Early in the morning of September 5, 1972,   eight Palestinians slipped into the Munich Olympics village, made their way to the residential quarters of the 11 athletes representing the regime occupying Palestine,  killing two in a struggle and taking the remaining nine as hostages. 

The Palestinians wanted the release of 234 imprisoned Palestinians and a safe flight out of Germany with their hostages.  Negotiations with the German authorities,  authorised by the zionist ‘prime minister’ Golda Meir, resulted in an agreement allowing the Palestinians to fly out of Germany with their hostages, probably to Libya or Syria.   But the Palestinians were deceived.  "Israel" had no intention of negotiating with ‘’terrorists” and authorised an attempt by German police to kill the Palestinians when they reached the tarmac after being helicoptered to the Furstenfeldbruck NATO base.   The flight crew of the 747 waiting to fly them out were all German police in disguise.  

Realising they had been led into a trap, the Palestinians ran back to the two helicopters as they walked towards the plane, one of them wounded on the way by a German sniper.  All snipers positioned around the helicopters then began shooting. The Palestinians then opened fire inside the helicopters, destroying one with a hand grenade.  All the captured athletes died. Five Palestinians were killed, and the remaining three were captured and imprisoned.  

In the immediate aftermath the regime in “Tel Aviv” ordered air attacks on Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Syria, killing 100-200 people.   On September 16 an armored column crossed into southern Lebanon from occupied Palestine and killed 45 more.  These were plain revenge attacks,  followed by a campaign to assassinate leading Palestinian political and intellectual figures that went on for years. 

While the ‘western’ world uniformly blamed the Palestinians for these bloody events,  the attack on the athletes has to be put in the same category as the resistance of any people to the occupation of their country. In essence, it is no different from the killing of the French in occupied Algeria or the Germans in occupied Poland. The difference lies in the totalitarian scale of the occupation of Palestine.  Some 800,00 Palestinians were herded out of their homes towards the armistice lines of Lebanon,  Syria, and Jordan.  Close to 500 villages or hamlets were destroyed, with buildings that were not destroyed pillaged before being handed over to the “Custodian of Absentee Property.”   The grand theft included household items down to furniture,  carpets, and books as well as rich agricultural land extending across Palestine. Palestine was not just occupied, as Algeria was.   The zionists wanted to destroy it,  efface every trace of it on the map and long-term resistance – which in fact goes back to the beginning of the zionist presence in Palestine – was inevitable. No occupied people would respond in any other way.  

Thus 1948 – only 24 years before -   is why the athletes at Munich were attacked. Even so, there was no reason for them to die. Under the agreement with the German authorities,  they and their hostages would have been flown to an Arab country, probably Libya or Syria, where undoubtedly the hostages would have been released.  The zionists, however, preferred putting their lives at risk to negotiating a peaceful outcome. 

This was the only occasion up to 1972 where Palestinian hostage-taking had ended in the death of the hostages.  The previous occasions include:

- On July 23, 1968, when the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) took over an El Al plane flying from Rome to "Tel Aviv".  It was diverted to Algeria, where all the passengers were released.

- On August 29, 1969, when Leila Khalid and Sami Issawi diverted a TWA flight bound from Rome to "Tel Aviv" to Damascus,  where the plane was blown up after all the passengers but six Israelis were released. They were soon released too, except for one later ‘traded’ for a captured Syrian Air Force pilot. No one was hurt. 

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- On September 6, 1970, when Leila Khalid and Patrick Arguello, a Nicaraguan Fulbright scholar, took over an EL Al flight from Amsterdam to "Tel Aviv" and diverted it to London’s Heathrow airport.  Arguello was shot in cold blood by the airline’s ‘security’ detail, while Leila Khalid was imprisoned but released within a month.  

- On September 6, 1970, when PFLP commandos took over a TWA flight from Amsterdam and a Swissair flight from Zurich and diverted both planes to Dawson’s Field former air force base in Jordan. At the same time, a Pan Am flight was diverted from Beirut to Cairo. On September 9 a BOAC (British Airways) flight from Bahrain was diverted to Dawson’s Field.  On September 12 all three planes as well as the plane taken to Cairo were blown up.  Most hostages were immediately released.  Some were held but released on September 30 in exchange for Palestinians held in British and Swiss prisons. Neither in Jordan nor Cairo was anyone hurt.

- On February 22, 1972, PFLP commandos took over a Lufthansa Tokyo-Frankfurt flight and diverted it to Aden. All 182 passengers and crew were released the next day in exchange for a $5 million ransom.

Immediate responsibility for the chaos and killing at Furstenfeldbruck base lies squarely in Golda Meir, a Ukrainian who had emigrated to Milwaukee and taken up US citizenship before moving on to Palestine.  Her government’s policy was ‘no negotiations with terrorists.’ Although she tried to offload all responsibility for the bloody outcome onto the Germans,  she would have authorised every single action they took.    

All previous examples of Palestinian hostage-taking are evidence that had the plane been allowed to leave Germany,   the Israelis would have been released even though all were citizens of an enemy state and some had fought in the 1967 war. Munich was followed by a wave of Mossad assassinations glorified in the Steven Spielberg film Munich, which includes a nonsensical version of the murder of Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Muhammad Yusif al Najjar in Beirut in 1973.  They were killed in the fashionable Verdun district, not in Spielberg’s crumbling port area.  

In this merciless operation, Kamal Nasser was shot in front of his family.  He was a journalist and poet who did not know how to use a gun and did not even have one in the house until persuaded that he should, by his more security-conscious friends. Muhammad Yusif al Najjar’s wife was shot dead with her husband,  while Lebanese civilians and security personnel were also killed in this rampage through West Beirut. 

Munich has now come up again because it is 50 years since the Olympics of that year and because after a long period of bartering, Germany has agreed to pay $28 million – haggled upwards from $10 million – to the families of the 11 dead athletes. The money should be coming from their own government,  whose predecessor in 1972,  by every action it took,  must be held responsible for the bloody outcome at Munich.  

Munich was a mere drop in the rivers of blood shed by the zionists since 1948. They still kill or maim virtually every day of the week, in occupied Palestine or in surrounding countries.  Their orgy of death, destruction, and provocation that could have led to a regional war 1000 times over shows no sign of stopping.  Yet the military balance – unless one day they use nuclear weapons and that cannot be ruled out– has steadily turned against them since 1967. They were driven out of Lebanon in 2000 and their ground forces were humiliated again in 2006.   Hezbullah and Iran now have the capacity to launch attacks across all of occupied Palestine. 

Demographically,  Jewish ‘Israelis’ now constitute 47 percent of the population between the sea and the River Jordan. The influx of Ukrainian and other ‘immigrants’ is unlikely to have a significant effect on this trend.

When it comes to "Israel", wartime guilt has determined German accommodation of the zionist regime whatever it wants.  A recent poll, however, carried out by Bertelsmann Stiftung, showed that one-third of those questioned thought "Israel" is treating Palestinians the same way the Nazis treated the Jews. Only 40 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. Thus, even in guilt-ridden Germany, the zionist state is losing the propaganda war.