Remembrances: From Munich to Tehran |
Our first child was born in early September 1972, just a few days after the Munich Olympic Village massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches. The excitement and joy of our son’s birth was, to a degree, subdued knowing that once again Jews were victims, and more blood was spilled on German soil.
The grainy image of the masked PLO terrorist leaning out over the balcony of Building 31 stung us then and has remained etched in memories. Stephen Spielberg’s film Munich revealed how Israel’s Mossad hunted down the Munich killers. Despite the “even handedness” of the movie, the violent demise of the murderers by the methodical Israelis felt very right.
In retrospect, the flow of Israel’s history feels compressed. Only ten years before Munich, Israel had found, captured and disposed of Nazi henchman Adolph Eichmann. And only twelve years before that the nascent State of Israel fought for independence against seven Arab nations.
Several years ago, we had lunch in Jerusalem with good friend David Raab. In 1970, he was a seventeen-year-old boy on hijacked TWA Flight 741. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took him and........