A Deadly Palestinian Raid Inside Israel
At 4 o’clock the afternoon of Sunday, March 11, 1978, a band of Palestinian guerillas landed in two rubber dinghies at Maagan Michael, an Israeli kibbutz between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They took positions on the coastal highway, opened fire on a bus and passing vehicles, seized the bus and a passing Mercedes, and forced civilians attempting to flee to board the bus.
The militants ordered the driver to head for Tel Aviv, which they reached by 5:25 p.m. Israeli forces had set up a huge roadblock on the outskirts of the city and immediately opened fire on the bus when it appeared. The Palestinian militants fired back, throwing grenades and firing automatic weapons from the windows. About 10 or 15 minutes into the battle, according to witnesses and The New York Times, the bus caught fire. “One Israeli,” The Times reported, “said he had thrown grenades at it, setting it ablaze.”
The bus then exploded. By the time the battle was over, 37 Israelis and nine Palestinians had been killed, most of them from the bus explosion. More than 70 people, most of them civilian, were wounded in the attack. It was the bloodiest Palestinian operation inside Israel since the March 6, 1975 attack on the Savoi Hotel in Tel Aviv, when one woman hostage and six Palestinian guerillas were killed.
Condemnations
Whether, as Palestinians claimed, Israeli soldiers had caused many of the civilian deaths was irrelevant: the Palestinian militants had unquestionably intended to kill and maim as many civilians as possible. They were referred to, accurately, as terrorists, as their raid had no military target and no military value and was intended solely as a means of terrorizing civilians—not just in Israel. The Palestinians knew that their attack would trigger a revenge Israeli raid on Lebanon.
Even as Palestinian refugees in 13 refugee camps were seized with terror at the prospects of Israeli retaliation, the PLO responded to the raid defiantly: “Those who occupy our land,” a PLO spokesman said, “must expect that there will be more operations of this kind.” Sadat, however, broke ranks with unanimous Arab support for the raid, denouncing the attack as “irresponsible,” “sad and tragic.”
“This is part of the vicious circle that I’ve done my best during my last visit to Jerusalem to break,” Sadat said. “Let me repeat, let us break this vicious circle of action and reaction because it will lead to nothing. I am against anything done against the civilians.”
Fateful Promises of Reprisals
Begin, the Israeli prime minister—whose popularity had been on the wane before the attack—did not stop at condemnation and immediately alluded to retaliations. “What I can say is that those who killed Jews in our times cannot enjoy impunity.” He called the PLO “one of the meanest and basest in the annals of mankind,” compared the raid to a “Nazi atrocity,” and used it as proof that a Palestinian state was “a moral danger to our people and our country.”
Barely two days later, the night of March 14, 1978, some 25,000 Israeli soldiers crossed the Lebanese border in Operation Litani. The invasion would claim the lives of almost 2,000 people, most of the Lebanese civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers, and set the stage for three decades of attacks and ineffective, but bloody reprisals.
