Munich and the Wrath of God

Before dawn on 5 September 1972, eight members of the Black September Organization — the Fatah offshoot named for the 1970 defeat in Jordan — entered the Olympic Village in Munich, killed two members of the Israeli team who resisted, and took nine others hostage. They demanded the release of 328 prisoners held in Israel, together with the German Red Army Faction prisoner Ulrike Meinhof. West German authorities attempted a rescue at the Fürstenfeldbruck airbase that night; it collapsed in confusion — the five police marksmen had no radio contact with one another. All nine hostages were killed, along with a German policeman and five of the eight attackers. The Games were suspended for thirty-four hours, the first such suspension in modern Olympic history. The three surviving gunmen were released a month later, after the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight.

Israel’s response reshaped the following decade. Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized a covert Mossad assassination campaign, later known as Operation Wrath of God, against Black September and PFLP figures. Wael Zwaiter, the PLO representative in Rome — whose connection to Munich later investigators questioned — was shot twelve times on 16 October 1972; Mahmoud Hamshari was killed in Paris that December by a bomb planted in his desk telephone. The campaign continued for years, running in parallel with the April 1973 commando raid that killed three PLO leaders in Beirut.

It also killed the wrong man. On 21 July 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway, Mossad agents shot dead Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter, after mistaking him for Ali Hassan Salameh; five agents were convicted by Norwegian courts and released by 1975. The acknowledged planner of Munich, Abu Daoud, was never assassinated. Munich hardened every side of the conflict: it fixed the image of Palestinian “terrorism” in Western opinion at the very moment the PLO was moving toward the diplomacy that brought Arafat to the UN podium two years later.