Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks typically make news for a day or two, then the dead are quietly buried, the wounded are forgotten, and the world moves on to other things. But we will soon mark the 50th anniversary of an attack in Israel that unexpectedly generated headlines decades later.
On a sunny morning in May 1970, a gang of Arab terrorists slipped across Israel’s northern border and positioned themselves on an embankment above a nearby road. They ignored various cars that passed by as they waited for their target: little Jewish children.
Finally, a school bus came along, filled with children from Moshav Avivim. They had their target. The terrorists fired four bazooka shells, two of which struck the bus. That wasn’t enough for the Palestinian attackers. They wanted to make sure they killed as many Jewish children as possible, so as the bus careened off the road and flipped over, they raked it with gunfire.
Eight children from ages 6 to 14 were killed, along with the driver and two other adults. Twenty-one children were wounded, many of them seriously. Additional tragedies followed: an Israeli police officer searching the area stepped on an old Arab mine and lost part of his leg in the explosion, and five parents of the school children were injured when their speeding car crashed on the way to the hospital where the terror victims were being treated.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency described “scenes of uncontrollable weeping and despair” at the mass funeral. “Scores of doctors and nurses were in the crowd administering tranquilizers to the mourning relatives of the slain.” The deputy prime minister, Yigal Allon, delivered the eulogy. “Even Satan has not yet invented the revenge for the blood of a child,” he said, quoting the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) announced that it had carried out the attack. The PFLP was, and remains, the second largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In those days, nobody pretended that either the PFLP or the PLO was “moderate.” That fiction came later.
The international reactions to the massacre were so predictable that you could guess what they were without reading the rest of this article. The “moderate” Jordanian government claimed that the bus “was not carrying children but technicians on their way to build a military road.”
Then came the “even-handed” condolences. Pope Paul VI expressed sympathy for the victims, then quickly added that he “deplored all acts of violence no matter what their source which do serious harm to innocent people and which only deepen the rift between one people and another.”
The British were not much better. Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart said he was “shocked at this cruel act of terrorism” – then added that he “deplored attacks, by whomsoever committed, which have caused so many casualties and contributed to the further deterioration of the situation in the area.” Just a few days earlier, the British supported a UN Security Council resolution that condemned Israel for striking back at terrorist bases in southern Lebanon.
The United Labor Zionists were shocked and disappointed that their allies on the American left were silent. “We share their justified desire for peace in Southeast Asia,” the Labor Zionists declared. “We mourn with them the deaths of the six students at Kent State and Jackson State. But where are they now when the dead students are Israeli? Where is their outcry? Where is their sense of horror? From the anti-war students, as from their elders, there is only silence.”
Big surprise.
For Israelis, of course, memories of the attack lingered long afterwards. But as the years, and then the decades, passed, naturally the names of the Avivim victims faded from public notice.
Not so for the family of Leah Revivo. At age nine, she was one of the children wounded in the attack. Despite being gravely wounded, she managed to recover to the extent that she ultimately married and raised four children. But one piece of shrapnel was so deeply imbedded in her brain that the doctors dared not try to remove it. So she lived with the scars and the pain. None of us can imagine what that must have been like.
In early 2012, the shrapnel became infected. Leah began to suffer epileptic seizures. Her son Kobi later said “the epileptic attacks grew so terrible that medication could no longer treat her.” In late 2013, “she suffered an epilepsy attack that left her with severe brain trauma, and she fell into a vegetative state.” In January 2014, Leah Revivo passed away. Suddenly, all of Israel was again gripped by the horror and sadness of the slaughter that shook the nation decades earlier.
Leah’s children said they marveled at “her encouraging spirit in the face of tragedy as well as her love for the land of Israel, Torah, and kindness.”
May her memory serve as a blessing.