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By Root 761 0

in 1947, a better deal than they would ever achieve in the ensuing decades, they also repeated in Lebanon the behaviour that had led them to being thrown out of Jordan. Donations from Arab states, above all Saudi Arabia, and the tithe levied on expatriate Palestinians working in Europe, the Middle East and the US were used to construct a parallel polity, with courts, hospitals, schools and training camps for the Palestinian refugee community. The PLO opened some thirty-five industrial concerns, manufacturing a variety of consumer goods, in and around Beirut, with Arafat as chief executive officer of this PLO Inc. In addition to these legitimate activities, PLO militants carried out bank robberies and kidnappings, making their own contribution to the destabilisation of one of the few parliamentary democracies ever to have existed in the Middle East.

II MUNICH

Revenge for those blamed for Black September came fast, as Arabs practised the old way of an eye for an eye. At lunchtime on 28 November 1971, the Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal went up the steps of the Sheraton hotel in Cairo to meet his wife after a morning of Arab League negotiations. As he crossed the crowded lobby looking for her, a young man, later identified as Essat Rabah, fired five shots into him, scattering his bodyguards. Tal’s dying words were ‘They’ve killed me. Murderers, they believe only in fire and destruction.’ Another assassin, Manzur Khalifa, knelt down to lap up blood from the pool spreading beneath Tal’s body. His lower face smeared red, Khalifa shouted: ‘I am proud! Finally I have done it. We have taken our revenge on a traitor.’ Stumbling towards the commotion, Tal’s wife screamed: ‘Palestine is finished!’ As the assassins were captured and driven away by Egyptian security officials, they shouted triumphantly: ‘We are Black September!’ Two weeks later an Algerian gunman loitering on a quiet Kensington street emptied a submachine gun into the car carrying Zeid al-Rifai, the Jordanian ambassador to London and a key adviser to king Hussein. The ambassador was wounded in the hand. Egypt quietly released on the PLO’s recognisance the four men sent for trial for murdering Tal. They vanished. Similarly, although the French authorities captured Frazeh Khelfa, the man who had shot at the Jordanian ambassador in London, they quickly put him on a plane to Algeria where he was allegedly wanted for earlier offences. Meanwhile, Black September struck at various targets in Europe. Five Jordanians said to have collaborated with Israel were murdered in a St Valentine’s Day-style massacre in a basement in Brühl in Germany. Gulf Oil storage tanks were blown up in Holland, while an Esso pipeline was attacked near Hamburg.

Black September was the terrorist organisation which Arafat founded in Damascus in August and September 1971, initially to wage a terrorist war against the Jordanian monarchy. He admitted as much when, referring to Tal’s murder on PLO Radio, he described the assassins as ‘four of our revolutionaries’. The point of Black September was that it was deniable. In the words of one of its commanders: ‘[Black September] was separate from Fatah so that Fatah and the PLO would not have to carry opprobrium for our operations. The group, as individuals and as a leadership, was responsible for its own successes and failures without compromising the legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people [the PLO].’4

It had a collective leadership, with the officers able to draw upon Fatah and the PFLP’s existing pool of men for each operation. The leaders included the former school teacher Salah Khalef (or Abu Iyad), Abu Youssef (Mohammed Youssef al-Najjar), Ghazi el-Husseini (a relative of the mufti), Fakhri al-Umari, Abu Daoud and Abu Hassan (Ali Hassan Salameh), all senior Fatah figures working under this new flag of convenience. Abu Iyad was head of Fatah’s secretive Reconnaissance Department, Jihaz el-Razd, into which he had recruited the young Ali Hassan Salameh, the son of the renowned Hassan Salameh, with a brief to uncover and kill Israeli double-agents.