The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (31 page)

Meanwhile, opening on August 26, the 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to be a symbolic graduation ceremony for the FRG. The last time the Olympics were held on German soil had been the 1936 Berlin games, which became a propaganda vehicle for the Hitler regime. Commentators were not shy to admit that the 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to signal a moving on, a testament to how well West Germany had gotten over its fascist past.

As an unrecognized portent of things to come, that June, the International Olympic Committee refused requests to allow a Palestinian team to participate in the games.
⁵

Early on September 5, midway through the games, an eight-man Black September commando entered the “Olympic Village” housing athletes from around the world. The commando made directly for the Israeli dorms, which they secured, in the process killing two sportsmen who tried to resist. They seized nine other Israeli athletes as hostages and issued their demands: the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs from Israeli prisons, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the FRG, and safe passage to Egypt for all concerned.
⁶

Black September named this its “Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im.”
⁷

Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, informed the West German authorities that Israel would not release any of the prisoners. At that point, the West Germans developed a plan to pretend to arrange for the safe passage of the commando and the hostages out of the FRG, while in fact preparing an ambush.

At 10:20
PM
, the guerillas and their captives were flown to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, halfway between Munich and Augsburg. A Lufthansa Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac, ostensibly to fly the group to Tunis. But the area was crawling with cops, and five snipers had been positioned with orders to take the “terrorists” out as soon as the signal was given.

Two members of the commando checked out the Boeing to make sure that all was as had been promised. They then started back to the helicopters where the hostages and the other commando members had
remained. At this point, the police sharpshooters opened fire: they missed, and there ensued intermittent volleys of bullets lasting over an hour. Finally, unable to subdue the Palestinians with gunfire, just after midnight police in armored vehicles moved in to try and storm the helicopters.

Seeing this, the commando executed the nine hostages.

By the time the cops were in control, five members of the Palestinian commando and a police officer also lay dead. The entire hostage-taking had lasted barely twenty hours.

It was later revealed that the Bavarian police had seriously bungled their ambush. A team that had been designated to overpower the commando inside the Boeing had voted (!) to desert their posts just twenty minutes before the helicopters landed at Fürstenfeldbruck—they considered the proposed ambush “suicidal.”
¹
This put all the pressure on the marksmen, and yet there were only five deployed, they were not equipped with the recommended rifles for such an operation, nor had they received infrared sights, bulletproof vests, or walkie talkies.
²
They were not even informed of each other’s positions, which led to one police sniper shooting another, whom he mistook for a member of the commando!
³

The authorities had obviously underestimated the Palestinian guerilla. “At the moment we fired there were not enough terrorists exposed,” explained Bruno Merck, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. “We had expected, nevertheless, that those who had not been shot would surrender in the shock of the gun battle. That didn’t happen… All we could do was hope for a mistake. But these people are not amateurs.”
⁴

The distinction between “amateurs” and “professionals” is an odd one. Two of the commando members were teenagers, and the others mostly in their early twenties; obviously, none had participated in other actions of this sort. Their determination most likely came from their own personal experiences. They had all grown up in refugee camps, their families forced to endure extreme poverty, hunger, and the constant threat of Israeli violence, while most of the world happily ignored their existence.
⁵
In the words of Abu Daoud, who claims to have organized the operation, “They were people who had left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then. They were people whose houses were now the homes of Polish, French and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to.”
⁶

The three survivors from the commando—Sammar ‘Adnan ‘abd al-Ghani al-Jishshi,
⁷
‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Dinnawi, and Samer Muhammad ‘Abdallah
⁸
—were taken into West German custody. Less than two months later, on October 29, a second Black September commando skyjacked a Lufthansa jet en route from Beirut to Ankara, threatening to blow up the plane if the three were not released. Still licking its wounds from the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco, the West German government agreed: the Munich survivors were granted safe passage to Libya.
⁹

Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im sent shockwaves around the world. To Israel and its supporters, Black September had massacred innocents, and the Germans had been criminally incompetent. In the words of one Israeli diplomat, “The human mind fails to grasp the barbaric depravity of the cruel murderers of the Israeli athletes.”
¹⁰

The response was not long in coming and took the form of collective punishment:

[On September 8] Israeli Skyhawk planes attacked villages and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria… killing a total of 59 people and wounding 40 others, all of whom were civilians. Among the victims were 19 children.
¹¹

Eight days later, a second exercise in collective punishment was carried out:

The Israeli army, supported by tanks, armored cars and jet aircraft, crossed into Lebanese territory, and for 36 hours attacked a
number of Lebanese villages within an area of some 250 square kilometers, killing people at random and destroying houses and blowing up bridges…

The refugee camp at Nabatiya was attacked from the air by napalm bombs, wounding eight of its inmates… By the time the Israelis withdrew, they left behind a trail of death and destruction. About 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed or wounded, and over 200 houses destroyed or damaged. In addition, 18 Lebanese soldiers died in defense of their homeland.
¹

The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning these massacres, and in doing so put Israel’s policy of carrying out reprisals against Palestinian civilians on a firm international footing for decades to come.
²

Not only did the Munich operation provoke attacks against Palestinian civilians, it also spelled the beginning of the end of Black September as an organization. On the one hand, Israeli secret services embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution, letter bombs and targeted assassinations, which would eventually claim dozens of lives.
³
At the same time, various Arab regimes which supported the PLO began to worry that the Palestinians’ struggle might endanger their relationship with the imperialist west. The final turning point for these regimes occurred just six months later when a Black September commando took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires
⁴
—one Belgian and two American diplomats were executed before the commando surrendered.
⁵
The pressure from conservative Arab states increased, and the PLO and Fatah withdrew their support for hijackings and hostage-takings, which caused Black
September operations to rapidly taper off.
⁶
Within a few years, the organization was no more.

As for the West German reaction to the events at the Munich Olympics, the whole mess was seen as a great embarrassment. One result was the decision to establish a crack special operations unit, the
Grenzschutzgruppe 9
(literally, “Border Protection Group 9” but shortened to GSG-9), announced within weeks of the Fürstenfeldbruck blunder. Led by Ulrich Wegener, Genscher’s liaison officer with the BGS, who had been present on the scene at the airfield, it would receive its initial training from Britain’s SAS and Israel’s
Sayeret Mat’kal
. As its name implies, the GSG-9 fell under the umbrella of the Border Police, not the armed forces, legally enabling it to attempt long-term “deep cover” infiltration of the radical scene. The GSG-9 would eventually win international recognition as one of the most fearsome “counterterrorism” units in the world, some of its operatives receiving additional training in NATO’s International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) School.
⁷

Of more immediate consequence was the crackdown against the FRG’s small Arab population.

Earlier that year, Black September had already carried out less dramatic attacks in West Germany. On February 6, the group had assassinated five Jordanians, believed to be intelligence officers who had been active in the civil war, near Cologne.
⁸
Then, on February 8, a bomb had gone off in a factory belonging to the Strüver Corporation near Hamburg. The factory produced electrical generators for Israeli aircraft.
⁹
On February 22, the Esso Oil pipeline near Hamburg had been similarly damaged.
¹⁰

Now, with the Munich attack passing under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, the state moved into action; raids were carried out, and the FRG’s 4,000 Arab students and 37,000 Arab “guest workers” came under intense scrutiny. In short order, approximately one hundred Palestinian activists were expelled, and two Fatah front groups—the
General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Workers—found themselves banned.
¹

At the same time, within the radical left, some saw the events of September 5 quite differently. To anti-imperialists and others who sympathized with Black September, the operation had been a legitimate one, even if it had ended in tragedy. Some would even argue that the operation had been a success, for although no prisoners had been freed and so many people had died, the world could no longer pretend it did not know about the plight of the Palestinians.
²
Furthermore, it was argued that blame for the Israeli athletes’ death lay squarely with the West German police, who had attempted a double-cross which simply blew up in their faces.

Sympathetic observers pointed out that the Palestinians had certainly not wanted to kill their hostages. They hoped rather to free their own comrades. This argument was more difficult to dismiss in 1972 than it would be today, as skyjackings and exchanging hostages for prisoners had not yet exhausted their utility for guerillas at that time, and often did meet with success (as the October 29 skyjacking would demonstrate).
³

Furthermore, although the athletes were noncombatants, they were nonetheless representatives of a colonial state, one which was for all intents and purposes waging war against the Palestinian people. Certainly, far bloodier actions had been carried out in anticolonial campaigns around the world. No less than Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian
guerilla leader, had argued in his famous
Minimanual
that “non-political” celebrities could constitute legitimate targets:

The kidnapping of personalities who are well-known artists, sports figures or who are outstanding in some other field, but who have evidenced no political interest, can be a useful form of propaganda for the guerrillas, provided it occurs under special circumstances, and is handled so the public understands and sympathizes with it.
⁴

Whether the operation was understood or enjoyed public sympathy depended very much on who one thought of as constituting the “public.” Certainly, in the Arab world, the action was widely understood, and met with a large measure of sympathy. When the bodies of the slain commando members were brought to Libya, for instance, over 30,000 mourners followed their funeral procession from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaidess Cemetery.
⁵

It is equally true that in the imperialist countries, most people neither understood nor sympathized with the aims of the Palestinians. The commando’s public testament, released shortly afterwards, met with simple incomprehension. Thus the outrage, not only at Black September, but also at anyone who dared to speak up in defense of the Palestinian guerilla action.

If it has been necessary to our study to consider these events in such detail, it is precisely because of this outrage.

Critics of the RAF have zeroed in on the
Black September
document, scandalized at this support for the Munich operation. The guerilla’s penchant for purposefully shocking formulations (i.e. “Israel burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews”) did not help matters. Likewise, a strong argument could be made that the RAF, like much of the revolutionary left, did a poor job at acknowledging and analyzing the specifically antisemitic dimensions of German fascism.

What is important to stress in the context of our study is that this is not why the RAF was criticized. Rather, the fact that the captured combatants dared to stand in solidarity with Black September has been
construed as “proof” that they were antisemites, not in the sense of having a weak analysis or oppressive blindspots, but in the sense of “hating Jews.” According to the state, various “terrorism experts,” and some right-wing and liberal pundits, it was in this sense that the RAF was accused of being an antisemitic organization.

Yet regardless of whether one finds it to have been correct or ill-conceived, justified or egregious, it is plainly evident that the Munich hostage taking had nothing to do with antisemitism. It was simply part of the struggle of the Palestinian people against colonial oppression. There may be plenty of moral and political arguments with which to object to the targeting of the Olympic athletes, but opposition to antisemitism is not one of them. Indeed, while anti-Jewish racism may well have led some bigots to applaud the action, anti-Arab racism seems to have led far more to automatically condemn it, and with it all those who would not turn their backs on the Palestinian people.