Prince of Fire

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PRINCE OF FIRE IS A WORK OF FICTION. THAT said, it is based heavily on real events and was inspired in large measure by a photograph-a photograph of a young boy at the funeral of his father, a master terrorist killed by agents of Israeli intelligence in Beirut in 1979. The terrorist was Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh, architect of the Munich Olympics massacre and many other acts of murder, and the man upon whose lap the boy sits in the photograph is none other than Yasir Arafat. Students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will recognize that I borrowed much from Ali Hassan Salameh and his famous father to construct the fictional Asad and Sabri al-Khalifa. There are key differences between the Salamehs and the al-Khalifas, far too many to enumerate here. A search of the Coastal Plain will produce no evidence of a village called Beit Sayeed, for no such place exists. Tochnit Dalet was the real name of the plan to remove hostile Arab population centers from land allocated for the new State of Israel. There was once a village called Sumayriyya in the Western Galilee. Its destruction occurred as described in the pages of this novel. Black September was indeed a covert arm of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and the consequences of its brief, bloody reign of terror live on today. It was Black September that first demonstrated the utility of carrying out spectacular acts of terrorism on the international stage, and evidence of its influence is all around us. It can be seen in a school in Beslan, in the wreckage of four trains in Madrid, and in the empty space in lower Manhattan where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

Yasir Arafat fell ill and died as I was completing this novel. Had he chosen the path of peace instead of unleashing a wave of terror, it would have never been written, and thousands of people, Israeli and Palestinian, would still be alive today.