A

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

LEADER: Ahmed Sadaat

ESTIMATED SIZE: 800

USUAL AREA OF OPERATION: Syria; Lebanon; Israel; West Bank; Gaza Strip

U.S. TERRORIST EXCLUSION LIST DESIGNEE: The U.S. Department of State first designated the PFLP a terrorist organization in October 1997

OVERVIEW

The Marxist-Leninist PFLP emerged from the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1967. It viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict not as a religious struggle nor even particularly nationalistic but as part of a broader revolution against Western imperialism. During the so-called heyday of Palestinian terrorism in the early 1970s, the PFLP gained a reputation for spectacular attacks, particularly aircraft hijackings. In the recent past, its most notorious act was the assassination of the Israeli Tourism Minister, Rehavam Ze'evi, in October 2001.

HISTORY

The roots of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) lie as far back as 1953 with the formation of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) by the Palestinian-Christian, Dr. George Habash in Beirut. Habash identified the Palestinian fight for independence as part of a wider struggle within the Arab world against Western imperialism. He saw that the Arab people were inherently weak because of a lack of education and unity when compared to their Western "enemy," and in order to progress and shake off its colonial shackles, Arab society had to be rebuilt and a new breed of man emerge.

Habash's ideas were similar to those of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his emergent Ba'ath movement, in that they both propagated a kind of anti-imperialist, secular pan-Arabism. However, Habash was a Marxist-Leninist doctrinaire and his worldview was framed by socialism. Later, he liked to compare himself to the Cuban revolutionaries.

The ANM formed underground branches throughout the Middle East, including Libya, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and several Gulf States. It also formed a commando group, Youth for Revenge (or Youth Avengers) in 1964, which began carrying out attacks in Israel that year. In 1967, shortly after the devastating Six Day War, Youth for Revenge merged with two other groups, the Syrian-backed Palestine Liberation Front, and Heroes of the Return, a paramilitary group set up in Lebanon in 1966, which already had strong links to the ANM. This new coalition was named the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and would retain strong links to the ANM.

Like the ANM, the PFLP combined militant nationalism and violence, explained and justified in Marxist rhetoric. For instance, it considered itself "a progressive vanguard organization of the Palestinian working class [dedicated] to liberating all of Palestine and establishing a democratic socialist Palestinian state." Essentially, like all Palestinian liberation groups, it was committed to the elimination of Israel, but only as part of a global communist revolution.

Habash, a particularly uncompromising individual, was, from the outset, in conflict with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement over various issues of principle but also power and representation in the PLO. He refused to join the PLO in 1968, a position he maintained until 1972, although following Jordan's "Black September" crackdown on Palestinian groups in 1970, the PFLP agreed to take part in the Palestinian National Council and some other PLO institutions.

Nor was it just Arafat that Habash fell out with. A power struggle between Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front element of the PFLP coalition, and Habash bubbled over in spring 1968. The two disagreed on the principle of state sponsorship, with Jibril believing that the Palestinian struggle could not succeed without outside sponsorship. Habash, fearing Syrian domination and for his own position against a Damascus-backed rival, disagreed, and the two rival factions went their separate ways. Jibril founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) with his followers in December 1968, leading it from Damascus. Habash returned to Lebanon, leading a diminished PFLP.

Nevertheless, Habash's faction quickly made a name for itself with a series of spectacular terrorist attacks. In July 1968, PFLP terrorists forced an El Al plane flying from Rome to Tel Aviv to land in Algeria. The flight had been targeted because the PFLP incorrectly believed the Israeli general, Ariel Sharon, to be on board. At Algiers, twenty-one passengers and eleven crew members were held hostage for thirty-nine days. This marked the first in a series of plane hijackings orchestrated by the organization (and the only time an El Al flight has been successfully hijacked).

Like the Abu Nidal Organization after it, the PFLP showed a remarkable ability to conduct terrorist attacks from a variety of locations. Gunmen opened fire on an El Al flight leaving Athens for New York in December 1968, killing one passenger. (In accordance with a policy of holding Arab governments responsible for fedayeen terrorism, Israel responded with a commando mission on Beirut Airport, which destroyed thirteen Lebanese passenger jets valued at $100 million and nearly plunged the region into war.) In a repeat attack at the Zurich airport, on February 18, 1969, PFLP opened fire on an El Al passenger jet taxiing for take off. In August that year, a PFLP cell, led by Leila Khaled (who would emerge as the PFLP's most glamorous and iconic member), hijacked a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Damascus and held two Israeli passengers hostage for forty-four days. In September, it simultaneously carried out grenade attacks on the Israeli embassies in The Hague, Bonn, and El Al's Brussels office.

Yet, the PFLP saved its most notorious attack for the following year. On September 6, 1970, the PFLP simultaneously hijacked three passenger jets: a TWA flight from Frankfurt; a Swissair flight traveling between Zurich and New York; and a Pan Am flight from Amsterdam. A fourth attempt to hijack an El Al flight led by Leila Khaled was thwarted, and the plane took an emergency landing at London. The TWA and Swissair flights were taken to Dawson's Field in Jordan; the Pan Am flight, which had been more spontaneous and carried out by two PFLP members denied passage on Khaled's flight, was taken to Cario via Beirut. There, it was blown up as a sign of the PFLP's disgust at Nasser for agreeing to Middle East peace negotiations.

Concerned that they might not have enough British nationals to trade for Khaled's release, four days later a PFLP team hijacked a London-bound BOAC flight shortly after its takeoff from Bahrain. The VC-10, carrying 105 passengers and a crew of ten, was ordered by two gunmen to land at Dawson's Field (renamed by the terrorists as "Revolution Airstrip") beside the two other hijacked aircraft.

Meanwhile, the PLFP, with worldwide attention focused on them and their cause, held regular press conferences at which they extolled their demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Europe and Israel, also giving publicity to the cause of Palestinian liberation. The hostage takers draped banners on the airliners' open doors and even painted the Popular Front's name in large Arabic letters across the fuselage of two of the crafts. They also provided ambulance rides for child hostages, helped older passengers climb down onto the tarmac for daily exercise, and brought in a doctor to attend to medical problems. Hostages would later joke of the congenial atmosphere that predominated, with one stewardess likening it to a "six day pajama party."

Concerns, however, that U.S. or Israeli commandos were preparing a raid on the hostage takers led them to evacuate the jets and blow them up, thus bringing an end to the dramatic hostage crisis.

King Hussein of Jordan, however, disliked the global attention the crisis had brought on his country, and, fearing an uprising from the 25,000 Palestinian fedayeen in his country, used it as a pretext to crackdown on militants. These events became known as "Black September," and forced the Palestinians out of Jordan at a cost of thousands of lives.

In turn, Black September was to have a unifying effect on the PLO, which would lessen the PFLP's violence. Moves towards membership of the PLO were instigated immediately after Black September, with full membership following in 1972. Throughout the 1970s, the PFLP would exist as the second largest group within the PLO, although it rejected Arafat's attempts to engineer a settlement with Israel, and in September 1976 left the PLO Executive in protest at such attempts.

Moves towards politicization were not, however, always without internal conflicts. Habash came to have little faith in the pursuit of terrorism and did not believe that it would further the Palestinian cause. Wadi Haddad, the mastermind behind the PFLP's litany of attacks, by contrast, was a staunch supporter in taking the armed struggle to the world.

At the Third Congress of the PFLP in March 1972, Habash persuaded the majority of delegates to reject "operations outside Palestine," but Haddad refused to accept the decision. In May 1972, he used PFLP allies from the Japanese Red Army (a left wing Japanese terror group) to stage what became known as the "Deir Yassin Operation." Posing as tourists, the Red Army operatives bypassed Israeli security officials at Lod Airport, before opening fire with automatic weapons: twenty-five Israelis were killed and seventy-eight wounded.

Haddad continued to utilize overseas contacts to engage in terror. On June 27, 1976, two Haddad operatives, along with two members of the West German Baader-Meinhof Gang posing as German tourists, hijacked an Air France jet in Athens and took it to Entebbe in Uganda, via Libya, where it held the passengers and crew hostage. Israeli commandos ended the crisis with a daring raid, which killed all the terrorists and liberated all but one of the hostages. The following October, another PFLP/Baader-Meinhof team hijacked a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu, where West German paramilitaries eventually freed the aircraft.

The outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 saw the PFLP return to Syria, where the Syrian President Assad sought to curtail its extremism. From thereon, the militancy of the PLFP was severely limited, and it followed a Fatah pledge in 1988 not to engage in terrorism outside Gaza and the West Bank. The decline and fall of the USSR, on which it was reliant for financial, military, moral, and political support, also weakened the organization. Its opposition to the Oslo Accords in 1993 also precluded it from returning to the Occupied Territories and playing a part in the Palestinian Authority, until it accepted an invitation from the PA to join it in 1999.

George Habash's retirement in 2000 and the onset of the al-Aqsa intifada later on that year saw a shift in strategy. Israel accused the PFLP of carrying out several bomb attacks in Jerusalem, and in August 2001 assassinated Habash's successor Abu Ali Mustafa, a killing that prompted worldwide outrage. In reprisal, the PLFP killed Israel's hard-line Tourist Minister Ramavah Ze'evi two months later.

Under pressure from Israel, the Palestinian Authority subsequently arrested a number of PFLP leaders, including its new leader, Ahmed Sadaat. Nevertheless, the organization has continued to show glimpses of its deadly potential. For instance, in April 2002, Israeli officials claimed to have foiled an attempt to blow up a Tel Aviv skyscraper (this has also been linked to the PFLP-GC), and it has been linked to a number of subsequent suicide bombings in Israel.

PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist-Leninist organization committed to the liberation of Palestine and creation of a new world order based on socialism. Its founder and long-term leader, George Habash, often compared the Palestinian struggle to that of the Cuban revolutionaries, and its central tenet is a commitment to socialism as opposed to nationalism (like Fatah) or religion (like Hamas). It is committed to the destruction of Israel as a way of creating a Palestinian homeland, and it opposed the PLO's efforts to reach a political settlement in the 1970s and 1980s, likewise the Oslo Accords of 1993.

In its early stages, Habash sought to model the PFLP on the Cuban revolutionaries, building up a small, highly educated and ideologically motivated organization. Given its physical limitations, it used international terrorism as a way of bringing world attention to the Palestinian problem, particularly through the use of aircraft hijackings. Casualties in these attacks and waged frequent press conferences to publicize their cause. In particular, Leila Khaled, became an iconic figure through such publicity.

From the late 1970s, the PFLP was hamstrung by its Syrian hosts and was thus limited in its extremist activities. Its return to Palestine in 1999 and the retirement of Habash a year later has seen attempts to switch the PFLP's focus to being a mainstream secular alternative to Fatah, although only with limited success. Terrorist activities since then have consisted of attacks on Israeli civilians, as well as accusations of suicide bombings and the assassination of a senior Israeli politician.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

In the wake of the PFLP's quadruple hijacking in September 1970, Time magazine hinted at some of the global outrage caused by such audacity. "Skyjackers are the greatest threat to travel since bandits roamed the Old West, " it asserted. "With astonishing impunity, the pirates of the skies are able to take over the swift vehicles that represent the most advanced developments of modern technological civilization. Less and less often are the culprits misfits and former mental patients seeking psychic as well as physical escape. Increasingly, they are dedicated, vicious political fanatics, who have discovered that one of the most vulnerable points of the developed world is a jetliner at an altitude of 30,000 ft."

Time then went on to suggest that such acts did little to further the Palestinian cause. "If the world has become a global village … the Palestinians have become its most troubled ghetto minority," it stated. "Evicted from their ancient homeland by the influx of Jews after World War II, the Palestinians were driven into the squalid misery of refugee camps on the Jordanian desert. The Arab governments, which could have helped them, preferred to allow the refugees to remain in the camps as living symbols of the Israeli usurpation. The Israelis were unwilling to accept large numbers of Palestinians inside their own borders and thus risk becoming a minority within their own state. Gradually, the Palestinians honed their hostility. From the sons and daughters of the original refugees have sprung thousands of guerrilla fighters whose fury intimidates even the Arab governments."

In a 1974 essay on guerilla warfare, Walter Lacquer traced back two centuries of guerilla movements all the way through to the Palestinians. While hijackings and suchlike might provoke outrage and consternation, it kept the Palestinian cause alive. "Despite all their setbacks, the Palestinian terrorist organizations have succeeded in their main aim, which is to keep the Palestinian issue alive," he wrote. "Their failure to establish an effective resistance movement inside Israel was regarded by the Israelis as a decisive defeat, but with guerrilla warfare in the generally accepted meaning of the term impossible inside Israel, the Palestinians found by trial and error that there were other ways of carrying on the struggle, and that publicity was the decisive weapon in this particular fight. Hence the decision to hijack planes, the attacks against foreign ambassadors in Khartoum, the Munich massacre, and similar operations.

"These actions were widely condemned, but what was infinitely more important, they were given a great deal of publicity. The Israelis, it was said, had driven the Arab refugees to these acts of despair, and there would be no peace in the Middle East unless justice were done to the Palestinian cause. It remains doubtful whether this strategy would have succeeded but for the growing dependence of the industrialized countries on Arab oil, but there was an auspicious international constellation and the Palestinians made the most of it. Confidence has risen dramatically in recent months. The Zionist state, as the Palestinian terrorists see it, is in a condition of advanced decay; a few more determined pushes and it will collapse altogether. 'We believed the struggle would last a hundred years, now we think it will last only ten,' one of the Palestinian leaders in Beirut was quoted as saying the other day."

SUMMARY

Following the retirement of a charismatic leader, PFLP has struggled to carve a niche in the post-Oslo political era, created by a peace deal that it steadfastly rejected. Attacks linked to it in the al-Aqsa intifada at best seem to be exaggerated attempts to grab some of the limelight, and it looks as if the PFLP's heyday passed with its last skyjacking nearly three decades ago.

PRIMARY SOURCE
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

DESCRIPTION

Formerly a part of the PLO, the Marxist-Leninist PFLP was founded by George Habash when it broke away from the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1967. The PFLP does not view the Palestinian struggle as religious, seeing it instead as a broader revolution against Western imperialism. The group earned a reputation for spectacular international attacks, including airline hijackings, that have killed at least twenty US citizens.

ACTIVITIES

The PFLP committed numerous international terrorist attacks during the 1970s. Since 1978, the group has conducted attacks against Israeli or moderate Arab targets, including killing a settler and her son in December 1996. The PFLP has stepped up its operational activity since the start of the current intifadah, highlighted by at least two suicide bombings since 2003, multiple joint operations with other Palestinian terrorist groups, and assassination of the Israeli Tourism Minster in 2001 to avenge Israel's killing of the PFLP Secretary General earlier that year.

STRENGTH

Unknown.

LOCATION/AREA OF OPERATION

Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

EXTERNAL AID

Receives safe haven and some logistical assistance from Syria.

Source: U.S. Department of State. Country Reports on Terrorism. Washington, D.C., 2004.

SOURCES

Books

Khaled, Leila. My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.

Savigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993. England: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Web sites

Red Pepper Magazine. "Interview with Leila Khaled." http://www.redpepper.org.uk/intarch/x-khaled.html (accessed October 19, 2005).

Time Magazine. "Habash: 'Israel Will Fall.'" http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,945844,00.html (accessed October 19, 2005).

SEE ALSO

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC)

Abu Nidal Organization