Family albums have a habit of turning up surprises. When Jesse Cox found a photo of his great aunt, Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown, casually hanging out with the former chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, he was curious to find out more. What he uncovered was a story of love, murder and mystery.

On 16 October 1972, Palestinian writer and translator Wael Zuaiter was assassinated in Rome by Mossad, Israel's secret service.

In September '72 it was an earthquake for the Israeli intelligence community. They were in shock, they didn't prepare themselves. Aaron J Klein, Israeli author

To this day there remain conflicting theories about why Zuaiter was targeted.

Was he involved in terrorism, or was he becoming too influential in Italian politics, advocating for Palestine? Or perhaps most tragically: was it a mistake, a hastily conceived plan resulting from inaccurate intelligence?

On the evening he was killed, Zuaiter had left the apartment of his fiancée, Australian painter Janet Venn-Brown. Janet is my great aunt and growing up I had heard fragments of Zuaiter's story from my mum.

I remember going to see Stephen Spielberg's Munich with her and watching a dramatised version of Zuaiter's assassination played out on the screen. I became intrigued by how our family had somehow been caught up in this much bigger story.

An international crime thriller



On 5 September 1972, members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September disguised themselves as athletes and scaled the walls of the Olympic village in Munich. They took 11 members of the Israeli team hostage. Over a dramatic 48 hours the ordeal was broadcast live across the world; the images remain iconic more than four decades later. The siege would end in tragedy, with all the hostages killed.



Israeli author and journalist Aaron J Klein told me Israel's intelligence community was 'in shock' after the event and very quickly 'had to start fighting terrorism from zero to 100 in days'.

In an operation that would inspire Spielberg's Munich, Israel's secret intelligence service drew up a list of prominent Palestinians they claimed were involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens.

The first person on the list was Wael Zuaiter. He would be killed just six weeks after the Munich attack.

'At the time, the head of the operational branch of Mossad working overseas in Europe, he told me he had only two combatants working in Europe,' Klein says. 'Only two, in very low key missions, and now he was given the task to carry out preventative operations. He had no intelligence, no targets basically, so he had to start from scratch.'



The speed at which Zuaiter was identified and assassinated could explain why the circumstances of his assassination remain contested to this day.

Klein, a former army intelligence officer, has spoken to many of the people involved in the operation and says 'they have no question marks' about the fact that Zuaiter was the right target. However, he says that if you talk to other agents who read the files a few years later when the atmosphere was calmer, '...they will come and say we have questions marks'.

Zuaiter's brother and sister, as well as my great aunt, are convinced he was intentionally targeted, not because he was linked to terrorism but because he was becoming too outspoken and influential in Italian political circles.

My aunt told me 'they [Mossad] were after all the intellectuals', while his sister Nalia says, 'they killed him because he could persuade most of the Italian intellectuals about our cause.'

In 1975 arrest warrants were issued by Italian authorities for a number of people accused of being involved in Zuaiter’s death. At the time Israel had not claimed responsibility for the mission, and in 1980 an Italian court heard the case against eight of the accused, who were all tried in absentia.

The judges cited a long list of circumstantial evidence—eyewitness accounts of two sturdily-built people fleeing the scene, notebooks with coded messages found in abandoned hotel rooms, the accused being traced to other European cities at the times other Palestinians had been assassinated. However, they lacked any evidence to prove the accused agents had ever actually been in Italy.

While the judges concluded Zuaiter had been 'murdered by an organisation that planned the physical liquidation of members of the Palestinian liberation movement' and that the investigation was 'increasingly convinced that Zuaiter had been the first victim of Israeli counter-terrorism', the seven suspects were acquitted.

An Arabian folk tale

The story of One Thousand and One Nights is a classic Arabian folk tale. In it, the Sultan Shahriar takes a new bride every day, but has his wives executed the following morning. The Sultan's grand vizier, tasked with choosing the brides, has a daughter, Scheherazade, who decides to put herself forward to be the next royal bride.

Determined to end the Sultan's murderous rampage, she hatches a plan to keep herself alive.

On the night he was killed, Zuaiter was carrying a cheap paperback copy of One Thousand and One Nights. He had been translating the original Arabic into Italian, a task that is still yet to be completed. Zuaiter had been intending to write an article that night using the story of One Thousand and One Nights to show that in the history of Islam there had been no antipathy towards Jewish people.

'It's a story of survival in which a character saves herself by telling a story every night, which is why I guess it was so profound why it was that particular book that was in his pocket that night,' says Palestinian artist Emily Jacir.

The night Zuaiter was killed he was shot 13 times, with one of the bullets piercing the pages of his copy of One Thousand and One Nights.

'The fact that a bullet pierced that book in particular symbolises so much of the Palestinian trajectory and narrative,' says Jacir.

Many of the stories I heard about Zuaiter from those who knew him seem to have taken on the qualities of a folk tale. They have been told and re-told many times and it feels like they could find their way into one of the many volumes of One Thousand and One Nights.

There's the story of when he moved from Germany to Italy and carried seven bags of books but almost no clothes, or the time he did not want to kill the ants that had overrun his kitchen or close the door on a floating leaf: stories of Zuaiter the poet and intellectual.

At Zuaiter's funeral his good friend, Italian writer and intellectual Alberto Moravia, touched on these comparisons in his eulogy.

'Wael was a living incarnation of certain Arab characters, both loveable and legendary,' he said. 'A knight full of fantasy, artless, courteous and romantic, who with his simple-heartedness and vagabond spirit made one think of a world without frontiers or nationalism, vast and religious, where men used to call themselves, and often were, brothers.'

A love story

My aunt remembers being instantly attracted to Zuaiter on the day they met. 'He was very good looking, he hard dark eyes, very soft eyes in this dark-headed person, very soft eyes.'

While Janet knew very little about Palestine and the Middle East, after Zuaiter's death she became very involved in the Palestinian cause.

She published a book called For a Palestinian: A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter.

For the decade after Zuaiter's death, my aunt travelled throughout the Middle East, spending each summer painting.

An invitation from the Iraqi ambassador to visit the country turned into invitations to visit Jordan, Syria, Oman, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and more.

She visited Zuaiter's hometown of Nablus in the north of Palestine, and through her paintings became increasingly aware of and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

It was during this time that, while visiting Italy, Yasser Arafat called in to visit my aunt.

Janet says she is not a political person.

'I don't think anyone would believe whatever I have to tell about the situation in the Middle East, but when I tell them about Wael being killed they sit up and take notice.'

By telling people the story of Palestine, my aunt is able to keep Zuaiter's memory alive. Now in her nineties, his story is still a major part of her life.

Somewhere locked in the Mossad archives is a file on Wael Zuaiter. One day it may be declassified, but until then many will continue to debate theories about why he was killed.

Wael Zuaiter: Unknown Friday 24 April 2015 Listen to the full episode to hear more about this story of love, murder and mystery playing out against the backdrop of Israeli-Palestinian tensions. More

Illustrations by Matt Huynh. Refresh your ears with Radiotonic: a heady mix of fiction, non-fiction, essays and drama from writers, artists and radio makers, brought to you by RN’s Creative Audio Unit.

