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Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, who fell in the raid on Entebbe, supposedly was sacrificed for political reasons, according to an unnamed Arab source, a British diplomat speculated
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| By israelinsider staff June 1, 2007 |
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The state of Israel may have been behind the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, and cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in staging the affair. At least that was the speculation of a mid-level British diplomat contained in a just-declassified UK government file from 1976, citing only an unnamed Arab source as the basis for the idea.
The British press -- including the BBC, the Guardian, and the Telegraph and The Times -- were all atwitter with talk of the supposed conspiracy, alleging the wily Israelis engineered the hijacking to besmirch the PLO and scotch its warming relations with the West, especially France.
The release of the previously classified diplomatic file from 1976 comes as relations between Israel and the UK took a sharp turn for a worse, with growing calls among British leftists and Palestinians in Britain for more boycotts against Israel and Israelis, and Jewish groups mulling counter-boycotts and sanctions against the UK.
According to the file released by the National Archives, the unnamed contact told David H. Colvin, the first secretary at the British embassy in Paris, that the Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security service) and the PFLP collaborated in seizing the plane, which was hijacked in Athens and flown to Entebbe in Uganda, where 98 passengers, most of them Israelis, were held hostage.
The crisis was brought to an end after Israeli commandos stormed the airport. Three Israeli hostages and one Israeli commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, were killed during the raid.
See BBC video report.
In the document, written June 30, 1976, when the crisis was still unresolved, Colvin wrote that, according to his source, "the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet."
"The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans."
He added: "My contact said the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis."
Describing the collaboration as an unholy alliance, he went on: "The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's [Palestine Liberation Organisation] standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.
"Their nightmare is that after the November elections, one will witness the imposition in the Middle East of a Pax Americana, which will be the advantage of the PLO (who will gain international respectability and perhaps the right to establish a state on evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal Front (who will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and will lose their raison d'etre) and Israel (who will be forced to evacuate occupied territory)."
The diplomat concluded: "If the incident does lead to a reappraisal of French Middle East policy (which seems unlikely), it is likely to lend weight to the arguments of those who call for an early resumption of moves leading to an overall peace settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state on territory to be evacuated by Israel. "Unless this is done, the indiscipline of the Palestinians will become more marked and incidents of this kind will become more frequent."
There has been no confirmation of the claims from any other source. The claim is not known to be backed up by corroborating evidence, and the file does not make it clear whether the British government took the claim seriously.
Most of the file is taken up with Foreign Office attempts to distance itself from the Israeli raid while privately admitting that the Israelis were probably justified in sending their troops into President Idi Amin's Uganda, the Telegraph said.
There is no indication that the conspiracy theory was taken further, but the suggestion of inter-Palestinian rivalries resurfaced days later when a Foreign and Commonwealth Office official reported his discussions with the journalist Leo Murray, who said sources had told him "the Entebbe hijacking had been planned by Wadia Hassad's splinter group from the PFLP ... to prevent the development of contacts between Arafat of the PLO and the West...."
Another British official noted: "If, as Mr. Murray's sources allege, the aim of the Entebbe hijacking was to prevent the development of relations between Arafat and the West, and Arafat knew this, it would provide another motive for Arafat's recent approach to the French in Cairo warning us of further attacks.''
These warnings were made as Britain came under diplomatic pressure to congratulate Israel on its raid, the Times reported, and ascertain the fate of Doris Bloch, a British-Israeli grandmother left behind by the mission, who later went missing from hospital, where staff had seen her dragged away, screaming. Within a week she was presumed dead, and by the end of the month Britain had severed diplomatic ties with Idi Amin's regime. |
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