In September 1970, David Raab was a teenager from New Jersey who had just wrapped up a summer in Israel. Along with his mother and four siblings, he boarded a TWA flight for the long ride home. Little did he know that he was about to find himself at the center of a cataclysmic drama that would shape Mideast politics for years to come.

His plane, along with two others — a Pan Am flight from Brussels and a Swissair flight leaving Zurich — were all hijacked by Palestinian terrorists — members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — and flown to the Jordanian desert. For the next three weeks, Raab and the dozens of other passengers were held hostage. Most were kept in the planes; others, like Raab, in buildings scattered around Amman.

The brazen hijackings amounted to the final straw in a worsening standoff between Jordan's now-deceased King Hussein and the PLO, which was fostering anarchy in the desert kingdom and preparing to launch an overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy. Faced with chaos and the international opprobrium that came in the wake of the hijackings, Hussein responded by initiating what Palestinians have lamented ever since as Black September, the routing and uprooting of the PLO by Jordanian forces. From there, the PLO decamped to Lebanon.

In his Terror in Black September: The First Eyewitness Account of the Infamous 1970 Hijackings (Palgrave, Macmillan), Raab recounts those events, but in an unusual and creative way — interspersing the historical narrative with pages from the diary he wrote immediately upon his return home to Trenton. As a result, we're given both a firsthand view of the havoc that only a hostage can describe alongside a meticulous interpretation of those disturbing events — the effect is the sort of reporting more often associated with a dispassionate journalist. Raab, you see, is not a historian; he is, in fact, a business consultant.

But when he realized the story had never been told — and since he himself had been caught up in the history — he decided to do the job himself. As a result, we have a highly readable and insightful account that provides both the human drama that took place in the Jordanian desert and a sharp analysis of the Byzantine feuds that then characterized not only the Mideast but the wider world of international diplomacy.

In colorful, precise language, Raab makes the reader understand the fear that gripped him and the other hostages, the stench of a plane that sits in the baking desert for days with dozens of unwashed passengers, and the uncertainty that comes with getting caught up in a larger war. At the same time, he relied on old-fashioned research to provide the backdrop to the fateful decisions, conflicting policies, and film noir intrigue in Washington, Europe, and Israel that influenced the outcome of the crisis.

"I never wanted to write a victim's book," the unassuming and boyish-looking Raab, who now lives in Israel, said in an interview during one of his frequent trips back to New Jersey. "And this was a fascinating moment in history. This was an event that, through its aftermath, changed the whole political landscape in the Mideast. A lot happened on a lot of different levels during that month, and as a result of that month.

"But I wanted to write it as a historian and as if I'd found the diary of a 17-year-old," he said.

Raab began his research four years ago, a process made easier because his work allows him to split his time between the United States and Israel. Not surprisingly, he said, delving into the subject was cathartic; he even visited Jordan and went to the building in which he was held. There were moments that were, however, decidedly anti-climactic: He actually met up with one of his captors, who failed to answer any substantive questions about those long-ago events.

At the time of the hijacking, Raab's family was well-known in Trenton, where his father was the rosh yeshiva, or principal, of the Trenton Hebrew Academy and the family belonged to Congregation Jeshurun People of Truth.

Raab and his wife now live in Ra'anana, and Israel is home to other family members: two of his children and their families, two of his brothers, and his parents, Rabbi Menachem and Sara Raab. One of Raab's sons and his family live in Miami Beach, his sister lives in Teaneck, and his youngest brother is headmaster of a yeshiva in Miami Beach.

Raab said he will never get over the experience of 37 years ago, "but I'm really happy there's a book out that documents what I went through and what this was all about. But it's not as if I'm angry. And I don't hate Palestinians," said Raab.

He said that he and the other hostages talked about dying, but, he added, they were mindful that if they were to die, "perhaps our deaths would not be in vain, that our deaths would trigger the United States and Israel to come in and clean out the terrorism."

And if his experience offers any lessons, what would these be? "Even today, anybody who boards a plane could find the same thing happen to them," he said, mentioning 9/11 as the most obvious example. "I believe that you can't negotiate with terrorists. There's just so far a government can go for a hostage's release. You can't let terrorists dominate national policy. Every life is valuable and you have to try to get them out, but you have a country with other citizens and they have to come first. It's a very fine line. And I was lucky."

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