What can a hostage crisis dating back over five decades teach about the present Gaza hostage ordeal? Six survivors of one of the “Black September” hijackings carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in September of 1970 spoke with The Times of Israel in recent months about their experiences being held captive by terrorists.
These six survivors were on board TWA Flight 741 from Lod bound for John F. Kennedy Airport on September 6, 1970, when it was hijacked after stopping off in Frankfurt. It was one of four planes commandeered by the PFLP between September 6 and September 9.
The hijacked survivors’ testimonies shed light on the potential after-effects of captivity as Hamas continues to hold 97 of the 251 hostages who were kidnapped during its October 7 terror onslaught on southern Israel, which also saw 1,200 people brutally murdered. At least 33 of the remaining hostages have been confirmed dead by Israel.
Jerry Berkowitz, 84, a resident of Buffalo, New York, recalled how decades after their plane was hijacked, his wife Rivke suffered panic attacks on the few occasions when they flew.
“We were on the way back from my father’s funeral — on a plane about to leave La Guardia — and my wife was standing frozen with her finger pointing out the plane door which was open,” Berkowitz said. “I wanted to know what in the world she is looking at. It was clear she was not seeing the tarmac, she was seeing the Jordanian desert where our hijacked plane landed.”
Rivke, who died eight years ago, was pregnant at the time of the hijacking and flying with her two-year-old daughter Talia. Towards the end of her life Rivke made a point of staying away from airports, though in her professional and family life she was completely functional, said Berkowitz.
Three of the hijacked planes, carrying slightly more than 300 passengers, were forcibly landed in Zarqa, Jordan, at the Dawson Field, a stretch of land used as a makeshift runway because of its flat, packed-dirt surface and triangular shape.
Dawson Field was renamed “Revolution Airport” by the PFLP.
The PFLP attempted to use the hostages as bargaining chips to pressure Israel, Germany, Switzerland and England to release jailed Palestinian terrorists. They warned that at the end of a 72-hour deadline, the hostages would be murdered.
Most of the hostages — Germans, Swiss, British, Dutch and American, as well as some of the 78 Jewish Americans — were released within the first week, with 107 non-Jewish females and children released after the first day.
Of all the captives, only three — a woman named Nava Goren and her two small children — were Israelis. Fourteen more had dual Israeli-US citizenship, of whom only two were adults. The terrorists searched for, and singled out, the Jews, holding them in captivity longer than non-Jews with a similar age and gender profile.
Fifty-six captives — Jews, government and military officials and airplane crew — were held for three weeks.
The PFLP would later demand the release of 56 Palestinian, Algerian and Lebanese terrorists.
Germany and Switzerland would cave in to their demands and release six terrorists. Britain violated an extradition agreement with Israel and released the female terrorist Leila Khaled.
The US and Israel would refuse the PFLP’s demands.
Recognizing trauma
It’s difficult to draw parallels between Hamas’s hostages from October 7 and the Black September survivors.
All of those interviewed made it clear that their own experiences in captivity paled in comparison to the horrors of the Hamas-orchestrated hostage crisis.
“I’m not saying [the PFLP terrorists] were nice people, but they did no physical harm,” said Fran “Foozie” Chesler, who lives in Petah Tikva. “It’s not the depravity that you see now. Slaughtering babies, pregnant women.”
Black September hostages were held by the PFLP for no longer than three weeks, shorter than the 50 days endured by Hamas captives released in November of last year and a fraction of the time spent by the hostages still being held in Gaza.
Also, the PFLP terrorists were not governed by Islamic fundamentalism like Hamas. Many saw themselves as secular Marxist-Leninists aligned with other left-wing — and murderous — terrorist groups such as Italy’s Red Brigade, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group, Japan’s Red Army, and Spain’s Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland and Liberty).
Many of the PFLP terrorists were women.
This might explain why none of the approximately 300 hostages held by the PFLP were raped, while Hamas terrorists have perpetrated sexual assaults on women as well as men during and after the October 7 terror rampage, with many worried that such assaults are ongoing against hostages in captivity.
And while the PFLP would later resort to murder — including suicide bombings — to advance its agenda calling for the destruction of Israel, none of the hostages in the Black September hijackings were killed.
At the same time, in the 1970s there was little awareness about the diagnosis and treatment of traumas. Only in 1980 did Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As a result, many of the survivors of the Black September hijackings did not receive adequate psychological treatment.
Survivors of the hijackings told how it took them decades to come to grips with what they experienced, while several said that the horrors of October 7 reignited the traumas dating back over 53 years.
Moshe Raab, who was 14 years old during the New York-bound TWA hijacking, says that for the first time in decades, he is awakened in the middle of the night by nightmares.
“I am trapped in a room with my wife and kids and grandkids and I am trying to get to safety and recently there is something new in the nightmares — I have to write code to find a way out,” said Raab, a software production manager who today lives in Israel.
Raab, who was held hostage for less than a week, said that he worries about the hostages that were released by Hamas and he cannot even imagine what it must be like for those still being held.
“Very few people know what it is to be a hostage. Under no circumstances can the memory ever leave you and even if you push it aside, it is still there,” he said.
‘Very few people know what it is to be a hostage. Under no circumstances can the memory ever leave you and even if you push it aside, it is still there’
“I’d say the experience made me less materialistic than my friends,” said Raab. “There was a sense that but for chance I could have ended my life there. The plane was boobytrapped and wired with bombs, terrorists wandered around with Kalachinkovs, and at any time either Jordan, Israel, or the US was liable to stage a forced hostage release.”
Raab said that he tries not to watch the news about the hostages in Gaza. But he did watch how the hostages released from Hamas captivity in November were driven to the border.
“I saw the Gazans scream ‘Itbach al-Yahud‘ [massacre the Jews] at the hostages being released and I was reminded that was exactly what the Jordanians and Palestinians screamed at us when we were transported through the streets of Jordan on our way to Amman to be released,” he said.
Roy Spungin, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who was 13 years old at the time his plane was hijacked, said that after October 7 he began to feel unsafe in the newly-built Givat Olga neighborhood in Hadera, where he and his partner live.
“We live at the extreme corner of the neighborhood and we felt isolated,” said Spungin. “I went out and bought a sledgehammer and a mechanism to block the door of the bomb shelter. Both of us applied for gun licenses.”
Learning to cope
Survivors of the Black September hijackings, alternatively known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings, said the lessons they learned from coping with their traumas might be relevant for the hostages released from Hamas captivity in November and for those who, hopefully, will be released in the future.
Many of the survivors, including four of the six who spoke with The Times of Israel, chose to immigrate to Israel from the US in the years following the hijackings.
Raab, originally from New Jersey, now lives in the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
‘I suddenly realized that this guy representing the US government was justifying the hijacking of my family merely because we were Jewish’
“When we were evacuated to Nicosia, Cyprus, we were greeted by someone from the US State Department,” said Raab, elaborating on his reasons for making the move. “He explained to us that the PFLP hijacked us because of the suffering of the Palestinian children. As a 14-year-old American kid interested mostly in baseball, I suddenly realized that this guy representing the US government was justifying the hijacking of my family merely because we were Jewish.”
“Across from us was the Israeli ambassador presenting flowers to the Israelis and the dual Israeli-US citizens,” he said. “That is when I realized I was in the wrong group. I needed to be in the Israeli group.”
Though the Black September events were devoid of explicit sexual violence, there were cases of sexual harassment.
“One of the things that was particularly difficult for me,” recalled Susie Rosenrauch, who was 14 at the time of the hijackings, “was that in order to get on and off the plane we had to climb a wooden ladder. I was wearing a mini dress and I had gotten my period. My panties were stained and the PFLP guys down there were looking at me. I felt very uncomfortable.”
Although there are many differences between the Black September hijackings and the events on and after October 7, there are also similarities.
Captives held by the PFLP suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition. “Food was a sometime thing,” as David Raab, one of the captives, put it in his book “Terror in Black September.” There were frequent shortages and the water was heavily chlorinated to prevent the outbreak of diseases.
Some of the captives expressed a sense of being totally isolated, which the terrorists — both Hamas and the PFLP — attempted to exploit.
Spungin noted that “one of the toughest things was the uncertainty, not knowing whether your government cared about you.”
The PFLP terrorists took advantage of this fear and uncertainty to enlist the hostages to write letters to heads of state in the US, Europe and Israel imploring them to release imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.
‘One of the toughest things was the uncertainty, not knowing whether your government cared about you’
“We wrote a telegram to [prime minister] Golda Meir and [president Richard] Nixon to release the prisoners so we could come home,” said Mimi Nichter, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
This is not unlike the videos released by Hamas in which Israeli hostages were filmed imploring the Israeli political leadership to do more to release them.
Similar but different
The first in a series of PFLP hijackings was on July 23, 1968, a year after Israel resoundingly defeated the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War.
The new tactic of hijacking was conceived by PFLP co-founder Waddia Haddad as an alternative to failed attempts at waging conventional warfare against Israel. High-visibility terrorist attacks, argued Haddad, would bring the Palestinian cause to world attention.
Haddad was proved right: In the July 23, 1968 hijacking, after 11 crew members and 21 Israelis were held for five weeks, the PFLP managed to secure the release of 16 Palestinians from Israeli jails. The hijackers went free, which would be the case in other hijackings as well.
In negotiations with Israel over a potential hostage deal, Hamas has demanded the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, head of the PFLP, who is serving a 30-year sentence
To this day, the PFLP is involved in terror against Israel. In the 2000s the PFLP added suicide bombings to its terrorist repertoire. On August 23, 2019, PFLP terrorists activated a roadside bomb near a spring outside Dolev that killed Rina Shnerb, 17, of Lod, and injured her father and brother.
In negotiations with Israel over a potential hostage deal, Hamas has demanded the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, head of the PFLP, who is serving a 30-year sentence for his involvement in the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi on October 17, 2001, at the Dan Jerusalem Hotel on Mount Scopus.
And PFLP representatives, together with representatives from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, met in March with Yemen’s Houthi rebels to discuss coordinating terrorist attacks against Israel.
Another theme that resonates both in the present hostage crisis in Gaza and in the Black September hijacking was how ineffectual the Red Cross proved to be.
Andre Rochat, the Red Cross representative responsible for the hostages held at Dawson Airfield mistakenly reported to his superiors that a woman had given birth on the TWA flight.
But even though he apparently believed a woman had given birth, Rochat did not try to remove the purported newborn.
‘Only later did I realize that the so-called vitamins we were given were really sedatives’
He was aware that because the plane’s electricity system was disabled the lavatory was not functioning and was overflowing, which produced a horrific smell and represented a hygiene risk. He was also aware that the hot Jordanian sun heated the metal frame of the plane to dangerously high temperatures for a newborn. During the cold desert nights temperatures dropped.
Had there really been a birth, as Rochat assumed, the baby’s life would have been endangered.
Just as Hamas drugged its captives, particularly during their release so they appeared relaxed and composed, the PFLP gave its captives sedatives.
“Only later did I realize that the so-called vitamins we were given were really sedatives,” recalled Raab.
As is the case in Gaza, so too in Jordan the captives were held in a war zone. Palestinian militants from the PFLP and other terrorist groups belonging to the Palestinian Liberation Organization who sought to overthrow King Hussein’s regime and who received backing from Syria, Iraq and the Soviet Union, fought with Jordanian forces in the streets.
At one point, as Raab shows in his book, Jordan, fearing the situation was deteriorating, requested, via the US, that Israel’s air force bomb Syrian tanks. Bombs and artillery shells landed near the secret hiding places where the PFLP hostages were being held, which intensified the trauma of their captivity.
Time heals some, but not all, wounds
For many of the interviewees, processing the full trauma of the hijacking took years, sometimes decades.
Rosenrauch, a social worker and psychotherapist living in Ra’anana, was responsible for her two younger brothers, who were on the plane with her. They were held for a week before being released.
She said that the first time she truly confronted what had happened to her was in the early 1990s when “American Experience,” a PBS television program, did a segment on the Black September hijackings.
“They found original footage documenting our time on the hijacked plane. There I was, sitting next to my brothers near the emergency exit which was wide open. The wind was blowing through my hair and one of the stewardesses was pouring water for us,” Rosenrauch said. “When I got the tape from my parents, I took it to my therapist. I watched it with him and for the first time ever, I cried.”
Rosenrauch said that what helped her to finally process what had happened 20 years before was that for the first time she received from her therapist recognition that what she had experienced was actually horrible and traumatic.
“Me and my brothers and other captives with whom I stayed in touch used to joke and say things like, ‘You should fly with me because bad things don’t happen twice to the same person.’ Or we’d sing, ‘I’m living on a jet plane,’ instead of, ‘I’m leaving on a jet plane,’” she said, referring to the John Denver song.
‘For a long time, we told ourselves our experience was interesting and strange, not horrifying. But it was horrifying’
“For a long time, we told ourselves our experience was interesting and strange, not horrifying. But it was horrifying,” Rosenrauch said. “People aimed guns at us, people got rid of all the non-Jews and kept all the Jews on the plane. We had to sit on the plane for days. We had poor sanitation, small amounts of food. The planes were wired with explosives to be blown up at any moment.”
A recurring theme in the interviews was the importance of confronting and processing the pain of being held captive. Every survivor spoke of going through a transformation, sometimes weeks, sometimes decades after the events.
In some cases, this transformation had aspects of epiphany after which a decision was made to cease to be a victim, to cease to be defined by the trauma.
“I was lying on a bed in my friend’s room in the dormitory in Stern College,” recalled Chesler, one of the 56 hostages held for three weeks in one of three different hiding places around Jordan: the Ashrafiyah neighborhood in Amman, the el-Wehdat refugee camp, or Irbid.
“I saw myself as if from the outside and I was looking up at myself standing over me looking down at me. I was separating into jigsaw pieces,” she said. “All I had to do was open my hand and all the emotions and the conflict from the hijacking would be over. In my mind, I said, ‘Fran, are you crazy? Are you going to allow them to destroy your life? I’m not going to let them live in my head rent-free.’ Since that incident on the bed, I will not let anyone run my life. Nobody can put a gun to my head and force me to do anything in my life.”
Chesler said that what made it easier for her to deal with the trauma was the advice one of her psychology professors gave her.
“After he asked how I was and I said I was doing great. He said to me, ‘You know, right now you are flying, but that is going to end. You are going to crash. Just know that it will end.’ He was absolutely right and he gave me his number. But the fact that he told me the high would end made it so much easier to go through,” she said.
For other hostages, fully coping with the trauma took much longer. In the case of Nichter, who was also held hostage together with Chesler for three weeks, it was only after writing a book about her experiences over 50 years after the fact that she fully began to process what had happened to her.
The result is “Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience,” which was completed just before the October 7 onslaught.
Nichter said that at the time of the hijacking, most of her friends were left-wing activists involved in the campaign against the Vietnam War.
“They thought that the PFLP were cool revolutionaries. There was a lot of sympathy for them,” she said. “It’s not unlike what is happening now. There was negativity toward Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians. It felt like I was caught in the middle.”
“So people in my cohort really did not understand, and that caused me to stop sharing my experiences, to stop talking about it. Then in the 1990s, a high school classmate called me and said he was writing a book on international terrorism,” recalled Nichter of the process which enabled her to come to grips with what had happened to her.
‘Finally, I realized I needed to think and talk about it and deal with what had happened’
“I found myself thinking, ‘How can I not engage with him since I, as an anthropologist, rely so much on other people talking to me openly and honestly about their experiences? So that was the first time I really talked a lot about what happened and that opened me up for the first time,” she said. “Finally, I realized I needed to think and talk about it and deal with what had happened.”
Nichter said she became silent again for several years. Then during a yoga class she had a transformative experience.
“I sort of saw something leave my body,” Nichter said. “I felt that something important had happened and I knew what it was: I released something and it enabled me to write about my experience. It took me a while to actually sit down and write. But eventually I did.”
Nichter described the process of writing her memoir as therapeutic.
“As an anthropologist, I’ve lived a life where I’ve seen firsthand conflict and have lived in conflict areas. At first, I was wary of entering those places because of my hostage experience but I had to push my fears aside so I could live my life and do my research,” she said. “Finally, I realized I needed to think and talk about it and deal with what had happened.”
Opening up and talking about what happened might be better than an imposed silence. But reiterating a traumatic experience often reinforces it, according to Spungin, who names his captivity experience as crucial to his decision to become a therapist.
“My mother, a seventh-generation Israeli who understood Arabic and overheard the terrorists say they planned on killing us, was devastated by the hijacking,” he said. “In the months after our release, she ground down her teeth to the point where she lost them all. She had nightmares years after the event. And she talked about it all the time. That was not a good thing because she rehearsed it again and again in her mind.”
Spungin recalled that only in 1999 at the age of 42 while learning Buddhist meditation in India did he have a real breakthrough in coping with being held captive.
“It came at a specific time from a specific teacher. I sat with her for five weeks and after the third time I sat with her, I recognized a truth and it has been clear to me ever since,” he said.
Spungin described how he was able to heal the trauma of being held by armed terrorists in a booby-trapped airplane by connecting through spiritual practice.
‘There was this feeling inside me of beauty, infinity, that I was never born and I would never die, that I will be okay and that is who I really am. The body-mind organism is temporary’
“There was this feeling inside me of beauty, infinity, that I was never born and I would never die, that I will be okay and that is who I really am. The body-mind organism is temporary. True, I might feel pain for a while and I might be sad for the people I love, but all that is temporary and will pass. Pain is just a sensation in the body, it’s not me. There is a higher place. You can get to that place. In fact, you are always there but you choose to focus on the ‘me story,'” he said.
For Raab, the transition back to a modicum of normalcy came on Thanksgiving, about two months after the hijacking.
“What actually helped me was that I failed my math class,” recalled Raab. “I remember how my math teacher announced in front of the entire class, ‘And this is the failure,’ as he handed me back my test. I had never failed before. It was a shock.”
Raab said that he called his brother David, a math major who had also been held hostage by the PFLP.
“He said, ‘Bring your book over.’ He sat me down and said, ‘You have to figure it out on your own.’ I sat there on the verge of crying for hours. Eventually, I solved it. Looking back, that was the switch. I realized that I had to get back into real life. I couldn’t space out anymore.”
Raab noted how history repeats itself. Fifty-three years ago he, his mother and his siblings were taken hostage while his father, who was in New Jersey, waited expectantly for news. In the wake of October 7, Raab’s daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren were evacuated from their home in Moshav Shokeda near the Gaza border.
“Not too long after the October 7 attack, my 10-year-old granddaughter said to my daughter, ‘I heard there are children who are being held hostage by Hamas.’ She was really concerned,” Raab said. “But my daughter replied, ‘You know your grandfather was a child when he was kidnapped, and he came out okay.’”
