MIDDLE EAST: Israel's Night of Carnage

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Israelis had to search back to the pre-independence battles of 1948 for a parallel to so awful a civilian massacre. But totally unparalleled and unexpected was the fact that the three attackers were from Japan, a nation with which Israel has no quarrel whatsoever. The surviving terrorist insisted that he was Daisuke Namba, the name on his passport, but this was actually the name of a Japanese who was executed for the attempted assassination in 1923 of the then Crown Prince Hirohito. The youth turned out to be Kozo Okamoto, 24, a university dropout from southern Japan. His dead accomplices, however, had no names for the moment except those, undoubtedly false, on their passports—Ken Torio and Jiro Sugisaki, both 23.

All three were members of Rengo Sekigun, or the Red Army, a small extremist group of university students who had skyjacked a Japan Air Lines jet and its passengers to North Korea in 1970 and engaged in a shootout with Japanese police that took three lives (TIME, March 13). They had also purged—by torture and murder—at least twelve of their own members.

The trio had apparently been recruited in Japan by a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which last week promptly claimed responsibility for the airport massacre. Two weeks ago, they turned up in Rome behaving like tourists. Cameras slung over shoulders, they asked directions to the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and American Express. They had difficulty eating spaghetti, recalled the staff of a pensione at which they stayed, and they left no tips. An Oriental woman of 30 or so made contact with them at one point. Finally they bought Air France tickets to Tokyo, with a five-day layover in Israel.

The shooting brought almost as much anguish to Japan as it did to Israel. The newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun termed the Lod events "the most idiotic act committed by Japanese since the close of the second World War." Premier Eisaku Sato, reading a bulletin on the shootings, asked unbelievingly, "Could Japanese really do such a thing?" Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda personally called at the Israeli embassy to apologize on behalf of an entire nation and promised compensation for the families of the victims.

Capable of Acting. Most Arab reaction was of a considerably different order. Jordan's King Hussein called it "a sick crime committed by sick people and planned by sick minds." But Egyptian Prime Minister Dr. Aziz Sidky welcomed the massacre because, he said, it "proves we can, with God willing, realize victory for ourselves in the battle with Israel." Most jubilant of all was the P.F.L.P., which said that the Lod Shootout was timed for this week's fifth anniversary of the Six-Day War; it was intended as revenge for Israel's killing of two Palestinian skyjackers aboard a Sabena airliner last month and to prove that "we are still capable of acting." The P.F.L.P. saw nothing immoral in the massacre, comparing it with Israeli bombings of an Egyptian factory and school during the 1970 war of attrition. Said a spokesman: "There are no innocent civilians in Israel since we consider every Israeli as either a soldier fighting us or a colonist occupying our land."

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