Rohana R. Wasala

That distressful video of 24 year old Israeli hostage Evyatar David, made to dig his own grave in a Gazan tunnel reminded me of the harrowing accounts of the worst anti-Semetic violence perpetrated on Jews in the last century under Germany’s NAZI leader Adolf Hitler during World War II (1939-45). From the creation of Israel in 1948, they became persistent pursuers of their sadistic NAZI tormentors of the Holocaust. In our adolescent years in the ‘60s, we read exciting press narratives (in Sinhala newspapers and magazine periodicals) about shrewd Israeli agents hunting down Nazi persecutors of European Jews. The stories of their successful missions warmed our proud patriotic hearts, as did the accounts of the boxing ring victories since 1960 of the Black American Cassius Clay (who in 1964 became a Muslim convert as Muhammad Ali in protest against the racial prejudice that he experienced in his native America); the amazing power of his punches in the ring (punch force) was once a topic of excited discussion among us then. No doubt, we were more thrilled than our parents by such displays of brave defiance and independent self assertion against white supremacists by descendants of their former victims, though we would have been unable to describe such feelings of strong empathy with Nazi pursuing Israeli Jews and Black American boxing champion Mohamed Ali as due to our own instinctive defiance of White imperial dominance, which really was the case.

It was the early phase of the Cold War (global geopolitical rivalry) period between the USA and the USSR and their respective allies (1947-1991). What was known as the Space Race (competition between America and Russia to achieve superior spaceflight capability) was one striking ‘theatre’ of the Cold War. Russia beat America in this in 1961 when twenty-seven year old Russian pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin successfully completed one orbit round the Earth for the first time in human history in the spacecraft named ‘Vostok I’. The round the earth flight took only an astonishing 108 minutes (1 hr 48 mins). We in the GCE-prep talked excitedly about Gagarin’s heroism and the power of Soviet science, which, as it was described in Sinhala language periodicals that we read in our school Reading Room adjoining its modest library, was thanks to the Jewish scientists that the Russians took with them to Russia to work for them at the end of World War II (just as Americans took some of them to America for the same purpose.) We found this latter detail a little funny, but it added to our admiration of the Jews. The news of Russia’s space victory over America thrilled us. Our euphoria increased with Yuri Gagarin’s visit to Sri Lanka (then known abroad as Ceylon) on December 7, 1961, only about eight months after his historic achievement, on the invitation of the world’s first female Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. (Incidentally, Golda Meir, a Jewish migrant from Ukraine, became the prime minister of Israel in 1969 and served in that post till 1974; she was the first ever female prime minister and head of state of Israel until then. A second Israeli woman to occupy the hot seat has not appeared yet.)  

A war was happening on the opposite side of the world involving the East Asian country of Vietnam divided into two rival halves known as North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The first was backed by the Communist countries of Russia and China and their allies, and the second by the United States of America and its allies. The Vietnam war, which  raged for two decades from 1955 to 1975, touched us even more deeply because the victims of aggression there were largely our co-religionist Buddhists. Witnessing the conclusion of that war  with the ignominious defeat of Americans at the hands of Viet Cong forces in 1975 was for us a heartwarming experience of a maturer kind. 

But let me resume the topic. One riveting story we read as teenagers at that time was about the detection and capture of a disguised Holocaust commander by the name of Adolf Eichmann in a certain location in Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1960 by Shin Bet and Mossad detectives. They had no photo of Eichmann to confirm his identity. So they compared the shape of his ears to that found in his SS file photos that the Israeli agents had acquired. This was one cute bit of information among many in that story, that I still remember. Eichmann was brought to Tel Aviv in Israel and tried before its supreme court and sentenced to death by hanging. His execution took place in 1962.

Unlike today, we were able to look upon events and persons in the Middle East (actually, West Asia for us Sri Lankans) in my youth, with a sense of unconcerned detachment that allowed us to make lighthearted references to the collective defeat  of the Arab states inflicted on them by the Israelis (resulting in the occupation of some 7000 sq km of Arab territory including the Gaza Strip by the latter) in what became historicised as the Six-Day War in June 1967 and make good humoured fun of our Muslim friends. The celebrated Israeli general Moshe Dayan, with his iconic eyepatch, who commanded his victorious forces in this war, remained a hero in our youthful memory for many years. We were even more impressed by the exploits of the young female Palestinian militant, the glamorous Leila Khaled, who, in 1969, became the first woman to hijack a plane. 

The hijacking of the Belgian National Airlines Sabena Flight 571 from Vienna in Austria to Tel Aviv in Israel with 90 passengers and 7 crew members by four armed Palestinians (two men and two women pretending to be couples) from the Palestinian terror group Black September on May 8, 1972, failed to win their demand through terror for the release of 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel. A team of 16 well trained and thoroughly rehearsed Sayeret Matkal commandos including the current Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu then aged 22 carried out a military raid codenamed Operation Isotope disguised as technicians in white overalls. They rescued all the 90 hostages unhurt, except one who later died. Ehud Barak who led the operation and Benjamin Netanyahu, the only commando who was hurt, both later were to serve as Prime Minister of Israel. 

In the infamous Munich massacre perpetrated by the same Palestinian terror group Black September on September 5-6, 1972, all 11 Israeli hostages (5 athletes and 6 coaches) got killed during an abortive rescue operation undertaken by the German Police. We got an eyewitness account of the tragic situation there from the new principal of the school in central Sri Lanka where I ended my short career of six years as a government school teacher. He had  been into sports in his youth and got a chance to attend the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. I can’t remember the details now. Being of a comparable age to the Israeli athletes who were killed in that attack, I kept thinking about their gruesome death for many days. In the following years, the Mossad carried out successful secret operations, killing the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the carnage.

Arabs’ attempted retaliation to the Six Day War came in the form of a surprise attack launched on Israel by an alliance of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement, on October 6, 1973. The conflict lasted for nearly three weeks doing little to change the outcome of the Six Day War.

Then came the hijacking of a civilian Air France (Airbus A300) flight operating between Tel Aviv and Paris with 248 passengers (106 Israelis out of them taken hostage by 7 terrorists {5 Palestinians + 2 Germans}) on July 3-4, 1976. The plane was finally made to land in the Entebbe International Airport in flamboyant dictator Idi Amin’s Uganda, whose involvement injected an element of comedy to the later media narratives of the event. The spectacular codenamed ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ launched by the Israeli commandos rescued 102 of the 106 hostages. The only Israeli commando fatality was Yonatan Netanyahu (older brother of today’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu) who commanded that Sayeret Matkal operation at Entebbe.

However, our initial adolescent admiration for such daredevilry on the part of the activists of the Palestinian resistance movement turned sour, when their only strategy against alleged Israeli aggression became mindless terrorism, news reports about which filled the pages of Newsweek International magazine and other print media, and formed the material of news bulletins broadcast over the BBC World Service radio, that we used to follow from Sri Lanka at that time of our youth. This was three years before the introduction of television to Sri Lanka.

Prime minister Netanyahu said in a recent post :

Today the Dictator of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei posted this (showing a placard, presumably containing a statement by the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei). The title is ‘Why must the Zionist regime, that’s Israel, be eliminated from the region. So, here, you have the ruler of Iran openly declaring again that his goal is to destroy the State of Israel, and the most brazen thing about this is that the issue he is negotiating, supposedly negotiating, is  peace with the United States.

Well, Israel will not be eliminated!

What must be eliminated is Iran’s axis of terror, and its nuclear programme. Not only for the sake of Israel, but (for) the sake of our entire region, and for the sake of peace in our world.”

In a latest statement that he made (August 25, 2025), Netanyahu expressed his resolve to finish off Hamas:

Given Hamas’s refusal to lay down its arms, Israel has no choice but to finish the job and complete the defeat of Hamas.

Israel’s security cabinet instructed the IDF to dismantle the two remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City.

Contrary to false claims, this is the best way to end the war and the best way to end it speedily.”

We can’t do anything but keep our fingers crossed in this tragic situation, caught up as we ourselves are in an existential crisis without any friends to help us, unlike in the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians.