Habash, George

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George Habash

August 2, 1926

Lydda, Palestine Mandate

Leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

"For decades world opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now."

T hrough a half century of Palestinian resistance to the nation of Israel, which was established on Palestinian land in 1948, several different kinds of opposition have arisen. One recent kind is militant Islam, represented by Osama bin Laden (c. 1957–; see entry), in which Palestinian nationalism, the desire to found a new Palestinian nation on the land controlled by Israel, is seen as part of worldwide Muslim resistance to the Jewish state.

George Habash, however, was born a Christian. His opposition to Israel is not based on religious or ethnic grounds. Even as mainstream Palestinian groups moved toward peace with Israel, Habash and his followers in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) remain opposed to negotiating a treaty with Israel.

As leader of the PFLP, Habash was the main Palestinian opponent of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat (1929–; see entry). Where Arafat believes the Palestinian Arabs must create their own nationalist opposition to Israel, Habash believes that the entire Arab people must rise up to defeat Israel. Habash supports pan-Arabism, the belief that all Arabs should unite in a single nation. The tensions between Israelis and Arabs have sometimes hidden the fact that quarrels among Arabs have resulted in nearly as many terrorist incidents as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Birth and childhood in Palestine

Habash was born on August 2, 1926, in the city of Lydda, Palestine (now called Lod, a city in Israel). His family, who were well-to-do merchants, were members of the Greek Orthodox Christian Church.

In the 1920s Palestine was governed by Great Britain under a "man-date" granted by the League of Nations (the international organization that came before the United Nations) after the Ottoman Emprie, which had ruled Palestine, was defeated during World War I (1914–18). As Habash was growing up, Arab Palestinians and Zionist Jews were fighting over the future of the land. (Zionism is the movement that had as its goal the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.) Palestinian Arabs wanted another Arab state, like the one that had been set up in Lebanon after the war. Jews, including some immigrants from Europe, wanted a Jewish state: Israel. To support their claim on the land, which was held holy by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, the Jews pointed to a promise made by Britain's prime minister during World War I, Arthur Balfour (1848–1930). In 1917 Balfour had offered European Zionists land for Israel after the war ended.

In 1948, when Habash was twenty-two, Israel declared its independence. Almost immediately armies from surrounding Arab countries, as well as Arabs living inside the new country, attacked. The new Israeli army successfully defended its country, but the fighting resulted in thousands of Palestinian Arabs being driven from their homes. Habash's family was among them.

Words to Know

Intifada:: a popular uprising by Palestinians living under Israeli control.
Palestinian nationalism:: the desire to found a new Palestinian nation on the land controlled by Israel.
Pan-Arabism:: the idea that all Arabs should unite in a single nation.
Zionism:: the movement with the goal of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Habash moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he studied at the American University of Beirut and became a pediatrician, a doctor who treats children. He opened a child-care clinic, the "Clinic of the People," and a school for the children of Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan. He stayed there for five years, until 1957. But pediatrics was not to be his life's work.

Entry into Palestinian politics

While still at the American University, Habash became a follower of Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), who dreamed of a single unified Arab country. Habash organized the Arab Nationalist Movement, whose aim was to unite the Arab world against Israel. Unlike the rival Fatah organization led by Arafat, whose goal was to lead the Palestinian Arabs to create a nation of their own, the Arab Nationalist Movement focused on leading all Arabs against Israel.

In 1957 Habash moved to Damascus, Syria, which had become part of the short-lived United Arab Republic, a union of Egypt (led by Nasser) and Syria. The union dissolved four years later, in 1961, and Habash was forced to leave Syria. He moved to Beirut. In 1964 Habash organized Palestinian members of the Arab Nationalist Movement into a new command, with himself in charge. But three years later, the Six Day War (June 1967), in which Israeli troops easily defended itself against the invading armies of surrounding Arab states, including Egypt, was a serious blow to Nasser's ideal of Arab unity.

The result of the Arab loss was the formation of the PFLP in 1967, an organization that became famous over the next decade for a series of spectacular terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. In the PFLP's founding statement, Habash declared that "the only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence." It was necessary, he said, that the PFLP should turn "the occupied territories [captured by Israel in the 1967 war] into an inferno whose fires consume the usurpers [people who seize something by force]."

Terrorism in earnest

In addition to opposing Israel, the PFLP also turned its anger on Arab governments that supported negotiating a peace treaty with Israel. Habash's organization fought both Israel and these Arab states to avoid a peace treaty with Israel.

The first terrorist attack by the PFLP came in 1968, when its agents seized an El Al (Israel's national airline) jet on a flight from Rome, Italy, to Tel Aviv, Israel, and forced it to land in Algiers, Algeria. There, in exchange for the passengers, the hijackers demanded freedom for sixteen Palestinians jailed by Israel. It took a month, but eventually Israel gave in.

The El Al hijacking put the PFLP in the spotlight. Terrorist groups in Europe, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, formed alliances with the PFLP. The KGB (the spy agency of the Soviet Union) also took favorable notice of the PFLP. So did a Venezuelan-born radical named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who soon joined the PFLP and became one of its leading terrorists: Carlos the Jackal (see entries on Baader and Ensslin; Fusako Shigenobu; and Carlos the Jackal).

The hijackings continue

Aircraft hijackings became a specialty of the PFLP. On September 6, 1970, the PFLP attempted to hijack four passenger jets on the same day. The first hijacking, of an El Al Israeli plane, failed when the pilot put the plane into a dive, knocking the hijackers off their feet. One hijacker was shot to death by a security guard, and the other, Leila Khaled, was taken prisoner. The second plane, a Pan American 747, was too big to land at the airstrip in Jordan as planned. It flew instead to the larger airport at Cairo, Egypt, where the passengers were ordered off the plane and the plane was then blown up by the hijackers.

The two other planes hijacked that day were forced to land in Jordan. Yet another plane was hijacked by PFLP sympathizers on a flight from Bombay, India, to London, England, on September 9, 1970, and also forced to land in Jordan. The PFLP said the hijackings were to avenge America's providing military aid to Israel. In exchange for the planes and passengers, the PFLP demanded that several prisoners be released from European jails.

Eventually the passengers and crews were released in exchange for Khaled and several other prisoners, and the planes were blown up on the ground. Although the hijackings were partly successful, Jordan's King Hussein (1935–1999) was furious that the PFLP had staged the incident on Jordanian soil without his permission. The king ordered his army to drive out armed Palestinians from his country in the battle that became known as Black September.

Along with most of the other Palestinian resistance organizations, the PFLP went to southern Lebanon. Habash sent his new Venezuelan recruit, Carlos the Jackal, to London to oversee a series of terrorist incidents under Habash's direction.

In May 1972 the PFLP joined the Japanese Red Army to stage another terrorist attack inside Israel. A group of Japanese, posing as tourists, pulled out guns at the passenger terminal in Lod Airport in Israel and opened fire, killing twenty-six people.

On the international scene, however, Palestinians realized that the terrorist incidents were not helping their cause and were, in fact, turning other countries against them. In 1973 the PLO declared that international attacks (as opposed to attacks on Israel itself) should be abandoned. Although he disliked the PLO, Habash agreed to drop international terrorist incidents. However, his partner in the PFLP, Wadi Haddad, disagreed with the decision. Haddad's part of the PFLP continued to carry out terrorist attacks outside the Middle East.

Change in tactics

After 1973 Habash limited his attacks to targets in Israel, outposts of the government Israel helped set up in southern Lebanon, and Jordan, which was beginning to talk to Israel about a peace agreement.

In 1978 President Anwar el-Sadat (1918–1981) of Egypt signed the Camp David Accords, in which Israel and Egypt agreed to negotiate a peace agreement. For Habash, it was a terrible blow. The homeland of his hero Nasser (who had died of a heart attack in 1970) had become the first Arab state to sign a peace agreement with Israel. The possibility of uniting the Arab world behind the Palestinian cause was shattered by the sight of Sadat shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (1913–1992; see entry).

In 1980 Habash suffered a serious stroke that disabled him for several months. Habash never fully regained his influence. Instead, he took on the role of a senior wise man for the Palestinian cause. (However, he did not formally resign as head of the PFLP until 2000.)

In 1987 the PLO launched the first Intifada, a popular uprising by Palestinians living under Israeli control. The PFLP became one of the most active groups in organizing car bombings and assassination attempts against Israeli targets.

The 1993 peace negotiations between Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) of Israel, which resulted in the peace agreement known as the Oslo Accords, enraged Habash. He spoke out against the agreements and joined other radical Palestinian groups in opposing them. For the first time he allied with two Islamic organizations, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. It was an unusual friendship, since the Christian Habash had rooted his positions in political philosophy while those of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad are rooted in Islam.