In 1972, a team of commandos – including a young Binyamin Netanyahu – stormed a plane at a Tel Aviv airport to rescue it from Black September hijackers. A new Israeli docudrama tells the story from both sides. Here, surviving hijacker Theresa Halsa and director Nati Dinnar look back at the extraordinary events

Theresa Halsa was only 18 when she hijacked flight 571. Was she ready to die? “Of course. Everybody involved in the operation was ready to die,” she says from her home in Amman, Jordan.

Halsa is the only survivor of the four Black September hijackers who seized the Sabena airlines Boeing 707 20 minutes into its flight from Vienna to Tel Aviv on 8 May 1972. After forcing the plane’s British captain Reginald Levy to land at Lod (now Ben Gurion) airport, the hijackers demanded the release from Israeli jails of 315 Palestinians convicted of terrorism offences, and threatened to blow up the plane with its passengers if their demands weren’t met.

“They called us terrorists, but we weren’t. The real terrorists were the Israelis who threw the Palestinian people off their land,” Halsa says.

Halsa is talking to me because a new Israeli docudrama about the hijacking, Sabena Hijacking – My Version, premieres at the Jewish film festival in London on Saturday. It mixes interviews from those who took part on both sides with archival footage and dramatisations.

During the 30 hours in which Halsa and her accomplices held 90 passengers and 10 crew at gunpoint, she recalls, she expected to die. “I thought I would be shot by Israeli soldiers. Or we were going to blow up the plane if our demands weren’t met. I was ready to die because I wanted to make the Europeans and Americans realise that there was a Palestinian people and that they had been treated unjustly by the Israelis.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scene from Sabena Hijacking – My Version

The Black September group was named in commemoration of the deaths and expulsions of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan in September 1970, but became famous mostly for its attacks on Israeli targets, notably the murders of 11 of Israel’s athletes in Munich during the summer Olympics a few weeks after the flight 571 hijacking.

How did the Israeli-born Arab nurse become a hijacker? “It’s a long story. Difficult to talk about on the phone with my bad English.” But she tries. Halsa came from a family of Arab Christians and graduated from an Israeli school in Acre. She says she wanted to join the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) because of growing hostility of Jews toward Arabs in and outside of Israel.

Six months before the hijacking, she crossed the Israeli-Lebanese border and took part in training at a camp near Beirut, learning how to use a handgun, explosion belts and grenades. Early in 1972, she and three other Palestinian members of the Black September group were chosen to hijack flight 571. The four – Ali Taha Abu Snina, Abed al-Aziz Atrash, Rima Tannous and Halsa – only met the day before they seized flight 571, and posed as two young couples. They flew from Lebanon on forged passports to Rome, where they were provided with forged Italian passports, before flying to Frankfurt, then Brussels, where they boarded flight 571 with yet more forged passports (this time Israeli ones), on the first stage of its journey to Israel.

Twenty minutes after takeoff from Vienna, they seized control of the plane. At that point, the captain laconically remarked to passengers over the PA: “As you can see, we have friends aboard.” The four men and women were armed with two handguns, two hand grenades and two explosion belts.

The hijackers told Levy to fly to Lod airport near Tel Aviv. Once on the runway, they issued their demands to ground control staff. Soon after, the defence minister Moshe Dayan and the transport minister (and future PM and president) Shimon Peres arrived to oversee negotiations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israeli troops patrol around the plane. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

The Israelis used the negotiations to play for time, pretending to accept the demands, while 16 commandos from the special forces unit Sayeret Matkal prepared to storm the plane. Twenty-four hours after the plane had landed, Operation Isotope began. All the Israeli commandos involved were wearing white overalls to dupe the hijackers into believing they were technicians who had come to fix the plane’s hydraulic system.

In the ensuing gun battle, the two male hijackers were shot dead and the two women captured. Three passengers were injured and one, 22-year-old Miriam Anderson, later died in hospital.

Operation Isotope was all the more remarkable for the fact that two other future Israeli prime ministers – Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu – were among the commandos. Hence a headline in the Times of Israel recently: “When the prime ministers took down the hijackers.”

Operation Isotope has long been celebrated in Israel as showing the cunning and resolve of its politicians and armed forces against terrorist threats. When prime minister Netanyahu spoke at the film’s premiere in Jerusalem in September, he recalled that in the 1970s, “terrorists were like preying animals, grabbing planes, kidnapping passengers and threatening to kill them and sometimes doing so”. The “most important lesson” of this era for Israel, he said, “is that it was not merely sophisticated military expertise but our determination and our daring against those who threaten us that curbed this particular form of terrorism”.

Does Halsa have any regrets about what she did? “Yes. I wish we had blown up the plane.” Why? “I think that European and Americans are looking at Israel with two eyes. With the Arab people, they look just with one eye.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cockpit scene from Sabena.

Halsa was sentenced to 220 years in jail for her part in the hijacking of Sabena flight 571 – a life sentence for each of the hostages on the flight. “The Israeli authorities wanted to break us, to break our character, to break the spirit of the Palestinian people, by giving us these long sentences, ” Halsa says. “But they didn’t.”

In November 1983, as part of the prisoner exchange between the PLO and Israel after the first Lebanese war of 1982, she was released and now lives in Jordan. “I didn’t choose to go out [of Israel],” says Halsa. “It was imposed on me. Now I’m very happy in Jordan.” Now in her mid-60s, she is married, has two sons and a daughter and is a care worker with disabled people.

The film is, among other things, a window into another world. “In those days,” says the director, Nati Dinnar, “people would hijack planes because they believed they could get what they want.” Indeed, two of Halsa’s accomplices had successfully hijacked planes before. One had participated in the hijacking of an El Al plane to Algeria in 1968 and a Lufthansa plane to Aden, Yemen, in 1972, while another had been involved in PLO hijackings in Jordan.

“Now nobody hijacks planes like that. Instead, they fly them into the twin towers or blow them up over the Sinai,” says Dinnar. “Everybody knows that negotiators are not going to give in, as they did in the past, but stall for time. So hijacking doesn’t work.”

Dinnar’s docudrama was given more detail and authenticity by the discovery of the late Levy’s tape-recorded account of the hijacking, some of which is played during the film. But what Sabena even more poignantly dramatises is the quiet heroism of the London-born Jew, who received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime service for the Royal Air Force, during the 30-hour ordeal, which coincided with his 50th birthday. “He functions so calmly,” says Dinnar. “One minute he was about to be killed by the hijackers when he tries to grab their pistol, but a few hours later he managed to convince them to let him go and speak to the Israelis.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa Halsa, right, and Rima Tannous, left, hear the reading of their life sentences at the trial in Lod on 14 August 14 1972. Photograph: AP

Levy was astute enough not to disclose to the hijackers that his wife was one of the passengers. He had brought her on the flight for a romantic meal to celebrate his birthday in Tel Aviv, planning to return the following morning. In one fine scene, Levy is allowed to leave his cockpit to visit his crew and passengers in the cabin. He speaks to his wife as if she were a passenger: “I am so sorry,” he says, “for the terrible ordeal I have put you through.”

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In another scene in the cockpit, the leader of the hijackers, Ali Taha Abu Snina, discovers that not only is the captain a Jew but, even worse, an English Jew. “So you are the ones to blame,” says Snina, clutching his gun. “Sorry?” says Levy. “You. The English. You gave the Jews a state. So you are to blame.” The two men crack thin smiles, then go on to exchange confidences about their respective families and children. “Suddenly you make me miss my daughters,” says Ali. “Well, I hope that you’ll be able to hug them all again soon,” replies Reginald.

Moments later, the plane is stormed and Ali shot dead.

At one point during the dramatised storming of the plane, we see Netanyahu grab Halsa by the hair. But the hair is a wig, which comes off in his hands.

“It’s a movie,” says Halsa, when I asked her what it was like to watch herself played by an actor in such scenes. “I can’t say it’s a wonderful movie.” Why not? “In the film, they didn’t show that I was injured in the storming of the plane. But I was.”

But the truth of what happened is stranger than she suggests. When Netanyahu burst in through the plane’s emergency door, he grabbed Halsa and tried to get her to tell him where the explosives were. Another soldier, Marko Ashkenazi, then struck her with a loaded gun, which went off. A bullet from the gun struck Halsa, but passed through – straight into Netanyahu’s biceps. The Palestinian hijacker and the Israeli commando were injured by the same bullet.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from Sabena.

After the Israeli premiere, Netanyahu recalled lying wounded on the runway after the shootout: “I recognised my brother Yoni.” Yoni Netanyahu was at the time a fellow commando, disappointed not to have taken part in Operation Isotope. “He ran to me, his face was very worried. He came closer. He saw me lying there with my white overalls stained with blood. In a moment [after realising his brother’s injury was minor], his face changed and he said: ‘You see, I told you that you shouldn’t have gone!’” Yoni was to die in action four years later, when he was the only Israeli commando killed during Operation Entebbe to free Israeli hostages held by PLO fighters in Uganda.

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Would Halsa like to meet the Israeli prime minister now to talk about what happened on 8 May 1972? There is a pause on the line. “No. I don’t like this idea.”

Dinnar tells me he would have liked Halsa to attend the premiere in Jerusalem, but that it was not possible due to Netanyahu’s presence. “Rescuing hostages from a plane is easier than arranging security for a screening for the prime minister of Israel,” he says.

Halsa also has misgivings about the way in which she was portrayed in the film. “This actor is playing my character, but it’s not close to me.” In what way? “I was always smiling with everybody on the plane, to try to make them feel less afraid. She made me very tough, very unsmiling, but I wasn’t like that.” The film does sometimes depict Halsa sympathetically, though, as when she is shown administering an insulin shot to a diabetic passenger. The film also includes interviews with passengers who recall that Halsa was kind to them. Why did she behave that way to her hostages? “We didn’t want people to suffer. We didn’t want people to be afraid.”

But, quite possibly, what vexes Halsa most about the film is that it dramatises how she and her accomplices were duped by the Israelis who ran Operation Isotope. “They think they were very clever. But they weren’t as clever as they think. They were lucky. It could have turned out much worse for them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from Sabena. Photograph: PR company handout

But it didn’t and, as a result, the foiled hijacking served as propaganda coup for the Palestinian hijackers and the Israelis who foiled their plan, serving to publicise the Palestinian cause as well as Israeli virtuosity and resolve at resisting Palestinian terrorists.

The Israeli-Arab actor George Iskandar, who plays Snina, took a different message from the hijacking and from the film. “They were not terrorists, but fighters, people who fought for their principles,” he told Israeli reporters after the premiere. “I am not against peace and I am not in favour of such things, but I see these things differently. Instead of ‘terrorists’ I call them ‘fighters.’”

Certainly, the hijacker whom Iskandar plays in the film was of a very different mindset from Halsa, who was prepared to blow up the plane. Indeed, the film includes an interview with Bassam Abu Sharif – a former senior adviser to Yasser Arafat – who says he knew Snina and believes he would never have blown up the plane, “not because he wasn’t courageous enough, but because he was wise enough”. What Sharif means by that, no doubt, is that murdering 100 people by blowing up a plane would hardly have furthered the Palestinian cause.

Dinnar tells me that the message of his film, which he hopes gives a balanced picture of the events of 43 years ago, is that violence will solve nothing. But it is a message that has not been heard. “The only thing that has happened in the 40 years since the hijacking is that the violence has escalated.” And it escalated very quickly. Only three weeks after the foiled hijacking of Flight 571, Lod airport suffered a much bloodier attack: 24 people were killed and 80 injured when three members of the Japanese Red Army, who had been recruited by a Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-External Operations, machine-gunned the passenger arrival area.

Does Halsa remain committed to the Palestinian cause? “Yes, of course. The Palestinian cause is not for two years or 10 years or 20 years. When it is solved, it will be OK, but it is not solved.”

Sabena is at the Jewish film festival on 14 November, ukjewishfilm.org