Israel's Night of Carnage

To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast should I adore? What holy image attack? What hearts break? What lies uphold? In what blood tread?

Rather steer clear of the law. The hard life, simple brutishness, to lift with withered fist the coffin's lid, to sit, to suffocate. And thus no old age, no dangers.

--A Season in Hell, Rimbaud

THE unassuming young Japanese carrying Rimbaud's memoirs in his pocket--as police discovered later--was elaborately polite as he debarked with two companions from Air France Flight No. 132 at Tel Aviv's Lod International Airport last week. "Where are you from?" an elderly woman asked. "I am from Japan, madam," was the reply, "and I am very excited about my trip to the Holy Land." The woman answered: "I hope you have a pleasant stay." Minutes later, both were dead, along with 24 others, and 78 persons were wounded in one of the most callous and grotesque terrorist attacks in the Middle East's tortured history.

Once past the police booths, the three Japanese had headed for the luggage conveyor belt, and removed their jackets. Their baggage was among the first to arrive, because they had been the last to board the flight at Rome. In seconds, they opened a suitcase and pulled out Czech-made VZ 58 lightweight submachine guns from which the butts had been removed and half a dozen grenades of a new type whose shrapnel bursts with devastating effect after the initial explosion. Standing spread-legged and back-to-back, they coldly began firing from the hip into the crowd of deplaning passengers and bystanders, sweeping the hall from side to side. When they had emptied their first magazines, they lobbed the grenades at groups of tourists and airport attendants, then reversed the magazines in their guns and began firing again.

Travelers were blown apart by the exploding grenades. At least six people were decapitated; other bodies were later found without limbs. A child of seven or eight was cut through in two places. Near by a corpse fell onto the luggage rack, which was still running, and traveled macabrely around its oval course with the bags, dripping blood along the way.

More than half of the dead were Puerto Ricans arriving for a long-planned tour of the Holy Land. Another victim was renowned Israeli Biophysicist Professor Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky, 58, who was returning from a symposium at M.I.T. Also among the dead: two of the three Japanese. One had apparently been shot by a companion who accidentally swung his gun too far. The second had dashed out, and either tossed his grenade at a parked jetliner, and was killed when it exploded on the rebound, or held the grenade in his hand and committed suicide; he was decapitated. The third Japanese was captured by an El Al employee as he dropped his gun and tried to flee the airport. In jail he pleaded: "Execute me as soon as possible, or let me kill myself."

Israelis had to search back to the pre-independence battles of 1948 for a parallel to so awful a civilian massacre. But totally unparalleled and unexpected was the fact that the three attackers were from Japan, a nation with which Israel has no quarrel whatsoever. The surviving terrorist insisted that he was Daisuke Namba, the name on his passport, but this was actually the name of a Japanese who was executed for the attempted assassination in 1923 of the then Crown Prince Hirohito. The youth turned out to be Kozo Okamoto, 24, a university dropout from southern Japan. His dead accomplices, however, had no names for the moment except those, undoubtedly false, on their passports--Ken Torio and Jiro Sugisaki, both 23.

All three were members of Rengo Sekigun, or the Red Army, a small extremist group of university students who had skyjacked a Japan Air Lines jet and its passengers to North Korea in 1970 and engaged in a shootout with Japanese police that took three lives (TIME, March 13). They had also purged--by torture and murder--at least twelve of their own members.

The trio had apparently been recruited in Japan by a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which last week promptly claimed responsibility for the airport massacre. Two weeks ago, they turned up in Rome behaving like tourists. Cameras slung over shoulders, they asked directions to the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and American Express. They had difficulty eating spaghetti, recalled the staff of a pensione at which they stayed, and they left no tips. An Oriental woman of 30 or so made contact with them at one point. Finally they bought Air France tickets to Tokyo, with a five-day layover in Israel.

The shooting brought almost as much anguish to Japan as it did to Israel. The newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun termed the Lod events "the most idiotic act committed by Japanese since the close of the second World War." Premier Eisaku Sato, reading a bulletin on the shootings, asked unbelievingly, "Could Japanese really do such a thing?" Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda personally called at the Israeli embassy to apologize on behalf of an entire nation and promised compensation for the families of the victims.

Capable of Acting. Most Arab reaction was of a considerably different order. Jordan's King Hussein called it "a sick crime committed by sick people and planned by sick minds." But Egyptian Prime Minister Dr. Aziz Sidky welcomed the massacre because, he said, it "proves we can, with God willing, realize victory for ourselves in the battle with Israel." Most jubilant of all was the P.F.L.P., which said that the Lod Shootout was timed for this week's fifth anniversary of the Six-Day War; it was intended as revenge for Israel's killing of two Palestinian skyjackers aboard a Sabena airliner last month and to prove that "we are still capable of acting." The P.F.L.P. saw nothing immoral in the massacre, comparing it with Israeli bombings of an Egyptian factory and school during the 1970 war of attrition. Said a spokesman: "There are no innocent civilians in Israel since we consider every Israeli as either a soldier fighting us or a colonist occupying our land."

The P.F.L.P. also cleared up some puzzling questions. The Japanese had been recruited, a spokesman admitted, because they could enter Israel more easily than Arabs--especially since Israel last year decided to waive visas for visiting Japanese. For their part, the Red Army men were looking for new ways to carry out their goal of global revolution; their organization has lost appeal and prestige in recent years. The Palestinian fight was an attractive alternative. The P.F.L.P. also insisted that the hired killers were not on a kamikaze mission. Palestinians living in Tel Aviv, they said, were supposed to help them escape. How the escape could occur through aroused Israeli police and guards, they did not explain.

In the Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir placed the blame on Lebanon, which she accused of "openly enabling the centers of the terrorist organizations to reside in their midst." Lebanon--recalling that Israel had attacked Beirut airport in 1968 and destroyed civilian planes in retaliation for a fedayeen assault on an El Al plane--braced itself for Jerusalem's revenge. Its 18,000-man army was alerted, and the airport put under tight guard; antiaircraft guns could be seen swiveling beside the runways.

Israel's charge against Lebanon was only partly fair. True, the P.F.L.P. operates in Beirut. The three Japanese terrorists were wearing Lebanese-made clothes, according to the Israelis, who also assert--despite P.F.L.P. denials--that the three had been trained in Lebanon. Yet Lebanon, a half-Christian, half-Moslem country and temporary home for 300,000 Palestinians, could contain the terrorists only at grave risk to its own fragile unity. Every time the government has tried to do so, a political crisis has resulted. Lebanon is the handiest target for Israel, but the P.F.L.P. also has headquarters in Paris, Rome and Pankow, East Germany. Still, Lebanon's jitters could be premature. At week's end Israeli embassies were issuing statements assigning equal blame to Egypt, which "for years has given its blessings to the indiscriminate killings by the terrorist groups as an instrument of its own policies against Israel."

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