Wen Israeli jets yesterday forced a German airliner to divert from its route to Tel Aviv and land instead in Cyprus, the Sharon government wrote a new chapter in state-sponsored thuggery. A caller with an Arabic accent had apparently called Lufthansa to warn that there was a bomb on board flight LH865 from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv. In the light of five bomb hoaxes on international flights in the past ten days, the Germans decided the threat was not a serious one. The Israelis disagreed. They did not want a jet exploding above or on the ground in Israel so they forced the plane to go to Cyprus to explode. The Israelis made their point by sending up jet fighters to oblige the Boeing Jumbo jet with its 347 passengers and crew to divert to Larnaca airport in Cyprus. Whatever the Sharon government may claim to the contrary, implicit in this action was the threat that if the German pilots did not change course, the airliner would have been shot down. It has yet to be established if this act of aerial piracy took place in international or in Cypriot airspace.

The civilized option, once the German airline had refused to re-route the flight, would have been to have closed Tel Aviv airport to the Lufthansa flight. Perhaps, however, the Israeli authorities were concerned that the pilots might have declared an emergency and, as is their right under international aviation law, landed in Israel anyway. As we know, however, despite its pretence to the contrary the civilized option is not one that Israel often prefers. As the Lufthansa drama was unfolding, Israeli soldiers struck another “heroic blow against terrorism” by riddling a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl with 20 bullets as she passed too close to a security watchtower on her way to school.

There can be no doubt that the recent series of bomb hoaxes that have forced emergency landings of international flights have to be taken seriously. It is a classic terrorist tactic to issue a succession of phony warnings in order to exhaust the attention of the authorities and then to commit a real crime when no one was expecting it. If these warning calls are not being made by some sick individual but by terrorists themselves, they are also a brutally effective way of spreading alarm and disruption for no greater cost than the price of a single telephone call.

It is right therefore that everyone should take these threats seriously. Security at airports may have been tightened considerably but as various recent journalistic exposes in the US and Europe have demonstrated, it is not yet tight enough. All countries need to work together to combat the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately that is exactly what Israel did not do yesterday. It chose to shuffle the problem onto a neighboring country.

Lufthansa may have been wrong to decide to ignore the threat to its Tel Aviv flight yesterday but the Israelis were definitely acting outside the law by using jet fighters to force the airliner to divert to another country. Israel has once again demonstrated that far from being a helpless victim, it is in fact an accomplished bully.