The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The Popular Front was born out of a catastrophe and an argument. The catastrophe was June 1967: in six days the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground, the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan were occupied, and the promise that the Arab states would liberate Palestine died in public. The argument was inside the Arab Nationalist Movement, whose Palestine Section had already been running small operations since 1964 under the formula “more than zero and less than entanglement.” After the defeat the ANM executive decided the Palestine Section should move to armed struggle; from August 1967 its fighters organised in Gaza as the Vanguard of Popular Resistance and in the West Bank under a field command in Ramallah headed by Mustafa al-Zabri. On 11 December 1967 three commando groups — the Heroes of Return, the Revenge Youth and Ahmad Jibril’s Palestinian Liberation Front — merged and announced the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Its founding manifesto argued that the defeat of the Arab armies marked “the beginning of a new stage of revolutionary work in which the masses would assume responsibility for leading the fight against imperialism and Zionism through revolutionary violence.” Where Fatah was deliberately ideology-light, the Front went the other way, and fast. Its first conference in August 1968 declared for “proletarian ideology”; its second, in February 1969, adopted a document that remains the clearest statement any Palestinian organisation has made about its own reasoning. Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine opens by refusing consolation: “Our people have waged a long fight against Zionist and colonialist plans. Since 1917 (the Balfour Declaration), the masses of our people have been fighting to keep their soil, to obtain freedom, to free their country from colonialists, to assert their right to self-determination… In 1936 our people took up arms in defence of their lands, homes, freedom and the right to build their future, offering thousands of martyrs and bearing all sorts of sacrifices… Nevertheless, in spite of all the sacrifices, of the long line of martyrs whose number exceeded that of today’s martyrs in commando action… our people even until this day, have not triumphed.” The conclusion drawn is the document’s whole thesis: “it is not sufficient for us to take up arms,” and what is required is “a clear perspective of the enemy and a clear perspective of the revolutionary forces.” The enemies were named as Israel, the world Zionist movement, global imperialism and Arab reaction; the strategic goal, as the Front put it, was “the liberation of Palestine from the colonialist Zionist occupation, and the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state on the entire land of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital” — one state, not two, and secular, for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

The people are what people remember. George Habash, a physician from Lydda whose family was driven out in 1948 and who had run free clinics in the Amman camps, was general secretary from the founding until he stepped down in 2000; he died in Amman in 2008. Ghassan Kanafani was the Front’s spokesman and the editor of its weekly al-Hadaf — and one of the great Arabic novelists of the century, the author of Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa, born in Acre in 1936 and driven out at twelve. On 8 July 1972 a bomb placed in his car in Beirut killed him and his seventeen-year-old niece Lamees Najm; Israel has never formally acknowledged the operation, and it has never been seriously disputed. Leila Khaled, from Haifa, became the most photographed woman of the era after the 1969 hijacking of TWA 840 and the failed attempt on El Al 219 in September 1970, in which her comrade Patrick Argüello was killed. Wadie Haddad, Habash’s medical-school friend, ran the external operations branch until the Front expelled him. Abu Ali Mustafa returned to Ramallah in 1999 and was killed there by an Israeli helicopter missile in his office on 27 August 2001; his successor Ahmad Sa’adat has been in Israeli prison since 2006. The writer and pharmacist Basel al-Araj was killed by Israeli forces in Ramallah in March 2017.

The Front’s own record includes what its opponents cite and what its admirers do not always mention. From 23 July 1968 the external operations branch under Wadie Haddad ran hijackings and attacks abroad under the slogan “pursue the enemy everywhere,” beginning with an El Al flight from Rome diverted to Algiers. In September 1970 it hijacked three airliners to a desert strip near Zarqa in Jordan that it renamed Revolution Airport and blew them up before the world’s cameras — an act that helped precipitate the Jordanian army’s assault on the Palestinian resistance that month and its expulsion from the country. In May 1972 the branch, working with a cell of the Japanese Red Army, carried out the attack at Lydda airport that killed twenty-six people, most of them Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims. And here the internal record matters, because it is real history: George Habash stated publicly in Beirut on 14 March 1972 that the PFLP’s executive committee had decided at its meeting of 5 November 1970 to stop aircraft hijackings. Haddad refused to comply, went on to organise the Entebbe hijacking of June 1976, and was expelled from the Front along with the entire external branch. He died in East Germany in 1978.

Politically the PFLP has been the PLO’s permanent internal opposition. It withdrew its member from the Executive Committee on 26 September 1974 in protest at the Ten Point Programme and helped found the Rejectionist Front that October; it condemned Camp David; it rejected Oslo outright and boycotted the Palestinian Authority’s institutions for years. Yet its own positions moved: the fourteenth PNC in 1979 and the Front’s fourth conference in April 1981 accepted that “parts of Palestine may be liberated by the revolution, and it would be natural for it to establish a state on those parts it has control over.” It remains the second-largest faction in the PLO, with a substantial student and trade-union base, and its social organisations in the West Bank have been a particular target: in October 2021 Israel designated six Palestinian human-rights and civil-society organisations as PFLP fronts, a designation that European donor states and the UN human rights office said had not been substantiated by the evidence presented to them. As documented facts about other states: the United States designated the PFLP a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997, and the European Union added it to its terrorist list in 2002; the organisation is legal and openly organised in parts of the Arab world and holds seats in Palestinian institutions.

Sources

• Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP Second National Congress, February 1969 (PDF) — PFLP Documents Archive
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• George Habash — palquest
• Ghassan Kanafani — Wikipedia
• Leila Khaled — Wikipedia
• Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — Wikipedia
• Foreign Terrorist Organizations — U.S. Department of State