On the run

Shiva Naigaul

13laCk September Christopher Dobson (Robert Hale £4.00) We three soldiers, after we die, want to become three stars of Orion ... I believe some of

those we slaughtered have become stars in the

Sky. The revolution will go on and there will be Many more stars . . ." This was the sort of

Pseudo-mystical gibberish that came pouring

from the mouth of a young Japanese, Kozo Okamoto, in a flamboyant peroration delivered to the Israeli court about to pass sentence on bun. Earlier that year (on 30th May, 1972, he together with two colleagues — all members of that particularly virulent gang calling itself the

Japanese Red Army — had emptied their automatic rifles into the crowded arrival

lc-lunge of Lod Airport. The indiscriminate

!Pray of bullets killed twenty-four people Instantly and wounded seventy-eight. Most of the victims were Puerto Ricans on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. "Why," one of the dazed survivors is reported to have asked, "should JaPanese murder Puerto Ricans because Arabs hate Israelis?"

Okamoto, after his own fashion, attempted to unravel this bizarre chain of causation for the benefit of his Israeli judges. "The Arab world," be said, "lacks spiritual fervour, so we felt that through this attempt we could stir up the Arab World." He went on: "I would like to warn the entire world that we will slay anyone who stands on the side of bourgeosie." Thus terrorism makes martyrs of us all; when terror becomes an end in itself all 'causes' are exchangeable. Okamoto spoke the kind of lines generally reserved for the villain in Hollywood 8 movies. He slipped effortlessly into the role tYPified by the 'brilliant' but 'mad' scientist Who, armed with his secret and deadly formula, threatens destruction on everyone and every thing in the name of 'peace', 'justice', brotherhood — or whatever other mantric terms he chooses to fish out from the Inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary ideals. Yet, despite all his bombast, Okamoto was not

above carrying a little paper doll in his pocket

to act as a goodluck charm; and, though he claimed to yearn for the stellar resurrection, he refused, when given the chance by his captors, tO take his own life. Instead, Okamoto wept. The great revolutionary, the self-appointed slaughterer of the bourgeoisie, chose to end his career with a whimper rather than a bang.

However, Okamoto's peroration was not ere bluster: there were to be many more stars' lighting up the firmament; and if, as he ,rlaimed, one of the purposes of the Red Army's

fraternal exercise at Lod was to instil suitable spiritual fervour into their dilatory Arab comrades, then the operation must be counted 4 Magnificent success. The indigenous Black SePtember organisation — which had already ade a modest debut with the murder of the sl,ordanian Prime Minister towards the end of 197f -followed up the example they had been ,set at Lod with the massacre at the Munich IYMnics (fifteen killed including five of the req. orists), the massacre at the Rome Airport ‘„thIrtY-one killed), the massacre at the Saudi 'Arabian Embassy in Khartoum (three killed

including the American Ambassador) and the massacre at Athens Airport (three killed, fifty-five wounded). And, of course, there were the usual Israeli reprisals culminating in the shooting down of a Libyan civil airliner which had lost its way in a sandstorm and blundered into the air space of occupied Sinai — an act of counter-terror which cost one hundred and six lives. The practice of terror eats up causes no less surely than the female praying mantis eats her mate during the course of their coupling. Starting from the head, she works her way downward. "Death," a Palestinian once said, "is the door to a happy future for our people." Such statements signify the death of the mind. The ruination of the Palestinian people began long before the emergence of Black September. That shadowy , organisation was merely its most vicious expression, born out of the hatred and despair engendered by King Hussein's 'crackdown' on the refugee camps during septernber 1970. The roots of the conflict were embedded in the uneasy relationship which has always existed between the refugees and their host countries; a relationship characterised chiefly by cynicism. The immediate pretext for the blitz was a series of hijackings which ended with three airliners, filled with four hundred and twenty five hostages, being landed at an airfield in the Jordanian desert. Hussein, keen to show that he was still master in his own house, let loose his Bedouin soldiery.

The Israelis and the Americans looked on approvingly, prepared to lend a helping hand if the gallant little king showed signs of being unequal to the task he had set himself. But Hussein needed no assistance for his fratricidal mop-up. Christopher Dobson, reporting these stirring events for the Sunday Telegraph, was marooned on the Israeli side of the border. Unable to get to the fighting, he decided to grab a bite. There follows one of the most lyrical pieces of journalism I have read for a long time.

I sat outside a cafe owned by the local kibbutz eating steak and chips and listening to the cannon-fire rolling round the hills. Israeli jets, shining silver in a burnished blue sky, flashed over the quiet green waters [he was dining near the Sea of Galilee] and the kibbutzniks harvested their cotton and plowed (sic) the fields for next year's crops." While the kibbutzniks worked their disputed soil in pastoral tranquility some four thousand fedayeen were being slaughtered by Hussein's desert warriors. Th-d nihilism born then was to find its expression in Munich, Rome, Athens and Khartoum.

Frustration, despair, hatred — it is Mr Dobson's considered opinion that none of these all too human responses to the threat of national extinction can sufficiently account for the phenomenon of Black September. He is equally bewildered by the spectacle of Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, etc., not only applauding mindless acts of murder but actually providing shelter and support for those who commit such acts. The answer, he suggests, lies in what he calls a "fatal flaw" in the Arab character. That fatal flaw is the average Arab's inborn predilection to violence. To prove his point, Mr Dobson describes gory episodes in the careers of Saladin and Haroun al Rashid. Then he pauses briefly to deal with an objection that might be raised against his devastatingly simple hypothesis. Surely — he imagines some naive reader wondering — one can find similar examples of blood-lust in the history of all peoples? What about (and these are Mr Dobson's own examples culled from recent 'European' history) Hitler's concentration camps? Stalin's purges? Lieutenant Calley's adventures at My Lai? "These," he tells us, "were aberrations inherent in the systems imposed on the people but not in the people themselves." Ego te absolvo . . .

Clearly, the problem in the Middle East is not political: it is genetic. Still, I gather from the foreword to this brusquely efficient but ultimately unenlightening piece of journalism that some of the author's best friends are — or used to be — Arabs.