Description of the event
The birth of the Israel state, proclaimed on May 14th, 1948 on maturity of the English protectorate on that territory, leaves the Palestinian Arab people without a homeland. By that moment, the secular opposition between Jews and Arabs happens again with the course of the events. These are definitely influenced even by the new bipolar structure of the world, generater by the “cold war”, as well as by the new fragile balances which are establishing in the Middle East, a few years after the decolonization.
Already on May 1948, breaks out the first “Arab-Israeli war”. It allows the Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion a first extension of his country’s borders, beyond the limit stated by the United Nations. After another moment of great tension (the crisis of Suez, between October and November 1956), which directly involves the great international powers too, the United Nations intervention, though putting an end on crisis, is not able to warrant peace and steadiness. Another important crisis in the Middle East is in 1967, with the “Six-day war”; thanks to this quick conflict, Israel can conquer about 70.000 km/q of territory.
Three years earlier the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was born. The mission is to coordinate the different movements born in the previous years to fight a situation which relegated the Palestinian to the condition of unpatriotic people, of refugees. In a period already characterized as a “mass-media era”, tremendous actions, properly terrorist too, could be considered the only way to open all the world’s eyes on a situation.
On February 1969, Yasser Arafat, former leader of the al-Fatàh movement, takes the leadership of the PLO. In 1971, in polemical spirit against Arafat’s leadership, deemed too moderate, is created the terroristic movement “Black September”, to fight against Israel in any way.
The activity of “Black September”, soon imitated by other similar formations born in the Arab area (and financially mantained by several countries, such as Libya), is immediately very violent: every kind of attempt, diversions of airplanes, homicides and so on; therefeore, they are able to hit Israeli citizens all over the world. The most impressive action is on September 5th, 1972, during the Olympic games: at dawn a “Black September” commando manages to enter the Olympic village in München, to take some Israeli athletes as an hostage. The hole day is a series of exhausting negotiations, carried on in a bad way. The balance is: 11 Israeli athletes killed, as well as five among eight of the terrorist commando and one of the German policemen.