THE SPECTATOR
DO NOT PAY DANEGELD
There must be a great temptation for President Reagan to concede to the Beirut hijackers' demands. He knows that Israel was anyway preparing to release its Shi'ite Muslim prisoners, now that its withdrawal from South Lebanon is complete. He has only to say the word to the Israeli govern- ment and it will be done. He has in Mr Nabih Berri a powerful and smooth-talking intermediary, who might well be able to deliver on his promise of then releasing the American hostages — although it is by no means clear that all are in his charge. And he may reckon that patriotic relief at seeing `our people come home' will outweigh any doubts the American public might have about their government so flagrantly re- neging on the commitment it has so public- ly made: never to concede an inch to terrorism. As we write, President Reagan has given no sign in public of succumbing to this temptation. We sincerely hope that, as you read, he will not be doing so in private. For the logic of iron resistance to terrorism — the lung cancer of contempor- ary political life — is simple:
That if once you have paid him the Danegeld You never get rid of the Dane.
Apart from Lebanon, the country which so far comes worse out of this incident is the one in which it started: Greece. The International Air Transport Association's figures show clearly that improved airport security has significantly reduced the num- ber of hijacking incidents since the mid- Seventies. But Athens has long been noto- rious for the laxness of its controls, which, indeed allowed the vanguard of the present team of hijackers to get aboard. Yet the Greek Foreign Minister absurdly maintains that security at Greek airports is equal to that in other European cities. In other areas, Greece's Ruritanian pride is merely a source of quiet amusement. But not where so many lives are at stake. And this is not all. The Greek government has the cheek to sing its own praises for returning the hijackers' accomplice, arrested in Athens, in order to secure the release of the three people with Greek connections aboard the hijacked plane — one of whom, the singer Demis Roussos, had the further cheek to describe the hijackers — as 'very nice'. All Greece's European partners should make clear their dismay, and insist that it now takes serious steps to improve its airport security. Yet if Greece is to be blamed for exchanging one for three, what are we to say to Israel, which so recently exchanged 1,150 for three: 1,150 Palesti- nian prisoners for three Israeli prisoners of war. No less an authority than the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Yitzhak Navon, has said that this was a grave mistake which 'may well have encouraged the present hijack'. It is hard to disagree. We can only hope that, after this lesson, the Israelis will return to their previous exemplary toughness in the face of hijack- ing and terrorism. As for their Shi'ite Muslim prisoners of war, whose release the hijackers demand, we are bound to observe that — as with so much else in the Lebanese wars — there is wrong on both sides. The Israelis were (not least, in international law) wrong to take these prisoners back to Israel, and they should have released them already. But they would be even more wrong to release them now: as a direct concession to blackmail. Hard as it is, the best thing that the United States and Israel can do for the world is to stand firm. The eastern Mediterranean is already sufficiently anarchic.
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