No contour flying, not with the Prime Minister on board. Up to three thousand feet where the sharp winds that gathered on the hills behind Tiberias buffeted and pitched at the helicopter, causing him to steady himself in his canvas seat and feel for the safety harness that he wore. Not a time for thinking, for weighing alternatives. Dead time, lost time, that would duly add up till inevitably the pressure on the decision-makers would increase. Not the way it should be, but the way it always was: the penalty of living in a country perpetually in a state of war.
Flying south of the hills and towns and villages where the Palestinians liked to work, the settlements close to the Lebanese border fence. The targets the Palestinians sought out Hard, fanatical killing teams who came to Israel to test their muscle against the might of a modern and sophisticated society, and who were broken on the anvil of gunfire and grenade explosions, and who kept coming. This was the ground they came to, bright in the harsh sunlight below him, to the little communities that nestled close to the cultivated fields and the orange groves that were burned and dry in the heat. Men who came in their groups of four, having let their blood run together in the symbolic farewells in the Fatahland of South Lebanon, and who died horribly and brutally at the hands of Squad 101, the elite of the Israeli army, the counter-terrorism storm squad. 'Terrorists' they called them in his country – could find no other title for them, shunning the acceptance of such words as 'guerrilla' and 'commando' because that would bestow a certain fractional legality on their actions. He was musing to himself, not thinking with the speed and clarity he was capable of, just wafting the ideas in his head as the helicopter powered its bumping way towards Jerusalem. And what was it Gadhafi had said? Moammar Gadhafi, President of Libya, paymaster of the assassins, organizer of their plans, harbourer of their escapes. Gadhafi said there were terrorist? and freedom fighters, that if the cause is right then so too the action is justified. Any action against the State of Israel is justified, any attack could be supported if it bore the name of Palestine, that was the message of the Libyan. And the response of the Prime Minister's government had been fierce and consistent; that the international community should succour no sympathy for the gangs and cells of armed men, that there should be no condoning of the terrorist, that he should be fought and brought to justice. There must be no weakening. –
The helicopter yawed its way down the scale of the altimeter, dropping sharply and without ceremony into the city, the sun's flat beams splintering light on to the silver dome of Al Aqsa.
Was a Jew with a gun held to a pilot's head a different flower, to be 'watered and ' husbanded from the Palestinian weed that they chopped and hoed when he took his grenades and explosives to the cockpit of the El Al plane? Did the Jew fight for freedom or for terror? Principle or self-interest? There was ano precedent from which to take comfort. The decision of Entebbe had been easy by comparison, the decision to loose the killer squads in Europe to seek out their Palestinian ccounterparts had been simple. But this was fraught with dangers. Principle and expediency, principle and emotion; all cavorting inside him as the machine lurched the final feet to the ground.
He hurried to the grey-green Pontiac with its curtained rear windows and chassis that strained low under the weight of the armour-plated body. Men around him with unshielded Uzis, and walky-talky radios, and police who saluted him and who wore pistols at their belts in holsters of which the top restraining flap was unfastened. And why were they all there? One reason, one reason only: because of the threat of the small groups, the men who stood apart from the shouting, chanting abusive crowds of protest. Four hundred yards from the helicopter pad to his offices, and a lift to the third floor. More men in slacks and light summer shirts that they wore outside the waist of their trousers that their hand-guns should be concealed and not frighten the stream of foreign visitors who came to pay their respects and tell him how his government should conduct its affairs.
The Security Committee was waiting for him, gathered round the table by the window, opposite his wide- topped desk. Piled in front of the chair that he would use were the papers that would tell him the story of the hi- jacking so far, what was known of the participants, the statements of the Russians, and the decisions that had been made by the West European governments in whose territory the plane might attempt a landing. Sombre reading, no light in the darkness, no crack through which optimism might wear a path.
He shuffled the papers together, waved his colleagues into chairs, understood the pain in their faces and knew they had read all that he had seen. Fools, he thought, three idiots wallowing in their own stupidity.
'One decision at least can be made,' the Prime Minister said. 'We cannot condemn and we cannot condone. The world will be watching for our reaction, our friends and our enemies. We cannot support these three, not publicly, and at the same time we cannot be seen to be abandoning them. Our movement must be through the passive channels, through suggestion.'
'But that does not confront the issue.' It was the senior civil servant of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, still in his thirties with the aggression of youth and the high brow of intellect. The Russians are asking for the return of these people once they have landed; they are telling the Europeans that these three are criminals and must be sent back to stand trial for murder. They are accused of shooting a policeman in Kiev, and we hear now that the pilot of the aircraft has been killed. The penalty for those offences in the Soviet Union is death. There are many in our country who would believe in such a sentence if the roles were reversed. For any Western government to permit the plane to land and refuel and facilitate its onward flight is unthinkable. That is why the Germans refused to become involved. The country to which the plane comes must disarm these three and then will have to consider its options, will have to decide whether to send them back, to their executions. Whether we do it privately or publicly this is the issue on which we must clear our position,'
'You have pre-empted me,' said the Prime Minister. 'I too see the problem. You are not alone in identifying the difficulty. All of us can see it.'
'We have spoken much in the past of the need for solidarity to fight the aerial warfare of the Arab groups…'
'You say the obvious,' intercepted the Prime Minister wearily, his ears still ringing with the hammer of the rotor blades. 'We know that, we know what we have said. So what do you ask me to do? Do you ask me to tell the British, or the Dutch, or the Danes, or the French… do you ask me to tell them to disarm these people and put them on a flight to Moscow?'
The silence was broken by the scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor. All except the Prime Minister began pacing, searching for a clear way forward, while the smoke rose up in grey-blue columns, and coffee was poured… The evening of the Middle East comes fast, running across the sandstone houses and the cement towers and the grey roads, but it was many minutes after the shadows had infiltrated the room before the lights were switched on; that seemed to change the mood and break the stillness in which those present had cocooned themselves, and emphasized the passing of time. The Prime Minister rapped the desk top with his pen.
'When the plane lands we must offer our services to the government concerned. We must make an offer to help in all ways possible to ensure that there is no further bloodshed, no siege.
Perhaps we could send one of our people to talk to these three youngsters, to persuade them to surrender. We would demand one thing in return, and require a solemn promise on this, that the three should be tried in whatever country they land for whatever offences they have committed.
In anything with political involvement the death sentence isn't inflicted in Western Europe. We would accept a period of imprisonment…'
'And in Western Europe who has the greatest sway?' The scepticism of the Minister of Defence. 'Is it us, or is it the Soviet Union? What if our appeal is rejected?'
'What is your solution, then?' said the Prime Minister, angry that his reasoning so carefully arrived at should face challenge so soon.
' I have no 'solution', as you call it. Perhaps there is none. But we must be clear in our minds what we are looking for. When the French took Abu Daoud then we called for his extradition.
We made noises and we flexed what muscle we possessed. It is irrelevant that it was not sufficient. On the same basis the Soviets will want the return of these children, but that Is something that we cannot permit, that is unthinkable. There would be the deepest shame on ourselves and our people if we failed to use every artifice available to us to prevent the young ones being sent back to execution. I accept, of course, that we cannot associate our government with their actions, but at the same time I say that we cannot disassociate ourselves to the extent of permitting them to go to their deaths in a Soviet prison…'
'What would you have me do? Fly in the paratroopers again, recreate Entebbe? Lift them from whatever airfield they land?'
' I say that we cannot hold our heads high as the representatives of the people of the Jewish State if we tolerate the sending back -'
'What do you seek to tell me?'
'For years now we have fought and struggled to rid our people in Russia of persecution. We cannot allow-
