• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 869 0

time. In the Arab world, the new policy was called “neither peace nor war.” Its aim was to wear down the Israelis. If the big armies were no longer in a position to lead conventional warfare, the alternative was small terrorist operations, which meant the Palestinians. Originally, such raids by Palestinians had been an Egyptian idea, sponsored by Nasser in the 1950s. The attacks were inexpensive and popular with the Arab public. Syria started sponsoring them in the mid-1960s. Now hundreds of guerrilla fighters were being trained in Jordan and Syria. This would greatly strengthen the hand of Palestinian leaders and facilitate the evolution of the “Arabs of occupied Jordan” into “the Palestinian people.” The Arab nations, especially Syria, were scrambling to assert control over these guerrilla organizations. But by the summer of 1968 Al Fatah had established itself as a separate power in Jordan beyond King Hussein’s control. The group had come a long way from its first operation—a disastrous attempt to blow up a water pump—only four years earlier.

Before the 1967 war, the Israelis refused to describe any of their actions as either a “reprisal” or a “retaliation.” Government censors would even cut these two words from correspondents’ dispatches. But by 1968 both of these terms were in common usage as Israelis struck beyond Jordan’s and Lebanon’s borders to reach the Palestinian guerrillas.

By summer, with the Israeli government having given the concept of land for peace a year’s effort, Israelis, if not their government, were giving up and settling in to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, into a larger and different Israel from the one they had dreamed of. Amnon Rubenstein of the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz wrote, “The Israelis, on the other hand, will have to learn the art of living in an indefinite state of non-peace.”

In the tropical, oil-rich delta of the Niger River, it was not nonpeace but open warfare that people were living with indefinitely. An estimated fifty thousand people had already died in combat. In May, when Nigerian troops took and destroyed the once prosperous city of Port Harcourt and put up a naval blockade and encircled Biafra with eighty-five thousand soldiers, the rebel Biafrans lost all connection to the outside world. It was reported that the Nigerian force had massacred several hundred wounded Biafran soldiers in two hospitals. The small breakaway state that did not want to be part of Nigeria was fighting on with an army of twenty-five thousand against the one-hundred-thousand-soldier Nigerian army. It had no heavy weaponry, a shortage of ammunition, and not even enough hand weapons to arm each soldier. The Nigerian air force with Soviet planes and Egyptian pilots bombed and strafed towns and villages, leaving them littered with corpses and writhing wounded. The Biafrans said that the Nigerians, whom they usually referred to by the name of the dominant tribe, the Hausa, intended to carry out genocide and that they specifically targeted schools, hospitals, and churches in their air attacks. But what finally started to get the world’s attention after a year of fighting was the shortage not of weapons but of food.

Biafran soldier in 1968

(Photo by Don McCullin/Magnum Photos)

Pictures of skeletal children staring with sad, unnaturally large eyes—children who looked unlikely to live through the week—began showing up in newspapers and magazines all over the world. The pictures ran in news articles and in advertisements that were desperate pleas for help. But most attempts at help were not getting through. The Biafrans maintained a secret and dangerous airstrip—a narrow, cleared path lit with kerosene lamps to receive the few relief planes. Those who attempted to find this strip had to first fly through a zone of radar-guided Nigerian antiaircraft fire.

The West learned a new word, “kwashiorkor,” the fatal lack of protein from which thousands of children were dying. Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Umuahia had treated 18 cases of kwashiorkor in all of 1963, but, visited by reporters in August 1968, the same