Israel, A Nation of Warriors

By Moshe D. Katz

I was just a child when I was introduced to international terrorism.

It was 1970. My aunt, uncle and infant cousin Tali came to visit us in Israel. As they boarded their TWA flight back to New York none of us could imagine the ordeal that was about to unfold. Just a few hours later we heard the news; the plane had been hijacked by Arab terrorists and taken to Jordan, fate unknown. My father was in the barbershop having a haircut when the news was broadcast on radio Israel. The shock jolted him out of his seat causing him to cut his ear on the barber’s scissors.

Our mindset is to fight terror

That day the terrorists attempted to hijack four planes, part of their struggle against the state of Israel. This was the beginning, the birth, of international terrorism, the curse that would come to plague Western society in years to come. The Western world had no training in this kind of warfare, no understanding of the terrorist mindset. The Israelis, however, were already veterans of this war.

Three attempts succeeded, only one failed; the attempted hijacking of El Al Israel Airlines. Four terrorists boarded the El Al flight; two of them aroused the suspicions of the security staff and were refused entry. They then boarded Pan Am airline without any difficulty and hijacked it. The two remaining terrorists managed to board the El Al flight; the legendary female terrorist Laila Chaled and Patrick Argüello. The operation had been planned for a team of four and Arguello hesitated. Laila Chaled assured him that she had done this before and all would go smoothly. It did not.

The terrorists stood up and pulled out handguns and hand grenades and announced that the flight was being taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. What they had not counted on was resistance and Israeli stubbornness. The general international policy in those days was to cooperate with the hijackers and enter into negotiations, not to resist and endanger the passengers. The crew and passengers of El Al Israel Airline thought differently.

The pilot was no ordinary civilian. Uri Bar Lev was a former captain in the Israeli air force, he was a fighter and no terrorist was going to hijack his plane. Laila Chaled stood outside the cockpit with a pistol held to a stewardess’s head and a hand grenade in her other hand. She demanded that the pilot open the door at once. Captain Bar Lev refused to open the cockpit door; he would not be the first to blink. Instead, the former combat pilot sent the aircraft into a nose-dive, causing the same effect as an elevator collapsing. The sudden move knocked the hijackers down. Passengers attacked the terrorists. Later one of the Israelis said, “I made a decision that they were not going to hijack this plane. I decided to attack him rather than wait and see what happens. So I jumped him. I got shot in the shoulder.” The terrorist Argüello was hit over the head with a bottle of whiskey and then killed by his own gun in the struggle. Laila Chaled was tied up with neckties and belts provided by passengers. The pilot echoed the same fighting spirit, “I didn’t succeed because I was a better pilot. It was only because of my attitude that we were not going to be hijacked. Our mindset is to fight terror.”