Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Not to be confused with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين- القيادة العامة
Logo of PFLP-GC
Founder	Ahmed Jibril
General Secretary	Ahmed Jibril
Founded	1968 (1968)
Headquarters	Damascus, Syria
Ideology	Anti-Zionism Arab Nationalism Socialism Palestinian nationalism Left-wing Nationalism Guerrilla warfare
Political position	Far-left
International affiliation	Affiliated to the Syrian Government under Assad and Ba'ath Party command.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين - القيادة العامة) is a Palestinian nationalist organization, backed by Syria and Iran. It is considered a terrorist organisation by more than 30 countries.

Background

The PFLP-GC was founded in 1968 as a Syrian-backed splinter group from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It was - and still is - headed by Secretary-General Ahmed Jibril, also known by the kunya "Abu Jihad" (not to be confused with Khalil al-Wazir, the head of Fatah's armed wing who used the same nom de guerre), a former military officer in the Syrian Army who had been one of the PFLP's early leaders. The PFLP-GC declared that its primary focus would be military, not political, complaining that the PFLP had been devoting too much time and resources to Marxist philosophizing.

Although the group was initially a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it always opposed Yassir Arafat and opposes any political settlement with Israel; for this reason, it has never participated in the peace process. The PFLP-GC left the PLO in 1974 to join the Rejectionist Front, protesting what they saw as the PLO's move towards an accommodation with Israel in the Arafat-backed Ten Point Program of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). Unlike most of the organizations involved in the Rejectionist Front, the PFLP-GC never resumed its role within the PLO.

Relations to the PLO

PFLP-GC is considered very close to Syria, and has in effect acted as a Syrian proxy force in Lebanon both during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), and after the Syrian occupation of Lebanon after the war. In 1976, after the PFLP-GC supported Syrian attacks on the PLO, an anti-Jibril faction defected from the organization, and created the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF).

The PFLP-GC in Lebanon

The group has limited influence in Palestinian politics, but is still influential in the Palestinian refugee camps of Syria, where it is based, and Lebanon, where Syrian support added to its importance. Its role in Lebanon after Syria left the country in 2005 (see Cedar Revolution) is uncertain, and it has been involved in a number of clashes with Lebanese security forces. In late October 2005, the Lebanese Army surrounded camps of the PFLP-GC in a tense standoff, after Lebanese authorities claimed that the PFLP-GC was receiving Syrian arms across the border.^[1] The group has come under fierce criticism within Lebanon, accused of acting on Syria's behalf to stir up unrest.^[2]

Designations as a terrorist organization

The PFLP-GC is designated a terrorist organization by the United States (see the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations), the European Union, Canada, and Israel.

Armed actions

Further information: Night of the Gliders

In the 1970s and 1980s, the group carried out a number of attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, and gained notoriety for using spectacular means. In one such attack, a guerrilla landed a motorised hang glider (apparently supplied by Libya^[3]) near an army camp near Kiryat Shemona in Northern Israel on 25 November 1987. He killed six soldiers and wounded several others, before being shot dead himself.^[4] The action has been seen by some as providing the catalyst for the eruption of the First Intifada.^[5] The PFLP-GC has not been involved in major attacks on Israeli targets since the early 1990s, but it has reportedly cooperated with the Hezbollah guerrillas in South Lebanon.

On February 21, 1970, the group used its first barometric triggers to detonate two in-flight airliners nearly simultaneously. A Swissair flight to Tel Aviv that fell in Canton Argau killing 41, and an Austrian Airlines flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, which actually failed to destroy the aircraft, which made an emergency landing.^[6]

From 1970-73, the group targeted a number of aircraft; typically having members seduce single young women and promise them a life of adventure and love - often while getting them addicted to drugs - before asking them to carry some cash and a mysterious package onto a flight to Tel Aviv. While the girls assumed they were helping their "boyfriends" pass drugs, they were unknowingly carrying explosives.^[6]

The PFLP-GC was responsible for the Avivim school bus massacre in 1970 and the Kiryat Shmona massacre in 1974.

Supporters of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing have suggested the PFLP-GC was in fact responsible [5]

Distinctions from other groups

Jibril joined with George Habash in 1967 as more or less an equal partner in the PFLP leadership. When he quickly tired of the group's lack of field initiative, he was therefore still able to leave while retaining a significant retainer of his previous supporters. One of his most hated enemies within the group, Naif Hawatmeh, unintentionally provided him with the pretext: While Jibril wrestled with Habash over why the Popular Front was so dependent on theoretical discussion rather than armed struggle, Hawatmeh tried to influence the PFLP in the direction of an ideology as leftist as possible.

Jibril decided that Hawatmeh's theorizing was chafing the PFLP and producing an organization of impotent intellectuals, and declared as such when he formed the General Command. Habash, he stated, had become a puppet to the professors of the exile, the elite among the refugees who were well-educated and wealthy, yet preached class revolution to the masses in the camps.

From the start, the PFLP-GC was more concentrated on means than ends. They never depended on a political platform; most of their recruits were young, exiled, poor, illiterate, and angry. The General Command promised a gun in every hand, and the means to write their own narrative rather than read and praise those of others as the better off exiles did in universities in Europe.

Jibril still used iron discipline to keep his fighters loyal and professional, and the General Command's insurgents were as a result for decades considered the best trained of any of the Palestinian guerrilla groups. What may have helped Jibril was Hawatmeh's own 1969 defection from the PFLP to form the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP, later without the "Popular"), after Habash tried to compensate for some of the problems that had caused Jibril's exit.

After 1969 Habash could no longer claim that he was the head of the true organization, as all three of the group's original triumvirate were now separate. Nevertheless, due to the PFLP's spectacular successes, including the Dawson's Field hijackings (September 1970), Lod Airport Massacre (1971), and coordination with the Fatah-backed Black September group in the Munich Olympic killings (September 5–6, 1972), Habash continued to be the first among equals among the Rejectionist Front, the groups that refused any permanent settlement in a framework other than military victory.

Jibril therefore focused on carving out a stake of the PLO recruitment in Lebanese refugee camps. While Fatah absorbed enormous casualties in the 1982 Lebanon War, the General Command succeeded in surviving, and at the end retained most of its previous manpower.

After Oslo

Following the rise of Hamas in the 1987-91 First Intifada among Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jibril found an able ally in resisting the trend started by Fatah leader Yasser Arafat toward a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By that time, the Rejectionist Front was composed primarily of leftist groups, among them the PFLP, DFLP, General Command, PLF, and numerous other small factions. However, the members of these PLO groups were limited in their ability to confront Fatah, which never lost its supremacy within the umbrella organization. The only group that waged uninterrupted attrition against Arafat was the Fatah Revolutionary Council led by maverick hardliner Sabri al-Banna (better known as Abu Nidal), who was viewed by other Palestinian organizations as not so much a guerrilla as a pure criminal with no higher goal than deposing the moderates at the head of the PLO.

Though many Palestinians still were opposed to compromising on the principle of defeating Israel by armed struggle, the existing groups could not channel their desires, as many of them were led by the elite among the exile population, who were detached from the reality of the refugee camps, be they in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. Many leaders of Palestinian groups lived in luxurious accommodations throughout the Eastern Bloc, Europe, or various Arab states, especially Syria, Iraq, and Libya Jibril uniquely insisted on living in a specially designed security bunker in the Lebanon mountains, a hilly terrain that was more attuned to the image of a guerrilla leader than Arafat's mansions in Tunis.

With the emergence of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad throughout the 1980s, Jibril proved more able to cope than Habash and his other allies in the Rejectionist Front. This was enabled by a factor that had nothing to do with his abilities or beliefs: While Habash was a Greek Orthodox and Hawatmeh a Greek Catholic Christian, Jibril was a Muslim.

Throughout the 1980s the General Command actively cooperated with the nascent Hezbollah paramilitary group (made mostly of Shia Muslims) dedicated to armed struggle against Israel, as well as with Syria and Iran, both of whom fund and arm Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the mid-1990s, Jibril held conferences with these groups in Tehran and Damascus in order to achieve tighter coordination of activities, though his organization remained small and its own actions were more concerned with aiding Hezbollah and achieving an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The Israelis never forgot Jibril's spectacular exploits, especially the Night of the Hang Gliders, and used a variety of operations to try and kill him, none successfully, although his son and heir Jihad Ahmed Jibril was assassinated by a car bomb on May 20, 2002, with the identity of the assassins unknown. Due to these activities, the General Command is regarded as the most hard-line of the old insurgent groups, and currently resists the Oslo Accords from its bases in Syria and Lebanon.

Holocaust denial

According to MEMRI, in an interview aired on Al-Alam TV on May 15, 2009, PFLP-GC representative in Lebanon Anwar Raja denied the Holocaust, claiming that "the Jews have managed to falsify history" according to their interests and that the figure of 6 million Jews (killed by the Nazis) is an "inflation, falsification, and exaggeration". He further claimed that "If Hitler had won, we would be reading a different version of history" and that "Hitler was no worse than the current U.S. administration" ^[7]

References

1. ^ [1][2]
2. ^ The Daily Star - Politics - Outrage after PFLP-GC gunmen shoot two
3. ^ "Sponsoring Terrorism: Syria and the PFLP-GC" (September 2002)
4. ^ [3] [4]
5. ^ Die linke Opposition in der PLO und in den besetzten Gebiete
6. ^ ^{a b} Katz, Samuel M. "Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the manhunt for the al-Qaeda terrorists", 2002
7. ^ "PFLP-GC Representative in Lebanon Anwar Raja Denies Holocaust, Claims 'Hitler Was No Worse Than the Current U.S. Administration'". MEMRI. http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD237509. Retrieved 2009-05-28. 

External links

Palestine portal

• PFLP-GC official site
• Terrorism Resources. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) (U.S. Navy) Source: Country Reports on Terrorism, 2004. United States Department of State, April 2005.
• Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (ICT)
• The International Dimension of PFLP-GC Activity by David Tal. The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. JCSS Project on Low Intensity Warfare & The Jerusalem Post INTER – International Terrorism in 1989 (pp. 61–77) Tel-Aviv, 1990
• Collection of PFLP-GC posters

Further Reading

Katz, Samuel M.Israel versus Jibril: The Thirty-year War Against a Master Terrorist. New York: Paragon House, 1993.