An old Palestinian terror group’s back with a vengeance

The older I get, the more my childhood memories fade, but I still vividly remember the morning of Sunday, July 4, 1976.

I was eight years old at the time, spending Shabbat with my grandparents at their house in London. Early on that Sunday, I woke to the sound of my grandpa, the eminent Sephardic Rabbi Dr. Solomon Gaon, whooping and yelling and generally making a racket in the kitchen — behavior that was most definitely out of character. Thinking something was wrong, I bolted downstairs to discover my elated grandfather listening to the BBC radio news. Locked in his embrace, and in between his joyous shouts of, “They are free! The hostages are free!” I could make out certain words uttered by the announcer — “Israeli forces,” “rescue operation,” “hijacking,” and so on.

The news that made my grandfather’s heart burst with pride was, as those who recognize the date will have figured out, the rescue operation mounted by Israel to free around 100 hostages from an Air France plane that had been hijacked seven days earlier by Palestinian terrorists and diverted to Uganda, then under the boot of the brutal dictator Idi Amin. After a week of sheer hell, during which the German leftist hijackers separated the Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers with the uncompromising determination of concentration camp guards, Israel launched a daring and successful raid to bring them home. Among those killed in the gun battle was the operation’s commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of the current Israeli Prime Minister. President Ronald Reagan later described the operation as a gift from Israel to mark the United States bicentennial, which fell the same day.

I relate that anecdote because that morning was the first time that I encountered the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by the late Dr. George Habash, which planned and executed the Air France hijacking in conjunction with a group of left-wing German terrorists.