Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [113]
By that time, the PLO leadership had itself decided to turn off Black September, because its depredations were becoming counter-productive. Abu Iyad and a trusted colleague devised a novel solution that did not involve killing them. They travelled to PLO offices in Middle Eastern countries with large Palestinian populations. They identified about one hundred of the most attractive girls they could find, urging them to go to Beirut on a mission of great national importance. There they were introduced to members of Black September. The latter were told that if they agreed to marry these women, they would receive US$3,000, a fridge, a gas stove and a television, as well as a regular job in a nonviolent PLO-affiliated organisation. If they had a child within a year, they would receive a further US$5,000. Many of these men did marry, settled down and started families. To test their resolve, the PLO handed them legitimate passports and asked them to go to Geneva or Paris on PLO business. They mostly refused, not wishing to jeopardise their settled existence. Modified versions of this decontamination strategy have been tried from Northern Ireland to Saudi Arabia, but it seems to have been the PLO that pioneered it.11
Although it is invariably overlooked, the PLO were also victims of another campaign of assassinations running parallel with the activities of Mossad. Several PLO breakaway factions advertised themselves as ‘rejectionists’, opposed to Arafat’s ceasefire with king Hussein and, from his 1974 UN address onwards, to his readiness to negotiate a political settlement with the Israelis. From 1974 onwards there were clandestine contacts between the Israelis and Palestinian moderates, which were informally institutionalised through the Israel-Palestine Friendship League. The Austrian socialist chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the former French premier Pierre Mendés-France were important facilitators of these dialogues.12 Although Fatah continued to hit Israel through guerrilla activities, it scaled back its involvement in international terrorism. The rejectionists included George Habash’s PFLP, Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-General Command and, last but not least, Abu Nidal, whom the Iraqis cultivated as their Palestinian client at a time when the PLO in Lebanon seemed to be slipping under the suasion of their Syrian rival for dominance within the pan-Arab national socialist Baath movement. Abu Nidal was the first terrorist to turn murder into an international business, although he has had many rivals since. He was not the first, nor the last, terrorist to enjoy violence for its own sake, an Arab Nechaev for our times.
Born in 1937 in Jaffa, Sabri Khalil al-Banna, or Abu Nidal, was one of the many sons, by a maid turned wife, of a wealthy citrus-grower, for whom the exchange of luxurious homes with servants for refugee tents may have been too much to bear. After periods as an odd-job man in Saudi Arabia, Nidal returned to Nablus in the West Bank working as an electrician, and then moved to the Jordanian capital where he founded a trading company named Impex that provided a cover for his increasingly murky political activities. Abu Iyad sent him to run the PLO office in Iraq, about two months before king Hussein obliterated the PLO in Jordan. In Iraq, Abu Nidal vented his fury at the direction in which Arafat was taking the Palestinian movement. His first independent operation, code-named ‘The Punishment’, was to take hostage eleven Saudi diplomats in the Paris embassy so as to secure the release of Abu Daoud from the Jordanians, and to distract attention from the Non-Aligned Conference which, to the annoyance of Iraq’s leaders, Algeria was hosting. This maverick operation, which did secure the release of Abu Daoud after Kuwait paid Jordan US$12,000,000, was condemned by Abu Iyad, who sent the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to Baghdad to reason with Abu Nidal. He failed and stormed out of the meeting. Abu Nidal was expelled from Fatah in March 1974.
In late 1974 Nidal announced the formation of ‘Fatah: