Olympic shock waves rock Middle East – dim recently rising prospects for peace

Sadat initiative: first casualty?

By John K. Cooley | Staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Beirut, Lebanon

The shock waves of the Munich Olympics tragedy are likely to rock the Middle East for some time and severely set back any early prospects for Arab-Israeli peace, observers here believe.

Repercussions are likely to extend beyond any immediate threat of Israeli military reprisals against Arab countries where Palestinian guerrillas are quartered, expressed Sept. 6 in Israeli newspapers and broadcasts calling for a war to eliminate the guerrillas.

Egyptian President Sadat’s hopes of developing a Middle East peace initiative by enlisting Western European support may be one of the first and most severe political casualties of Munich.

Arab diplomats are speculating that the proposed West German tour of the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mourad Ghaleb and any hopes of Mr. Sadat to attend the coming UN General Assembly session in New York now are canceled because of the depth and breadth of anti-Arab feeling aroused in the West.

King comments

“The Black September terrorists,” said one Lebanese professional man bitterly, “have caused the Arabs to lose all the good will and sympathy they had begun to gain in one fell swoop. It means that peace is again blocked for who knows how long.”

The earliest official top-level Arab reaction to the Olympics attack, before the killing of the 11 Israeli hostages was known, came from King Hussein of Jordan. He termed it a “savage, uncivilized act,” the “Work of sick minds,” similar terms to those he employed for the massacre of civilians at Tel Aviv airport by Japanese gunmen working for Palestinian guerillas last May 30.

The outside world may be dismayed that there is not more widespread outrage publicly expressed in the Arab world over what is seen in the non-Arab world as a frenzied murder. But for the past quarter of a century or more Arabs have put up with (as they see it) an outside world’s double standard: concern for Israeli or Jewish lives and well-being, and disregard for Arab lives, property rights.

Palestine steadily lost

Progressively since the end of World War II, the Palestinians have lost all Palestine – partly, it can be argued, through their own blunders. But the fact remains that a Jewish diaspora has come in and taken over every inch of Palestine that in Arab eyes was inalienably Arab. Moreover, as Arabs see it, Jewish success in getting all Palestine owes something to terrorism – particularly in the early days.

When Arabs and Palestinians in particular have cried out for recognition of the injustice they believe they have suffered, hardly an outside voice is raise in their behalf or even an outside ear cocked in their direction. Irrational as it may seem to outsiders, it is this Arab feeling of outside indifference and callousness which drives such groups as the Black September splinter organization to go to such murderous lengths to attract attention to their cause.

It is also this background that would have made it virtual political suicide at home for any Arab government to have accepted the Munich guerrilla group and their Israeli hostages with a view to releasing the hostages and returning them to Israel.

Egyptian Prime Minister Aziz Sidky rejected a West German proposal to send the Black September attackers and their Israeli hostages from Munich to Cairo, the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram reported.

Though initial Israeli reprisal threats seemed to concentrate on Syria, the reaction of Lebanon, which last felt the force of Israeli reprisal raids last June, was extreme nervousness.

Syrian message intercepted

A Lebanese Government spokesman said the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Beirut disavowed any connection with the Black September group.

Guerrilla radio stations in Damascus, the capital of Syria, broadcast a series of coded messages during the final hours of the Munich drama.

“From Samir to the eagle: we await your gift. The sky is clear and the job well done,” was one.

Palestinian refugees in camps throughout the Middle East were reported in a high state of excitement over the attack. Radical sympathizers with the Palestinians, such as Samir Frangieh, a leftist writer for the Beirut newspaper Al-Nahar, said the Munich attack “has proved once again, at a moment when Arab regimes, especially in Egypt and Jordan, are multiplying concessions to Israel in an effort to make peace, the vainness of trying to impose peace on the region . . . without regard for Palestinian rights.”