In fifty years, since the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by a Palestinian commando, the geopolitical environment has changed profoundly. The first change concerns terrorism itself. This attack illustrated a period of essentially political terrorism, sometimes pro-independence (ETA, IRA, Tamil Tigers), even revolutionary (Red Brigades, Shining Path…). From the years 1990-2000, we will be dealing, with Al-Qaeda and radical Islamism, with terrorism of a religious nature, one not necessarily being exclusive of the other. And we will not forget that in the midst of the Cold War, the Eastern secret services provided logistical and financial support for most terrorist organizations throughout the world, provided they affected Israeli and/or Western interests. Despite the contemporary return to a form of cold war, this is no longer the case today, if only for lack of truly pro-Russian terrorist groups.
In addition, the attitude of Western states towards terrorism has evolved considerably; the strengthening of Interpol, the creation of judicial poles devoted to this form of rising violence and the setting up of elite police teams (Raid and GIGN in France) will illustrate a weakening of complacency and will allow greater efficiency. By September 1972, not only had the German police made a fool of themselves during the hostage-taking, but the political will to prosecute the perpetrators had largely left something to be desired across the Rhine, but also in France and elsewhere.
On the other hand, although original in terms of the choice of an Olympic site, the attack in Munich was quite banal as a ground hostage-taking (the aerial ones had already begun) and above all targeting civilians; Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, nationalist or leftist terrorists regularly targeted non-soldiers – their Islamist successors then made it a specialty, like 9/11 but also contemporary killings by Daesh or Boko Haram.
It is no longer serious to speak of an Arab-Israeli conflict
The second major change is diplomatic and strategic. In the Middle East and at the UN, the Palestinian cause then gained in importance, including when murderous attacks such as that in Munich were perpetrated; the rising extreme left – Trotskyist, Maoist and even still Stalinist – hailed them as legitimate, the moderate tendencies and the Western chancelleries generally distinguishing between independence demands and the fanatically anti-Semitic spadassins of Black September and other hardliners of the PLO (the Organization of liberation of Palestine would only gradually influence its policy from 1974 and especially during the Oslo Accords of 1993). Moreover, two years after Munich, Yasser Arafat will be received at the United Nations platform to the great displeasure of Israel, France, followed by the other European states, recognizing the PLO during the following years.
However, half a century later, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been permanently relegated from the rank of a serious conflict with global resonances to that of a simple local dispute, evacuated from the agenda of Westerners and from that of an Arab League which has since been moribund. the Arab springs. During the carnage in Munich, the Jewish state was on the decline in Western chancelleries and opinion after the Six-Day War of 1967, and would be even more so after that of Yom Kippur in 1973. Today, not only it is opened up, but its considerable rise in economic, technological, military and even demographic power allowed it a diplomatic triumph: peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, Jordan (also a victim of Palestinian terrorism) in 1994, Mauritania in 1999, and especially Sudan, Bahrain and the powerful Morocco and United Arab Emirates in 2020 during the Abraham Accords (not to mention the all-out opening to India, Southeast Asia and Africa). .; it is no longer serious to speak of an Arab-Israeli conflict, no offense to the pseudo-realists who, for decades, have claimed ad nauseam that peace could not come between Arab States and Israel without a prior resolution of the Palestinian question.
Let’s finish with a symbol relating to the respective status of the President of the Olympic Committee and the Secretary General of the United Nations: in September 1972, when eleven Israeli athletes fell, the first was a former convinced pro-Nazi, and the second a former Werhmacht officer. .