The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command

The PFLP was assembled in December 1967 out of three groups, and one of them did not fit. The Palestinian Liberation Front had been founded secretly in 1959 by Ahmad Jibril — born in Yazur near Jaffa in 1938, raised in Syria after 1948, and trained as an officer in the Syrian army before being cashiered for communist sympathies — and it was a military organisation run by a professional soldier, with close ties to Syrian military intelligence and no interest in congresses. As the Popular Front’s Arab-nationalist wing under George Habash moved towards Marxism through 1968, Jibril’s people found themselves in an organisation whose leadership was spending its time on questions of class analysis. In October 1968 Jibril withdrew and announced the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, taking most of the PFLP’s military cadre with him. The founding argument was blunt: the front was talking when it should be fighting.

What followed was a career of technically ambitious operations and total political subordination to Damascus. The PFLP-GC pioneered methods that others copied — remotely detonated devices, the use of hang-gliders and hot-air balloons to cross the northern border, tunnelling. Its operations included the bombing of a Swissair flight over Würenlingen in February 1970, in which all forty-seven people aboard were killed, and the attack on an apartment block at Kiryat Shmona in April 1974, in which eighteen people, including eight children, were killed along with the three attackers. It also negotiated, in May 1985, what Palestinians know simply as the Jibril Agreement: the exchange of three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon for 1,150 prisoners held by Israel, the largest such exchange in Palestinian history until 2011, which released among others Ahmed Yassin, who two years later founded Hamas. In November 1987, six days before the First Intifada began, a PFLP-GC fighter flew a motorised hang-glider from Lebanon into an Israeli army camp at Gibor and killed six soldiers before being shot — an operation whose effect on morale in the occupied territories is cited by many participants as one of the sparks of the uprising.

Its relationship with the rest of the Palestinian movement was mostly adversarial. The PFLP-GC opposed the Ten Point Programme, joined the Rejectionist Front in 1974, and in 1983 fought on the Syrian side against Arafat’s loyalists in the Fatah rebellion in the Beqaa and in Tripoli, helping to drive the PLO chairman out of Lebanon a second time. In the “War of the Camps” of 1985–88, in which the Syrian-backed Amal movement besieged the Palestinian camps of Beirut and killed and starved thousands of their inhabitants, the PFLP-GC stood with Damascus against the camps’ Fatah defenders — a fact that Palestinians in Shatila and Burj al-Barajneh have not forgotten. It left the PLO’s Executive Committee, opposed Madrid and Oslo, and helped found the Damascus-based Alliance of Palestinian Forces in 1993.

The organisation was long alleged by Western investigators to have carried out the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988; the theory dominated the first two years of the inquiry before the investigation turned to Libya, and the PFLP-GC has always denied involvement. The United States designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997; the European Union added it to its terrorist list in 2002. Ahmad Jibril died in Damascus in July 2021 at the age of eighty-three, having led the organisation for fifty-three years; his son Jihad Jibril, the commander of its armed wing, had been killed by a car bomb in Beirut in May 2002. Talal Naji succeeded him as secretary-general.

The PFLP-GC survives, mainly in Syria and Lebanon, much diminished by its decision to fight for the Syrian government in the civil war after 2011 — a choice that cost it heavily in the Palestinian camps, above all in Yarmouk in Damascus, once the largest Palestinian community in the world, which was besieged and largely destroyed between 2013 and 2018. Its history is a hard case for any archive: an organisation founded on the entirely defensible proposition that a liberation movement needs a serious military capacity, which then spent most of its existence as an instrument of an Arab state against other Palestinians.

Sources

• Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command — Wikipedia
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP (on Jibril’s October 1968 withdrawal) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Ahmed Jibril — Wikipedia
• Jibril Agreement, May 1985 — Wikipedia
• Foreign Terrorist Organizations — U.S. Department of State