker 60: was supposed to work officially was...
Speaker 60: Military intelligence would identify a potential target.
They
Speaker 16: would investigate that target.
And if the
Speaker 16: target was approved for liquidation, then Unit 101 would get its orders to develop an operation
Speaker 11: and take that guy out.
Well, that's a slow process. And
Speaker 11: patience was never one of Ariel Sharon's strong suits. And so while he waited for Israel's spies to identify his high-value targets...
Speaker 11: Unit 101 occupied itself by developing its own intelligence, running its own operations, attacking and terrorizing Arab villages where Palestinian militants were thought to be hiding or using for support.
Sharon was one of those guys
Speaker 3: who was never comfortable unless he was out on an
Speaker 43: operation. As
soon as one
Speaker 43: mission was over, he was begging his superiors to turn him loose on another one.
And
Speaker 43: not just waiting for orders,
Speaker 11: but coming to them with ideas. You know, we should hit this, we should do that.
He wanted to
Speaker 11: continue attacking Palestinian villages and camps, of course.
But he also
Speaker 7: wanted to go after not just military, but civilian targets in Egypt and Syria and Jordan.
Sometimes when he couldn't
Speaker 6: provide his superiors with a good reason to attack the Arabs, he and his men
Speaker 3: would just create one.
They'd run an
Speaker 3: off-the-books operation to bait an Egyptian military unit to engage them.
And
Speaker 3: then they'd call headquarters and say, we're under attack by the Egyptians, we need reinforcements, and the IDF would show up in force.
Unit 101's
Speaker 3: intelligence officer, Uzi Ailam, said,
There were
Speaker 3: many cases
Speaker 34: in which we, at Arik's bidding, provoked the enemy over the border and incited war. In
a real
Speaker 34: analysis of who started it over the entire history of the IDF's retaliations, we will not come out squeaky clean.
When I think
Speaker 3: about the early Zionists, I often make a comparison to the Americans colonizing the frontier in
the
Speaker 36: 18th and 19th centuries. Many
of the
Speaker 36: Zionists, incidentally, made that same comparison to the point that
Speaker 45: the American cowboy aesthetic actually became popular among the settlers for a while.
Obviously,
Speaker 11: there's a million differences between those two sets of circumstances,
but
I make
Speaker 3: the comparison because the bottom line in both of those situations was this.
There was no
Speaker 3: way to turn North
Speaker 16: America into
a
Speaker 61: European state and maintain good relations with the Native Americans. That was just not going to happen.
Speaker 16: It was not possible. And
there was no way to
Speaker 16: transform Palestine into a Jewish state without coming into conflict with the Arabs who
Speaker 44: lived there. That was not possible.
And so the
Speaker 16: people who came to settle America were not exactly a random cross-section of European society. These
were a lot
Speaker 16: of bold people,
Speaker 12: a lot of desperate people, fanatics, zealots, adventurers, soldiers,
Speaker 11: some criminals. And then
the Americans who
Speaker 11: went out into Indian country to colonize the frontier, they were self-selected to be an even harder group of people.
Just
Speaker 11: imagine taking your family out into the middle of nowhere to build a cabin out of trees that you cut down with an axe in
a place where
Speaker 43: there are no police to come to your rescue and the natives come knocking wanting to know why your home is on their hunting ground.
It wasn't just
Speaker 11: anybody going out there.
It was hard people
Speaker 11: who had an idea of what they were getting into and thought that they could handle it.
sort of a
Speaker 16: similar situation with the zionists you know that kibbutz where that young lieutenant i mentioned a moment
Speaker 43: ago was killed it's called nahal
oz go
Speaker 43: find that on a map
it is
Speaker 43: less than half a mile from the border with gaza and then as now
Speaker 62: gaza was full of a lot of very unhappy arabs many
Speaker 11: of whom had been recently driven out of their homes by the
israelis
And there was
Speaker 11: no wall surrounding Gaza yet. No surveillance drones. No remote-controlled robot machine guns like they have today. None of that existed. And
so what kind of people
Speaker 63: are you going to get to go live in a place like that? Because
somebody's got
Speaker 63: to go live there. Because
if
Speaker 50: your people don't go live there...
then
Speaker 64: the Gazans are going to start to spread out and they're going to take that territory back just by osmosis. So you've got to go settle that land if you want to keep it.
Who are you going to
Speaker 65: get to do it?
And when the
Speaker 65: Arabs do attack and Jewish blood is spilled, who
are you
Speaker 65: going to get to go across the border into
Speaker 42: their towns, into their villages, into their neighborhoods to take revenge?
Today, in a
Speaker 64: place like America, we say, well, you send in the army, you know, send in the
Speaker 37: Navy SEALs,
and then
Speaker 37: this massive bureaucratic apparatus kicks into gear to go deal with whatever
Speaker 5: it is. But
institutions like
Speaker 5: the army in
Speaker 16: Israel at this time had not really developed into much more than a militia. And
while the
Speaker 16: average soldier might be brave, might be prepared
Speaker 37: to handle
Speaker 11: a rifle and stand firm at his defensive position if the Arabs attack...
Not
Speaker 11: everybody is cut out to go into hostile territory
Speaker 16: beyond the range of any rescue or reinforcement to go carry out assassinations or sabotage.
And so who are you
Speaker 64: going to get to do it?
There's only one
Speaker 64: answer to that question.
There's only
Speaker 43: ever been one answer. You're going to get people like Ariel Sharon.
You don't do something
Speaker 43: like what
Speaker 16: the Zionists were doing.
Or
Speaker 16: what the Americans did on the frontier, for that matter. Without people like that.
And those
Speaker 42: people often have a character that makes them heroic when the shit hits the fan. But
makes them a
Speaker 42: dangerous liability in any
Speaker 16: situation short of that.
Kind of
Speaker 16: like that tough guy friend that you always want to have your back in a bar fight. But
for some
Speaker 64: reason, every single time you go out with them, you seem to get into a bar fight.
well
Speaker 16: with men like Sharon at the business end of Israel's relations with the Arabs it was easy to see how things were going to turn out
and of course Sharon would
Speaker 16: say they were always going to turn out that way only
Speaker 11: without men like him the whole Zionist project would have gone under it's like Dayan said in that eulogy how
could they
Speaker 11: ever come to terms with a people whose land they had taken by force
Speaker 11: other than by giving their land back. You remember, at this time we're talking about,
this was not
Speaker 11: something that had happened a few generations ago. It wasn't something that had happened to your grandparents or great-grandparents.
It happened
Speaker 11: to you.
Seven to
Speaker 42: eight hundred thousand Palestinians were living miles away in squalid camps while Jews slept in their beds in their former homes.
But that
Speaker 66: is not something that can be fixed
Speaker 43: with words. And
the more
Speaker 43: ruthless and practical Zionists like Sharon and Dayan knew that there was no way to make that right because they knew how
Speaker 11: men like them would react if that had happened to them. And so unless they wanted to just give up on the
Speaker 7: Zionist project, and at
this point
Speaker 7: where could the Jews go even if they wanted to in the wake of World War II, they
were just going to
Speaker 7: have to forget about questions of right and wrong.
And
Speaker 7: just get ready to fight.
Now the Palestinians
Speaker 43: were not only a problem for Israel.
Anytime you
Speaker 43: uproot 700,000
Speaker 11: people, throw them out of their homes with what they can carry on their backs, and send them off to live anywhere but here,
that population is
Speaker 16: going to present problems for any country where
Speaker 43: they
end up.
Where they
Speaker 43: ended up was in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Gaza
borders Egypt
Speaker 3: and fell under Egyptian military control after the 48 War. The
West Bank,
Speaker 3: which is on the western bank of the Jordan River that the Israelis hadn't taken, had been under the control
Speaker 68: of Jordan since the 48 War.
The
Speaker 3: influx of so many destitute refugees was very difficult on these countries. It was
Speaker 5: economically burdensome, socially disruptive, politically destabilizing for sure, in all the countries that received them. Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, these
were all
Speaker 5: very young states themselves. Until
the First World
Speaker 5: War, they'd been Ottoman Empire
Speaker 18: provinces,
And
Speaker 3: then France controlled
Speaker 18: what would become Lebanon and Syria while Britain controlled Jordan.
And these
Speaker 18: countries only really acquired independent statehood in the mid-40s during and after World War II.
And so they're
Speaker 16: just a few years old.
Aside from Egypt,
Speaker 16: these young states were held together with string and silly putty. And actually, even in Egypt, the government wasn't really stable. In
Lebanon, for
Speaker 16: example, around 100,000 Palestinian refugees...
Speaker 16: entered a state with a total population of only about 1.3 million.
And those people weren't
Speaker 16: distributed evenly throughout the country. They were concentrated in certain
Speaker 7: areas in the south, which meant that certain portions of the already fractious Lebanese population felt the brunt of the consequences. The Lebanese
Speaker 69: government was totally out of its depth
Speaker 7: trying to deal with that situation
and
Speaker 6: And so, the various ethnic and religious communities started taking matters into their
Speaker 3: own hands. And tensions started to build, and Lebanon started down its path to disaster. 100,000 people is a lot in any case, but that's one-thirteenth of the population of Lebanon at the time. So, just imagine
Speaker 16: something like 25 million people coming into the U.S. all at once.
With
Speaker 16: little or nothing to their names, and essentially taking over a region of the country. Oh,
and by the way, they're at
Speaker 16: war with
Speaker 70: the country next door. And the country next door is going to hold you responsible for anything those people do.
The largest group of
Speaker 3: refugees ended up in Jordan. And
ever since the
Speaker 3: founding of Israel, the Jordanian monarchy has had to walk a tightrope.
with
Speaker 40: provoking Israel by its support for the Palestinian
Speaker 42: cause on one side and inviting accusations of being a collaborator and a stooge of the Zionists on the other side. They
still walk
Speaker 42: this
Speaker 7: tightrope.
And just
Speaker 7: now, in the last few weeks, a record number of Palestinian protesters, hundreds of thousands of protesters,
Speaker 7: flooded the streets
Speaker 3: of Amman, the capital of Jordan, to denounce the Israeli assault on Gaza and call for action from the Jordanian government.
This is not a
Speaker 38: small concern for a monarchy that is not even native to the region of Jordan.
The Hashemites
Speaker 38: who ruled
Speaker 16: Jordan came from the Arabian Peninsula. At
the time
Speaker 16: we're talking about, they had only been imported and installed by the British barely 40 years earlier.
Speaker 16: So it's not as if they had some deep claim to legitimacy. Palestinians made up
Speaker 63: over half the population of Jordan. They still do. The overwhelming majority of the urban population, which is to say the politically significant population.
From the very
Speaker 42: beginning, whenever the
Speaker 39: subject of a Palestinian state came up, the worry of Jordan's monarchy was that someone was going to say, Uh, excuse
me.
Why
Speaker 33: shouldn't Jordan be the Palestinian state? You
know, the
Speaker 33: Palestinians are the majority there, after all. And, you know, the
Speaker 50: Hashemites who rule that place are not even from the area. Why shouldn't that be Palestine?
And so, in
Speaker 3: fact, a lot of the
secular Arab
Speaker 3: leaders around the region, meaning the leaders of countries that had presidents, not kings
Speaker 71: like Egypt and Syria,
they
Speaker 71: were asking exactly that question. Why shouldn't Jordan
Speaker 38: be the Palestinian state? The retreat of the European empires from their former colonies after the Second World War gave
Speaker 3: rise to a generation of charismatic nationalist leaders in the Third
World. This was
Speaker 3: something you were seeing happen in Africa, it was happening in Asia, it was happening in the Middle East and North
Africa.
The
Speaker 38: people were swept up in the enthusiasm that comes with fresh independence. And charismatic leaders were rising up to represent those
Speaker 16: people and also to take advantage of that energy. The
thing is, in
Speaker 16: many of these countries, the Europeans had pulled out their colonial administrations and pulled out their military forces. But they didn't give up ownership of the resources and the infrastructure in those countries. So
that's just a
Speaker 11: recipe for conflict.
In
Speaker 11: fact, many of the post-colonial conflicts in the
Speaker 16: third world throughout the 20th century
were
Speaker 3: the result of exactly this dynamic.
And so, for
Speaker 3: example, the British and the French still held a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, which is really Egypt's chief
Speaker 72: infrastructure asset, chief
Speaker 7: strategic
asset of,
The Suez
Speaker 7: Canal runs right through Egypt, it's all on Egyptian territory, connecting the Red and Mediterranean Seas, and it's still owned by the French and the British at the time.
The Arab nationalists who
Speaker 3: were leading these new republics were not happy about the lingering foreign control in their countries, but it wasn't an easy thing to do something
Speaker 11: about it.
The biggest
Speaker 11: problems the Arab nations have faced...
Speaker 3: Then, and that they still face, is that they've just never been able to cooperate with each other. Not
for any
Speaker 3: length of time, anyway.
Some Arab
Speaker 18: countries are ruled by monarchies, others call themselves republics.
Some are
Speaker 18: religious and sectarian,
Speaker 16: others are secular and socialist.
The leaders of each
Speaker 16: Arab country competed with each other as
much or
Speaker 16: more than they did against outside powers, including Israel.
And so
Speaker 16: they've always been
Speaker 3: easy marks for Israel and the West to play off against
Speaker 42: each other.
These secular
Speaker 42: Arab leaders, they all wanted some form of pan-Arab unity.
Whether
Speaker 16: that meant political unification, as in like an Arab Warsaw Pact, or just a lighter alliance like an Arab NATO, they wanted that kind of organization. But they
all meant
Speaker 16: pan-Arab unity under their leadership, and they wanted that kind of organization.
Speaker 16: and so they could never quite agree on how to get it done.
After the
Speaker 16: humiliation of the Arab armies in 1948, one of the ways to bolster popular
Speaker 73: support
Speaker 38: for you being the one,
not only
Speaker 38: among your own people, but throughout the region, was to promise that you were going to be the one who was going to confront the Zionists
Speaker 7: and get justice for the Palestinians. By the
mid-1950s,
Speaker 6: over a million Palestinians were now living in squalor, mostly in squalor,
In
Speaker 40: neighboring countries with no end or change in their situation in sight.
Israel was a
Speaker 16: constant reminder of the years of European domination. Actually, not just a reminder. To the Arabs, it represented the continued
Speaker 42: presence of European imperialism in the Arab world.
while
Speaker 42: the Israelis saw themselves especially after World War II essentially as a nation of refugees themselves that
is not how
Speaker 42: the
Speaker 43: Arabs experienced them the Arabs experienced them as invaders and colonizers that's
not
Speaker 18: exactly new in history that's often how it goes the Turks who conquered the Byzantine Empire were only there because the Mongols had driven them off
the steppe
The
Speaker 18: Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410, they were being driven deeper into the Roman Empire because they were trying to get away from the Huns. Hell,
a lot of early Americans
Speaker 43: believed that they were refugees from persecution, but
that did not
Speaker 43: soften their impact on the Native Americans. And so, promises by the Arab
Speaker 3: leaders to drive out the Zionists were,
were of
Speaker 3: a piece with their more general commitment to extirpate European
Speaker 63: influence, political and economic control from the Middle East.
How you see the
Speaker 51: Israelis' behavior,
Speaker 3: both toward the Palestinians as well as toward the surrounding Arab countries, really depends on how broad a view of the situation you want to take.
Or maybe a
Speaker 75: better way to say it is...
It
Speaker 75: depends on when you want to start the historical clock.
Somebody taking
Speaker 20: a close-in view would say, well, look, the Israelis are being attacked,
so they're
Speaker 76: within their rights to retaliate. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Just let people attack them?
Answer to that seems
Speaker 64: pretty obvious, right?
But someone taking a
Speaker 64: 30,000-foot historical view is going to say, well, wait a second, the Israelis were the ones who
Speaker 18: seized this land and drove these people out of their homes.
Right?
And so
Speaker 18: the Palestinians are surely within their rights to fight back. What are they
Speaker 43: supposed to do? Just accept their ethnic cleansing and move on? And
the answer to
Speaker 11: that seems pretty obvious too. And you still see people throwing these lines at each other with full earnestness as people debate the topic today.
Now that Israel's
Speaker 16: been around for 75 years,
people on the
Speaker 16: outside tend to have a different view of the situation than when it had only been around for a decade or so.
Speaker 16: Today, many people look at Palestinian terrorism the way they would look at it if the American Indian movement here in 2023 started lighting off bombs,
started a
Speaker 16: campaign of mass terror to take
Speaker 32: back North America. Just anachronistic, pointless
Speaker 38: violence, even if their original historical grievances were totally legitimate. But
most of us
Speaker 78: view Indian attacks in the 1700s
Speaker 43: and 1800s
Speaker 43: During and just after European settlers were driving them out of their homes and colonizing their land, we
view that
Speaker 43: differently than if the AIM started launching attacks today.
When the Israelis and Arabs
Speaker 79: were killing each other in the 50s and 60s, either
or both
Speaker 79: sides could be seen as acting
in
Speaker 3: legitimate self-defense or taking justified revenge, depending on how you want to frame the question.
But like
Speaker 16: Moshe Dayan said in that eulogy, for the Israelis, these were going to have to be moral quandaries for their children. To
debate and judge,
Speaker 20: hopefully, in Israeli universities, in Israeli cities, but that was only going to
Speaker 7: happen if this generation, this first settler generation, put those quandaries aside and acted ruthlessly and decisively. This
was in the
Speaker 5: wake of World War II.
And so
Speaker 5: the Zionists were not in a mood to take moral
Speaker 80: advice from anybody,
nor to
Speaker 80: listen to anyone's lectures on the laws of war. The
attitude of many
Speaker 16: Israeli leaders was the same as that of many Palestinian militants. If
America
Speaker 81: can nuke Japanese cities, and the Soviets can massacre their way through Eastern
Speaker 82: Europe...
If
Speaker 75: millions of German civilians can be ethnically cleansed from European countries they lived in for centuries, then
given the
Speaker 42: existential danger they faced, both Israelis and Palestinians
Speaker 16: felt that any means were justified in pursuit of their victory. It
really is
Speaker 16: important to remember that historical context, meaning the fact that the initial
Speaker 3: acts which set off the cycle of violence
Speaker 3: happened right around the era of world war ii not because the context
Speaker 16: justifies anything but
because it
Speaker 16: affected what people thought
Speaker 64: of as normal
what people
Speaker 64: thought of as being within the bounds of what was normal
in war the world
Speaker 37: had spent the last few years of world war ii engaged in
Speaker 16: total unrestrained violence against civilian populations
and
Speaker 16: Both sides, the Axis
Speaker 11: and the Allies.
When the
Speaker 11: Zionists expelled the Palestinians in 1948, the Soviet Union, a world power,
a member in
Speaker 16: good standing of the UN Security Council, legitimized by the other Allies who had allowed Soviet butchers to sit as judges of war crimes at Nuremberg.
At the same time that
Speaker 64: the Zionists were carrying out those expulsions,
The
Speaker 64: Soviet Union was engaged in extraordinary violence against millions of people in the parts of Europe that it had conquered.
In the Korean
Speaker 64: War, a few years later in the early 50s, we killed something like
Speaker 42: 20% of the entire population of North Korea. A
lot of it by
Speaker 42: using heavy bombers against an enemy that had no air force.
And so that's the
Speaker 42: state of the
Speaker 83: world.
The
Speaker 83: state of international affairs in the 40s and 50s.
There's another point
Speaker 84: about the historical context, which is good to keep in mind. And
Speaker 85: actually, I guess I've already kind of touched
Speaker 51: on this, but it's worth bringing into the foreground.
And it's that in
Speaker 37: these early days, Israeli government institutions were still in their
Speaker 16: infancy. I
mean, they
Speaker 16: were just being put together.
You hear
Speaker 16: about like an Israeli intelligence agency And a lot of times it just meant a shabby building With a few deaths thrown in it
Today
Speaker 3: when we say Mossad or Israeli defense forces People picture this hyper-efficient High-tech organization With elaborate bureaucracies To handle everything from recruiting To training, to pensions To propaganda
Speaker 42: and legal questions Back
in the
Speaker 42: early days None of that existed
And the
Speaker 42: Israelis were flying by the seat of their pants a lot of the time, often building out these institutions as it became necessary in the course of operations. And
so they were
Speaker 42: carrying
Speaker 34: out very bold operations. Operations that would never make it past legal review today in the modern world.
They would often
Speaker 33: carry out operations in one part of the government that the rest of the government knew nothing about.
Just
Speaker 3: like Sharon's Unit 101 Picking its own fights in Gaza Half the time the Israeli defense forces Sent in to reinforce them They just thought it was an Egyptian attack Which is what was intended by Sharon's unit
Take an
Speaker 3: example from 1954 Famous
Speaker 16: example In 1954 Israeli military intelligence Recruited a handful of Jews Who were living in Egypt at the
time
and got
Speaker 16: them to agree to plant bombs in movie theaters, libraries, and education centers owned by Britain and the United States, where British and American people frequented. Two
American
Speaker 86: libraries in a British theater were
Speaker 73: bombed by these terrorists working for Israel.
They called it
Speaker 73: Operation Susanna. It's come down better
Speaker 87: known as the Levon Affair.
Speaker 87: after the Israeli defense minister at the time.
The plan was to
Speaker 73: blame the attacks on the Egyptians to incite the British and the Americans against Israel's main enemy. Just a straightforward, dictionary-definition
Speaker 20: false flag.
Fortunately, the
Speaker 40: operation was poorly planned and sloppily carried out.
So the
Speaker 40: Egyptians caught on, and 11 Israeli agents, both Egyptian
Speaker 45: Jews and undercover Israeli officers,
were
Speaker 45: captured, they were tortured, and except for two
Speaker 88: who managed to escape, sentenced to long prison terms or death.
Israel, of
Speaker 16: course, denied involvement in the Levon affair, continued to deny involvement until 2005, when the government
Speaker 45: finally dropped the charade and officially honored the
Speaker 3: surviving agents of the operation.
So that's the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that was going
on.
Two
Speaker 3: years later, 1956, the Israelis engaged with Western powers against Egypt more
Speaker 34: directly. Jamal Abdul Nasser had taken over as President of Egypt in 1956, and he was positioned as the natural leader of
the Arab
Speaker 34: world. He was also Israel's number one nemesis from the mid-50s
Speaker 3: until the late
1960s.
Speaker 3: Nasser was a complicated figure in many ways. In some ways I would say he was a
Speaker 16: great man, you know, in a political sense, a great man of 20th century history. He was
Speaker 20: tall, he looked the part, he was a very, very good orator, very inspiring figure.
Speaker 89: Sometimes, let's just say, his appetite was a little bigger than his stomach, and that brought some disaster onto his country eventually. Nasser
championed the
Speaker 90: Palestinian cause, as all Arab leaders
Speaker 38: did, and
he did it
Speaker 38: for his own reasons, as all other Arab leaders also did. Nasser
wanted to bring the
Speaker 5: Arab countries under a single political authority, under his leadership, and,
And so
Speaker 91: aside from questions of justice or law or religious obligation, Israel was just in the way. It was literally
Speaker 3: a physical impediment to his plans, separating Egypt from the rest of these Arab countries. All
the secular Arab
Speaker 3: leaders in the region favored some kind of pan-Arab cooperation, if not outright political unification like Nasser wanted. All the republics
Speaker 6: wanted that.
But none of
Speaker 6: the Arab monarchies wanted that. The Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq,
Saudi
Speaker 43: Arabia and the other Gulf shikdoms, the Moroccans, these countries were the personal possessions of
Speaker 3: their monarchs, and they were not going to allow their personal possessions to be absorbed into some
Speaker 34: pan-Arab socialist republic. Many
of these monarchies
Speaker 34: had been put in place by the British Empire.
And
Speaker 34: they continued to have chummy relations with Britain in the West.
Now, the
Speaker 7: Prime Minister of Jordan, who served King Hussein in the late 60s, for example,
that guy
Speaker 7: had served in the British Navy.
And so, from
Speaker 7: Nasser's perspective, and
that of the
Speaker 7: Syrians and the
Speaker 42: Ba'athists as well,
these monarchies
Speaker 42: were illegitimate. They were pawns of Western powers. More importantly, they stood in the way
Speaker 38: of Arab unity
and,
And so they
Speaker 38: were all right next to Israel on the list of things that had to go. Egypt
had for a long time
Speaker 38: been close to the British too. But
neither
Speaker 42: the British nor any of the Western powers were in
Speaker 40: favor of Arab unification. And so once Nasser came to power in 1956, he began to pull away from the West and started seeking friendship with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 3: which was looking for allies in the region and making big promises of funding and engineering support and military training.
And so 1956
Speaker 3: was going to
Speaker 39: be the year of the second Arab-Israeli war, the first being 1948. It's usually called the Suez Crisis over here, but it was the second Arab-Israeli war, and this time there was no question about who had started
it.
as i
Speaker 39: mentioned a few
Speaker 3: minutes ago egypt was a sovereign independent nation now but british and french investors still held the controlling interest
in
Speaker 92: the suez canal which ran right through egypt the
french and british
Speaker 93: reaped a majority of the profits from
Speaker 38: shipping that passed through the canal
and so nasser
Speaker 38: decided that had gone on long enough and that the canal properly belonged to
That
Speaker 38: Egypt should be the one deciding whether and whose and how much shipping would pass
through
Speaker 3: their territory, and
that the Egyptian
Speaker 3: people should be the ones benefiting from it financially, and so he nationalized it.
Well, the British and the
Speaker 7: French were not prepared to just let such an important strategic asset, not to mention cash cow, go without a
Speaker 16: fight. The French and British wanted to take military action against Egypt.
But someone
Speaker 11: was standing in their way, that someone was U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.
Speaker 16: Eisenhower was focused on the broader Cold War with the Soviet Union. He was not interested
Speaker 40: in the petty financial interests of the French or the
Speaker 19: British. And he was interested in
Speaker 37: asserting America's authority in the post-war
world.
He was much
Speaker 16: more concerned with the possibility of alienating all the countries of the Middle East and losing them to the Soviet Union and what that might mean in the context of the Cold War. A
global propaganda
Speaker 16: war was being waged in the Third World and non-aligned countries. Soviet messaging was very simple. It practically wrote itself. They were saying to the Third World, Look, yeah, sure, we joined...
The
Speaker 16: Allies, Britain, France, you know, America, we joined the Allies to fight the fascists during World War II.
But then what happened? Your
Speaker 16: colonizers, backed by the Americans, went and allied with Japan and even Germany.
And they're
Speaker 16: still trying to
Speaker 94: control your countries. You know, we support your movement for national liberation. We're with you. They want to retain their empires.
And
Speaker 95: just look at the French in Vietnam and Algeria, look at the British in Kenya, still
Speaker 16: asserting control over the vital resources and assets in your countries, threatening you with violence if
Speaker 43: you try to take back what's rightfully yours. Now, you can poke holes in that narrative if you want, but that's very powerful propaganda for newly independent
Speaker 64: countries whose core infrastructure and natural resources are in fact still owned by their former colonizers.
And so while
Speaker 16: the British and French were concerned with trying to keep their assets, at least some American leaders had their eye on a bigger picture. And they knew that France and Britain bullying countries in their former colonial stomping grounds made for very bad propaganda. And
so Eisenhower vetoed
Speaker 40: any military action by the French or British against Egypt.
Speaker 40: which was the most populous
Speaker 39: and, in the terms that mattered to Cold War planners, the most important Arab power in the Middle East.
And so the French and the
Speaker 39: British got together with the
Speaker 3: Israelis.
And they huddled
Speaker 3: together and came up with a plan.
Again, this was
Speaker 3: 1956, so the Soviet Union was
Speaker 34: busy putting down a revolt in Hungary. They weren't going to be available to bail Egypt out of a military crisis.
And so the
Speaker 34: three devised a
Speaker 16: secret plan in which the Israelis would attack Egypt unprovoked
with the goal
Speaker 16: of provoking an Egyptian counterattack, which would then allow Britain and France to move in and occupy the area as peacekeepers,
Speaker 3: reclaiming the Suez Canal in the process. And
so that's what
Speaker 3: happened, and it all went according to plan.
Speaker 3: Israel invaded, Egypt retaliated, France
Speaker 16: and Britain moved in, seized the canal, and Israel was rewarded for its role
with control of
Speaker 18: the Sinai Peninsula. Now
they knew that the Americans
Speaker 16: were going to figure out what happened right away, but
they figured
Speaker 16: that Eisenhower would just accept the facts
Speaker 43: on the ground once the deed was already done.
But they were
Speaker 43: wrong about that. Eisenhower was not happy.
It
Speaker 43: didn't help that David Ben-Gurion gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament,
Speaker 16: crowing about how the
Suez Crisis
Speaker 16: had made the 1949 peace with Egypt dead and buried, and that Israel would no longer be constrained by the terms of that deal.
There were calls for
Speaker 16: a UN peacekeeping force to separate the Israelis and Egyptians at Suez,
but Israel,
Speaker 96: Ben-Gurion said that under no circumstances would UN forces ever be allowed
Speaker 3: on any territory controlled by Israel. And so Eisenhower was pissed, and he wanted to make it absolutely clear
Speaker 16: who was calling the shots in the non-communist world.
He ordered
Speaker 16: the French and British to get out.
He made the
Speaker 16: Israelis give back the Sinai Peninsula, and then Nasser allowed UN peacekeepers to be stationed near the canal.
It was
Speaker 16: probably the moment you can mark in the history books as the official end of France and Britain as real great powers on the
Speaker 37: world stage.
Well, so Egypt had lost
Speaker 37: that war militarily. They'd lost it badly. But Nasser was still able to
Speaker 44: brag... Nasser had only been in office a few months. He came in in 1956, and that's when this happened. And he was able to brag
that...
He
Speaker 44: stood up
Speaker 97: to not just Israel, but to the two European powers that had dominated the Middle East since the Turks left,
and at least
Speaker 75: ended up no worse than he'd started off. And
so his popularity
Speaker 16: around the Arab world skyrocketed. Two years later, in 1958, he formed the United Arab Republic with Syria, a first step toward political unification. And while Syria remained nominally independent...
For
Speaker 16: the few years that it lasted, Nasser was making most of the important decisions for both countries,
taking an
Speaker 16: important first step toward
fixing
Speaker 31: the Arabs' traditional problem of never being able to cooperate with each other. Nasser
was so
Speaker 43: popular that Nasserite factions formed in other countries,
usually
Speaker 3: led by military officers who wanted to model their own country's government and foreign policy on Nasser's Egypt.
Nasserite
Speaker 98: factions gained momentum in Lebanon, Yemen, and
Speaker 43: especially Iraq. Iraq, again, was controlled by a monarchy from the same Hashemite family as the monarchy that ruled
Speaker 51: Jordan. Pro-Nasser military officers in Iraq wanted to overthrow that monarchy.
and
Speaker 16: institute a secular government along the lines of Egypt and Syria. And in 1958, the year Nasser formed the UAR with Syria,
Speaker 67: the plotters launched a bloody coup d'etat, which reduced Iraq to chaos for a while.
My wife's mother
Speaker 3: was actually a little girl,
living in
Speaker 3: Baghdad at the time of the revolution in 1958. And
even though
Speaker 3: she was very young, she remembers tanks pointing their cannons at her family's apartment building.
and
Speaker 3: seeing cars dragging bodies through the streets.
This is from
Speaker 3: Jillian Becker's book on the Palestine Liberation Organization. Quote,
In the
Speaker 16: 37 years since the British had created the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, there had been 57 ministries, a history of
Speaker 38: instability with numerous uprisings, massacres, and barbaric assassinations.
The
Speaker 33: regent, Abd al-Alaq,
The
Speaker 33: uncle of the young King Faisal II had ambitions of his own for Iraq to dominate
Speaker 16: in Arab unity embracing Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. In February 1958, he achieved a union
Speaker 40: between Iraq and Jordan, the two remaining Hashemite kingdoms. This
was as
Speaker 33: intolerable to Nasser as the union of Egypt and Syria was unbearable to Abd al-Alaah.
Under
Speaker 33: pro-Nassarite
Speaker 16: leadership, a contingent of Iraqi troops dispatched by the region to help quell a pro-Nassar uprising in
Speaker 33: Lebanon turned instead on their own ruling house. At
dawn on
Speaker 33: 14 July 1958, Faisal was murdered, along with his grandmother, his aunt, and others in the palace, including an orphan boy. His uncle, Abd al-Ela, was dragged through the streets of Baghdad tied with ropes to the back of a truck.
Then
Speaker 33: his body was dismembered with axes and his limbs and head tossed about by the hysterical mob.
The torso
Speaker 33: was hung from a balcony, and chunks of its flesh were sliced off and thrown to the crowd below.
The Prime
Speaker 33: Minister, Nouriel Saeed, disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape, but he was found and instantly killed, and his body was left lying on the road to be driven over and squashed and broken
Speaker 16: by the cars of exulting motorists.
He was
Speaker 16: succeeded for a brief period by General Abdel Karim Qasim, who led the revolt and the massacre, and who favored friendship with the Soviet Union.
After five
Speaker 3: years, Qasim, too, was murdered, and his body was devoured by dogs.
Now, I should
Speaker 3: mention that Jillian Becker's book on the PLO definitely has an angle. It's not a neutral book. It's got an
Speaker 33: agenda to the point that you would be justified calling it a polemic against the
Speaker 99: Palestinian groups and their supporters and an apologia for
Israel.
But it's got a
Speaker 38: lot of good information. Sometimes you just have to work through bias sources and account for the bias because sometimes
Speaker 3: they provide information that is not spelled out well in other sources. And
in her
Speaker 3: book, there's particularly good
Speaker 67: information about how Arab leaders around the region use the Palestinian cause to jockey for position among themselves. Now,
Iraq was
Speaker 100: just first on the
Speaker 101: list.
Speaker 101: Nasser wanted to see all the monarchies toppled.
In
Speaker 6: 1960, his agents killed the Prime Minister of Jordan with a bomb that had been intended for the king. In 1962, he took the side of revolutionary forces
Speaker 73: against the monarchy in Yemen and fought a proxy war there against Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 38: In
the meantime,
Speaker 38: there was another coup d'etat in Syria,
And
Speaker 38: that country pulled out of the
Speaker 3: United Arab Republic in order to start reasserting its own leadership position in the region. Hopefully you're starting to get a picture of why the Arab nations were never able to organize and cooperate to keep from being pushed around by little
Speaker 16: old Israel.
Meanwhile, the
Speaker 16: Palestinian issue festered, and relations between Israel and its neighbors continued to deteriorate.
In
Speaker 16: 1964, with the Egyptians fighting in Yemen and Syria reasserting itself, Nasser had a clever
Speaker 44: idea. He
called a meeting of
Speaker 44: all the Arab heads of state as well as some important factional leaders to
see if
Speaker 44: the one
Speaker 37: issue
on which
Speaker 37: they all agreed, the Israel-Palestine issue, could bring them together, under Nasser's
Speaker 84: leadership, of course.
He
Speaker 102: proposed to create a political entity to
Speaker 50: organize and represent the Palestinian
Speaker 42: people. The Palestinian people were scattered in many countries. They didn't have a national government of their own to speak for them.
And so the Arab League
Speaker 39: approved the plan. They voted to fund this new organization. And thus
Speaker 103: was born the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. Again,
this was a
Speaker 104: clever idea by Nasser.
He had
Speaker 104: called the meeting,
he
Speaker 16: chose the president of the PLO, and he expected that it was going to organize the
Speaker 45: Palestinians into an Egyptian proxy that he could then put to use in the countries where Palestinians lived.
Later in the year, the
Speaker 45: PLO
Speaker 16: president was invited to represent the Palestinians at a meeting of the Arab League, and he was treated like the leader of a proper national state.
Well, this was
Speaker 51: welcome to most of the participants, but not to King Hussein of
Speaker 16: Jordan. Again, most Palestinians lived in Jordan. Most Jordanians were Palestinian. So an organization whose purpose was to politically organize and represent the Palestinian people would amount to forming an alternative state structure
Speaker 97: within his country.
Worse, the
Speaker 97: PLO had already started behaving like a state, demanding the right to levy taxes
Speaker 16: on Palestinian citizens in Jordan to fund its operations, and even to raise a Palestine Liberation Army that would operate independent of the Jordanian military. These are
things no
Speaker 16: sovereign country could tolerate.
Speaker 105: Naturally, the actual government of
Speaker 106: Jordan saw this as a threat to its authority and legitimacy.
Speaker 106: which it was, and which is exactly what Nasser had intended it to be. So all political energy, most political energy around the Palestinian question started
Speaker 16: flowing into the PLO at this point. But not all Palestinians were enthusiastic about it.
Some of them did
Speaker 16: not trust the Arab states to stand for the Palestinians when the chips were down. In 1948...
Speaker 16: They had fled as soon as they had done enough to say they'd done something.
These people didn't
Speaker 45: trust international organizations to take any meaningful action on their behalf.
They believed that
Speaker 75: only Palestinians could liberate Palestinians, that their liberation could only be achieved through
Speaker 81: armed revolutionary struggle in keeping with the spirit of the age.
One of those who
Speaker 107: thought this way was George
Speaker 16: Habash,
Speaker 16: a young Palestinian Christian who would later found and lead the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
Speaker 108: the PFLP.
Habash was born in
Speaker 16: 1926, making
Speaker 45: him 22 at the time of the 1948 war, in
a town
Speaker 45: called Lidda.
During the war,
Speaker 16: the new Israeli army had moved into Lidda and forced virtually every Arab resident out of the town with whatever they could carry,
Speaker 16: driving them out into the desert on foot in July
Speaker 91: to live or die however they could while Israeli soldiers
Speaker 45: looted their homes and stripped them of valuables on their way out. And hundreds of them did die out in the
Speaker 39: desert, especially old people and children, before they were able to reach the next safe haven.
The cleansing of Lida and a
Speaker 3: simultaneous identical operation
in the
Speaker 3: town of Ramla
Speaker 3: resulted in some 50,000 Palestinians being driven out into the desert on foot as
a result of
Speaker 3: one operation.
For people who
Speaker 1: were there and for people who heard the stories of those who were, this act of ethnic cleansing and, you know,
Speaker 3: look, there's some dispute over whether that term is appropriate here, but there's no controversy as far as I'm concerned, so I'm going to
use it.
the
Speaker 109: order was given by the israeli government to drive the residents of lida and ramla out
israeli
Speaker 16: military communications were already referring to the people as refugees while they were still in the cities
look
Speaker 110: that's a
Speaker 33: debate we can have another time the bottom line is one way or another tens of thousands of palestinians were driven out of the two cities at gunpoint and many of them died on their long walk through
Speaker 51: the desert
and
And to
Speaker 51: the people who went through that,
to the people who
Speaker 41: went through that, it left a permanent impression of what the Israelis were actually all about,
Speaker 1: whatever they might say.
Another young man who thought
Speaker 91: like George Habash was Khalil al-Wazir, nom de
guerre
Speaker 40: Abu Jihad, born in 1935 in the Palestinian town of Ramla, the
Speaker 3: other city whose population was driven out.
Speaker 3: during the operation I just mentioned.
Speaker 45: Khalil was 12 or 13 years old in 1948,
when the
Speaker 45: Zionist terrorist group known
Speaker 16: as Irgun exploded a bomb in Ramla's main marketplace, killing 18 civilians and wounding another 45.
And then
Speaker 111: later that year, he and his family and everybody he knew were driven out of
Speaker 1: Ramla at gunpoint by Israeli forces and never
allowed to
Speaker 16: return. Khalil and his family ended
up in
Speaker 16: Gaza, and just three years later, when he was 16 years old,
he was already
Speaker 16: leading a Palestinian militant group, 16 years old. He and his friends sought out men who'd gained experience fighting in the '48
war,
And
Speaker 16: those men taught Khalil and his friends what they knew.
And then
Speaker 16: Khalil's group went out and recruited and trained more fighters. And by the time he was 18, in 1953, Khalil commanded some 200 young fighters, 18 years
Speaker 67: old.
Operating out of Gaza,
Speaker 67: they launched operations against infrastructure and against
Speaker 37: people in southern Israel.
And they were encouraged and
Speaker 37: supported by the Egyptians.
who
Speaker 37: used them as expendable proxies to
Speaker 16: harass the Israelis. And
the
Speaker 51: Egyptians would send Palestinian students from Cairo as reinforcements for the group.
One of the young
Speaker 61: men they sent was an electrical engineering student
from the
Speaker 61: University of Cairo named
Speaker 80: Muhammad Yasser Abdelrahman Raouf Arafat Al-Qudwa Al-Husseini, better known to all of you as Yasser Arafat.
Arafat and Abu
Speaker 61: Jihad immediately recognized the other's talent, and they took a liking to each other, and
Speaker 45: the two formed a partnership that would completely change the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After a few years,
Speaker 20: Arafat, Abu Jihad, and another friend who had become important to their organization, Saleh
Halaf,
Speaker 112: traveled to Europe.
to go to
Speaker 113: an international student congress sponsored by the Soviet Union in Prague.
Many prominent
Speaker 67: Palestinians and other Arabs who could afford to do it would send their kids to school in Europe, and so the three guys made important connections
Speaker 40: with a lot of these expats during their visit. And then instead of going back, immediately they moved on to Stuttgart in West Germany to go sound out the student movement there. This
was still
Speaker 17: 1956-1957.
So
Speaker 17: there's not a whole lot going on internationally with
the
Speaker 114: Palestinian movement outside of the Arab emigre students groups. Arafat
had become
Speaker 115: accepted as
Speaker 21: the leader of their little group by this point. And
since he
Speaker 21: was an engineer, he applied for and got a job in Kuwait. And once he got there, he got
Speaker 16: work permits for his friends to come and sent for them.
Well,
Speaker 16: when Abu Jihad arrived, he had brought along a new friend that he had acquired in Europe.
The man was a
Speaker 90: Palestinian, but he
Speaker 67: had spent the previous few years fighting for the National Liberation Front, the FLN, against the French in the Algerian War of Independence.
Speaker 39: The
Algerian War was
Speaker 39: a savage affair that officially began in
Speaker 16: 1954. The Algerian War was a savage affair
that officially began in 1954.
That
Speaker 16: year, the French had just been humiliated at Diem Bien Phu and driven out of Vietnam, and revolutionary nationalists in Algeria thought, hey, if the
Speaker 116: Vietnamese can do it,
we can
Speaker 116: do it too. Algeria
was very
Speaker 116: different from
Speaker 73: Vietnam, though.
There were
Speaker 73: over a million French living in Algeria, many of whom had been born there.
And
Speaker 73: many in the French establishment considered
Speaker 90: losing Algeria to be akin to losing a province in mainland France.
And so it was
Speaker 91: a very ugly affair.
It ran for eight
Speaker 91: years, from 54 to 62, and the French
Speaker 16: went out kicking and screaming.
The success of the
Speaker 16: Vietnamese was proof that a determined national insurgency could defeat a European power.
But the
Speaker 16: Algerians provided a demonstration of a whole new kind of war, a people's war designed for the mass media age, a very dark and ugly kind of war, but one that tries to answer the very hard question
of how a
Speaker 16: far weaker force can defeat a vastly superior force in a prolonged conflict.
The problem
Speaker 16: all these
Speaker 75: anti-colonial movements faced was simple and similar.
Speaker 75: There is a much more powerful military force in your
Speaker 16: country. They don't want to leave. It is up to you to change their minds. So how are you going to do that?
The Vietnamese
Speaker 16: showed that under
Speaker 42: certain conditions, as
long as
Speaker 42: you're tenacious and well-equipped and willing and able to take casualties, and
as long
Speaker 42: as you have a safe haven you can retreat to to lick your wounds,
You might
Speaker 42: actually be able to defeat that military in a war of attrition. But
most of these
Speaker 42: resistance and revolutionary movements were working with far less in the Vietnamese, and yet they still had to solve that same problem. How do you make the stronger force want to leave?
Speaker 116: Well,
it's a method with
Speaker 116: which we're all now very familiar, because it's arguably the mode of warfare that has most defined the
Speaker 16: post-World War II era of combat. In simplest terms,
The
Speaker 16: insurgents
Speaker 40: engage in acts of terrorism that are not intended to harm the capacity of the other side to fight,
but to
Speaker 40: provoke the stronger side into retaliating
in a way
Speaker 16: that will not play well in the media, and on campuses, and in parliaments back home and around the world.
And that's what
Speaker 16: happened in Algeria.
The FLN
Speaker 16: engaged in wanton acts of violence.
The French
Speaker 79: responded with their own brutality
And
Speaker 79: the left-wing and anti-colonial activists back in France, they took it from there.
By the end, by
Speaker 16: 62, the French military was not about to give up Algeria.
Speaker 3: In fact, there was almost a military coup against the French government over it.
But by the early
Speaker 3: 60s, the French
Speaker 76: people and
the French
Speaker 76: political establishment had had enough.
Again, this
Speaker 73: makes for a very ugly war.
Speaker 73: Where when the enemy
Speaker 3: responds to one of your operations by massacring some civilians, maybe some women and children on your side, or by torturing some
Speaker 42: of your people who were held prisoner, then that's actually a successful operation. That's actually
the point. To get the
Speaker 42: other side to do those things to your own people so that you can use
it as
Speaker 42: propaganda, knowing that over time, at least when you're fighting a
Speaker 83: western country...
it
Speaker 83: tends to have its effect.
Well,
Speaker 79: it had its effect in Algeria, and the Algerians drove the French out.
And that made a
Speaker 112: huge impact on revolutionary movements around the world.
Arafat and his
Speaker 7: friends took that lesson to heart.
Speaker 16: Palestine would not be liberated by Arab armies. It would only be liberated through the armed struggle of a Palestinian people's war along the lines of
the one...
That
Speaker 16: had returned Algeria to the Algerians. Arafat,
Speaker 20: Abu Jihad, and Khalaf, they self-consciously separated
Speaker 40: themselves from Palestinian elites and the Arab regimes. They presented their group as coming up
Speaker 16: from the people.
You know,
Speaker 16: they wanted to differentiate themselves not only from the Arab regimes who had lost the 48 war, but also from the Palestinian elites
Speaker 42: who were perceived by many regular Palestinians as having sold the people out.
You know, these
Speaker 42: people who could afford to just move to Beirut and buy a nice villa for their
Speaker 3: family, that they had left the poor Palestinians, the rural Palestinians, hanging out to dry.
Arafat
Speaker 3: himself was a cousin of the very prominent Husseini
Speaker 40: clan, but he often denied or downplayed that connection publicly;
Speaker 66: he wanted to be seen
as a man of the
Speaker 41: people. They emphasized their lack of dependence on the Arab states, for
Speaker 117: anything except places to train and conduct their
Speaker 73: operations. They called themselves the Movement for the Liberation of
Palestine.
And
Speaker 3: unfortunately, after they had settled on the name and started publicizing it and operating under it for a little while, somebody
noticed that
Speaker 42: the Arabic acronym of the name spelled out Hataf, which in their language means something like quick death. And
so one
Speaker 42: of them had the idea to switch it around from Movement for the Liberation of Palestine to the Palestine
Speaker 86: Liberation Movement.
Speaker 86: reversing the acronym to a word that translates to something like glorious victory, and that
Speaker 42: is the name by which we all know Yasser Arafat's organization today, FATA. FATA
started
Speaker 118: gaining momentum
Speaker 45: around the time that the alliance between Syria and Egypt broke up.
Already by
Speaker 20: 1961, Arafat and Abu Jihad had been making a lot of moves.
They had
Speaker 50: managed to insert their activists into student groups in Europe and
Speaker 16: throughout the Arab world. They picked up a decent number of recruits, including a couple hundred Palestinians from European universities who actually went and traveled to the Middle East for training in guerrilla warfare. And they were forming
Speaker 119: alliances with like-minded organizations.
After the
Speaker 40: victory of the Algerians in 1962, the new government there turned Algiers into a headquarters for the world revolution.
They provided
Speaker 120: subsidies to foreign revolutionary groups. They
gave
Speaker 87: asylum to foreign revolutionaries who were on the run from their home countries. The
Algerian
Speaker 73: government
Speaker 16: recognized groups like the North Vietnamese and the Black Panthers as the legitimate representatives of their people.
and set
Speaker 16: up embassies for them. And so Arafat met with the new president of Algeria and came away with offices and a stipend for Fatah. But then, in 1964, Nasser called that conference that created the PLO and activist and political
Speaker 40: energy surrounding the Palestinian cause all began flowing into that channel. And the Algerians gave Fatah's offices to the PLO.
Speaker 99: They weren't actually called Fatah yet. I'm just using it to avoid confusion.
And
Speaker 39: Algeria redirected the subsidy and the other support that they had been giving to Fatah to the PLO as well. And so Fatah basically collapsed all the way
Speaker 91: back down to its original core. Just Arafat, Abu Jihad, Saleh Khalaf, and a few others, about eight people. Arafat
and his friends
Speaker 3: were sort of at a loss for how to proceed, but
help
Speaker 16: was on the way.
Because
Speaker 16: as fate would have it, they were not the only ones looking for an alternative to Nasser and the PLO.
The Syrians were
Speaker 34: back on the scene, and looking to make their own bid for leadership of the Arab world.
The head of Syrian
Speaker 45: army intelligence at the time,
Speaker 67: Major General Ahmad Suedani, said in an interview, I believe
Israel is
Speaker 16: not a state, but serves as a military base for the imperialist camp.
We must
Speaker 16: not take the line of conventional
Speaker 45: warfare, using conventional weapons. We must take the line of the
Speaker 42: Popular Liberation War.
Should Israel
Speaker 42: react to the Popular Liberation War by conventional warfare, the Arab armies must be ready to enter the battle in order to safeguard the bases of the Fedayeen, who are the basic element of popular warfare.
Arab unity
Speaker 44: is a necessity.
We
Speaker 44: believe that unity born in battle is the unity we long
for. He
Speaker 44: who liberates Palestine will be the one to lead the Arab nation forward to comprehensive unity.
He
Speaker 42: who ignites the fire of popular liberation war can throw all the reactionary regimes into the
sea. The
Speaker 42: sons of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other reactionary countries will overthrow the kings
Speaker 16: as traitors,
and
Speaker 16: joined the liberation march, end quote.
Arafat and his buddies
Speaker 16: were in Lebanon when they got word that Syrian army intel agents were working the refugee camps, looking for recruits to train as Fedayeen fighters.
Fedayeen
Speaker 3: translates as self-sacrificers, but we're not talking about suicide bombers or anything like that. That comes quite a bit later.
Speaker 39: Fedayeen is the common word for guerrilla fighters in the Arab world, especially in the
Speaker 40: context of Palestinians fighting Israel. Two
years after the coup
Speaker 44: d'etat that had led to Syria pulling out of the United Arab Republic, there
was
Speaker 3: another coup in 1963, this time by Ba'athist military officers. And they immediately went to work trying
Speaker 16: to reestablish their country
as a
Speaker 16: powerful independent player in the region.
not
Speaker 16: playing second fiddle to Egypt anymore.
Syria had
Speaker 16: surrendered the initiative to Nasser when he'd formed the PLO.
But the Syrians began
Speaker 16: working immediately to secretly build up a rival organization to counter the PLO, to counter Nasser's
Speaker 122: play for leadership of the Palestinian cause.
And so Arafat and his
Speaker 16: friends approached one of the Syrian agents, and right away the Syrians realized that they had something very useful in their hands.
Fatah
Speaker 16: hadn't just brought them eight new recruits but eight
Speaker 45: tightly knit operatives with experience recruiting, organizing, and leading others a few with combat experience
people who did
Speaker 16: not need a lot of hand-holding or preparation before they could be put to work and so the Syrians put them to work right away
For their first
Speaker 16: operation it was decided that they were going to bomb Israel's national water carrier here.
This
Speaker 16: huge system of pipes and canals delivering water from the Sea of Galilee down to the dry areas in the south. The
attack was meant
Speaker 16: to be more symbolic than anything else. The
teams
Speaker 45: didn't go in with enough explosives to do any damage that couldn't be repaired very quickly. But
the
Speaker 50: symbolic value was still significant, not
only
Speaker 123: to Fatah, but to their new Syrian sponsors.
The water
Speaker 73: carrier was one of the most important infrastructure projects in the early development of Israel.
It was a
Speaker 73: vast project, and its
Speaker 16: construction was seen as a marker that was being put down by the Zionists to say, we are here to stay. This
is the
Speaker 16: new world. It is a permanent arrangement, and so you
Speaker 72: better get used
to it.
The
Speaker 16: Arab states, especially Syria,
Speaker 42: had been blustering on about how they would never allow this project to come to completion, but no one had actually done more than
Speaker 16: talk. The
bad news for Arafat
Speaker 16: and his buddies was that the attack failed miserably. The
good news is
Speaker 16: that that really didn't
Speaker 75: matter. Again,
this was a
Speaker 75: new kind of war, with different measures for operational success or failure.
The first
Speaker 75: group of
Speaker 124: Arafat's men were
Speaker 33: caught before they ever laid their explosives. The second group laid their explosives, but they didn't go off, and then they were all caught.
Speaker 16: A
couple weeks later,
Speaker 16: a group managed to plant some bombs, and they did go off, but they didn't do any damage of any real significance. In
any
Speaker 19: traditional mode of warfare, that operation was a complete and total disaster. But
this was not
Speaker 84: any traditional
Speaker 16: mode of warfare.
Speaker 16: The group released a communique and sent it to several Arab media outlets,
Speaker 65: crowing about the great blow struck against the Zionist beast by the Fedayeen, who, with
Speaker 64: God's help and permission, had struck fear into the heart of the colonizer.
Well, that's what
Speaker 64: the Arab papers printed.
And word
Speaker 64: spread that a
Speaker 44: great blow had been struck against Israel,
not by the
Speaker 44: Arab states, but by common
Speaker 16: people willing to give themselves over to the cause.
Okay.
Speaker 16: Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan all officially denounced the attack. Egypt because they wanted Palestinian political energy flowing into the PLO. Lebanon and Jordan because the last thing they needed was their Palestinian population starting to think
Speaker 42: about the possibilities presented by infrastructure terrorism. But Syria applauded and promoted it.
That attack signaled the
Speaker 42: beginning of a shift in strategy for the Palestinian
Speaker 61: militants.
They
Speaker 61: had been relying on the Arab states to rescue them in 1948, and they didn't come through. They'd been waiting ever since, but they didn't have to wait. They
could take
Speaker 61: matters into their own hands. Now,
the Israelis hardly
Speaker 61: paid any attention to the attack,
had no idea
Speaker 61: that it
Speaker 81: was the first shot on a newly opened front in their long war against the Palestinians. The
Israeli security
Speaker 16: establishment was, for good reason, ill.
Speaker 16: totally focused on the threat from neighboring Arab militaries,
and they
Speaker 16: considered these student groups and
Speaker 40: other young radicals like Arafat Nabu Jihad to be a nuisance at most.
It was only in
Speaker 40: 1965 that
Speaker 16: anybody in the Israeli security agencies was even assigned to the issue of monitoring and countering Palestinian terrorism. A three-man committee was set
Speaker 20: up to identify and eliminate targets, and...
When
Speaker 40: they came up with their list, Arafat and Abu Jihad were right at the top of it.
The committee was going to
Speaker 40: have to be
Speaker 21: very creative with their methods.
After a
Speaker 21: couple high-profile failures by the
Speaker 123: Mossad had caused the government to lose confidence in that intelligence agency.
There are actually
Speaker 89: more than
Speaker 7: a couple disasters.
Within the Mossad, there
Speaker 7: was this Tier 1 Special Ops unit called Qasaria, which
Speaker 40: specialized in assassinations.
The
Speaker 40: unit's top spy in 1965 was an Egyptian-born Jew named Eli Cohen. Cohen
was
Speaker 16: assigned to go into Syria posing as an Arab merchant who had been away for years in Buenos Aires and to work himself into the elite social circles of Damascus. His
Israeli handlers
Speaker 16: recognized his value,
Speaker 42: especially as he started to make connections, and they didn't want to waste him on anything worth less than
he was—
And so the
Speaker 42: official order was to act as a pure sleeper agent. Just
go
Speaker 72: be
Speaker 42: this prominent Arab businessman. That's it. Only activate if you hear
Speaker 75: that the Syrians are planning a surprise attack. Then you let us know and you come back to Israel. It
was his
Speaker 75: only
Speaker 42: job.
In case of an
Speaker 42: impending attack, he would send a message alerting Israel to what was happening. Otherwise, he was to keep a low profile as a Syrian merchant.
Speaker 20: unfortunately cohen got too comfortable too confident in his cover story and he began transmitting back all kinds of low-level
Speaker 40: information including
simple
Speaker 123: gossip he was picking up at parties and in other places
as handlers
Speaker 104: should have told him to cut it out but they
Speaker 3: didn't and eventually the syrians caught on cohen was arrested he was tortured
and
He was
Speaker 40: hanged in Damascus' central square and left hanging, covered in a white sheet with the text of his death sentence written on it as a message to other Israeli
Speaker 125: spies.
The savagery of his
Speaker 16: torture was evident on his face, but the torturers had also pulled out his fingernails and electrocuted his testicles.
The Mossad
Speaker 73: worried that he must have broken under that strain, and it turned out they were right. Cohen had given up secret encryption codes, he had deciphered hundreds
of
Speaker 3: secret messages for the Syrians, told them everything else that he knew about how Israeli intelligence operated. Well,
just after this
Speaker 40: debacle, an Israeli agent was uncovered in Cairo by the Egyptian government. He
would have
Speaker 40: suffered the same fate as Cohen,
Speaker 45: but...
The
Speaker 45: government of West Germany agreed to help Israel by telling the Egyptians, falsely, that he was also working for them and so pretty please don't kill him and we'll owe you one.
And so this spy and
Speaker 126: his wife were not hanged, but they were sentenced to life in prison.
So 1965 was a
Speaker 34: tough year from Assad.
This is from a
Speaker 34: book by Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman.
Speaker 46: Quote,
Prime
Speaker 16: Minister Esh Kahl said,
Speaker 16: regarded the downfall of the two spies as a national disaster.
But despite
Speaker 16: the bad state the Mossad was in, Eshkal decided to approve a special targeted killing mission by Qasaria in Uruguay anyway. Two months prior, a conference attended by representatives of the various intelligence agencies had been held to discuss the state of the hunt for Nazis, a matter that was not high on the list of priorities.
rafi
Speaker 16: medan deputy chief of the amal unit which handled the issue surveyed the possible targets for assassination on the
list when
Speaker 16: he came to the name of herbert kukurs a latvian war criminal who as an aviator had volunteered to assist the ss and the gestapo and began describing
Speaker 75: his horrific acts a loud thud
was heard
The
Speaker 75: head of Amman, the military intelligence directorate, Major General Aharon Yarev, had collapsed, and it took some time before he came to. Kukurs,
it
Speaker 80: emerged, had burned alive some of Yarev's relatives and friends.
After the
Speaker 127: conference,
Speaker 16: Amit, Meyer Amit, he's the head of Masada at the time,
Amit,
Speaker 44: who was very close to Yarev and was deeply affected by the incident, went to see Prime Minister Eshkol and received
Speaker 39: permission to have Kukurs eliminated. Holocaust survivors called him the "Butcher of Riga," and his name came up frequently at the
Speaker 16: Nuremberg war crimes trials as directly involved in the murder of some 15,000 Jews and indirectly in the killing of 20,000
more.
But
Speaker 16: after the war, he had managed to escape and find refuge in Brazil, where he developed a tourism business, surrounding himself with security guards for fear of the same fate that befell Adolf Eichmann. Yaakov Medad, a Casaria operative who spoke Spanish and German,
Speaker 16: Posed as an Austrian businessman, seeking openings in the tourism industry in South America, and managed to persuade Cucurs to go to Uruguay to meet a group of developers at a luxurious mansion outside Montevideo. At
the mansion,
Speaker 16: three assassins would lie in wait.
The plan
Speaker 16: was for Medad to enter first, followed by Cucurs.
One of
Speaker 16: the assassins would
Speaker 6: shove him inside and close the door behind him. Then, when the Mossad team was out of the line of fire, he would shoot him. The job, however, did
Speaker 12: not go as smoothly as planned. Kukurs was alert and feared a
Speaker 16: trap.
The moment
Speaker 16: he entered, he grasped what was happening and made a break for it.
Yarev tried
Speaker 16: to get a stranglehold on him as another Israeli dragged him inside. The
fact that
Speaker 16: Kukurs was frightened to death, said Medad,
and
Speaker 75: had lived in dread of this moment for 20 years gave him superhuman strength he managed to knock the guy down he grabbed the doorknob and had it not been for the three of us including
me holding the
Speaker 16: door shut he would have been able
to get out kukors
Speaker 16: bit hard into one of yarev's fingers cutting off the tip which remained in his mouth yarev
Speaker 44: screamed in pain and had to loosen his grip
on kukors neck
He
Speaker 44: almost broke free, but at the last moment one of
the
Speaker 16: hitmen, Zaev Amit, a cousin of the Mossad director, who had not been able to fire because of the danger to his comrades, picked up a hammer and smashed it into Kukur's head again and again until he
Speaker 128: passed out.
Then the
Speaker 129: third assassin, Eleazar Sadiqsharon, formerly
the
Speaker 44: chief hitman for the Irgun, fired two shots into the mass murderer, assuring that he was dead.
The
Speaker 44: operatives put the body into a suitcase, which they left in the mansion, and added on top of Verdict, a sheet of paper inscribed with the words, In
Speaker 3: consideration of his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 Jews, with horrible brutality, the condemned man has been executed. Signed,
Speaker 131: Those Who Will Never Forget. End quote.
Now within Mossad, this
Speaker 132: operation was considered a success.
They
Speaker 132: had been told to kill a man, and the man was dead.
But
Speaker 21: everybody else knew that it had been very
Speaker 3: sloppy and could have led to disaster.
And finally, I'm
Speaker 3: actually not done. I told you 1965 was a very rough year for the Mossad.
There was this. Israel had been
Speaker 122: cultivating a relationship with Morocco, a relatively pro-Western Arab
Speaker 16: regime with which Israel had no territorial disputes.
And
Speaker 16: in the fall of 1965, the Moroccan king had allowed Mossad to bug all the meeting rooms and private suites of the Arab leaders and military commanders who were going to be attending a summit at Casablanca.
The subject of the
Speaker 16: summit was what to do about Israel and how to proceed in doing it, so this was one of the great intelligence coups in history handed
to him
Speaker 16: on a silver platter by the king of Morocco.
The catch was that the
Speaker 40: Moroccans were not running a charity.
And
Speaker 40: they had a little ask of their
Speaker 16: own. A few years back, the king of Morocco had exiled his main political opponent, a man named Mehdi Ben Barca.
Ben Barca
Speaker 16: was an intellectual and a political activist who had briefly been a professor teaching his future persecutor,
Speaker 43: King Hassan II. But he was not a terrorist. He
was not a
Speaker 43: militant of any kind.
He'd been
Speaker 16: living in Europe since his exile, continuing to agitate for reforms in Morocco, and so the king marked him for death, and he wanted the Israelis to kill him,
or at
Speaker 16: least help
Speaker 21: his own men do it, and
so the
Speaker 133: Israelis agreed. They
started
Speaker 80: investigating Ben Barca, and before long discovered a kiosk in Geneva where he would have his magazines delivered. They
waited until he
Speaker 80: showed up, and then placed him under surveillance.
Mossad
Speaker 91: devised
Speaker 134: a plan to lure Ben Barker
Speaker 91: to Paris, supposedly to meet a documentary filmmaker who was interested in making a film about his life. The
Israelis
Speaker 73: provided the Moroccans with safe houses and vehicles in Paris, as well as fake passports, poisons, and shovels and
Speaker 135: other equipment to dispose of the body. Ben
Barker
Speaker 21: took the bait,
Speaker 21: And when he got to Paris, the Moroccans kidnapped him, took
him to
Speaker 3: one of the Mossad safe houses, and
went to work
Speaker 3: torturing him until he died from asphyxiation after being submerged again and again in
a tub
Speaker 3: of filthy water.
Mossad claims its agents were not
Speaker 84: present at their own safe house during the torture or killing. And who knows, it could be true that
Speaker 136: they...
Speaker 136: ...excused themselves temporarily while the actual deed was being done.
But it was Mossad
Speaker 12: agents who took care of the body.
They took the
Speaker 12: corpse to the San
Speaker 73: Germain Forest......threw the body in a hole and covered it with chemical powder to dissolve the remains.
That disposal
Speaker 42: site was chosen on the fly, so a short time later......Israeli agents moved the body, and according to some of the agents who were involved...
Ben
Speaker 91: Barca's remains are still buried beneath the Louis Vuitton Foundation Art Museum in Paris.
Well, given his status
Speaker 3: as an exiled foreign activist,
the French
Speaker 3: had been keeping an eye on Ben Barca themselves, and it did not take them long to figure out what had happened.
The story exploded
Speaker 3: like a bomb in
Speaker 80: the French media and government.
President de
Speaker 40: Gaulle actually disbanded his intelligence agencies for letting it happen.
and
Speaker 40: prosecuted the corrupt French police officers who had
Speaker 91: helped with the assassination.
France cut off all
Speaker 91: diplomatic relations
Speaker 16: with Morocco, and the incident left a shadow over relations between the two countries that really hasn't fully cleared to this day. The
Israelis denied
Speaker 40: involvement and outwardly presented a united front.
But
Speaker 40: behind the scenes, there
Speaker 34: were severe recriminations, and opposing political factions within Israel tried to use the incident to damage and extort their opponents.
And so in the wake of
Speaker 40: all this, when it came time to kill Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, the
Israeli
Speaker 3: government was not prepared to hand the operation to Mossad
Speaker 84: assassination squads.
Instead, the
Speaker 34: three-man committee recommended that the Israelis pull an old trick out of the hat,
and
Speaker 34: use letter bombs. And so they tried, but
Speaker 67: they didn't achieve much. A few Fatah operatives were injured,
but nobody important, and
Speaker 67: nobody was killed.
This was the
Speaker 80: first of many, many attempts on Arafat's life by the Israelis. And the
Israelis were
Speaker 80: already feared
Speaker 16: as legendary operators, with a carefully cultivated reputation of being able to find and kill anyone, anywhere in the world.
And the Israelis were already feared as legendary operators,
And
Speaker 16: soon, the elimination of Yasser Arafat would be the focus of whole departments of Israeli military and intelligence services for many years. And yet, Arafat would die an old man in
Speaker 34: 2004. Not
an easy
Speaker 34: thing to do without a state apparatus protecting you. In
1966, Fatah was
Speaker 40: able to carry out dozens of attacks. They were becoming more sophisticated and audacious.
The
Speaker 51: Syrians had set up training camps in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, very close to the Israeli border. Jordan,
the
Speaker 67: government of Jordan, registered protests, but it was very difficult for them to do anything about it without alienating Jordan's Palestinian majority. Attacks were emanating
Speaker 16: from those camps, and after three Israelis were killed in a Fatah attack, Israel attacked and destroyed two of those camps.
Thank you.
the
Speaker 16: jordanians had
Speaker 37: sent secret messages to the israelis saying look we're against these camps we're not responsible
they might have
Speaker 16: even been happy that the israelis took them out
but the
Speaker 21: jordanian government again was in a very tricky situation arabs everywhere supported the palestinian cause
The
Speaker 33: Jordanian government was already looked at by many in the region as an archaic
Speaker 73: monarchy, as a western
Speaker 16: puppet weak on Zionism, and if enough of the Palestinian population got really riled up and started looking at the Hashemite regime as an obstacle that had to be cleared before their struggle could
move forward, then he
Speaker 75: and his family could end up like his cousins in Iraq.
And so King
Speaker 44: Hussein did his best to play both sides, doing what he
Speaker 16: could to avoid provoking the Israelis, trying to keep the Palestinian militants under control, while still trying to maintain a pose of being down for the
Speaker 137: cause. It
was always a
Speaker 137: very hard line to walk,
and it
Speaker 3: was only going to get harder as things heated up.
In the second half
Speaker 3: of that year, again we're in 66,
Speaker 3: Fatah got the gumption to start attacking Israeli military targets. And in November, three Israeli
Speaker 80: soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a mine Fatah had planted on their patrol route.
This time, the
Speaker 16: Israelis sent a strong force into a nearby Palestinian village for a punitive operation.
But a
Speaker 16: Jordanian military unit happened to be in the area conducting exercises.
The two sides
Speaker 16: got into a
Speaker 21: firefight
but
Speaker 21: the Jordanians were outnumbered and outgunned, and 16 of them were killed by the Israelis.
On one
Speaker 39: hand, the incident bolstered King Hussein's reputation, because at least his forces had opposed the Israeli incursion.
But now the
Speaker 3: Israelis were pissed, because one of their own had been killed and several wounded,
and
Speaker 16: Jordanians were now looking to King Hussein to retaliate, to get one back.
And so
Speaker 16: tensions increased between Israel and Jordan, between Jordan and the Palestinians, between Jordan and Syria and Egypt.
Well, this was to the
Speaker 16: liking of the Syrian Ba'athists, and so they pushed Fatah to turn up the heat even more. In early 1967, Fatah launched over 100 attacks on Israeli soil, coming
Speaker 45: across all four major borders from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
Thank you.
Many of
Speaker 45: the attacks
Speaker 16: were inconsequential or only damaged property, but nine Israeli civilians and four soldiers were killed. Israel
retaliated in
Speaker 16: the directions that the attacks came from, but these responses were necessarily imprecise, and more often than not came down on people not directly involved with the attacks. So
just imagine that
Speaker 16: you're just a normal Palestinian.
Speaker 16: trying to get by with your family and one day the Israelis show up and start shooting and a couple of your kids get killed.
You know
Speaker 16: there's a conflict going on. You know that the Israeli raid has something to do with that. You
may have
Speaker 16: even heard rumors that Abdul down the street had a cousin staying with him who was supposed to be fed a yin.
But your
Speaker 16: kids are dead and you didn't do anything and the people who killed them are the same ones who put you in this refugee camp.
To
Speaker 44: the innocent people Caught in the crossfire These attacks by the Israelis Just seemed like terrorist attacks They
Speaker 16: experienced them the same way The Israelis experienced The things we traditionally call Terrorist attacks in their country And so The Arab governments were coming under
Speaker 3: Increasing pressure To do something about this Tensions mounted And in May The
Arab government
Speaker 16: 1967, Israel released an official warning to Syria that if it did not get the insurgents under control, it would take large-scale military action against them.
Instead of
Speaker 16: backing down, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan formed a joint military command and increased the concentration of
Speaker 34: forces on their borders with Israel, and the Israelis did the same in response.
War seemed to
Speaker 16: be in the air.
The UN
Speaker 16: peacekeepers who had occupied the Sinai, standing between Egypt and Israel for the last
Speaker 3: decade, got out of the way. We
know now that the Arab
Speaker 3: states, as usual, were mostly posturing. The
Israelis
Speaker 67: knew it at the time. They knew it from the recordings they'd gotten with the help of the Moroccans, on which they'd heard
Speaker 84: the Arab heads of state discuss how unprepared they were for another war with Israel.
Israel's
Speaker 16: own intelligence assessments estimated that they could win the war in less than two weeks if the Arabs attacked, and
in less
Speaker 16: than one week if Israel attacked first. Nasser
and the others
Speaker 16: moved forces up so they could beat their chests on the border, but
there were
Speaker 16: nowhere
Speaker 3: near enough forces for an invasion, and the ones that were present were still deployed in depth in a defensive posture. Unfortunately for them,
Israel,
Speaker 3: the israelis were not just posturing they were not just beating their chests
and if the arabs
Speaker 41: weren't prepared for war the israelis were not
Speaker 16: going to wait around until they were
and so on the
Speaker 16: morning of june 5th 1967 israel launched a massive surprise attack
Speaker 41: and despite their deployments the arabs were caught completely off
guard and
The
Speaker 16: Israeli Air Force destroyed virtually every combat aircraft the Egyptians and the Syrians had on the ground in a matter of hours. And
then with
Speaker 16: total air
Speaker 41: superiority, Israeli planes picked off targets at will while the IDF chased the enemy through the Gaza Strip across the Sinai Peninsula and into
Speaker 16: the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And when the six-day war was over,
The
Speaker 16: territory under the control of the Jewish state had increased more than 300%,
placing more
Speaker 16: than a million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.
There were
Speaker 16: prominent Israelis, including right-wing hawks,
who were
Speaker 16: warning at the time that it was a bad idea to bring a million Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction.
even if
Speaker 16: they weren't
Speaker 41: Israeli citizens or technically within Israel's official borders they were going to be held responsible for these people
but other Israeli
Speaker 138: officials were enthusiastic they pointed out that they would no longer have to rely on the Arab regimes to control
Speaker 73: the Fedayeen
Speaker 138: and that
Speaker 73: their own forces would no longer have to make incursions into neighboring countries to go
Speaker 16: attack the terrorists they were right here
Speaker 16: Instead, they could place
Speaker 3: garrisons in Palestinian areas. They could set up checkpoints and patrol Palestinian villages and towns and treat it like a proper counterinsurgency.
Others saw a
Speaker 137: historic opportunity to forge a permanent
Speaker 16: peace.
Israel at this
Speaker 16: point looked completely unbeatable, and they held a mountain of bargaining chips. A
top military
Speaker 16: intelligence official circulated a top-secret paper to other government and military leaders, saying,
We
Speaker 44: should not look like braggarts, mocking a defeated enemy, debasing him and his leaders.
Instead, he
Speaker 44: said, Israel should use the opportunity
Speaker 16: to be magnanimous and call for negotiations with the Arab states from a position of strength
and offer to return
Speaker 3: conquered territory in exchange for a lasting peace, which all sounds great.
Speaker 3: But in
Speaker 16: reality, that would be a tough sell in any country under the circumstances. It's very rare for nations to call for peace during the exhilaration of finding out that they're invincible. And instead of thinking about peace, many Israelis were looking forward to what victories they might score next.
One month after the
Speaker 135: war, a coalition of Israeli politicians, activists, writers, poets...
Speaker 16: created the movement for greater Israel and began pressuring the
Speaker 73: government to take advantage of the smashing victory to support the establishment of Jewish settlements in newly conquered territories.
There are passages in the
Speaker 91: Hebrew Bible in which God promises that the Jews will inherit all the territory from the Euphrates and Syria and Iraq
to the
Speaker 91: Mediterranean coast and from
Speaker 40: Lebanon all the way down to Egypt.
and
Speaker 40: many Zionist romantics and religious zealots believed
Speaker 91: that after 2,000 years of exile, the new state of Israel had an obligation to fulfill that prophecy.
In more
Speaker 73: modern times, supporters of the Greater Israel Movement don't take
Speaker 45: things quite that far, at least publicly, and mostly restrict their ambitions to annexing the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza.
The Movement for Greater
Speaker 113: Israel had the support of many prominent Israelis and Diaspora Jews as well.
Speaker 113: and the movement exerted influence on the rising right-wing in Israeli politics.
The head of the
Speaker 135: Mossad, Mayra Amit,
was one of
Speaker 135: those who was in favor of using the opportunity to make peace,
and he
Speaker 135: wrote in his
Speaker 33: diary, "'What's happening now is a disappointment, a painful
Speaker 21: disappointment. I am apprehensive and worried at this fearful waste of a victory. When I see how matters are being conducted,
My
Speaker 21: hands go limp, and I get a terrible feeling.
The leaders of the Arab
Speaker 139: countries involved were completely humiliated, totally
Speaker 16: delegitimized.
And those
Speaker 16: who had placed their hopes with them were all now looking for alternatives. And
this was the
Speaker 21: opportunity Fatah had been waiting for, and they were ready to take advantage of the opportunity.
They
Speaker 16: realized that while the destruction of the Arab militaries made another full-scale military conflict unlikely in the near term, the new occupation regime in Gaza and the West Bank actually provided the perfect environment for guerrilla war.
Because now they
Speaker 42: could attack the Israelis without even having to cross the border into Israel. So
while the Arab
Speaker 42: states
Speaker 3: licked their wounds, Fatah just kept doing its thing.
Speaker 3: carried out dozens of attacks from Gaza and the West Bank in the second half of 1967. They bombed factories,
Speaker 16: houses, movie theaters, infrastructure, reaching for targets of
Speaker 117: symbolic importance when possible, but settling for targets of opportunity most of the time.
With Israeli
Speaker 3: assassination squads constantly on his trail,
Speaker 3: Missing him by moments on various occasions, Arafat continued to increase the frequency and intensity of attacks. Over the next 10 months, Fedayeen attacks killed 65 Israeli
Speaker 69: soldiers and
Speaker 3: 50
Speaker 80: civilians, wounding another 249 soldiers and 295 civilians.
The period from
Speaker 40: 1967 until Nasser's death in 1970 is known as the War of
Speaker 16: Attrition.
There were no
Speaker 16: pitched battles in the War of Attrition, only continual small-scale hit-and-run attacks to wear the Israelis down and stretch out their defensive commitments.
Remember, their
Speaker 16: territory had
Speaker 117: tripled in size after
Speaker 16: the 1967 war.
And
Speaker 16: the military and security forces that they had going into that war were not built to control or protect that much territory. So the
Speaker 40: Israeli security apparatus had to expand and adapt on the fly as the Arabs were constantly probing, harassing,
Speaker 91: attacking.
Because of the success
Speaker 91: of the FLN in liberating Algeria from France, the
tactics
Speaker 16: and strategy of the FLN were taken up by national liberation movements around the world.
In many
Speaker 16: places,
Speaker 73: given enough time, it
ended up
Speaker 73: working. They
were able to make
Speaker 73: things hard enough on the colonial regime and to score enough propaganda victories
Speaker 38: to sap morale back in the colonial regime's homeland. Then
eventually they decided
Speaker 43: that it wasn't worth the effort and they went home.
Arafat was
Speaker 43: committed to this
Speaker 16: strategy.
But for
Speaker 16: some reason, he never accounted for a simple and pretty obvious
Speaker 37: fact
Speaker 3: that although Israel was a colonizing regime like French Algeria, the Israelis didn't have another country to go back to. They
had no
Speaker 3: choice but to
Speaker 51: keep fighting. And
in a way, it's hard to
Speaker 51: blame the Palestinians for taking that
Speaker 16: path. You know, the whole global left was going in that direction.
Speaker 16: Militant groups that adopted that strategy got funding and recognition from the Soviets and from non-aligned countries, and again, they'd seen it work.
Plus, when you place
Speaker 16: more than a million people under military occupation, the young men in that population are going to have something to say about it.
The task of protecting
Speaker 16: Israeli Jews from terrorist attacks was becoming more complicated by the
day.
Israeli
Speaker 3: soldiers patrolled the roads, towns, and villages of the West Bank in Gaza, which gave the
Speaker 16: Israelis options that they hadn't had before, but also created risks that hadn't existed before. Also, Israeli civilians began making their way into both territories to establish heavily armed garrison communities in the heart of Palestinian territory. The
vast
Speaker 45: majority of the Zionists who chose to do that
Speaker 45: The settlers, as you can probably imagine,
were driven
Speaker 7: strongly by religion and ideology. And many of them were real fanatics who saw themselves as soldiers in something like a holy
Speaker 16: war.
Problems with their new
Speaker 16: Palestinian neighbors began almost immediately. And when things escalated to violence, Israeli military forces were called in to reinforce the settlers. The Israelis
were having particularly
Speaker 16: tough problems
Speaker 3: in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 3: which today is one of the most densely populated urban zones in the world. One
Speaker 67: Saturday morning, a 30-year-old advertising executive named Bob Arroyo and his family went for a hike in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean and the Sinai Peninsula, on the far side of Gaza from
Speaker 91: Israel. Arroyo
Speaker 80: and his wife and his two children, five and seven years old, finished their hike and they got into the car to
go home.
And
Speaker 51: again, Arroyo was an
Speaker 3: advertising executive, and his two kids were adorable, and their faces were very well-known in Israel because Arroyo had used both of them in popular ad campaigns. And
so as they were
Speaker 73: driving home on a main highway, they passed Palestinian
Speaker 16: villages and refugee camps. At a
certain point,
Speaker 16: they were halted at a roadblock, and as soon as they
Speaker 141: stopped, a teenager ran up into their car and threw in a grenade.
Speaker 142: "'Arroyo was severely wounded, managed to crawl out of the car. "'There
were
Speaker 51: two young men nearby, and Arroyo started begging them "'to call for help for his family, which
Speaker 39: was trapped in the car, "'and the car was burning. "'He
said the boys just
Speaker 39: laughed at him.
"'His five-year-old
Speaker 3: daughter died in the car, "'and his seven-year-old son died soon after at the hospital, "'and his wife was severely handicapped for the rest of
her life.'
tens
Speaker 3: of thousands of Israelis attended the children's funeral in Jerusalem. When
Israeli intel
Speaker 21: caught the people who had done this, it turned out to be three boys acting on their own,
Speaker 81: aged 15, 16, and 17. Many
of the attacks
Speaker 41: originating in the West Bank seemed to be coming from a place called Karameh,
where the
Speaker 143: Palestinians had set up a base in the southern region of the Jordan Valley.
Every time
Speaker 83: there was an attack, the Israelis would retaliate, often attacking not only the Palestinians
Speaker 40: but Jordanian forces, and their retaliations were taking a toll. In
March of
Speaker 40: 1968, an Israeli school bus ran over a landmine,
Speaker 45: killing two adult chaperones and wounding ten children. I've
also seen
Speaker 45: in another source that 28 people were wounded. I'm not really sure where
Speaker 56: the two different figures come from.
The
Speaker 44: IDF prepared a large-scale helicopter-borne daylight assault on the Fatah base in Karameh.
Arafat himself
Speaker 109: was believed to be there at the time, and the Israeli soldiers had orders
Speaker 16: to kill every young male they found.
But the Israeli
Speaker 16: mechanized support units got bogged down in
Speaker 41: thick foliage around the Jordan River, and poor coordination cost them
Speaker 16: the element of surprise. Rather than try to run,
Speaker 16: which is what Fedayeen always did when the Israelis came in force, Fatah prepared to dig in and repel the assault while Arafat was taken away to a safe location on a motorcycle.
Meanwhile, King
Speaker 3: Hussein reluctantly
Speaker 34: dispatched a contingent of the Jordanian army.
There was a
Speaker 34: battle, and 33 Israeli soldiers were killed.
61 Jordanians
Speaker 16: and over 100 Palestinians have been killed, but that did not matter.
The
Speaker 16: Israelis had taken a lot of casualties, and they were forced to withdraw under conditions that they had not chosen.
And word went
Speaker 16: out that for the first time, the Palestinians, Fatah to be specific, had
stood their
Speaker 16: ground in direct combat with Zionist forces. The
word karameh means
Speaker 16: dignity, which only
helped
Speaker 3: propel the incident to mythical status.
There
Speaker 3: were public celebrations in refugee camps around
Speaker 16: the region. Arab leaders, including Nasser, came out in public support of the Fede Union.
Within two days
Speaker 44: of the battle, thousands of recruits showed up to be trained as fighters, and
Speaker 45: not only Palestinians, but Arabs from other countries as well.
After Karameh,
Speaker 87: Arafat became a folk hero.
And
Speaker 87: not just locally,
Speaker 3: not just in Palestine, not just in the Arab world, but in the radical era of the 60s and 70s increasingly around the world.
His organization
Speaker 3: had originally been set up to be a
Speaker 144: rival of the PLO, but now Fatah managed to take control of the PLO,
and
Speaker 116: before long virtually all Fedayeen groups had been brought under its control.
The charter
Speaker 145: of the PLO was changed to match the mission of Fatah to
Speaker 57: wage armed struggle against Israel until the Zionist entity was completely defeated. With
the Arab militaries in
Speaker 51: shambles and Palestinian insurgents still causing trouble, the Israelis scrambled to reorient their focus in that direction.
The
Speaker 51: military and intelligence agencies were furious at Arafat's narrow escapes, and they
Speaker 41: wanted his blood so bad they were willing to try just about anything. In keeping with the times,
Speaker 51: even a little MKUltra mind-control action. A
psychologist in
Speaker 51: the Israeli military told his superiors that
He
Speaker 51: had devised a series of methods
Speaker 16: that would allow them to turn a captured Palestinian into a Manchurian candidate who could be released back into the wild with subconscious orders to kill Yasser
Speaker 146: Arafat or do anything else.
Well, apparently the
Speaker 37: Israelis were very desperate. Or maybe they just said, screw it, let's just give this quack a shot, because they actually approved this plan. The doctor provided an ideal profile,
Speaker 45: the prisoner he was going to need...
Speaker 45: and one was selected from among the thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli jails.
The doctor and his
Speaker 45: team were given
Speaker 16: a building in which to conduct their work, and the doctor spent three months using various techniques designed to brainwash his guinea pig.
In the third
Speaker 16: month, the
man was
Speaker 16: placed in a room where pictures of Arafat would pop up,
and it appeared
Speaker 147: that he had been programmed to shoot them immediately, without
a
Speaker 122: thought.
A senior
Speaker 122: military intelligence official told
Speaker 113: Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman what he saw when he'd gone to observe, quote, Fatki, that's the
Speaker 135: codename given to the Palestinian prisoner, Fatki stood there in the middle of the room, and Shalit, the doctor, spoke with him, as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation. Suddenly, Shalit
Speaker 51: banged his hand on the table, and Fatki began to run around the table.
He
Speaker 51: reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit.
Then he
Speaker 51: put him in a room and showed us how Fatki raised his pistol to a firing position every time Arafat's picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive,
Speaker 44: end quote.
When the doctor decided
Speaker 44: Fatki was ready and in an ideal hypnotic
Speaker 3: state,
they sent
Speaker 3: him back across the Jordan River to rejoin his comrades in Fatah.
After
Speaker 71: about five hours, Israeli intelligence got
Speaker 16: word from one of their people in Jordan. Some Palestinian guy had shown up to a police station in Karameh saying that the Zionists had tried to brainwash me into killing Yasser Arafat. So
that didn't work. But, you know,
Speaker 122: you gotta give them an A-plus for effort and creativity.
Israeli intelligence
Speaker 122: drew up kill lists of wanted terrorists.
And
Speaker 122: as the list
Speaker 99: grew, it was obvious that Mossad assassination squads were not going to be enough.
And they were
Speaker 99: going to need military support.
Ariel Sharon was
Speaker 149: now a major general and commander of
Speaker 16: IDF Southern Command.
And he was
Speaker 16: happy to help.
As always, he
Speaker 3: took an extremely aggressive approach, to the point that he drew criticism from others in the government.
Israel's military
Speaker 3: governor, responsible for civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 40: complained that Sharon was making his job completely
Speaker 16: impossible.
He said
Speaker 16: that he was, quote, Moshe Dayan was the Minister of Defense, and he and Sharon did not see eye to eye on what had to be done in the Strip. From Bergman, quote,
Dayan wanted
Speaker 16: contacts and connections with the population, whereas Sharon was hunting the terrorists and could only see them through the sights of his rifle.
and the
Speaker 16: population did not interest him at all. I heard Sharon declare in front of all the officers, whoever kills a terrorist will get a bottle
Speaker 37: of champagne, and anyone who takes
Speaker 144: a prisoner will get a bottle of soda. I said, good Lord, what kind of policy is this? Who speaks like this? After
all, if
Speaker 144: we do not give them a little assistance, a little prosperity, they'll all turn to the path of terror. End quote.
At
Speaker 99: southern command, Chiron created a special assassination squad that reported directly to him, and only to him. The
unit had lists of
Speaker 67: names, some terrorists, others suspected of knowing about or supporting terrorists. They
kidnapped and
Speaker 67: interrogated
Speaker 71: these people, and often tortured them if they failed to cooperate.
Sharon's
Speaker 71: men infiltrated Gaza neighborhoods dressed as Arabs, and if they saw someone who fit the description of a wanted terrorist, they just
killed him on the
Speaker 116: spot. The commander of the unit told a reporter, "We exploited the main weak point to these terror
Speaker 143: cells. Because of their Marxist background, they practiced a very high level of need-to-know compartmentalization. Each man knew only the members of his own cell, and not those of other cells.
If
Speaker 143: you appear as an armed local and you can speak the target's
Speaker 116: language, he has no way of knowing that it is in fact a trick until it's too late." The
murder of the
Speaker 116: Arroyo children marked a sea change in how the Israelis were going to respond to terrorist attacks.
Mayer Dagan,
Speaker 143: the commander hand-picked by Sharon to lead his death squad, said,
After those
Speaker 143: kids were murdered...
Speaker 143: Ariel Sharon took the matter of terror in the Gaza Strip personally.
In the past, Sharon
Speaker 45: would let the unit develop its own intelligence and come to him with suggested targets and operations when they were ready.
But now he started coming
Speaker 71: down to the villa where they were based on the regular to participate directly in selecting targets and planning missions down to the small details.
The arroyo
Speaker 143: killings also effectively
Speaker 40: ended the debate inside the Israeli defense establishment about how to handle the Palestinian population in the conquered territories. The
Israeli politicians
Speaker 143: and security officials who were interested in trying to win hearts and minds were shouted down as terrorist appeasers, and Sharon's approach triumphed. Massive forces poured into the Gaza Strip,
On
Speaker 143: Sharon's orders, they demolished rows of houses in order to create wide-access roads through the crowded refugee camps. The
people
Speaker 40: whose houses were destroyed were not compensated or provided with any alternate
Speaker 45: accommodations. They were just thrown out and left with nothing. One
night in
Speaker 45: January 1972, Sharon ordered the
Speaker 143: expulsion of thousands of Bedouin from a 2,500-acre area south of Rafa.
Thank you.
The
Speaker 143: Israeli general, in
Speaker 71: charge of government activities in the occupied areas, was outraged by this. He even threatened to resign, but
he was
Speaker 71: talked out of it and did nothing. Sharon
was given free reign
Speaker 71: to use special
Speaker 34: forces and other clandestine units virtually without restraint to find and kill terrorists before they could do any damage.
Speaker 45: Meanwhile, Dagan and his assassination squad continually devised new methods for finding and disposing of wanted Palestinians. One
tactic was to
Speaker 143: ambush them in brothels. Another was to hide in trees in the citrus groves when they knew that terrorists were planning to meet there. They'd
hide up
Speaker 143: in the branches,
communicating
Speaker 99: with each other by pulling on fishing cords stretched out between their trees to maintain silence. When
the
Speaker 71: militants turned
up,
No
Speaker 71: attempt was made to detain them. They were just shot and killed without warning. Of
course, these
Speaker 71: methods often lead to mistakes.
When you're
Speaker 71: targeting people before they can launch an attack, by definition, you're hitting
Speaker 125: them before they've launched an actual attack. Sometimes random Palestinians would happen by and notice
Speaker 143: the Israelis lying in ambush.
And the
Speaker 143: Israelis were not about to let them run off and raise the alarm, and there were times when they simply murdered innocent people to prevent that.
Another thing they'd
Speaker 143: do is use Arab collaborators to sell booby-trapped grenades to the Palestine Liberation
Speaker 122: Army. The
fuses would be
Speaker 122: clipped from the usual three-second delay to a half-second,
ensuring that
Speaker 122: whoever
Speaker 143: used them would blow himself up.
On one
Speaker 143: occasion, they borrowed an idea from Britain's famous ploy before the invasion of Italy called Operation Mincemeat.
Meyer Dagan,
Speaker 149: the commander of this unit,
Speaker 143: pretended to be a corpse and was carried by his comrades, two of them Palestinian collaborators and the others disguised as Arabs, into a militant hideout. And once they were all
Speaker 45: inside, Dagan rose from the dead and the team
Speaker 41: threw down and killed everybody in the room. Pretty incredible.
About a month
Speaker 41: after the Arroyo killings, two jeeps under Dagan's command were moving down a road that ran
Speaker 80: between the Jabalia refugee
camp and
Speaker 80: Gaza City. Jabalia refugee camp, by the way, is the one that was recently bombed. It was in the
news.
Along
Speaker 149: the way, the Jeeps encountered a
Speaker 143: local cab that was loaded with passengers driving in the opposite direction, and Dagan thought he recognized two targets among the passengers, and so he ordered the Jeeps to turn
Speaker 91: around and chase the cab down. The Jeeps caught up and then passed the cab and then cut off the road, and Dagan's soldiers jumped out and surrounded the car. Dagan
approached
Speaker 135: the vehicle with his pistol drawn. One
of the
Speaker 135: targets, Abu Nimr, jumps out,
Speaker 135: holding a hand grenade the
pin is
Speaker 135: already drawn he says if you get any closer we all die
and so Dagan paused
Speaker 106: for a second or two and then he yelled grenade and he
Speaker 71: charged Abu Nimr and he grabs the hand holding the grenade to keep the guy from releasing the trigger and starts headbutting on Abu Nimr with his helmet until he went unconscious Dagan's men neutralized the rest of the passengers and Dagan kept hold of Abu Nimr's hand as he went to the ground.
and
Speaker 71: found the grenade pin and put it back in its slot.
After the
Speaker 150: operation, Sharon said of Dagan, his greatest expertise is separating an Arab
Speaker 143: from his head.
Well, thanks to the
Speaker 41: tactical leadership of Dagan, Yitzhak Pundak, the IDF military governor who had clashed with Sharon in the past,
could not
Speaker 41: deny the effectiveness of Sharon's tactics. But he had other concerns than just military effectiveness.
He had to
Speaker 41: worry about political implications and how these operations were affecting Israel's foreign relations and the long-term relationship with the local population.
And Sharon was
Speaker 41: making those parts of his job
practically impossible. Bergman
Speaker 151: again, quote, Pundak
later recalled
Speaker 97: reading a report filed by the unit that read,
Our
Speaker 97: detail is chasing a wanted terrorist in El Shati, a refugee camp in Gaza. He ran into one of the houses. The unit broke in after him, disarmed him, and killed him in the house. Pundak
says he
Speaker 97: drew the attention of an intelligence officer to the possibility that if such a report reached the
Speaker 143: UN or the Red Cross, it would cause an international scandal. So, what's the problem? said the officer, according to Pundak. Destroy the report.
pundak
Speaker 143: took this story to sharon and when he refused to investigate further pundak recalled he told sharon you are a liar a crook and a knave sharon rose and raised his hand as if to slap pundak but pundak wasn't scared if
you do
Speaker 41: that i'll break your bones right here in your office he said
sharon sat
Speaker 41: down pundak says he saluted and declared now i know you're also a coward and left the room.
Several
Speaker 143: journalists have collected accounts from Dagan's unnamed men saying they shot people after they surrendered, their hands in the air. One was quoted as saying that he and other soldiers had apprehended a Palestinian man who was wanted for murdering an IDF officer. A Shin Bet agent, who was with them, purportedly said that the man could never be brought to trial
Speaker 71: because the Secret Service would be forced to name the collaborator who had provided the information that led to his capture.
the
Speaker 71: soldiers let their captive escape and then shot him as he ran
Speaker 51: another unit veteran said the captive would be led from the house he was captured in into a dark alley off to the side
Speaker 122: where the soldiers would leave a pistol or a grenade in a way that made it very tempting for him to reach out for
it when
Speaker 122: he did they'd
Speaker 71: shoot him sometimes they'd tell him you have two minutes to run and then they'd shoot him on the grounds that he
tried to run away the
Other
Speaker 51: former members said that when it came to the list of targets, Dagon had unilaterally annulled the IDF's rule that suspects be given a chance to surrender before being
Speaker 45: killed. Under Dagon's command,
Speaker 41: a target was assassinated on sight. All the complaints, rumors, testimonies, to say nothing
Speaker 143: of the many dead bodies, were swept into a closet, locked tightly to prevent any outside inquiry.
The
Speaker 1: aggressive Israeli tactics were making it harder to hit targets inside Israel,
Speaker 41: and so the PLO reached out to new friends willing to help carry out operations elsewhere. Europe
was a
Speaker 41: very juicy target. Israelis
came
Speaker 143: and went often, and European security procedures were insufficient to say the least.
The
Speaker 41: 60s revolution was in full swing, and the PLO shaped its message to attract the support of left-wing and would-be revolutionary movements around the world, like this PLO statement, The
Palestinian
Speaker 97: national struggle and the Arab national democratic struggle are an integral part of the militant movement against imperialism and racism and for national liberation throughout the world.
Speaker 143: Mutual solidarity and support between the Arab national struggle and the world revolutionary struggle are a necessity and an objective condition for the success of our Arab struggle. The
Speaker 93: Arab-Palestinian national struggle is decisively and firmly on the side of all world revolutionary forces. End quote.
Well, you
Speaker 153: know.
That kind of
Speaker 154: thing is catnip to Western radicals, of course,
Speaker 155: and so militant left-wing movements in Germany and Italy and radical groups across the
Speaker 41: continent adopted the Palestinian cause as their own.
The PLO brought
Speaker 143: European radicals to Lebanon and Jordan for military training in the camps, and the Europeans helped the PLO with messaging and logistics and even operations in Europe.
On several
Speaker 41: occasions throughout the 1970s, major PLO operations targeting Jews overseas turned out to have received direct support from European
Speaker 45: leftists. In
the summer of
Speaker 45: 1968, as protests and revolutions rocked capitals around the world, Palestinian militants adopted a new tactic that would become one of the hallmarks of the era.
They
Speaker 71: hijacked Flight
Speaker 143: 426 of the Israeli airline El Al. The
Speaker 67: plane was on the way from Rome to Tel Aviv when three men took it over and ordered the pilot to divert to Algiers.
There were
Speaker 67: 38 people on board, including 12 Israelis and
Speaker 143: another 12 Israeli crew members. Once the plane landed in Algeria,
Speaker 122: all the non-Israelis
and
Speaker 122: all the women, children, and elderly, regardless of whether they were Israeli, were all released, leaving seven crew members and five passengers as
Speaker 51: hostages, all Israeli men.
They were moved to a
Speaker 51: building where they were kept under guard by Algerian government security forces for three weeks when the Israeli
Speaker 45: government finally agreed to free 24 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages' release.
The El Al
Speaker 91: Flight 426 skyjacking was carried out by George Habash's outfit,
Speaker 67: the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP Which was formed separately from Yasser Arafat's Fatah, but came under the PLO umbrella with
Speaker 156: everyone else after Arafat took it over The
PFLP was
Speaker 156: a
Speaker 44: Marxist organization, popular with the educated middle class Which opened a lot of doors into the Eastern Bloc and
Speaker 91: the West European Left
Thank you.
The
Speaker 91: success of the El Al hijacking was pretty much total. No one had been
Speaker 67: hurt. Leftists had no problem defending the operation since the hijackers had
Speaker 143: wisely decided to let everybody but the men go. And 24 Palestinian militants had been freed from Israeli dungeons. What's
more, the
Speaker 143: Israelis had been forced to negotiate
Speaker 37: with a group
that
Speaker 37: they officially refused to recognize, and said was a gang of criminal terrorists.
For years, the official
Speaker 37: policy of the Israeli government
Speaker 16: was to never negotiate prisoner exchanges with hostage-takers, since doing so would only encourage more hostage-taking operations.
But now that
Speaker 16: policy had been put to the test, and the Israelis had
Speaker 40: buckled.
And so hijacking
Speaker 41: became a regular thing.
About a
Speaker 41: year after Flight 426, a TWA flight from L.A.
Speaker 44: to Tel Aviv was jacked by four Palestinians. Two of
them forced
Speaker 44: a stewardess
Speaker 51: at gunpoint to open the door to the cockpit, and when the pilots looked up to see what was the matter, they had gun barrels in their faces. To
their surprise,
Speaker 51: one of
Speaker 143: those guns was being held by a woman,
dressed all in
Speaker 143: white, with a white floppy hat and a white tunic and white trousers. Wow.
Her name
Speaker 79: was Layla Khaled, and for a time, she would become an international symbol of Palestinian resistance. Khaled
and the
Speaker 33: others ordered the plane to land in Damascus, and Israeli air traffic control tracked the plane the
whole
Speaker 70: way,
Speaker 33: but they
had
Speaker 70: no choice but to just watch as this aircraft made its way over Israeli airspace to land in the capital of their Syrian enemy.
Once the plane
Speaker 17: was safely on the ground, all the hostages were released except for two Israelis who were held
Speaker 71: for three months until another prisoner exchange was negotiated. The
thing about the
Speaker 71: Palestinian movement is that, just like
Speaker 40: today, it was a very mixed bag.
Most
Speaker 40: groups fell under the banner of the PLO, but that didn't mean that the PLO had chartered those groups or handed out their missions. Most of these groups formed on their own
Speaker 41: and then declared allegiance to the PLO, but
the PLO
Speaker 41: leadership wasn't always exercising
Speaker 16: operational control. And
so you had
Speaker 16: some groups, usually the more educated, secular ones...
That had
Speaker 16: a nose for the global propaganda environment,
and
Speaker 80: they would do things like release women and children and try to negotiate prisoner exchanges without hurting anyone.
Other groups were not
Speaker 157: like that at all, and were
just all
Speaker 16: about violence and mayhem. As
the conflict
Speaker 16: dragged on, and this is one
of the
Speaker 16: things that happens as conflicts drag on
Speaker 67: into real blood feuds,
The
Speaker 67: mutual savagery of both sides allowed the ultra-violent extremists to pull pretty much everybody down to their level.
There was a palpable sense that
Speaker 67: things were spinning out of control in the late 60s and early 70s. That sense existed even in Europe and the United States, and it was amplified in
Speaker 71: a country where two peoples were fighting what each of them saw as an existential war for survival.
Wow.
in
Speaker 41: rome a team of palestinian terrorists
Speaker 75: went through an airport terminal shooting at people and
then they went out
Speaker 75: onto the tarmac started shooting and throwing grenades into a taxiing airplane set it on fire and killed 30 people
Speaker 16: and then they commandeered another aircraft with hostages and threatened to crash it into central athens before making their way to the middle east where after some wrangling they faced no punishment and got away
That
Speaker 16: sounds like
Speaker 3: a crazy, crazy, crazy incident But I'm dedicating just a few lines to it Because things like that
Speaker 40: happened all the time back then Between 1968 and 1972 Okay,
just a
Speaker 40: couple years, 68 to 72 Literally hundreds of passenger planes were hijacked
Only some of them
Speaker 40: by Palestinians and other Arabs It was just a thing
to do
You had
Speaker 40: French-Canadian separatists jacking planes and flying them to Cuba. Some
people were doing it just
Speaker 40: because they were crazy and wanted to be famous. There
were 82
Speaker 40: attempted hijackings
Speaker 45: of American aircraft in 1969 alone. That's
Speaker 16: like one every four days. Just imagine that. Most
were just taking
Speaker 16: hostages and making demands. They weren't flying them into buildings or anything like
that.
But the
Speaker 44: Israelis realized that they couldn't keep negotiating prisoner exchanges with these people.
Every time they
Speaker 44: did, it validated
Speaker 40: the tactic, practically guaranteed the next hijacking or hostage-taking. And so the decision was made at some
Speaker 21: point that there would be no more negotiations, and instead they would use special forces or other operatives
Speaker 3: to attempt assaults and rescue missions. As Israeli strategy changed, the terrorists
Speaker 51: adapted to,
Speaker 51: It became much quicker to start shooting hostages when things went sideways. The
next fall,
Speaker 51: Khaled and one
Speaker 91: comrade kicked off a string of what would be five attempted hijackings, each carried out by a separate team in very quick succession.
Khaled's group
Speaker 91: failed when this badass pilot
Speaker 45: purposely sent the plane into a nosedive, sending the hijackers tumbling onto the floor.
There
Speaker 3: was an undercover Israeli agent on board, and he drew a concealed pistol, shot one of the hijackers, and a bunch of the other passengers piled on top of Khaled.
The plane finished
Speaker 41: its scheduled trip to London, and Khaled was
Speaker 122: detained by British authorities. But
three days
Speaker 122: later, there was another skyjacking,
another
Speaker 51: British flight coming in from the Middle East.
In
Speaker 51: exchange for the hostages, the PFLP demanded the release of Khaled and three other prisoners being held in West Germany and Switzerland. And
so over
Speaker 158: Israeli
Speaker 51: protests, they were howling in protest, the British, the Germans, and the Swiss complied
and
Speaker 41: released the hostages, including Leila Khaled.
This was followed
Speaker 41: almost immediately
Speaker 143: by three more skyjackings.
And then
Speaker 143: all four of the commandeered aircraft were brought to Jordan. The passengers were
Speaker 3: released, other than 55 Jews and one crew member, who were taken to a hideout in a Palestinian neighborhood of Amman. As
news cameras sent
Speaker 3: the images
Speaker 34: around the world, the four planes were blown up as the terrorists made their getaway. For
King Hussein
Speaker 159: of Jordan, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The
Speaker 159: Israelis were surely going to retaliate. And
what could
Speaker 1: he really say, after it had been revealed in front of the whole world that he had no control over his Palestinian population? The
PLO had been treating
Speaker 67: Jordan as if it had already owned the country, and even Hussein's supporters were starting to doubt his leadership. He
knew that he risked
Speaker 67: backlash if he moved on the PLO, but at this point he really felt like he had no choice.
It was
Speaker 45: September 1970. Becker writes, quote, The
Fedayeen
Speaker 97: had defied King Hussein's authority beyond a point that was politically tolerable. For several reasons, the king
Speaker 44: judged the time to be right to crush the organizations. Peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel were underway, initiated by the American Secretary of State, William Rogers.
The
Speaker 44: Rogers plan proposed that Israel withdraw behind her pre-1967 boundaries and
Speaker 16: that the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 be implemented.
But the PLO
Speaker 16: rejected Resolution 242 on the grounds that it referred to Palestinians as
Speaker 38: refugees and not to the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland and because it required the recognition of Israel.
And so the
Speaker 38: Rogers plan was also rejected.
But
Speaker 37: Egypt and Israel did sign a
Speaker 44: ceasefire agreement. Hussein wanted peace, too. The impediment was the PLO. Within Jordan, the Fedayeen groups had been encroaching even
Speaker 16: further on the state's prerogatives. They had formed their own police force. They had initiated armed clashes with the army. They had started their own radio station. They had organized
Speaker 90: mass demonstrations and a strike to stop the king receiving an envoy from the United States.
On
Speaker 90: that day, every driver on the roads of Amman, even army drivers, had stopped their vehicles for an hour when the Fedayeen asked
Speaker 97: them to. The Fedayeen were appealing to the people over the head of the government with alarming success. They had
Speaker 44: even interfered successfully to
prevent the king
Speaker 44: dismissing two officers and sending two others into exile.
Hussein had reason
Speaker 44: to fear that his power was being usurped and
his
Speaker 143: government destroyed,
It
Speaker 143: seemed plain enough that the intention of the Fedayeen was to take over the country.
His mind was made up
Speaker 143: for him after the Dawson's
Speaker 71: Field episode, before skyjacking. He
was carrying
Speaker 71: out a formal inspection of his Bedouin
Speaker 1: troops. Hussein, remember, came from Arabia and was installed by the British and ruled over a majority Palestinian
Speaker 3: population. The Bedouin were like his Cossacks, his most loyal troops and his regime's enforcers.
And so
Speaker 3: he's carrying out a formal inspection of his Bedouin troops.
When he noticed,
Speaker 16: as he was intended to, that one of the soldiers was flying a brassiere from the antenna of his radio. The
hint was
Speaker 16: not to
Speaker 90: be mistaken. The Bedouin were telling the king that he had turned them into women, keeping
them
Speaker 143: passive in the face of Palestinian provocation, end quote.
Hussein
Speaker 44: knew that he risked an uprising If he attacked Arafat and his people If
he was
Speaker 44: going to go in He knew he had to go in heavy With the element of surprise And not surrender the initiative He had to keep the PLO on its heels And destroy them Before they had a chance to organize a resistance In September 1970 He ordered his police, military, and intelligence forces To
attack
Speaker 83: Arafat's people Thank
you.
which was a
Speaker 75: more complicated operation than it might sound like.
The PLO
Speaker 75: was not located in any one place. It was distributed in communities
Speaker 34: throughout the population. Hussein's forces massacred people indiscriminately.
Speaker 44: They killed thousands of Palestinians. PLO groups, especially the PFLP,
Speaker 67: responded as well as they could, but they were being
slaughtered.
The
Speaker 84: Syrians sent a small contingent of tanks into northern Jordan to support the Fedayeen, but they were pushed back.
Jordan
Speaker 41: requested Israeli air support against the Syrians,
and the
Speaker 41: Israeli cabinet debated
Speaker 123: whether to intervene and ensure that the Palestinians were crushed once and for all. When
Syria massed
Speaker 123: more tanks on the
Speaker 161: border, Israel massed forces on its side of the northern Jordanian border, and Syria backed down.
Now,
Speaker 138: naturally, these massacres did not play well in the Arab press, to the point
Speaker 16: that King Hussein was actually hemorrhaging senior military and government officials who were defecting to the other side or resigning in disgust. The Jordanian Prime Minister
Speaker 67: went to Egypt for an emergency meeting between the Arab states about what to do. And
while he was
Speaker 65: there, he had a discussion with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi,
Speaker 65: after which he resigned his post and defected to Libya.
His fight
Speaker 91: could not go on if Hussein wanted to keep his head on his shoulders. But fortunately for him, the
Speaker 67: PLO had already been dealt a devastating blow by the end of the month, a month that would come to be called by Palestinians Black September. Arafat
and the rest of
Speaker 103: the remaining PLO leadership left Jordan through Syria and eventually
Speaker 67: relocated to Lebanon to try and rebuild.
And it
Speaker 44: didn't take them long to do it.
Despite the
Speaker 44: damage
Speaker 116: they'd taken, the PLO launched a new wave of attacks, not only in and around Israel, but in Europe as well.
In November 1971, the
Speaker 61: Jordanian Prime Minister who had
Speaker 67: ordered the assault on the PLO was assassinated in Cairo.
Two
Speaker 67: weeks later, gunmen nearly
Speaker 16: assassinated the Jordanian ambassador to Great Britain.
Two months after
Speaker 16: that, Palestinian militants executed five Jordanians in Germany, then bombed the
Speaker 40: offices of a Dutch gas company and a German electronics firm that was engaged in trade with
Speaker 67: Israel.
These attacks were all
Speaker 67: carried out by a group no one had ever heard from before, though it went by a name that had become very
Speaker 41: familiar.
A
Speaker 41: Lul al-Aswad, or Black September. Black September was a faction of Fatah led by a former PLO intelligence boss, and
it redefined
Speaker 41: and widened the war being fought by the Palestinian
Speaker 123: resistance. The
center of focus
Speaker 162: was no longer Israel.
Speaker 162: Israel was to be seen merely as the forward
Speaker 41: operating base of U.S. imperialism passing through the Arab regimes tied to it and ending with Israel. In
May 1972, a group of
Speaker 40: Black September terrorists jacked an airliner with 94 passengers and 7 crew members. The plane landed in
Speaker 44: Tel Aviv.
and the
Speaker 44: hijackers demanded the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Now, I don't know
Speaker 88: what possessed them to try to pull this off on Israel's home turf, but
that's what
Speaker 67: they did. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan approved a plan devised by future Prime Minister Ehud
Speaker 1: Barak,
who was
Speaker 1: commanding an Israeli special operations unit. His
team got close
Speaker 1: to the aircraft by donning white overalls
Speaker 67: and posing as an airport ground crew.
Each
Speaker 67: man was carrying concealed.22 Beretta, and when they were close enough, they rushed into the plane and eliminated all the terrorists. Only one female passenger was killed in the firefight. Two more were injured.
The only Israeli
Speaker 61: commando hurt was a young man named Benjamin Netanyahu, lightly wounded in the hand by an errant bullet from his own side.
Well, now it was the
Speaker 51: Israelis' turn to celebrate.
Speaker 51: Because instead of capitulating, they had shown potential hijackers around
Speaker 16: the world what could be waiting for them if they tried it again.
But again, this was
Speaker 16: a new kind of war, and the militants still considered the operation a success,
since
Speaker 3: it had brought the attention of revolutionaries from all over the world to focus on Palestine for an entire day.
Applications to
Speaker 50: join the resistance flooded in.
And one
Speaker 50: member of Black September said that nearly every
Speaker 41: one of them said something like, At last you have found a way of making our voice heard in the world.
Recruits came from all
Speaker 116: over the world.
The PFLP made
Speaker 116: contact with a band of revolutionaries out
Speaker 16: of Japan, led by a woman named Fusako Shigenobu,
calling
Speaker 91: themselves the Japanese Red Army. The
JRA was an
Speaker 91: avowed Maoist organization,
Speaker 91: which took things a bit too far, ideologically
Speaker 99: speaking, for the merely Marxist-Socialist PFLP.
But the
Speaker 3: Japanese radicals were committed, and apparently willing, and some said
Speaker 51: eager, to give their lives for the cause. Fusako's cadre was trained by the PFLP, first in North Korea and then in Lebanon.
According to a
Speaker 16: few sources, the Japanese militants were actually the first ones to raise the
idea...
that
Speaker 16: rushing to a certain death in battle was not
Speaker 40: suicide in the regular sense of the term.
The Japanese kamikazes
Speaker 3: who flew their planes into American ships were not suicidal. They gave their lives heroically for their country, and a soldier who rushes into a hopeless situation to
Speaker 51: do damage to the enemy is no
Speaker 163: different.
This was the case
Speaker 51: they were making.
Their Arab
Speaker 16: compatriots were skeptical. Suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam.
And
Speaker 16: even the
Speaker 3: more secular militants wondered how they would ever recruit fighters if they thought that they'd be sent off on suicide missions. And
so the Japanese Red
Speaker 3: Army decided to provide a demonstration of how effective a few militants could be when they acted without concern for their own lives. On
May 30,
Speaker 40: 1972, three JRA men pulled AKs and hand grenades from their bags in the main airport of Tel Aviv and began firing indiscriminately.
one
Speaker 41: witness said i saw 25 people piled up in a pool of blood near conveyor belt number three one
man
Speaker 116: stood near the belt with a submachine gun and fired across the entire length of the room another lobbed hand grenades whenever he saw people in large
Speaker 21: groups two
of the
Speaker 21: attackers fought to the death and another was badly wounded
and
Speaker 39: captured 26 innocent people were
dead
Speaker 39: Another 78 lay bleeding with shrapnel and bullet wounds.
17 of the
Speaker 39: dead were Christian pilgrims who were visiting the
Speaker 164: Holy Land from Puerto Rico. At
a Beirut press
Speaker 65: conference, the PFLP spokesman, who was actually married to
Fusako
Speaker 5: Shigenobu and fathered a daughter with her, openly defended the massacre, made no apologies for the non-Israelis who were murdered even.
He said
Speaker 5: not one of those people
Speaker 16: in the airport that day were innocent, since not one of them had cared or lifted a finger to object to the brutalization of the Palestinian people. The
sight of Japanese
Speaker 16: Marxists killing Puerto Rican Christians in support of Palestinians in
Speaker 3: their fight against Jews was as shocking as it was strange, and both Israelis and Palestinians understood that the war had just escalated to a new
Speaker 73: level.
Within a
Speaker 73: few months, the whole world would know it.
Eight Black
Speaker 73: September
Speaker 81: militants had been training at a camp in Libya for months. Arafat's
old
Speaker 3: friend, Salah Khalaf, met them there, along with the
Speaker 143: founder of Black September, and the group were told that they had been chosen for a very important mission. In
Libya, they
Speaker 143: were trained to proficiency with
Speaker 45: handguns, submachine guns, and grenades.
Speaker 40: and they underwent training and hand-to-hand combat and physical fitness.
They were also
Speaker 40: trained in disguise,
Speaker 73: with a focus on how to pass unnoticed in a foreign country. A
few of the
Speaker 73: trainees spoke German and
were
Speaker 3: familiar with major German cities, which might have given the militants some hint of where they were headed.
It was
Speaker 3: 1972, and the
Summer
Speaker 21: Olympics were underway in Munich.
On July
Speaker 21: 7th,
Speaker 51: a Mossad
Speaker 16: agent filed a report warning that Black September is planning an attack in Europe.
And again on
Speaker 16: August 5th, Black September is preparing an operation of an international nature. But
the
Speaker 165: reports were
Speaker 166: ignored. They were lost amid the flood of other reports just
like it.
On
Speaker 21: September 3rd and 4th, the eight Fedayeen flew separately into West Germany and made their way separately to Munich. The
PLO had asked for
Speaker 51: permission to send a Palestinian team to participate at the Olympic Games, but the Olympic Committee had said no. And
Salih
Speaker 44: Halaf later said, Apparently from the point of view of this reputable
Speaker 16: body, which pretends to be apolitical, we didn't exist.
the
Speaker 16: leadership of Black September decided to take things into its own hands.
Now, although the group might
Speaker 3: have put two and two together by now, it
was
Speaker 21: not until the night before the operation that they were informed of the plan.
All eight of them drew
Speaker 111: up their last will and testament, they picked up their weapons, and they made their way to
Speaker 21: the Olympic Village. Aided by left-wing German militants,
Speaker 21: They climbed the fence and made straight for the
Speaker 16: building where the Israeli Olympic team was staying. At
about 4
Speaker 16: a.m. on September 5th, the eight men stormed the Israeli dorms. The team's
Speaker 21: wrestling coach and one of their weightlifters put up a fight, but they were shot and killed. The rest
Speaker 3: of the team was held hostage in the same room with the two bodies.
Anyone, anywhere in the
Speaker 3: world, who was not already watching the Olympics...
was
Speaker 3: now watching the most audacious and high-profile terrorist
Speaker 80: attack in history unfold on live television.
The terrorists demanded
Speaker 111: the release of 200 Palestinian
Speaker 16: prisoners.
Israeli Prime
Speaker 16: Minister Golda Meir made the decision early on that there would be no negotiation with Black September or
Speaker 34: else Israel would never see the end of these attacks.
Israeli Special
Speaker 34: Forces began preparing a rescue
Speaker 67: operation.
but
Speaker 67: the West Germans refused to let them carry it out.
This was
Speaker 67: Germany, so the Germans called the shots.
The Germans were
Speaker 51: so adamantly pacifist in the post-war era
that they
Speaker 51: hadn't even armed the guards at the
Speaker 143: Olympics because they didn't want the world to see uniformed Germans walking around with guns.
The 72
Speaker 143: Olympics was
Speaker 44: supposed to be Germany's big coming-out party.
Speaker 44: 27 years after
Speaker 16: World War II, a giant show to demonstrate to the world that Hitler and the National Socialists, all that was part of the distant past. And
now Jews
Speaker 41: were dead, and more
were in
Speaker 41: danger of being massacred. And worse, they'd been helped by German radicals, who ironically were convinced that they were acting in the name of anti-Nazism.
The
Speaker 45: German state would not let
Speaker 76: the Israelis run the operation. They feared a televised bloodbath. But the Germans themselves had no experience with this kind of thing, and
Speaker 20: they were completely unequal to the
Speaker 16: task. The
two Israeli
Speaker 16: agents who were allowed to observe from a distance had to watch helplessly with the rest of the world, while
the rest of the
Speaker 16: Israeli Olympic team was
Speaker 45: led at gunpoint to two German military helicopters.
One of the
Speaker 45: Israeli observers said,
Speaker 44: "'The sight of the athletes being led to the helicopters I will never forget until the
Speaker 3: day I die. On both sides of the pathway, which was a kind of lawn, stood tens of thousands of people from innumerable countries. Deathly silence. I stood alongside German
Speaker 16: Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Gensher and Franz Josef Strauss, Victor
Speaker 79: at my side,
And we
Speaker 79: watched the Israeli
Speaker 16: athletes, with their hands tied, flanked by the terrorists, and all in step, they marched toward the
Speaker 39: helicopters. It
was an
Speaker 39: appalling sight, especially to a Jew on German soil, in
Speaker 113: Munich.
Bergman picks it up
Speaker 113: from here.
The helicopters took the
Speaker 144: hostages to a nearby
Speaker 44: military airport.
Speaker 44: where a plane was supposed to fly them out of Germany as soon as the deal for the release of the Palestinian prisoners had concluded.
The terrorists
Speaker 75: and the hostages were followed by additional helicopters with the Israeli observers and the German
Speaker 16: officials on board.
Germany devised
Speaker 16: a rescue operation at the military airport,
but the
Speaker 16: forces they deployed
Speaker 51: were untrained and disorganized, and they lacked the required intelligence on the terrorists, sniper equipment, and support for such a mission.
They
Speaker 3: opened fire in an uncoordinated manner and did not hit or kill enough terrorists to neutralize the squad. The
terrorists fired
Speaker 3: at the building where we were, Zamir
Speaker 16: said. He's one of the observers. Victor and I ran down the stairs, groping in the dark, looking for the commanders of the operation, with firing going on all the time.
We saw
Speaker 16: that the terrorists had shot the helicopter pilots, and they fell on their faces.
When we
Speaker 16: located the German commanders of the operation, I demanded to go up onto the roof to speak to the terrorists and warn them that if firing continued, they would not get out alive. The officers refused, and we insisted until they agreed on condition that we speak Arabic and not German.
Cohen took
Speaker 16: the megaphone and began trying to persuade the terrorists to surrender.
But it was
Speaker 16: too little too late, and all I got was a burst of fire that nearly killed
Speaker 41: us both.
Zemir
Speaker 41: asked the Germans why there wasn't a force
Speaker 44: storming the terrorists. He was told that the police were waiting for armored vehicles that were stuck on the way to the airport in a traffic jam created
Speaker 16: by all the curious onlookers. Zemir watched the terrorists lob grenades into the helicopters where the Israelis were being held. He saw them go up in flames after the
Speaker 45: grenades exploded.
When
Speaker 45: he ran to the smoldering aircraft, he found only the nine Israelis' bodies, handcuffed to one another, charred, and some still burning. To
Zamir, the
Speaker 75: Germans' conduct in the hostage situation was telling.
They did
Speaker 75: not make even a minimal effort to save lives, or take minimal risks to rescue people.
Speaker 83: Neither our people nor their own. He
said he had
Speaker 83: seen one of the German pilots crying out for help.
Speaker 83: I told the German police, for God's sake, there are people bleeding in the
Speaker 167: helicopter. A wounded crewman has crawled 200 meters. Get him out of there. He crawled on all fours, wounded, and no one made a move to rescue him.
Just after 3
Speaker 75: a.m., barely 23 hours after the initial terrorist assault, Zemir phoned Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir,
Speaker 16: who congratulated him on his success. He
said,
she
Speaker 16: had been
Speaker 67: misinformed by a german source that all the israelis were safe i'm sorry to tell you this golda he told her but
Speaker 130: the athletes were not rescued i have seen them all not one of them
survived
Speaker 135: the palestinians saw the operation as a success as their cause had taken center
Speaker 41: stage in world opinion
one
Speaker 41: PLO organ wrote
a bomb
Speaker 41: in the White House a landmine in the Vatican the death of Mao Zedong an earthquake in Paris could not have had
Speaker 16: greater resonance with every person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in Munich
it was
Speaker 16: like painting the name Palestine on a mountain visible from all corners of the globe end quote
Well, the
Speaker 51: Israelis, as you can imagine, went absolutely ham on the
Speaker 61: PLO. The Mossad sent teams around the world hunting everyone they could find with any
Speaker 87: connection to the attack.
They bombed a
Speaker 50: dozen bases, they attacked villages, they assassinated people across Europe and the Middle East. This
revenge
Speaker 45: operation eventually wound down, but
the lesson
Speaker 41: that the Israelis took from Munich...
Was
Speaker 84: that they could no longer restrict their operations to Middle Eastern countries.
Operation Spring of
Speaker 73: Youth, as it was called, had also shown the Israeli government how much their intelligence and
Speaker 3: special operations capabilities had improved since the disasters in 1965.
Showed them that they had the
Speaker 40: capability to strike anyone, anywhere in the world, with or
without
Speaker 67: the permission of local government. It
also hardened
Speaker 67: their outlook.
Speaker 45: radicalized them, instilled a certain cavalierness to the operations they chose and how they were executed. One time, when they were hunting a suspected terrorist in Lillehammer, Norway, Mossad agents identified the wrong man and just straight-up murdered an innocent Moroccan
Speaker 83: in front of his pregnant Norwegian wife. Quote, All
of a
Speaker 83: sudden, my husband fell. I
did not
Speaker 83: understand what had happened.
And
Speaker 75: then I saw those two men.
They were
Speaker 75: three, four meters away from us. One
Speaker 51: of them was the driver of the car, and the second was his passenger.
They stood
Speaker 51: outside the car, on both sides, firing pistols. I
fell flat
Speaker 51: on the ground. Sure, they wanted to kill me, too, and
Speaker 116: that I would die in a moment.
But then I heard
Speaker 116: the car doors slam, and
it
Speaker 75: drove away. My husband didn't shout. I
got up and
Speaker 75: ran as fast as I could to the nearest house and told them to call the police and an ambulance.
When
Speaker 75: I got back, there were already people around
Speaker 116: my husband trying to
Speaker 41: help him. An ambulance came, and I drove with my husband to the hospital.
And there
Speaker 41: they told me he was
Speaker 16: dead." The Mossad
chief at the time
Speaker 16: just waved this incident off. He said, Not one of us has the means
Speaker 75: of only making correct decisions. Wrong identification of a target is not a failure. It's a mistake.
The
Speaker 75: man behaved in a manner that seemed suspicious to our people who were following him.
He made a
Speaker 75: lot of journeys, the aim of
Speaker 95: which was difficult to know.
But as Bergman
Speaker 16: writes, quote, In truth, the man had no connection at all to terrorism, and the Lillehammer
Speaker 87: affair was nothing but the cold-blooded murder of an innocent pool attendant, end quote.
Even
Speaker 51: worse than that, as far as the Israelis were concerned, several members of the hit squad were caught by the Norwegian police, who quickly figured out what had happened. Documents
found on the
Speaker 91: agents revealed the locations of safe houses and collaborators, communications channels, and operational
Speaker 3: methods that the Israelis used all over Europe.
The men
Speaker 3: were sentenced to short prison terms for the murder, but they were released after a secret agreement was reached between Israel and Norway. When
they got off the
Speaker 3: plane back home,
Speaker 126: the murderers were greeted as returning heroes by a crowd of cheering Israelis. Nasser
died in 1970, and
Speaker 45: he was replaced as Egypt's president by Anwar
Speaker 139: Sadat.
The
Speaker 139: first years of Sadat's rule were very bad ones in Egypt. The country was
Speaker 143: demoralized after its defeat in '67, and now the death
of
Speaker 45: Nasser. The economy was
in a
Speaker 45: toilet. Sadat had been making noises in global media and through diplomatic channels that he was willing to recognize his real sovereignty,
which
Speaker 16: would have made Egypt the first Arab state to do that.
Speaker 16: in exchange for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Sinai, but so far he hadn't gotten anywhere.
And so in
Speaker 39: 1972, with Egypt in a bad place and his rule unstable,
he decided to
Speaker 39: take bold action to
Speaker 67: shake things up.
The 1967 war
Speaker 67: had left the Israeli
Speaker 16: security forces stretched to their limit.
while
Speaker 16: at the same time instilling a sense of arrogant invincibility that led them to underestimate what the Arabs were capable of.
After making a final offer
Speaker 41: for a lasting peace treaty delivered to the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir by
Speaker 16: U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger and being flatly rejected, Sadat began making preparations for another war.
With the help
Speaker 16: of the Soviet Union, he began a massive rearmament
Speaker 45: program, stocking up on MiG fighters and air defense systems, tanks and anti-tank weapons, and bringing Egypt's recruiting and training of its soldiers up to modern standards, or something close
Speaker 169: to it. Sadat
ordered a
Speaker 33: series of military
Speaker 16: exercises on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, with Israeli forces watching from the other side.
He kept
Speaker 16: doing this, and each time the
Speaker 40: Egyptians got moving, the Israelis had to respond, but eventually they got tired of it, and their responses started to slacken
Speaker 45: each time the Egyptians launched another exercise. They
were
Speaker 40: convinced that the Egyptians, who had been beaten so badly in 1967, would not dare try again, especially
Speaker 16: since now it would involve problems.
an
Speaker 91: opposed amphibious attack across the Suez Canal, something they did not think the Egyptian army was remotely capable of.
As a
Speaker 16: result, the Egyptians were essentially making war preparations within visual range of the Israeli military, and the Israelis weren't really doing anything to prepare for it.
Sadat called on
Speaker 16: Syrian President Hafez Assad to join the upcoming war with Israel. Jordan refused to
Speaker 67: participate.
Other
Speaker 67: Arab countries sent small expeditionary forces, mostly as a symbolic gesture. In
the first days
Speaker 67: of October
Speaker 91: 1973, General Ariel Sharon was shown photographs
Speaker 45: of Egyptian forces massing on the far side of Suez in much larger numbers than in any of the previous exercises.
Speaker 20: And so he called up the CO of IDF Southern Command and
told him
Speaker 20: that he thought that the Egyptians were planning to
attack.
Prime
Speaker 20: Minister Maier also got word from separate
Speaker 73: sources that a Syrian attack may have been imminent. All
of these
Speaker 73: warnings and many others actually were ignored. On
October
Speaker 40: 4th and 5th, Soviet advisors and their families began leaving Egypt and Syria at the same time that fleets of Soviet transport aircraft laden with military equipment started landing in Cairo and Damascus.
On
Speaker 40: October 6, 1973, the Egyptians sent five divisions, comprising 100,000 soldiers, 1,400 tanks, and 2,000 pieces of heavy artillery and mortars, across the Suez Canal on a massive
Speaker 73: surprise attack.
And despite all
Speaker 73: the warning signs, they caught the Israelis mostly off guard.
Israeli forces tried to
Speaker 73: counterattack the bridgeheads
Speaker 7: established by the Egyptians, but they were repulsed.
Speaker 7: Israeli forces looked for a time like
Speaker 43: they were about to be overwhelmed.
And the Prime
Speaker 43: Minister ordered nuclear bombs and missiles prepared in case they were.
There were real concerns
Speaker 43: at the time that if
Speaker 67: Israel did start nuking Arab cities, the Soviets might nuke Israel. Leading
to the very
Speaker 67: real possibility of
Speaker 3: nuclear war with the United States.
But none of that would
Speaker 3: be necessary.
The
Speaker 67: Egyptians didn't try to move out much from the narrow strip surrounding their bridgeheads for fear of leaving the protection of their air defense systems
and
Speaker 52: becoming vulnerable to Israeli airstrikes.
By October
Speaker 52: 13th, IDF Northern Command had successfully driven the Syrians back and fortified the Northern Front
so that
Speaker 52: Israeli artillery was now only three to five miles from being within range to target Damascus itself.
knowing that
Speaker 75: the U.S. and the U.N. were going to be forcing a ceasefire within the next 48 hours or so, there
Speaker 16: was a lot of pressure within the Israeli government to do something now, drastic now, against
Speaker 75: Egypt before that, before the ceasefire, in order to secure a better negotiating position in the aftermath. There
were calls to
Speaker 75: make a bold push across
Speaker 12: the Suez Canal to the Egyptian side to threaten Cairo,
But the
Speaker 12: Egyptians were too well-prepared,
Speaker 67: and no one saw a way to do that that would guarantee success. The
Israelis had
Speaker 75: lost over 400 combat aircraft,
and the
Speaker 75: defense minister informed the
Speaker 3: cabinet that the Air Force only had enough resources to support one more major attack.
With Israeli
Speaker 58: artillery almost within
Speaker 16: range of Damascus, Assad panicked and begged Sadat to order an Egyptian attack eastward
to
Speaker 16: take pressure off the Syrian front.
Now, the
Speaker 16: Egyptians were in
Speaker 67: a very strong position,
and they
Speaker 67: knew it was a bad idea to push out, but Sadat felt that he had no choice but to support Assad, lest
Speaker 80: Syria pull out of the war and leave Egypt one-on-one against the Israelis.
On October
Speaker 170: 13th and 14th,
Speaker 16: the Egyptian tanks began trying to push out from their secure positions.
Speaker 16: inviting a head-on confrontation with Israeli forces.
IDF's southern
Speaker 16: command was ordered to take up defensive positions and prepare for a fight, but Ariel Sharon had his own ideas.
Speaker 72: Disregarding orders, he took 750 troops,
Speaker 42: 20 tanks, and 7 APCs across the Suez Canal into Egyptian territory on ferries.
He caught
Speaker 16: the Egyptians completely off guard, and some units broke and ran, thinking that this must be a larger Israeli invasion that was imminent. The
disorder in the
Speaker 12: Egyptian forces caused by Sharon's maneuver opened up opportunities for air and artillery strikes
Speaker 16: against their exposed positions and left Egyptian tank forces vulnerable to counterattack. Sharon's maneuvers had cut off the
Speaker 51: Egyptian 3rd Army from resupply or reinforcement. It was basically trapped.
Some
Speaker 91: Israeli officials wanted to destroy the entire force, but others thought that it was best to preserve as a bargaining chip. The
Americans
Speaker 3: supported the latter idea, and the Americans had a lot of influence by this point.
The 73 war was
Speaker 67: in part a proxy war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Nixon
at first had
Speaker 67: refrained from throwing total U.S. support behind
Speaker 73: the Israelis when the war started,
But
Speaker 73: once it was clear
Speaker 16: that the Soviets were committed to helping the Arabs win, the U.S. decided that it couldn't let Soviet support be the determining factor in such a high-profile conflict, and so the U.S.
Speaker 171: got fully
Speaker 16: involved. The
Israelis had been
Speaker 16: running out of supplies
Speaker 43: and equipment, and the American support was desperately needed, so what the Americans wanted was not something that could be ignored. And
what the
Speaker 43: Americans wanted was a
Speaker 16: ceasefire.
What the Americans wanted was a ceasefire.
NATO
Speaker 16: and Warsaw Pact military forces had come nose-to-nose for
Speaker 73: the first time in a decade, and neither side wanted to test the sensitivity of the other's trigger finger. So, in fact, pressure
Speaker 172: was coming from both the U.S. and the Soviet
Speaker 67: Union to their respective proxies to wrap this up. By
the last week of
Speaker 67: October, a ceasefire
Speaker 45: was in place, although fighting would continue sporadically until the following January.
The
Speaker 80: 1973 war.
Speaker 80: The fourth Arab-Israeli war, or the Yom Kippur War, ended
up
Speaker 45: signaling a sea change in Arab-Israeli relations. It was in fact the last time, even to this day, that
Speaker 80: Israel was in direct combat with Arab military forces.
Although Israel had
Speaker 143: managed to gain the upper hand by the end, everybody knew that it had been
Speaker 109: by the skin of their teeth.
If the
Speaker 173: Egyptians had improved this much in six
Speaker 41: short years after their devastating defeat in the Six-Day War, what
were things
Speaker 41: going to be like in another six
Speaker 45: years? The
sheen of
Speaker 45: Israeli invincibility was
Speaker 16: gone.
From the
Speaker 16: Arab side, the 73 War actually opened doors to peace that had been slammed shut by the 67 War. That earlier war had left the Arabs so humiliated
That
Speaker 16: it was basically impossible for any leader to make a lasting peace with Israel without looking cowardly.
But now
Speaker 16: that Egypt could say that it really had dealt a serious blow to the Israelis and
shown that
Speaker 16: they mean business and were no longer to be taken lightly, that actually gave Sadat the confidence and the room to start working toward
Speaker 81: peace.
The Israelis suffered
Speaker 81: almost 11,000 casualties in this war.
They
Speaker 34: lost 400 tanks,
Speaker 34: Another 700 damaged or captured, as well as over 400 armored vehicles and
Speaker 44: 400 aircraft destroyed. The
Jewish population of
Speaker 44: Israel at the time was only about 2.7 million. You always have to keep that in mind when you hear casualty numbers
Speaker 45: like this. 11,000 casualties in a society with 2.7 million people is the equivalent of the U.S. taking 1.2, 1.3 million casualties
in a
Speaker 45: war that lasted just over two weeks.
The
Speaker 1: 1973 war might have been good for Sadat's popularity, and it was
good
Speaker 67: for Egypt's position in the region, but it had accomplished nothing for the Palestinians. While the Egyptians got to rest once
Speaker 91: the fighting came to a halt in early 1974, there would be no rest for the Israelis.
The
Speaker 91: fourth Arab-Israeli war might have been over, but the long war with the PLO only intensified. In
May of 74,
Speaker 41: three Fedeyin who were part of a PLO splinter group sneaked into northern Israel from Lebanon. At
night, they
Speaker 41: started toward a border town called Malot, and
on their way they
Speaker 41: ambushed a vehicle carrying several women returning home from work.
The
Speaker 16: terrorists killed one of the women and shot and wounded another, and then in the early morning they arrived at Malot,
Speaker 43: and two of them spoke Hebrew, so they knocked on the door of a house and announced that they were there looking for terrorists. When the door opened,
Speaker 131: the three men crashed through it. Inside was Yosef and Fortuna Cohen, and their four-year-old son Moshe, and their
Speaker 174: daughter Bibi, and a 16-month-old
baby.
The
Speaker 175: terrorists
Speaker 176: murdered the parents
Speaker 161: and the four-year-old and shot and wounded the little girl. They didn't notice the baby. As
they left the house,
Speaker 41: they came across a local man and asked him in Hebrew for directions to the school. The
man told
Speaker 41: him, and they shot him.
They got to the school with
Speaker 16: the intention of hiding out and waiting for the children to arrive in the morning.
But when
Speaker 16: they broke in, they
Speaker 51: found that there was already a large group of teenagers and ten adult chaperones who were already there, sleeping. It
was a group from
Speaker 51: another part of the country on
Speaker 41: an overnight field trip to Malou. When Israeli security forces arrived, the men announced that they would kill all their hostages at 6 a.m. if 20 Palestinian prisoners were not released. And
so a rescue operation
Speaker 45: was quickly thrown together, but it was botched and
and
Speaker 45: the terrorists began shooting and throwing grenades at the hostages.
It only took the
Speaker 16: Israeli force about 30 seconds to correct their early errors and kill the terrorists, but in those 30 seconds, 22 children and 4 adults were killed.
Every
Speaker 67: surviving hostage was at least wounded.
Another attack, this
Speaker 67: one also
Speaker 41: originating in Lebanon.
led
Speaker 41: to a hostage situation in a hotel right in Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital. The
Israeli
Speaker 16: security forces again tried a rescue mission, but the militants had adjusted their tactics to the Israelis' more aggressive posture. They were always ready to just start killing hostages at a moment's notice.
Before all the
Speaker 34: terrorists were neutralized, eight civilians and three soldiers had been killed.
One of the
Speaker 37: Israeli Special Forces soldiers, assigned to that hostage rescue team,
later you'd be the
Speaker 51: commander of the unit, he said, It was a terrible time. Every few weeks we scrambled to
Speaker 143: the scene of another terror attack.
You know that in the
Speaker 143: few hours you had before dawn, you had to eliminate the problem. Although
it
Speaker 44: was all happening inside Israel, the nature of the operations was different from what the unit was used to.
All
Speaker 44: the initiative, all the element of surprise, all the planning was the other sides.
Terribly scary. This went on
Speaker 143: throughout the 1970s.
Speaker 51: And
that is very important to
Speaker 51: understand about this conflict.
The kinds
Speaker 51: of attacks that were
Speaker 75: introduced to most Western countries after 9-11 and with the rise of ISIS,
Israel had already
Speaker 75: been dealing with that for
Speaker 143: decades.
The
Speaker 143: long-time mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kolek, was once asked by a reporter what he thought should
Speaker 51: be done about the problem of terrorism. He said, problem? We don't have a problem. Problems have solutions. We have a condition, and conditions can only be managed.
That's not an
Speaker 67: exact quote. I have never been able to find it again after I read it, but that was the gist of it.
Regular acts
Speaker 177: of...
This
Speaker 80: appalling savagery, followed by savage Israeli
Speaker 67: reprisals, became part of the background noise of the 1970s.
Things would
Speaker 67: go at a certain
Speaker 45: pace and intensity for a while, and then something would happen that captured the public's attention, like the killing of the Arroyo
Speaker 3: children, and things would go up a level, to
a new intensity, and
Speaker 3: stay there. As
the attacks became
Speaker 80: more savage and nihilistic,
The
Speaker 80: Israelis were becoming a more hardened people under
Speaker 45: the pressure. From Bergman, quote, On March 11, 1978, at 2.30 p.m.,
Speaker 75: 11 Fatah men landed on the beach near Kibbutz Magan Michael, south of Haifa,
Speaker 51: in a nature preserve bounded by fish-breeding ponds where flocks of migrant birds stop on their way to and from Africa.
An
Speaker 41: American nature photographer named Gail Rubin was taking pictures
Speaker 16: of the birds when the raiding party stumbled upon her. The Palestinians were close to despair after the three exhausting and hazardous
Speaker 178: days at sea, during which two of their number had drowned. Because the waters were so stormy and they had been washed miles out to sea, they had lost their bearings and
Speaker 44: thought they had landed in Cyprus.
They
Speaker 44: were relieved when Ruben told them that they were in Israel, halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They thanked her and shot her dead.
Then the attackers
Speaker 44: made for the coastal
Speaker 41: highway, the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. At gunpoint, they hijacked a taxi and
Speaker 51: then a bus and took the drivers and the passengers hostage. They ordered the driver of the bus to head south toward Tel Aviv. Abu Jihad, that's Khalil al-Wazir,
had
Speaker 44: instructed them to seize a hotel, but the raiders, now in bold high spirits because of the dozens of hostages in their hands, decided to change the nature of the operation.
The IDF's
Speaker 44: classified report on what followed
Speaker 16: noted, The terrorist's improvisation led to a new method of assault, an attack on the move, along a route of over 50 kilometers, which was a surprise and against which there was no deployment at all on the part of the security forces.
The
Speaker 16: terrorists fired from the bus windows at vehicles on the road
Speaker 75: and stopped another bus, taking its passengers hostage as well. Because of the novel nature of the attack, security forces
Speaker 44: found it difficult to read the situation, to maintain an updated evaluation, and to take the initiative, which affected the course of the incident and its results.
Although
Speaker 44: the police managed to stop the bus at the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv, the confusion led to utter chaos. The predominant factor was the lack of central
Speaker 16: control, both among the terrorists who were trying to defend themselves by firing in all possible directions, and among the security forces. One
of the
Speaker 16: terrorists rested the hand holding his pistol upon the head of the daughter
Speaker 41: of one of the hostages, Avraham Shamir.
Speaker 41: shamir saw the man was wounded and he charged at him
Speaker 40: grabbed his gun and shot a terrorist in the front of the bus then he fired three shots at another terrorist
Speaker 75: behind you warned a female hostage and shamir turned to see one of the arabs aiming his weapon
at him
Speaker 75: they both fired at the same time and wounded each
other the
Speaker 44: courageous shamir still functioning saw that the man whose gun he had grabbed was lying on the floor muttering his face covered in blood
he had
Speaker 79: a grenade in his hand.
the
Speaker 79: safety pin removed. Shamir tried to stop him from dropping it,
but he
Speaker 79: failed, and the grenade
Speaker 44: rolled onto the floor. He tried to use the terrorist's body to block the blast, but that didn't work either. The
Speaker 51: grenade exploded, seriously wounding Shamir's eyes and killing the terrorist and five hostages.
The
Speaker 45: blast set the bus on fire. Some of the terrorists and hostages managed to escape, but most were burned alive.
Speaker 67: "'In all, 35
Speaker 51: Israelis, 13 of them children, were killed, and 71 wounded. "'Nine of the terrorists died. "'One was captured at the scene, and another was found in a hospital "'where the casualties had been taken. "'I
see him
Speaker 45: lying there,' said Aryeh Hadar, the top Shinbet interrogator, "'lightly wounded, but with a feeding tube and
IV
Speaker 80: infusion, "'mocking us right in our face.'
The
Speaker 179: doctor understood what was up,
and
Speaker 180: turned his back to us and said, You'll do what you do, and I'll do what I do. We pulled out the tubes. End quote.
The coastal highway attack
Speaker 51: was one of those attacks, among the thousands that the Israelis have experienced, that really stuck in the collective
Speaker 39: memory. And
the nature of
Speaker 39: Israeli responses
Speaker 151: would change afterward.
Yeah.
The year
Speaker 151: before it happened, the Labour Party, which was born out of the mainstream Zionist movement
Speaker 57: before the state of Israel was founded, had
lost an
Speaker 57: election for the first time to
a newly
Speaker 57: formed right-wing party called Likud, which was descended from the Zionist
Speaker 16: revisionist movement. The
first Likud
Speaker 16: prime minister, Menachem Begin,
was
Speaker 16: the leader of the Irgun terrorist group that targeted Palestinian
Speaker 181: civilians with bombs and shootings in the 1940s. A
few years
Speaker 70: later, the Israelis would elect Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Stern
Speaker 67: Gang, a terrorist organization that had perpetrated dozens of massacres against Palestinian civilians, including probably the most famous at Deir Yassin.
It's another
Speaker 91: one of those situations where I try to step outside myself and imagine this from the perspective of the Palestinians. I'm
not a Fedayeen
Speaker 16: fighter, forget
Speaker 41: about them, but an average Palestinian who maybe isn't particularly comfortable with the behavior of the Fedayeen, and isn't sure if the Israelis are really as bad as they say they are, that terrible things happened in the
Speaker 16: previous generation, but that these were their children, and maybe it was possible to come to some sort of agreement.
Then the
Speaker 16: Israelis start electing governments run by literal terrorists, people who have committed mass murder against Arab civilians,
to the point
Speaker 16: that even the mainstream labor Zionist movement had outlawed and attacked those groups, those terrorist
Speaker 51: groups. But
now the Israelis are putting
Speaker 51: them in charge of the country. Of
course, if I'm born
Speaker 51: in Israel and I'm an Israeli politician and something
Speaker 16: like that coastal highway attack happens...
I
Speaker 16: know for sure I wouldn't be getting all historically philosophical about it. I would be looking for somebody to kill.
Under
Speaker 51: Likud, the security forces began to move away from focusing on clandestine raids and assassinations
in
Speaker 40: Palestinian areas and border countries.
It began to
Speaker 45: turn to the military itself.
No more ducking and
Speaker 45: weaving in the shadows at night. Now heavily armed soldiers...
Speaker 45: would march in and lay down the law.
After the coastal
Speaker 45: highway attack, they launched Operation Litani, sending armored forces and paratroopers into southern Lebanon to
Speaker 41: take revenge on the PLO.
They killed
Speaker 41: some 300 Fedeyin, destroyed many of
Speaker 49: their bases, but there were also murders and looting by Israeli soldiers.
Military
Speaker 155: intelligence cultivated ties with Lebanon's Maronite Christians, who hated the
Speaker 182: Palestinians and were their most bitter enemies in Lebanon. I
mentioned at the
Speaker 16: beginning of the show that the influx of Palestinians was tough on every country that absorbed them.
We saw what
Speaker 16: happened in Jordan.
Well, of all the
Speaker 16: countries, Lebanon was the smallest and the least able to deal with the fallout. It
was a very
Speaker 16: diverse and fractious society to begin with,
with
Speaker 16: a very slight Christian majority that was held together
Speaker 45: with string and bubble gum.
There'd been a
Speaker 45: brief civil war in 1958 when Nasserite elements got worked up and began agitating for union with Syria and Egypt in the UAR. After
the PLO got run
Speaker 75: out of Jordan in 1970, they set up shop in southern Lebanon and essentially turned the place into their
Speaker 50: own little fiefdom. People even called it Fatah Land.
The PLO
Speaker 50: started staging most of its operations from Lebanon, inviting Israeli retaliations and pissing off the people of Lebanon. The
Lebanese
Speaker 16: Christians, who were again around half the population, very slightly more, they were largely urban and a
Speaker 50: relatively prosperous population, and they demanded that the government get these PLO people under control.
Well,
Speaker 50: the PLO warned the government that if it interfered with its operations, it would declare itself an enemy of the people and be targeted as well.
And so the
Speaker 44: government was in an impossible situation. If
they allowed
Speaker 44: the PLO to continue what it was doing,
it would
Speaker 44: show itself as a false government and risk an Israeli invasion. If
they tried to
Speaker 75: intervene, they risked an uprising among Lebanon's Muslims in a civil war with the PLO.
Speaker 75: which might give neighboring Arab
Speaker 44: countries like Syria and Iraq an excuse to invade in order to keep the peace, a
Speaker 19: prospect that was particularly daunting because the Syrians in particular had never accepted Lebanon's independence in the first place.
The situation continued
Speaker 40: to escalate throughout the first half of the 1970s,
Speaker 40: Until in 1975, everything fell apart and the country descended into one
Speaker 183: of the most savage civil wars of the 20th century.
Lebanese
Speaker 141: Christians and the government fought PLO forces and
Speaker 51: other fedayin being shipped in from other Arab countries.
This was not a
Speaker 51: civil war like we're used
Speaker 67: to hearing about in America.
What we had
Speaker 67: in America in the 1860s was not really a civil war.
That
Speaker 3: was a situation where we broke up into two countries and then had a regular old war.
There was a
Speaker 3: bit of civil war out in the West in a few places, but
civil wars
Speaker 16: like the ones in Lebanon or the Balkans or Northern
Speaker 3: Ireland
are not fought by
Speaker 3: armies on battlefields. They're fought by gangs and militias in neighborhoods and villages,
and
Speaker 45: captured enemy when they're allowed to surrender at all. They don't go to POW camps. They don't benefit from the Geneva Conventions. They go to some basement in the enemy's neighborhood where they're tied to a chair and someone
Speaker 51: who's lost a friend or a relative in the war goes to work on them for as long as they want. From Becker, quote, In
Speaker 97: the first week of the Civil War, some hundreds
of
Speaker 44: motorists, halted in a traffic jam in Beirut,
Speaker 44: witnessed the execution of a man by the PLO. The captors and their victims stood on a piece of open ground at the side of the avenue Sami al-Soul. Some Lebanese, probably
Speaker 75: Maronite, were guarded by Fedayin. The captives' hands were tied behind
Speaker 44: their backs. One was singled out for special attention. Round his neck, the PLO militiamen tied sticks of explosives.
Speaker 44: People in their cars looked and waited
Speaker 67: uneasily for the arrival of the special police and Red Berets whose business it was to deal with violent incidents in the streets, but they did not appear. The victim stood still, with strange quietness and dignity, as one witness said, while the Fedein literally prepared to blow his head off. They set a fuse and ran back from the man, who continued to stand where he was, quite still, until the explosion came.
Not
Speaker 67: only was he decapitated, but the rest of
Speaker 135: his body was blown to pieces. The nationalist movement was openly joined by Fatah. The carnage was massive. Deaths from the fighting averaged about 50 a day.
National
Speaker 16: movement fighters and youths from the camps looted and destroyed stores in the heart of
Speaker 44: Beirut.
Dead and
Speaker 44: mutilated bodies lay everywhere in public places.
Speaker 44: corpses of sexually violated women and children and of men with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their
Speaker 135: mouths shop windows were shattered and their contents looted by a multitude of beggars many of them small ragged boys out of the camps who would offer the goods for sale on the streets wildly setting their own prices on items whose value they could not imagine garbage piled up in the streets piped water and electric power
Speaker 44: were cut off more often than
not
People
Speaker 44: were afraid to leave their apartments and seek safety elsewhere, knowing that they would lose everything to the looters, who would even tear down window frames and plumbing fixtures out of the walls. To
add to the terror
Speaker 44: and destruction, the Syrian PLO group Saika began its own campaign of bomb explosions in the commercial center of the city.
As this was
Speaker 44: a mixed area,
Speaker 141: its targets were indiscriminate. PLO offices and men were hit.
Speaker 141: It
Speaker 44: was the covert beginning of a direct Syrian assault on the weakening Lebanese state.
Snipers on
Speaker 44: roofs or at high windows picked off unidentifiable victims in the streets, in their rooms, in shops and offices. Everywhere
Speaker 16: in the city, armed elements sauntered in public wearing masks, balaclavas, or squares of cloth covering all their features, or carnival papier-mâché faces,
Speaker 44: comic or grotesque, under cowboy Stetson hats, helmets, any kind of headspace.
Speaker 44: headgear. Feather boas were seen draped around necks and shoulders under masked faces, and bits and pieces of all kinds of uniforms were worn. Jungle camouflage fatigues, jeans and t-shirts. Guns were carried as an indispensable
Speaker 3: necessity, even in restaurants and on beaches, by women as well as men.
Many a
Speaker 44: franc-tireur toted his gun in the ranks of the fedellin and the Marxists.
Speaker 44: Also, bourgeois idealists, youths from Europe, most of them diehards of the new left's militant peace movements of the late 1960s and now playing at revolution, and some of them neo-Nazis were drawn here from the safe societies of the West to revel in the real thing.
The PLO
Speaker 44: peristate in Lebanon was a subversive's honeypot. Here they had a license to shoot and kill in an alien world with no consequences to themselves.
Speaker 44: Would-be heroes of the revolution, playboys and playgirls of terrorism from West Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, came to dress up, strut, blow up, gun down. It was a masquerade with a cruelty all too real. The adventure
Speaker 67: required the suffering and dying of multitudes of helpless people. It was a carnival of death. End quote.
Speaker 67: Weapons flowed
Speaker 151: into Lebanon from all over the world Supposedly people could get RPGs for $25 According to
Speaker 45: one Maronite militia leader The
main Maronite
Speaker 16: militia was called the Falange Its fighters were called the Falangists And they viewed the fight as a
Speaker 67: war for their existence And so they acted with a savagery that matched that of the Palestinians and their backers
After one
Speaker 67: Falange leader's son was killed, he
Speaker 184: led a force that massacred some two or three hundred Muslims and Druze in Beirut in an incident that became known as Black Saturday.
Earlier in the year,
Speaker 52: 27 Palestinians traveling by bus from Beirut were attacked and
Speaker 45: massacred by a Falange unit. About
a month after
Speaker 45: that, Muslims kidnapped and murdered
Speaker 16: between 30 and 50 Christians,
For
Speaker 16: months in 1975 and 76, Muslims and Christians based out of hotels and
fought it
Speaker 16: out in central Beirut.
Speaker 122: If you were on the street, which few people ever dared to be because there was a good chance of being picked off by a sniper from one side or the
Speaker 65: other, you could literally look up at these high-rise hotels and see rockets and mortars
Speaker 45: flying overhead between the hotels.
Speaker 45: Mounted machine guns firing into the buildings from rooftops It was absolute chaos No distinction whatsoever
Speaker 51: Between combatants and civilians Zero distinction
About a month
Speaker 51: after that Black Saturday massacre Falangis attacked a Muslim district in West Beirut And killed 1,500 people
Two days
Speaker 138: after that PLO forces targeted the Christian town of Damor for destruction
And
as the
Speaker 72: PLO force approached
Speaker 42: the outskirts of the town the local Christian priest, Father Labaki called the Muslim sheik in the district and asked him as one
Speaker 16: religious leader to another to intervene and tell these people that Damor was a peaceful town the
sheik
Speaker 44: told him that this is the Palestinians and there's nothing I can do and so Labaki
Speaker 41: managed to get hold of one of Arafat's aides
and
Speaker 41: pled with him to call off the attack.
The
Speaker 83: Palestinians are shelling and shooting at my town. I can assure you as a religious leader, we do not want the war. We do not believe in
Speaker 75: violence.
The voice on the
Speaker 75: other end replied, Father, don't worry. We
don't
Speaker 51: want to harm you. If
we are
Speaker 51: destroying you, it is for strategical reasons.
PLO forces
Speaker 41: invaded the town just after midnight.
Speaker 41: The Saika men stormed into the houses. They massacred some 50 people in one night. Father Labaki heard screaming and went out into the street. Women came running
Speaker 51: to him in their nightdresses, tearing their hair and shouting, They were slaughtering us! The survivors, deserting that
Speaker 41: end of town, moved into the area around the next church. The invaders then occupied part of the town that had been taken. In the morning, the priest...
Speaker 41: "'Managed to get
one
Speaker 97: house despite the shelling "'to bring out some of the corpses. "'And I remember something that still frightens me. "'An entire family had been
Speaker 16: killed, the Kanan family, "'four children all dead, and the mother, the father, the grandfather. "'The
mother was
Speaker 16: still hugging one of the children,
and she was
Speaker 41: pregnant. "'The
eyes of
Speaker 41: the children were gone, and their limbs were cut off. "'No arms and no
Speaker 131: legs.'
Speaker 131: "'It was awful. "'We
took them
Speaker 131: away in a banana truck. "'And
who carried the corpses
Speaker 131: with me? "'The
only survivor, the
Speaker 41: brother of the man.
"'His name
Speaker 41: is Samir Kanan. "'He carried with me the remains of his brother, "'his
Speaker 51: father, his sister-in-law, and their poor children. "'We buried them in
Speaker 44: the cemetery under the shells of
Speaker 16: the PLO.
"'The town tried
Speaker 16: to defend itself.'
Speaker 16: 225 young men, most of them about 16 years old, armed with hunting guns and none with military training, held out for 12 days. The citizens huddled in basements, with sandbags
Speaker 51: piled in front of their doors and ground floor windows. Father Labaki moved from shelter to shelter
Speaker 16: to visit the families and take them bread and milk. He went often to encourage the young men defending the town.
Only
Speaker 16: three more townspeople were killed between the first night and
Speaker 51: the last day, January 23rd. But on that day, when the final onslaught came, hundreds of Christians were killed. The
attack took
Speaker 51: place from the mountain behind. It
was an
Speaker 51: apocalypse. They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting, Allahu Akbar, God is great, let them attack for the
Speaker 42: Arabs,
let us
Speaker 42: offer a holocaust to Muhammad.
Muhammad.
and they
Speaker 42: were slaughtering everyone in their path, men,
Speaker 16: women, and children.
Whole families were
Speaker 16: killed in their homes. Many women were gang-raped, and a few of them left alive afterwards. One woman saved her adolescent daughter from rape by smearing
Speaker 178: her face with washing blue to make her look repulsive. As the atrocities were perpetrated, the invaders themselves took photographs and
Speaker 42: later offered the pictures for sale to European newspapers.
Speaker 42: survivors testify to what happened a young girl of 16 sumaya ganame witnessed the shooting of her father and brother by two of the invaders and watched her own home and the other houses in her street being looted
Speaker 73: and burned
as they were
Speaker 73: bringing me through the street the houses
Speaker 51: were all burning around me they
had about
Speaker 51: 10 trucks standing in front of the houses and were piling things into
them i
Speaker 51: remember how frightened
Speaker 71: i was of the fire
i was
Speaker 71: screaming i
was screaming
And for
Speaker 71: months afterward, I couldn't bear for anyone to strike a match near me. I couldn't bear the smell of it.
She and her
Speaker 71: mother,
Speaker 75: Mariam, and a younger sister and infant brother had been saved from being shot in their house when she ran behind one Palestinian for protection from the pointing gun of the other and cried out,
Speaker 41: "'Don't let them kill
us!' And the
Speaker 41: man accepted the role of protector, which
the
Speaker 16: girl had suddenly assigned to him. "'If
you kill
Speaker 16: them, you'll have to kill me too,'
Speaker 16: "'he told his comrade.
"'So the four
Speaker 16: of them were spared,
Speaker 185: "'herded along the streets between the burning houses "'to be put into a truck "'and transported to Sabra camp in Beirut.
"'Some 500 gathered in
Speaker 44: the church of St. Elias. "'Father Labaki went there at six in the morning "'when the tumult of the attack awakened him. "'He preached a sermon on the meaning "'of the slaughter of innocents,
Speaker 91: "'and he told them candidly "'that he did not know what to tell them to do.'
if
Speaker 91: i say flee to the sea you may be killed
if i say
Speaker 41: stay here you may be killed an
old man
Speaker 186: suggested they raise a white flag
perhaps if
Speaker 16: they surrender if we surrender they will spare us father labaki gave him his
surplus he put it on the
Speaker 16: processional cross and stood it in front of the church ten minutes later there was a knock on the door three quick raps then three lots
Speaker 44: of three they were petrified
Speaker 44: father lebaki said he would go and see who was there if
it was
Speaker 44: the enemy they might spare them
but if they
Speaker 44: kill us at least we shall all die together
and
Speaker 51: we'll have a nice parish in heaven five hundred persons and no checkpoints
they
Speaker 45: laughed and the priest went to the door it
was not
Speaker 16: the enemy but two men of demur who had fled the town and had seen the white flag from the
seashore
They
Speaker 16: had come back to warn them that it would not help
Speaker 67: to raise a white flag. We raised a flag in front of Our Lady, and they shot at us.
End quote. The two men and Father
Speaker 91: Labaki then led the whole group of 500 people down to the seashore while their teenage
Speaker 45: defenders held off the attackers.
They made it to the
Speaker 45: beach and moved along the shore until they reached the palace estate of a wealthy Muslim.
As it
Speaker 51: happened, he was not a supporter of the PLO. And
Speaker 187: so he took the people in and he gave them shelter. Approximately
Speaker 40: 500 civilians had been massacred. The
name of
Speaker 40: the town, Damore, it
means
Speaker 45: destruction. And
it was
Speaker 45: probably
Speaker 67: that that has caused it to be remembered as well as
Speaker 125: it has because there were a lot of massacres around this time. After
about 18 months,
Speaker 67: there was a pause in the fighting.
and
Speaker 67: an uneasy quiet fell while all sides caught their breath. The
country was
Speaker 44: informally divided up into four zones, with the PLO controlling the south of the country, which was very poor and where most of the Shiites lived. The
people who
Speaker 44: had been through the inhumanity of the war were in a very dark place, and PLO gunmen oppressed and terrorized
Speaker 41: the locals, including Palestinian civilians.
these
Speaker 41: were young men who had been born and brought up in refugee camps taking in with their mother's milk nightmare stories about the evil people who put them there they've been given a gun early and
Speaker 79: raised as fighters and now they're 17 18 20 25
Speaker 16: years old and that has been their whole
life in most
Speaker 16: of their adult lives they've
been
Speaker 41: They have been spent in an environment of escalating violence and then absolutely unrestrained civil war.
You saw something similar in
Speaker 67: the reversion to savagery in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, where child soldiers were put to use heavily in their civil wars.
As the
Speaker 67: wars dragged on, those child soldiers became young men They became the commanders and local chiefs and warlords It's like a writer for the New Yorker I can't remember his name at the top of my head Who was reporting in Liberia at the time of their war He said it was as if the whole country had been taken over by a serial killer He
Speaker 72: tells...
Speaker 72: of stories
Speaker 51: about groups of armed children taking bets on the sex of a baby in the belly of a pregnant woman walking by and then just cutting her open to see who won and laughing and feeling nothing
you know humans are
Speaker 51: very pliable creatures
a lot of what we
Speaker 91: talk about on martyr made is all the different directions that people can go in extreme circumstances
when you
Speaker 91: raise children in an environment of unstructured barbarism, you're going to get barbarians.
Speaker 42: And
the truth was
Speaker 42: that even Arafat, world
Speaker 45: famous as he was by now, was only able to exercise occasional and temporary control over these people.
Becker
Speaker 41: writes, quote, In
this
Speaker 44: gunarchy,
Speaker 44: Every individual group member in possession of his own kleshin, that's an AK, was a danger to the civilians. If, in addition, he was intoxicated by drugs, and the fedayeen were notorious for their hashish smoking, he was even more likely to shoot and kill for the pleasure of it, as many stories in the camp confirm.
Typical of
Speaker 44: these stories are the following.
Thank you.
An
Speaker 44: illiterate Palestinian hospital reporter, Waleed A., who lived in the Sidon camp of Ain
Speaker 67: Hilwe, told the story, weeping as he told it, of how his little sister, age 10, was killed. She
came home from
Speaker 16: school, she put her bag in the house, took a sandwich, and went out to play one afternoon. And
a few
Speaker 16: hundred meters from the house, walked past a little hill, where stood a band of PLO people who were completely drugged,
and were known to
Speaker 16: be very dangerous people.
Speaker 16: They used to break into offices, banks, businesses, and take whatever they wanted and frighten people. And if anyone tried to stop them, they used to shoot him and go away. And nobody dared to do anything or complain. As
the little girl
Speaker 44: passed them, "'These PLO people just shot all over the place, just as a game, into the camp where people were walking. And
one of the
Speaker 51: bullets hit my little sister.
They hit
Speaker 51: her in the kidney, and she died at
once.'
a
Speaker 151: member of fatah also from ein hillway tells a similar story a boy aged 12 abdullah hussein ayood went up the hill to play with
the
Speaker 67: other boys and they met a group of plo people these people were drugged and they just shot him dead
they put
Speaker 67: him in a truck and took him to the plo
Speaker 44: hospital at sidon
on the way
Speaker 44: one of his sandals fell off his foot
Speaker 44: "'The PLO washed a car to remove all traces of what had happened, "'but the family found the sandal stained with blood
Speaker 51: "'so they knew their son had been hurt. "'They went to the hospital and found him there, dead. "'There
was
Speaker 146: nothing they could do. "'None of us could ever do anything. "'There was no one we could go to. "'I
Speaker 16: couldn't go to my superiors in the organization "'because they wouldn't listen to me.
"'And we're
Speaker 16: afraid that if we complain, they'll shoot us.'
Speaker 16: There's nobody but Allah who's looking after us.
The Fedayeen did
Speaker 16: not have to be drugged to kill at whim, or to avenge some slight, or to make sure that even their most trivial and unreasonable demands were obeyed. A laborer told this story.
My sister is
Speaker 16: the mother of five children. She was on her way home from the market in Einhilweh one week before this last war started, when she was stopped by the people of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And
Speaker 16: with them was Sheikh Ibrahim, who was the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in Einhilweh.
They told her that
Speaker 16: she could not pass.
She said
Speaker 16: she would go anyway and walked on. They threw a hand grenade after her.
Her
Speaker 131: little boy, Ahmad, two years old, was killed immediately. Another boy, Hussein, seven years old, lost a leg. And so did Fatima, a girl aged six.
End
Speaker 188: quote.
It got to
Speaker 40: the point that the Shiites, and even many Palestinians, began to turn on the PLO hard. But
there was very little
Speaker 190: they could do, because the PLO was the only organized armed force in that southern part of the country.
One sliver of the south, and a
Speaker 1: chunk of the east were under the control of the Christians, who were able to keep the PLO out of their areas. The north was under Syrian military occupation
by now.
There were
Speaker 67: intermittent atrocities in battles, but the intensity of the first stage of the war started to die down. And
it was right at this
Speaker 116: time that that coastal highway attack occurred. And
the Israeli
Speaker 116: military began to involve itself directly in the conflict. As
I said, they made
Speaker 116: common
Speaker 141: cause with the phalangists, who hated the PLO, but whose hands were caked with innocent blood. Bergman
Speaker 16: writes, quote,
This
Speaker 16: partnership came at a moral price. The phalangists were exceptionally brutal. A fundamentally corrupt
Speaker 45: gang of murderers that reminded me of a pack of wild dogs, said Uzidayan,
Speaker 80: Moshe Dayan's nephew and commander of Sayeret Matkal at the time. They
adorned
Speaker 41: their belts with ears severed from the people they killed, gruesome trophies
Speaker 44: of war.
They
Speaker 44: boasted of the massacres they had carried out in the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel Azatar, the Hill of Time, in August
Speaker 171: 1976. 1,000 Palestinians in the ocean is pollution, the phalangists said, almost as a war slogan. But 5 million Palestinians in the ocean is the
Speaker 44: solution.
The phalangists didn't limit
Speaker 44: their brutality to Palestinians.
Speaker 44: Their chief executioner, an
Speaker 16: Israeli-trained Maronite militant named Robert Hatem, said he personally killed or oversaw the killing of some 3,000 people. The phalangists had commandeered an
Speaker 45: old cow slaughterhouse in Beirut's Carantina quarter, where prisoners were taken.
Almost no
Speaker 45: one who came there to be questioned left alive, Hatem said. We used to shoot them in the head and dump their bodies into
Speaker 16: lime pits.
Speaker 16: Syrians and Shiites and Palestinians and son-of-a-bitch officers in the Lebanese army. Everyone who wanted to kill us, we killed them first.
Hatem said that
Speaker 16: Mossad officers approved the killing of a few prisoners, including four Iranian diplomats who were tortured before being shot and dumped into the pits. The phalangist's wider rampage was carried out with the strong backing of the Israelis. At the
outset of
Speaker 16: our relationship with them,
Speaker 171: I took a pill against nausea and carried on, said Reuven Merhav, a
Speaker 44: Mossad official heading the unit that liaised with the Falange. Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and they really helped us against the PLO.
But the more the
Speaker 44: days went by, I
Speaker 191: reached the conclusion that linking up with people like these could only lead to disaster.
Speaker 171: Merhav left the Mossad as a protest against
Speaker 130: the continued relationship, but the agency's strategic alliance with the Maronites only deepened, end quote, as
would the
Speaker 96: Israelis' involvement in Lebanon. One
night in April
Speaker 45: 1979, a PLO squad landed a rubber boat near the town of Naharia, a few miles south of the Israeli border
Speaker 80: with Lebanon.
one of the
Speaker 145: terrorists was just 16 years old they
tried to break
Speaker 67: into a house but they were shot at and they ran away when a policeman came for them they killed him and then they broke into the apartment of a
Speaker 45: sleeping family they took the father Danny Haran and his four-year-old
Speaker 3: daughter hostage and dragged them to the beach at gunpoint
Speaker 3: Soldiers and police were already waiting for them there So as soon as they realized that they were trapped The 16 year old shot Danny Hadar
And then
Speaker 48: grabbed the 4 year old girl And started smashing her face against a rock Over and over and over Until her head broke and he killed her
The mother of
Speaker 48: the family was back in the apartment Danny had managed to hide her And their 2 year old daughter in a crawl space Before he was taken
The child The child
Speaker 106: didn't know that their lives depended on her being quiet and
Speaker 71: her mother was terrified that the noise of the crying child would give them away so she covered her mouth the baby's mouth with her hand and in her frantic state she accidentally smothered her own little girl to death
from infrastructure
Speaker 71: sabotage and roadside mines and occupied areas
the shape of
Speaker 192: palestinian terror had transformed into something unrecognizable
It
Speaker 191: seemed to have no point except venting their hatred and
Speaker 41: frustration on the closest and easiest target they could find. The horror was the point. The pain was the point. Incidents
like this
Speaker 41: one
Speaker 16: against
Speaker 45: the Hadar family seemed less like a traditional terrorist attack than having Michael Myers or some serial killer come into your house while you slept.
From Bergman Yeah.
The head
Speaker 75: of IDF's Northern Command, Major General Avigdor Yanosh Bengal, arrived at the scene shortly
Speaker 97: after the incident. He
saw the little
Speaker 97: girl's shattered head, the two-year-old's lifeless body,
and
Speaker 51: their mother screaming with anguish after realizing she had lost everything dear to her. "'You cannot imagine the dimensions of the atrocity,' Bengal said."
At the
Speaker 79: funeral for
Speaker 16: Danny and his two children, Prime Minister Begin quoted a line from Israel's national poet, Chaim Nahman Bialik,
Satan
Speaker 45: has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a little child. The horrendous murder in Nehariya was to become yet another milestone in the degeneration of the
Speaker 44: conflict between Israel and the PLO into total warfare.
Chief of
Speaker 44: Staff Aitan gave Bengal a simple
Speaker 141: order,
Speaker 141: Kill them all, meaning all members of the PLO and anyone connected to the organization in Lebanon.
Mayer Dagan,
Speaker 75: the operational commander when Ariel Sharon had pacified Gaza a decade earlier,
was
Speaker 44: brought in and told, From now on, you are emperor here. Do whatever you want to.
He was
Speaker 44: given free reign by IDF
Speaker 75: Northern Command, not only to hit PLO operatives and bases, but to intimidate and attack anyone who gave aid or support to the organization. David Agnon, head of Northern Command staff, said, The aim was to cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint,
to
Speaker 90: give them the feeling they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.
Speaker 44: General Bengal said, "I used to do OK missions with a wink. I used to tell Aitan, 'We've got an op to do.' He'd say,
Speaker 61: 'OK, but nothing in writing. It's between you and me, personal. I don't want it to become known.'
We didn't act
Speaker 51: through the military bureaucracy, because we both did and did not carry out these actions.
We used
Speaker 44: locals as proxies and mercenaries.
We
Speaker 44: put motivation into
Speaker 67: them,
Speaker 16: Christians and Shiites and Sunnis, and we played them against one another.
They began to
Speaker 44: manufacture bombs, some smaller IEDs, but many larger devices as well, in oil drums, barrels, and other nondescript packages.
They used them
Speaker 44: to blow up the homes of people
Speaker 141: suspected of collaborating with the PLO, and in Palestinian neighborhoods,
in
Speaker 45: Lebanese towns and cities, killing many people and causing massive damage.
Other
Speaker 193: elements in
Speaker 16: the security establishment complained that Northern Command had launched an unsanctioned campaign of violence on foreign soil.
The head of
Speaker 16: military intelligence said, There
was a
Speaker 16: constant struggle with
Speaker 75: Northern Command. They bypassed us, worked behind our back. Bengal lied to us all the time. We did not believe any of their reports. What made it even more grave was that it was being done with the approval of the chief of staff, who kept the activity a secret from the general staff.
This was
Speaker 97: one of the ugliest periods in the history of the country.
And so
Speaker 97: Northern Command
had
Speaker 41: essentially just gone rogue. It was fighting a covert war in Lebanon without the permission or the involvement of the Israeli government.
Military intelligence
Speaker 50: tapped Northern Command's phones to try to get a read on what they were doing.
But
Speaker 66: Northern Command caught on to that and they set up a separate encrypted system to protect their communications from their own government.
Not long after that,
Speaker 155: military intelligence went to Prime Minister Begin to complain that Bengal had told Dagan
Speaker 51: to start booby-trapping the corpses of dead terrorists to kill their friends
and family
Speaker 51: who came to retrieve the body.
And when
Speaker 51: Begin confronted him about it, this clued
Speaker 45: Bengal in that military intelligence had managed to tap his encrypted system too. Bergman,
Speaker 44: quote, Early in 1980, various elements in the IDF, headed by Sagoy, the head of military intelligence, began informing Deputy Defense Minister Zipori that Bengal was conducting rogue ops inside Lebanon. They
turned to
Speaker 44: him because they knew that he was the only politician who dared to speak out about what was going on there.
They
Speaker 44: tell me about the explosions in
Speaker 75: Lebanon, and even that Yanosh was mining roads taken by IDF troops to make it look as if the PLO was behind it.
In June, Zippori
Speaker 75: heard that women and children had been killed
Speaker 16: in an operation two months earlier, when a car bomb was exploded on a main road in the western sector of southern Lebanon, with the aim of hitting PLO personnel.
The
Speaker 41: operation had not been submitted upstairs for approval because we feared that we wouldn't get authorization for a thing like that, said Bengal. Both in internal army reports and publicly, the
Speaker 16: Northern Command claimed that the operation had been carried out by one of the local South Lebanese militias, something that was feasible but was in fact
Speaker 67: totally untrue, end quote.
The defense minister
Speaker 67: called Bengal into his office.
and
Speaker 67: accused him to his face of killing women and children in an unauthorized operation.
Bengal just
Speaker 67: blew him off.
He said that
Speaker 39: those people had been out at 2 o'clock in the morning. They were probably terrorists anyway.
And so the defense
Speaker 39: minister Zappori went
Speaker 50: to the prime minister and demanded that Bengal be dismissed immediately.
But a few months
Speaker 50: later, instead of replacing Bengal, the prime minister replaced the defense minister
with, of
Speaker 124: all people, Zappori.
Speaker 124: Ariel Sharon. Sharon
Speaker 41: did not accept Teddy Kolek's
Speaker 103: assessment that the Palestinian situation had no permanent solution. There was a solution. He would just take an iron will and ruthlessness to see it through.
Once in office,
Speaker 184: Sharon had his officers draw up plans for an invasion of Lebanon
Speaker 41: all the way up to Beirut.
Then he had
Speaker 41: them extend the plans to occupy all of Lebanon and parts of Syria. But
despite the free hand
Speaker 41: Begin was giving Northern Command,
Speaker 51: which now reported to Sharon, international events made it so that he wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: simply start a war without a pretext. The U.S. had recently brokered a ceasefire with the PLO, and made it clear that it would not support an Israeli attack except in the event of some extreme provocation.
And
Speaker 91: so Sharon decided that he had to create that provocation.
Bergman
Speaker 45: quote, By mid-September 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly
Speaker 44: in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities. One
Speaker 41: went off in the Fakhani quarter of Beirut on October 1st, killing 83 people and wounding 300, including many women who were trapped in a fire in a clothing factory
Speaker 16: owned by the PLO.
Speaker 16: Another one exploded next to the PLO headquarters in Sidon, killing 23. In
December
Speaker 90: 1981 alone, 18 bombs in cars or on motorcycles,
Speaker 44: bicycles, or donkeys blew up near PLO offices or Palestinian population concentrations, causing many scores of deaths. A new
and unknown
Speaker 44: organization,
Speaker 16: calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from foreigners,
took
Speaker 16: responsibility for all these incidents. The explosives were now packed in aerial
Speaker 44: laundry powder bags so that if the cars were stopped at roadblocks, the cargo would look like innocent goods. The Israelis in some cases enlisted women to drive to reduce the likelihood of the cars being caught on the way to the target zone.
The car bombs
Speaker 44: were developed in the IDF's Special Operations Executive.
Speaker 44: Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Falange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians. The
Front for the
Speaker 45: Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners also began attacking Syrian installations in Lebanon, and it even claimed responsibility
Speaker 44: for operations against IDF units.
Speaker 44: Yasser Arafat was not hoodwinked by this ploy. He accused the Mossad of
Speaker 45: being behind the blasts and the front. With Sharon's backing, one Mossad officer of the time said, terrible things were done.
I'm no
Speaker 45: vegetarian, and I
Speaker 171: supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations that Israel carried
out. But we
Speaker 42: are speaking here about mass killing for killing's sake, to sow chaos
Speaker 16: and alarm among civilians.
Speaker 16: "'Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?'
"'Another Mossad
Speaker 16: man who was in Lebanon at the time, "'I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. "'We were teaching the Lebanese how effective
Speaker 44: a car bomb could be. "'Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah "'sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.'
Arafat
Speaker 44: realized that Sharon was trying to goad the Palestinians into breaching the ceasefire so that he could launch his invasion, and Arafat made a genuine effort not to oblige him, including a partly successful attempt to stop violence in the occupied territories.
Speaker 171: Unfortunately for Arafat, one of the downsides of having a decentralized organization is that it
Speaker 80: can be difficult to exercise control over everyone operating
under your
Speaker 80: banner. But you still have to
take
Speaker 61: responsibility for anything
done in your
Speaker 45: name. In June 1982, in London, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom was leaving a black tie dinner event for ambassadors and business
leaders.
Speaker 195: israel's security services weren't permitted to work in the uk and so he was
Speaker 45: assigned a british bodyguard who shepherded the diplomat outside to a waiting armored car he didn't see the assassin
Speaker 44: until it was too late
and as the
Speaker 44: bodyguard opened the door a palestinian approached and opened fire with a submachine
gun the
Speaker 67: ambassador was not killed but he was paralyzed and suffered from
That
Speaker 67: led to an early death in 2003.
The Israelis
Speaker 16: soon learned that the assassination attempt had been ordered by Abu Nidal, a terrorist leader who was a sworn enemy of Yasser
Speaker 51: Arafat.
It was done at the
Speaker 51: urging of Iraqi intelligence. Saddam Hussein had ordered the operation in the hope
Speaker 16: that it would ignite a major war between Israel, the PLO, and Syria, and
if he
Speaker 16: was lucky, maybe even Iran.
Well, as
Speaker 16: it happened, Sharon and his loyalists in the Israeli
Speaker 50: government wanted the same thing. The Mossad and other intelligence personnel tried to explain
to Prime
Speaker 50: Minister Begin that
Arafat had
Speaker 50: nothing to do with this attack,
that it
Speaker 50: was carried out by a fringe terrorist cell that had Arafat himself marked for death. And
the PLO had
Speaker 50: actually
Speaker 16: been behaving itself for the entire last year. But
Begin was not
Speaker 16: listening.
And so the
Speaker 141: Israeli Air Force began bombing Beirut and PLO bases elsewhere. Arafat
had no
Speaker 98: choice now but to respond, and
Speaker 80: soon communities in northern Israel came under PLO bombardment.
This wasn't the way
Speaker 34: that he had planned, but Ariel Sharon now had his war. Sharon
had big plans in
Speaker 61: Lebanon, but he didn't reveal them right away.
At
Speaker 16: first, he presented a plan to make a limited incursion to eliminate the artillery threat to Israeli communities on the border. The
PLO's longest-range
Speaker 51: guns could reach about 40 kilometers, so that's how far the IDF would penetrate. But
there were Syrian
Speaker 51: forces in Lebanon, and others in the government worried about the possibility that the Israelis would come into conflict with them.
Sharon was
Speaker 16: not worried about that.
In
Speaker 16: fact, he was counting on it for the excuse to begin his much more ambitious plan. Along with
his
Speaker 44: chief of staff, Sharon had a secret agenda that was far more grandiose. He intended to use the IDF's tanks to remake the whole of the Middle East. In his vision, Israeli forces and their phalange allies would conquer Lebanon from the border to Beirut,
Speaker 44: destroying all PLO forces and inflicting serious damage on Syrian units deployed there.
With the
Speaker 16: capital secure, the Israelis would install the phalange's leader, Bashir Gamayal, as president,
thus
Speaker 75: transforming Lebanon into a reliable ally. Next, Gamayal would expel the Palestinians to Jordan,
Speaker 196: where they would be a majority able to establish a Palestinian state in place of the Hashemite kingdom.
Speaker 16: This, Sharon reckoned, would eliminate the Palestinian demand for a state in Judea and Samaria,
the
Speaker 42: West Bank, which would thus become part of Israel. End quote.
His actual
Speaker 16: plan, just to repeat what I just read, his actual plan was to use the Christian militias in Lebanon to ethnically cleanse the
Speaker 44: Palestinians,
driving them
Speaker 44: into Jordan with the
Speaker 41: expectation
That they
Speaker 41: would spark a revolution in Jordan, overthrow the Jordanian government, create a Palestinian state,
and then they
Speaker 41: could
Speaker 16: stop bothering about Israel. And
that's why his forces had
Speaker 3: been doing everything they could to increase tensions between Palestinians and other groups in Lebanon by executing, again, plain and simple
terrorist
Speaker 16: attacks against civilians on all sides. That's
why he
Speaker 16: needed a war in Lebanon.
He knew, of
Speaker 16: course, that nobody in the government would ever approve such a thing, and so he just did it himself,
from his
Speaker 16: post as defense minister. And now almost 80,000 Israeli troops and thousands of tanks and armored vehicles were on the march into Lebanon. Sharon's
chief of staff
Speaker 72: led a portion of the Israeli force directly
Speaker 42: toward Syrian positions,
Speaker 42: drawing the Syrians' fire and giving them an excuse to launch a massive counterattack against the Syrians. Almost immediately, Sharon
Speaker 120: unilaterally overrode the commitment to a 40-kilometer incursion, ordered his forces to keep going.
Prime Minister
Speaker 120: Begin's military secretary
Speaker 75: said, I very quickly saw that the 40-kilometer plan was melting away, and the IDF was penetrating deeper into
Speaker 44: Lebanon.
Speaker 44: Sharon lied and misled Begin and the cabinet. Sharon's greatness was that he knew
Speaker 75: how to describe, in the most vivid way, why it was necessary to advance another few kilometers, because otherwise, tomorrow morning, the Syrian army would be sitting on some hill and endanger our troops.
That's how he
Speaker 75: managed to extract authorization from the cabinet for the creeping invasion.
By the end of June,
Speaker 135: the IDF had encircled Beirut.
Speaker 135: closed it off under siege and began shelling the city's western districts.
The Israeli
Speaker 16: government did not plan on taking and occupying Beirut, but Sharon and the Falange were secretly planning how to do it anyway. Israel's cabinet
Speaker 162: ministers heard only afterward about Sharon's orders to conquer, for
the
Speaker 16: first time in Israel's history, the capital of another sovereign state.
Speaker 16: Indeed, all throughout the war, Sharon never stopped assuring the cabinet, the Knesset, and the nation
Speaker 61: that there is no intention to enter Beirut, repeating this promise many times.
Speaker 97: But the command Sharon gave to the IDF was perfectly clear. We have to finish off the southern part of
Speaker 41: Beirut, where the refugee camps and PLO bases are located, he said at a meeting in his office, to destroy whatever can be
Speaker 12: destroyed, to raze it to the ground.
Speaker 12: The war in Lebanon turned into a disaster for Israel. The insurgency created a
Speaker 41: quagmire and led to an ugly occupation of the southern part of the country that lasted for 18 years. It turned
out that while
Speaker 41: Sharon's plan was to
Speaker 75: move in and let the Falange do a lot of the dirty work,
The
Speaker 75: Falange had similar ideas in
Speaker 42: the opposite direction, and they were content to let Israel conquer territory for them.
Images and
Speaker 73: stories began emerging that brought the whole world, even the United States, out against Israel.
Ronald
Speaker 91: Reagan, outraged, told Begin that you were causing a holocaust in Beirut.
Bergman
Speaker 41: again, quote,
The full
Speaker 41: extent of the deception that Sharon perpetrated against the government and the public of Israel emerged only gradually,
Speaker 16: but the steadily increasing Israeli casualty count, the indistinct and fluctuating goals, and the stories of destruction and suffering in
Speaker 51: Lebanon. Sharon's
chief of
Speaker 51: staff, Aitan, realized that
most of
Speaker 197: the IDF's moves in Lebanon were being made without the approval of the cabinet,
Speaker 41: so he deliberately absented himself from the meetings of that body, claiming that he was with the fighting forces. He left the job
Speaker 16: of compartmentalization and concealment to Sharon, who simply ignored all the opposition and pressed ahead. He doesn't stop on red was a song written about him by Israel's leading rock musician, Shalom Hanok.
It is unclear
Speaker 16: exactly how much Begin knew about Sharon's complicated plan.
In
Speaker 16: time, Sharon would
Speaker 51: sue a journalist who wrote that he had lied to Begin and concealed information from him. Sharon lost the case, end quote.
So with Israeli forces in
Speaker 80: control of half of Lebanon, the leader
of the
Speaker 80: Falange was installed as
Speaker 91: president of the country.
Speaker 91: Sharon expected him to hold up his end of the bargain And expel the Palestinians from the country But he knew that time was of the essence Because already there were talks about a UN peacekeeping force being deployed in Lebanon And once that happened,
no ethnic
Speaker 91: cleansing operation would be possible But
three weeks
Speaker 91: after taking office The Falange leader was killed by the Syrians In a bomb blast that demolished the Falange headquarters building The Falange wanted revenge for that
Speaker 91: and they looked to the Israelis to give him the green light. An Israeli commander present
Speaker 67: at the new Falange headquarters said that, on the morning of September 16th, quote,
All of a
Speaker 91: sudden, I saw the boys of Eli Hobeka, the Falange military chief, sharpening their knives, and they tell me, Today it is the turn of Silla al-Abiad, the white weapons, which is what the Lebanese call slaughtering with knives.
They
Speaker 91: didn't say against whom exactly,
but it
Speaker 91: was clear to me they were going to cut throats. I didn't inquire any deeper. I was just a guest of
Speaker 73: theirs.
When they were
Speaker 73: prepared, and with Sharon's blessing, the Falange force set out for two
Speaker 91: Palestinian refugee camps, known as Sabra and Shatila.
Robert
Speaker 198: Hatem, Hobeka's
Speaker 84: executioner.
Speaker 84: recalled that when the phalanges set out on their mission,
that Hobaca had
Speaker 65: told them, fuck everybody there. Erase the camp. He
said they
Speaker 41: took a D9 bulldozer to demolish the entire thing.
He said the camp was
Speaker 80: made up of shacks and tin shanties, and they went in and just started firing in all directions, and things were so unstable they just started coming down. He said we didn't check to see who was behind those walls.
Many of the
Speaker 80: phalanche partisans took a lot of drugs before going in to get hopped
up to
Speaker 80: get through the night. Journalist Robert Fisk, who lived in Lebanon
Speaker 54: for many years and reported on scene during this incident and throughout the war, writes, quote, There
was shooting
Speaker 91: in the camps. In the Commodore Hotel, I found Lauren Jenkins of the Washington Post, a bearded man with a huge
Speaker 41: head of black hair and an even fiercer temper at the Randalls.
He was
Speaker 41: a hard, tough man from Colorado, who believed all politicians were liars. He
was leaning across
Speaker 44: the reception desk, talking on the telephone. When
he put the
Speaker 44: phone down, he turned to me without a word of greeting. It
was 17
Speaker 51: September, and not seen him for weeks. Fisky, we got something going on in the camps. The Israelis had brought the fucking phalanges with them.
Speaker 51: I've just been down to Saib Salam's place, and this woman turned up and said she saw some fucker cut her husband's throat in Shatila. Want to come with me in the morning?
Well, Fist needed sleep, and so
Speaker 67: he went back to the hotel room for the night.
But he
Speaker 67: couldn't sleep.
There was
Speaker 87: commotion down in the two refugee camps all night.
He didn't know
Speaker 199: what was happening,
Speaker 80: but all night he saw Israeli jets flying over the area lighting off flares to provide light for whoever was doing it.
The next morning, he and
Speaker 61: Jenkins went down to the camps to see what had happened. It was the
flies
Speaker 16: that told us. There were millions of them, their hum almost as eloquent
Speaker 41: as a smell.
Big
Speaker 41: as blue bottles, they covered us, unaware at first of the difference between the living and the dead. If
we stood
Speaker 41: still, writing in our notebooks, they would settle like an army,
Speaker 16: legions of them, on the white surface of our notebooks, hands, arms, faces, always congregating around our eyes and mouths. Moving from body to body, from the many dead to the few living,
Speaker 16: from corpse to reporter, their small green bodies panting with excitement as they found new flesh upon which to settle and feast.
At first, we did not
Speaker 80: use the word massacre. They were everywhere, in the road, in laneways, in backyards, in broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage
Speaker 51: tips.
The murderers,
Speaker 51: the Christian militiamen whom Israel had led into
Speaker 41: the camps to flush out the terrorists,
had
Speaker 41: only just left.
When we
Speaker 41: had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting.
Down every
Speaker 41: alleyway, there were corpses. Women, young men, babies, grandparents,
Speaker 45: lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death.
Each corridor through
Speaker 44: the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at a Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to
leave.
Speaker 91: everywhere we found signs of hastily dug mass graves even while we were there
Speaker 42: amid the evidence of such savagery we could see the israelis watching us jenkins immediately realized that the israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror sharon he shouted that fucker sharon
what we found inside
Speaker 44: the palestinian shatila camp did not quite beggar description
but
Speaker 44: Although it would have been easier
Speaker 16: to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination.
There had
Speaker 16: been massacres before in Lebanon,
but
Speaker 44: rarely on this scale and never overseen by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In
the panic
Speaker 44: and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people,
Speaker 16: hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed.
This was a
Speaker 16: mass killing, an incident
Speaker 34: that,
How
Speaker 34: easily we used the word incident in Lebanon.
There was
Speaker 34: also an atrocity. It
went
Speaker 200: beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It
was a
Speaker 16: war crime.
There were women
Speaker 16: lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waist and their legs wide apart. Children with their
Speaker 67: throats cut. Rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall.
There were
Speaker 67: babies...
Speaker 91: blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded u.s army ration tins israeli army
Speaker 41: medical equipment and empty bottles of whiskey
down a
Speaker 41: laneway to our right no more than
Speaker 184: 50 yards from the entrance there lay a pile of corpses there were more than a dozen of them
Speaker 45: "'young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death.
"'All had been
Speaker 67: shot at point-blank range through the cheek, "'the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. "'Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats.
Speaker 156: "'One had been castrated, his trousers torn open, "'and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. "'The
eyes of
Speaker 41: these young men were all open.'
Speaker 41: the youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.
On the other
Speaker 41: side of the main road, up a
Speaker 135: track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and seven
children. The
Speaker 135: women were middle-aged and their corpses lay
Speaker 201: draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark, curly hair. Her
Speaker 67: eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face.
She
Speaker 67: was dead. Another
child
Speaker 201: lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud
Speaker 67: and dust. She could have been no more than three years
old. The back of her
Speaker 67: head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her
brain. One of
Speaker 67: the women also held a tiny baby to her body.
The bullet
Speaker 67: that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too.
Someone had slid
Speaker 67: open the woman's stomach. She was dead.
Speaker 67: Cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child.
Her
Speaker 123: eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror."
Speaker 113: Fisk's
account goes on
Speaker 113: for many pages like
Speaker 45: this.
When he
Speaker 45: returned from surveying the camps to the
Speaker 91: Israeli positions a short distance away, he found Falange militiamen there with the Israelis working together.
of course not
Speaker 91: every israeli was who was present was okay with what had happened and
some of
Speaker 3: them were soon speaking anonymously to the press saying that everyone knew what was happening in sabra and shatila
the labor party was in
Speaker 3: opposition at the time and tried to use
Speaker 16: the massacres against sharon but he warned them that if they tried then he was going to tell the world about the actions of
the
Speaker 16: During another massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon just a few years earlier, and
Speaker 34: so the Labor Party backed down.
But world opinion
Speaker 34: came down hard on Israel at this point.
And even
Speaker 34: within the country, politicians turned against the war, and
Speaker 201: public protests started to break out.
And Begin
Speaker 201: realized that Ariel Sharon had hoodwinked him.
He sank into a deep
Speaker 98: depression, and his health began failing rapidly.
Thank you.
And you
Speaker 126: know, I remember back in 2001, a
few
Speaker 45: months before 9-11, during the Second Intifada, when Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israel. I
was up in Montana at
Speaker 45: the
Speaker 91: time, and my grandpa was in his fundamentalist phase of his Christian journey.
Speaker 124: And he and all his friends, they loved Israel. They loved Ariel Sharon.
On one
Speaker 91: hand, it's easy enough to understand. You know, by then, Hamas was suicide bombing buses in Tel Aviv.
And as crazy
Speaker 91: as hostage taking
Speaker 73: and car bombs are, there's something foreign to an American about blowing yourself up to kill a bunch of civilians. But when
I think back on it now, neither
Speaker 73: my grandfather
nor any of
Speaker 64: his friends really had the first clue about the history of the conflict.
When they
Speaker 51: heard that the Palestinians
Speaker 45: called Ariel Sharon the butcher of Beirut, it just sounded to them like left-wing propaganda calling American soldiers baby killers in Vietnam. They
were very much
Speaker 135: your typical, normie, conservative American old guys. Most of them alive, some of them serving in World War II. And
they saw
Speaker 135: history as a battle between good and evil. Order.
Speaker 135: and chaos.
Sometimes the
Speaker 135: good guys get carried away. Sometimes they hit the wrong targets. Sometimes a few of them even cross over to the dark side, but those are aberrations. And when they happen, we hold people
Speaker 16: responsible. At
least we have
Speaker 16: enough shame to try to cover it up.
We don't celebrate
Speaker 80: in the streets when one of our units
Speaker 16: goes off the reservation and kills a bunch of villagers. And the Israelis, well, they're like
us.
and
Speaker 16: we've been attacked by terrorists too the Israelis wear uniforms bad soldiers
Speaker 42: can be court-martialed sure they might get carried away a little more often than our troops my grandpa and his friends would have said but considering what they're facing they've shown far more forbearance than anybody has a right to expect the other side's blowing up random people shooting up schools flying airplanes into buildings now
that's all
Speaker 42: true enough
Speaker 202: ...as far as it goes.
But what do you do with
Speaker 202: someone like Ariel Sharon?
The term war criminal
Speaker 202: gets tossed around a lot. But with Sharon, we are talking about the real deal. A war criminal even by his own country's laws.
His people were
Speaker 202: lighting off car bombs......in civilian areas of a foreign country......that had just been through an insane civil war......in order to reignite the conflict...
and
Speaker 202: hopefully see the whole Palestinian
Speaker 16: population ethnically cleansed. And he was doing it on his own, without the knowledge of his superiors in the Israeli government. And
when he
Speaker 16: got his war, he dragged his country further
Speaker 202: and further into it, by design and through deception, all while hiding it from his political leaders,
hiding from them what he
Speaker 202: was really
Speaker 120: up to. And
he conducted
Speaker 120: the war barbarically.
Speaker 120: Israeli soldiers were not shooting and cutting the
Speaker 91: throats of the people in Sabra and Shatila. But
they knew the deal
Speaker 91: when they sent a bunch of phalanges into that place. They
knew the
Speaker 91: deal when they were providing flares overhead all night to
Speaker 201: provide light for them. It
would be like
Speaker 91: sending ISIS into a refugee camp full of Jews and then saying, Well, we didn't know what was going to happen. It's not like
Speaker 42: we shot them.
Speaker 42: No, but your jets lit off flares all night to provide light for the killers during the massacre.
And not only is Ariel
Speaker 42: Sharon
Speaker 203: never punished, but
20 years
Speaker 203: later, he's elected prime minister. And
so if you're a
Speaker 204: Palestinian, you're thinking, these people are crazy. They're as crazy as
Speaker 167: our craziest terrorists. They drove us out of our homes in 1948. They terrorized us for fighting back.
They
Speaker 167: invaded even the lands we ran away to.
And we've been
Speaker 167: under military occupation for decades now. It looks permanent.
They elect
Speaker 167: terrorists. People who massacred villages and bombed civilian areas as their prime
Speaker 202: ministers. And now they've elected the butcher of Beirut to run their country. They're never going to stop.
And if you're an Israeli
Speaker 167: Likudnik, of course, you say...
Who
Speaker 167: but someone like Ariel Sharon should we elect when these animals are murdering
Speaker 64: families and blowing up school buses? And
around and
Speaker 64: around we go.
Well, I'm going to stop there
Speaker 64: for now.
Israel
Speaker 91: would get bogged down in Lebanon for years, but the conflict marked a transition to a new phase of the
Speaker 67: Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 83...
The
Speaker 67: year after the massacres at Sabran Shatila, Iran, now the revolutionary Islamic Republic,
would give
Speaker 67: Hezbollah its start in Lebanon, and Hezbollah has replaced the Palestinian groups probably as Israel's most fearsome
Speaker 91: enemy. In 2006, actually defeating an IDF ground invasion in their country. In
the late
Speaker 91: 80s, the first
Speaker 67: intifada, the first...
Speaker 67: Truly popular uprising of the Palestinians occurred,
Speaker 91: and it was put down with extreme force.
But out of that
Speaker 91: conflict was born Hamas, a Palestinian group in Gaza aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood
and that
Speaker 91: has gone
Speaker 16: to war at times with the PLO.
By the 1990s,
Speaker 16: Yasser Arafat was ready to talk peace and absurdly got a Nobel Prize for it.
but
Speaker 91: his health and influence were being degraded, and Hamas, as well as right-wing elements within
Speaker 45: Israel, made sure that the peace came to very little.
Under Benjamin
Speaker 45: Netanyahu's governments, Israel began launching full-scale air and land military operations against Palestinian areas to
Speaker 3: deter terrorist attacks.
In a
Speaker 3: 2014 attack on Gaza, Israeli planes and artillery killed thousands of Palestinians.
At least
Speaker 91: half of them, probably more like 70% of them civilians.
There are
Speaker 91: pictures and videos of Israeli civilians setting up
Speaker 3: picnics on the heights above Gaza City,
cheering as
Speaker 3: their jets launch missiles into civilian neighborhoods. And
there are videos of
Speaker 3: Palestinian street
Speaker 67: celebrations after another massacre of Jews in Israel.
The
Speaker 67: situation has fallen into a very dark place. And right now, it's perhaps
Speaker 91: at its darkest place it's been, maybe ever. A few
years back,
Speaker 91: in 2015 and 16, there was the brief knife intifada, where Palestinians, who have been pretty successfully disarmed by now, regular Palestinian civilians would just attack random Israelis with kitchen knives, and screwdrivers, and even shards of glass.
Speaker 91: Israeli civilians
Speaker 7: were all encouraged to carry guns to shoot these attackers on the streets.
Some of them
Speaker 7: were kids.
Speaker 63: I remember one story of a little girl who was on her way to school, and apparently on her way because she had her backpack with her school supplies
Speaker 3: in it.
But on the way,
Speaker 3: she took a screwdriver and stuck it into the side of an Israeli on the street, and she was gunned down by another Israeli. And
this happened
Speaker 3: hundreds of
Speaker 201: times.
So I don't have
Speaker 201: a lot of hope to leave you with I
don't really
Speaker 60: see a solution I don't really think That either the one state or two
Speaker 91: state solutions That have been talked about for decades Are remotely plausible anymore If they ever were At
this
Speaker 34: point I just worry for the souls of everybody involved
Thanks for
Speaker 34: listening.
This
Speaker 206: meets in your makeup,
Speaker 207: this flashes
Speaker 206: on your lips, as a nuclear warhead explodes
Speaker 208: in his hips.
The scientists are
Speaker 208: saying that I've got to do
Speaker 209: something to the moon, but
sit
Speaker 210: around and talk about it ain't gonna stop that hot moon. Where
Speaker 211: will we get?
When
Speaker 212: will it end?
Not till
Speaker 212: everything is dead.
The woman's in labor, she
Speaker 213: screams at the sky.
Somebody
Speaker 214: take a tan where I'm going Lay here and
die The doctor
Speaker 215: rushes in Puts a needle in her skin And
Speaker 216: says, oh, come on now, you really must cry Hey, you need
to
Speaker 217: go slowly And you won't be alone yet But everybody keeps on worship
Speaker 217: We'll
be right back.
So
Speaker 222: while you're
Speaker 223: talking in your
Speaker 222: Expressive clothes
I think
Speaker 222: somebody might
Speaker 216: just say something About the nose Where the boys are saying Tonight they'll
Speaker 224: be waiting For you right here
tonight I think somebody might just say something
Woo! Woo! Yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Where I'm going? Do something now! Oh! I'm sorry.
We'll see you next time.