The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal

By Yossi Melman. New York: Adama Books, 1986. 215 pp. $16.95

Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens

A boilerplate endorsement on this book's dust-jacket, contributed by "terrorist expert" Ray Cline, at first prejudiced me against the contents. For much of its length, The Master Terrorist lives up to the suspicion aroused by its title—that of yet another breathless and poorly-written account, by an Israeli journalist in a hurry, of the "seething cauldron" or "torturous labyrinth" of Middle Eastern subversion. Mr. Melman writes very badly indeed: he has frequent recourse to cliches and stereotypes about the Arab world; he is as free of reflective or analytical capacity as any journalist could decently be; and he gets my name wrong as well as giving a misleading summary of my one meeting with Abu Nidal. But his book is still slightly superior to the general run of "terrorism studies" to which we are currently being subjected.

Let me begin by listing the book's advantages. There is a serviceable account of Sabri el-Banna's family history and background, culminating in the dispossession of his wealthy family from its holdings in Palestine. There is some speculative but plausible additional material about the path of his subsequent political evolution. There is a pretty convincing weighing of the rumor of his death, with the credible conclusion that it is false. And there is a fair reconstruction of the circumstances in which the Abu Nidal group made an attempt on the life of Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to Great Britain, which thus raised the curtain on Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.

In this latter narrative I particularly cit the Israeli cabinet meeting called by Prime Minister Menachem Begin three days after the shooting of Mr. Argov. According to Melman, who clearly enjoys the confidences of some Israeli military officials in his work as a defense journalist, the head of the Shin Bet attended the meeting and proposed giving the floor to General Gideon Mahanaymi, Begin's deputy advisor on counter-terrorism. This officer was to explain the distinctions between the PLO and the Abu Nidal group, but Mahanaymi was preempted by Begin, who said, "There's no need for that. They are all PLO." General Rafael Eitan, the chief of staff, gave it as his opinion that time was wasted on such nuances. "Abu Nidal, Abu Schmidal, they're all the same," he opined.

Melman succeeds, if in nothing else, in showing that Eitan was wrong about that. The author appends an index which gives a chronology of Abu Nidal's assassinations of PLO envoys and spokesmen. He also pens several pages of reasoning on the likely motive for Iraqi backing in the 1982 episode, designed to increase Israeli pressure on Syria and perhaps offer a chance for Baghdad to disengage from the war with Iran. I find his cui bono logic quite persuasive.

The problem is that, on account is peppered with errors of the kind that reduce one's faith. The description of the murder of Yusef Sebai in Cyprus and its aftermath is both inaccurate and incomplete. The idea, twice put forward, that "Deir Yassin" is a distinctive watchword of the Abu Nidal movement makes one wonder what, if anything, Mr. Melman knows about the Palestinians.

"Terrorism" vs. "Free World"

Melman's work is premised on a naive ahistorical juxtaposition of "terrorism" versus the "free world," and the author hints at his definition of "terrorism" in an especially revealing footnote about the Rome and Vienna airport massacres of December, 1985: "One-third of the victims of terrorism since 1968 had been American citizens." Melman's contention—that one-third of those killed by politically-motivated violence against the innocent since 1968 were American citizens—is based on a scandalously narrow and partisan definition of terrorism.

The problem here is not one of "double-standards." Any fool can turn the epithet "terrorist" around in a propaganda war, and many fools have done so. The problem, rather, is one of low standards, where overtly propagandistic terms are accepted wholesale and ingested uncritically by the mainstream media. We have all suffered enough from this syndrome, and from its endless playbacks and repetitions at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and elsewhere. Although the author's cut-and-paste job on Abu Nidal and his faction shares the premises of these non-research institutes—that there is some identity between the word "terrorist" and the word "Arab," with any luck at all, Yossi Melman will not become the "anti-terrorist expert" of choice on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Christopher Hitchens is the Washington, DC correspondent for The Nation and The (London) Observer.