Courtesy Random House

Web-Exclusive Book Review Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response By Aaron J. Klein (Random House, 2005) Review by Jesse Kornbluth, December 2005

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Ninety passengers were on Sabena flight 571. Sixty-seven were Jews. Four were members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group intent on creating havoc on the grand scale. Over Greece they hijacked the plane and directed the pilot to fly to Tel Aviv. There they demanded the release of 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists. Foolish of them to have landed in Israel—once the plane was on the tarmac, 16 Israeli commandos stormed it, killing the two male hijackers and capturing the two females. The entire operation took just 90 seconds.

That was on May 8, 1972. A few months later the Israelis were not so professional. At the upcoming Munich Olympics, their athletes were going to be housed on the ground floor of a poorly secured dorm. The head of the Israeli Olympic delegation protested that these quarters were unsafe; Israel's chief security officer dismissed his warning. So at four in the morning on September 5, eight terrorists from Black September had no trouble gaining entrance to the dorm area by pretending to be athletes returning to their rooms.

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An Israeli heard fumbling at his door and, when he realized what was happening, tried to keep the attackers out. His heroism allowed one athlete—and only one—to escape. In minutes, two Israelis had been killed and nine others had been taken hostage. Naturally the terrorists had demands: the release of 236 prisoners, 234 of them held by Israel. And if they weren't freed? One hostage per hour would be killed.

The Germans were unprepared to deal with terrorists. They ordered the Olympics to continue. They devised an unworkable plan to kidnap the terrorist leader. The sole criterion for their rescue team was that a volunteer could fire a gun. And their final effort to save the Israelis pitted five exhausted, untrained marksmen against eight terrorists. Every Jew died. The terrorists ran. One was killed, the others captured.

For Israel the only possible consolation was absolute revenge: the killing of the men who had plotted the Munich massacre. So Israel struck quickly. On September 8, 1972, Israeli jets bombed 11 Palestinian bases in Lebanon and Syria, killing 200 terrorists and 11 civilians—and not a single person connected with Black September or the Munich murders. Days later Israeli forces hit Lebanon hard, killing 45 terrorists and 16 operatives. That set a pattern that would last three decades. Israel had great success eliminating "soft targets"—people tangentially connected to Palestinian terrorism—but much less at finding and killing the Munich ringleaders.

Aaron J. Klein, military and intelligence affairs correspondent in the Jerusalem bureau of Time magazine, does a masterful job of recreating the Munich tragedy. And for his reconstruction of Israel's revenge he unearths documents kept secret for 30 years. But in this second half of the Munich story—a cousin to the plot of Steven Spielberg's new film, Munich—Klein has, perhaps unconsciously, traded an independent point of view for access.

He is, he says, the first to interview many members of Israel's elite counterterrorism squad. And he does his best to tell their story. Those tales read like a Ken Follett thriller—we learn a great deal about the mechanics of killing someone and escaping in less than a minute—but the excitement obscures a fundamental reality. Israel's "revenge," more often than not, meant the death of targets who had been chosen simply because they happened to be available. As one senior intelligence source tells Klein, "It's not that the assassinated were innocent, but if a plan existed, and those were often easiest for soft targets, you were condemned to death."

I have not seen Spielberg's film yet, but from what I have read, he suggests that Israel's counterterrorism commandos were deeply ambivalent about killing Palestinians who were not connected to Black September. And the message of the film is said to be that violence begets violence—and the only way to break the cycle is for people of sensitivity and good will to make a tenuous peace.

How should Israel have reacted to the Munich massacre? Spielberg's response will infuriate Zionists, for although he favors appropriate retaliation, he can see beyond Israel's response to fresh waves of Arab-generated terror. "There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region," Spielberg says. "Where does it end? How can it end?"

A fascinating question. Indeed, the only relevant question. Perhaps out of deference to his sources, Klein mutes his distress, calling moral issues "beyond the scope of this book." Alas, no; morality is at the very heart of the book. The Israelis got to place Xs over the pictures of many Palestinian targets. But we will never know if this Old Testament approach—which certainly makes for thrilling reading—has legitimized violence as the first response to violence, and, in the process, has turned terrible acts of terrorism into a war that shows no signs of ending.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based writer and editor of HeadButler.com.