Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
The []Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Palestinian Marxist–Leninist organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization, the largest being Fatah.
A secular organization, the PFLP has generally taken a hard line on Palestinian national aspirations, opposing the more moderate stance of Fatah. It does not recognize Israel and promotes a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The military wing of the PFLP is called the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades.
The PFLP pioneered armed aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More recently, the group has participated in the ongoing Gaza war alongside Hamas and other allied Palestinian factions. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Japan, Canada and the European Union.
Ahmad Sa'adat, who was sentenced in 2006 to 30 years in an Israeli prison, has served as General Secretary of the PFLP since 2001., the PFLP boycotts participation in the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian National Council.
History
Arab Nationalist Movement
The PFLP grew out of the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab, or Arab Nationalist Movement, founded in 1953 by George Habash, a Palestinian Christian from Lydda. In 1948, 19-year-old Habash, a medical student, went to his home town of Lydda during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War to help his family. While he was there, the Israel Defense Forces attacked the city and forced most of its civilian population to leave in what became known as the Lydda Death March. They marched for three days without food or water until they reached the Arab armies' front lines, leading to the death of his sister. Habash finished his medical education in Lebanon at the American University in Beirut, graduating in 1951.In an interview with US journalist John K. Cooley, Habash argued for viewing "the liberation of Palestine as something not to be isolated from events in the rest of the Arab world" and identified "the main reason for defeat" as triumph of "the scientific society of Israel" over "our own backwardness in the Arab world"; because of this, he "called for the total rebuilding of Arab society into a twentieth-century society" and a "scientific and technical renaissance in the Arab world". The ANM was founded in this nationalist spirit. " held the 'Guevara view' of the 'revolutionary human being, Habash told Cooley. "A new breed of man had to emerge, among the Arabs as everywhere else. This meant applying everything in human power to the realization of a cause."
The ANM formed underground branches in several Arab countries, including Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, then still under British rule. It adopted secularism and socialist economic ideas, and pushed for armed struggle.
The ANM moves toward armed struggle
From 1962 to 1965, more than 145 ANM members, including Haddad, were trained in the Egyptian army's commando school at Inshas. Egypt also supplied the ANM in Lebanon with small amounts of arms and explosives.In late 1963 the ANM leadership established the Palestinian Action Command, an internal military organisation with nominal authority over the ANM's Palestinian members, wherever they were based. The PAC's formation was opposed by the ANM's leftist faction, who were mostly non-Palestinian.
After Gamal Abdel Nasser refused to take command of a region-wide coalition of revolutionary forces incorporating the ANM, the ANM decided to initiate preparations for armed struggle, and the PAC's name was changed to Revenge Youth Organisation
According to historian Yezid Sayigh, a three-way balance emerged within the ANM, "in which the old guard
headed by Habash and Hindi relied on the Palestinian constituency to counter the Left, but at the same time sought to contain pressures for military action against Israel.")
In collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Palestinian Liberation Army, the ANM established the Abtal al-Audah commando group in early summer 1966. The ANM exercised de facto control, unbeknownst to the PLO, which funded the outfit. Heroes of Return conducted its first operation inside Israel on 19 October, which was launched from Lebanon. Israel responded with a raid into Lebanon, in which its forces dynamited 118 houses. Heroes of Return proceeded to launch a further seven raids from the Jordan-occupied West Bank before the June 1967 war.
Formation of the PFLP
After the Six-Day War of June 1967, ANM initiated discussions with other Palestinian groups concerning the announcement of a united front organisation. Included within the discussions, as well as the ANM, were Heroes of Return, Ahmed Jibril's Syria-based Palestinian Liberation Front, and a group of Jordanian Nasserists led by the former army officer Ahmed Za'rur. These groups combined to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which was announced to the public on 11 December 1967, to coincide with a planned attack on Ben Gurion Airport in Lydda, which was a failure.By early 1968, the PFLP had trained between one and three thousand guerrillas. It had the financial backing of Syria, and was headquartered there, and one of its training camps was based in as-Salt, Jordan. In 1969, the PFLP declared itself a Marxist–Leninist organization, but it has remained faithful to Pan-Arabism, seeing the Palestinian struggle as part of a wider uprising against Western imperialism, which also aims to unite the Arab world by overthrowing "reactionary" regimes. It published a magazine, al-Hadaf, which was edited by Ghassan Kanafani.
Operations
The PFLP gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a series of armed attacks and aircraft hijackings, including on non-Israeli targets. Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades also claimed responsibility for several suicide attacks during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. See #Armed attacks of the PFLP below.Breakaway organizations
In 1967, Palestinian Popular Struggle Front broke away from the PFLP.In October 1968, Ahmed Jibril led a break away from the PFLP to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, and was joined by Ahmed Zarur and his followers. The PFLP-GC took with them around 100 to 200 guerrillas, accounting for around one quarter of the PFLP's armed strength, and Jibril's old Palestinian Liberation Front base near Damascus. Zarur later split from the PFLP-GC to form the Arab Palestine Organisation.
In 1969, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine formed as a separate, ostensibly Maoist, organization under Nayef Hawatmeh and Yasser Abd Rabbo, initially as the PDFLP.
In 1972, the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed following a split in PFLP.
The PFLP had a troubled relationship with George Habash's one-time deputy, Wadie Haddad, who was eventually expelled because he refused orders to stop hijacking operations abroad. Haddad has been identified in released Soviet archival documents as having been a KGB intelligence agent in place, who in 1975 received arms for the movement directly from Soviet sources in a nighttime transfer in the Sea of Aden.
PLO membership
The PFLP joined the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella organization of the Palestinian national movement, in 1968, becoming the second-largest faction after Yasser Arafat's Fatah. In 1974, it withdrew from the PLO Executive Committee to join the Rejectionist Front following the creation of the PLO's Ten Point Program, accusing the PLO of abandoning the goal of destroying Israel outright in favor of a binational solution, which was opposed by the PFLP leadership. It rejoined the executive committee in 1981.In December 1993 PFLP withdrew from the PLO and became one of the ten founding members of the Damascus-based Alliance of Palestinian Forces, eight of which had been members of the PLO, which was opposed to the Oslo Accords process. PFLP withdrew from APF in 1998. Currently, the PFLP is boycotting participation in the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian National Council.
In December 2009, around 70,000 supporters demonstrated in Gaza to celebrate the PFLP's 42nd anniversary.
After the Oslo Accords
After the occurrence of the First Intifada and the subsequent Oslo Accords the PFLP had difficulty establishing itself in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At that time the popularity of Hamas was rapidly increasing in the wake of their successful strategy of suicide bombings devised by Yahya Ayyash. The dissolution of the Soviet Union together with the rise of Islamism—and particularly the increased popularity of the Islamist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihaddisoriented many left activists who had looked towards the Soviet Union, and has marginalized the PFLP's role in Palestinian politics and armed resistance. However, the organization retains considerable political influence within the PLO, since no new elections have been held for the organization's legislative body, the PNC.The PFLP developed contacts at this time with Islamic fundamentalist groups linked to Iranboth Palestinian Hamas, and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah. The PLO's agreement with Israel in September 1993, and negotiations which followed, further isolated it from the umbrella organization and led it to conclude a formal alliance with the Iranian backed groups.
As a result of its post-Oslo weakness, the PFLP has been forced to adapt slowly and find partners among politically active, preferably young, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in order to compensate for their dependence on their aging commanders returning from or remaining in exile. The PFLP has therefore formed alliances with other leftist groups formed within the Palestinian Authority, including the Palestinian People's Party and the Popular Resistance Committees of Gaza.
In 1990, the PFLP transformed its Jordan branch into a separate political party, the Jordanian Popular Democratic Unity Party. From its foundation, the PFLP sought superpower patrons, early on developing ties with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and, at various times, with regional powers such as Syria, South Yemen, Libya, North Korea, and Iraq, as well as with left-wing groups around the world, including the FARC and the Japanese Red Army. When that support diminished or stopped, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the PFLP sought new allies and developed contacts with Islamist groups linked to Iran, despite the PFLP's strong adherence to secularism and anti-clericalism. The relationship between the PFLP and the Islamic Republic of Iran has fluctuatedit strengthened as a result of Hamas moving away from Iran due to differing positions on the Syrian Civil War. Iran rewarded the PFLP for its pro-Assad stance with an increase in financial and military assistance. The PFLP has been accused by Israel of diverting European humanitarian aid from Palestinian NGOs to itself.