The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

‘Where are we going?’

Leila Khaled was born in the port city of Haifa in what was then British-run Palestine. Her father had arrived there as a boy, travelling with his father from southern Lebanon in the 1910s or 20s. He had opened a grocer’s shop and brought Khaled’s mother from Lebanon a few years later to start a family. The Khaleds lived on Stanton Street, a narrow, busy thoroughfare that linked the crowded Arab neighbourhoods of Wadi Salib and Wadi Nisnas. Theirs was a traditional three- or four-storey house faced in local limestone with high, round windows and steep stone steps on one side. To the north was the port complex that the British had built, with its soaring cranes and busy jetties. Inland were the regular, spacious streets of the new suburbs that had been built before the First World War to accommodate Jewish immigrants and which had much expanded since, as successive waves arrived seeking refuge from persecution in eastern Europe. Beyond lay a belt of shanty towns, home to the poorest, most recent arrivals: Arabs from outlying villages seeking escape from hunger and hardship.

In early 1948, as the British prepared to withdraw from Palestine and war broke out between Jewish militia and Arab forces, this much coveted commercial centre, with its population split more or less equally between the two communities, was claimed by both. For months it had been the site of skirmishes, bombings and many deaths. In the initial phase of the war, however, fighting was concentrated around Jerusalem or in remote rural areas, and Haifa remained relatively calm, if very tense. Then, as Jewish forces went on the offensive and made advances throughout the territory of the Mandate, the city’s Arab residents began to flee. Reports of atrocities, some entirely accurate but others often deliberately exaggerated by both sides, accelerated the departures. In early April Khaled was placed in a hired car with her mother and siblings and driven north across the Lebanese border to the small, picturesque port of Tyre, twelve miles from the frontier. Just over a week later, the British withdrew to Haifa’s port area and Jewish fighters took over the city, prompting mass flight of almost all its remaining Arab residents. Within a month, Haifa was part of the newly declared independent state of Israel. This new status did not look likely to change in the immediate future. In intermittent rounds of fighting through the rest of 1948, the new Israel Defence Forces beat back the badly co-ordinated and poorly equipped forces of neighbouring Arab powers and seized much new territory, with further mass displacement of previous inhabitants.

To begin with, the Khaleds moved into the crowded home of a maternal aunt on the outskirts of Tyre. The contrast with their previous life was sharp. The family lived on rations distributed by the United Nations and when Khaled went to school, it was in a tent with a dirt floor. Her parents were among the more affluent of the 120,000 who had fled to Lebanon from what had been Palestine by the time the fighting had come to an end. Most had few skills, scarce funds and few or no local contacts. They lived in insalubrious camps in packed rows of tents, very cold in winter and unbearably hot for much of the rest of the year. But despite the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948 they, like most of the approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees scattered across the region, still believed they would one day regain their villages, land, businesses and property.

The nakba, meaning simply ‘catastrophe’, as it became known, prompted feverish debate among the refugees and throughout the Middle East. One result was the massive reinforcement of a newly emerging identity. Instead of seeing themselves primarily as members of a family, or a village clan, or as Muslims, or simply as former residents of a province of Ottoman-ruled Syria, some began to think of themselves as Palestinians.

There had been the Peleshet or Philistines of biblical reference, a Greek Philistia and a Roman province named Syria Palaestina. The first Arab invaders of the seventh century CE had named one of their military districts Falestin, and by the mid-nineteenth century the description of the territory roughly between the Litani river in the north, the Jordan river in the east and the Sinai Desert to the south as ‘Palestine’ was common. But it was only from the turn of the century that Arab intellectuals in any numbers started talking about being ‘Palestinian’ in the sense of belonging to a clearly-defined community with a shared history, identity and territory. The resistance to Zionism and British rule after the First World War had reinforced this new thinking, but the principal rallying cries during the 1920s and 30s were often the centuries-old ones: defence of Islam, tradition and community and the resolution of local grievances. In the aftermath of the 1948 wars, however, the idea that the Palestinians were a nation with a homeland – one that had just been robbed from them – held powerful appeal among its former residents.

This appeal was further heightened by two apparently contradictory forces. On the one hand, the host populations in their places of exile were often deeply unsympathetic to their plight. On the other, the idea that the Arabs as a whole were a nation, with a common civilisation, language, history and destiny, was also on the rise. With its roots in the intellectual debates of the late nineteenth century about how best to respond to an increasingly fragile Ottoman Empire and the technological, military and financial superiority of the West, the idea of a strong, independent, unified Arab nation had gathered momentum among the hundreds of millions of Arabs who found themselves ruled by colonial powers in the 1920s and 30s. The new thinking took many different forms: some were influenced by fascism, others by revolutionary socialism; some were rooted in faith, but many were secular.

Khaled’s older brothers were rapidly drawn into the wave of argument and activism catalysed by the conflict of 1948 and the creation of Israel. Two had won scholarships to the American University of Beirut (AUB), one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Middle East. There they joined an organisation called the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) that had been started a decade earlier by a group of students from across the region. Heavily influenced by earlier Arab nationalist and Islamist groups, the organisation they created was secretive, hierarchical and confrontational. Its motto was ‘Unity, Liberation and Revenge’ and discipline was strict, if slightly sophomoric: cigarettes and alcohol were banned, orders were supposed to be obeyed without question and members were admitted only after a lengthy trial period.

When they returned home to Tyre during holidays, Khaled’s brothers tried to convince their conservative father that the instrument of ‘The Return’ to Palestine was a single man: Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former army officer who had taken power in Egypt in 1954, two years after participating in the Free Officers coup that had overthrown the Egyptian monarch. Nasser’s electrifying speeches, broadcast from Cairo by the Sawt al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs radio station, commanded a vast audience across the Middle East. In Tyre and the surrounding refugee camps, Palestinians like the Khaled family and many Lebanese listened rapt to the young Egyptian leader’s promise to create a new Arab nation that would be united, technologically powerful, prosperous and more than capable of defeating and destroying Israel. Khaled’s parents were among many to name a new-born son after the Egyptian leader. By then the family had moved into their own six-roomed top-floor apartment in Tyre. By her early teens Khaled was climbing down drainpipes from her bedroom to attend nocturnal meetings of the ANM in flagrant breach of a ban imposed by her parents. When in 1961 she followed her brothers to the American University of Beirut, she sought out the organisation immediately.

By the time she joined, the ANM had expanded considerably since its foundation but was now riven by internal argument. Should the battle against Israel be prioritised over that against reactionary Arab rulers? How could the class struggle be reconciled with Palestinian nationalism? Should the ANM accept the support offered by Nasser or other sympathetic leaders? If so, which ones? Soon Khaled was passing most of her time either plunged into these debates, organising meetings, or at the forefront of demonstrations. When in 1963 she failed to win a scholarship to continue her pharmacy studies, her father told her she would need to earn her own living as he could no longer support her. The obvious option was to follow the large number of Palestinians who had been heading east over the previous decade, seeking employment in the booming monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Khaled had no great desire to travel, but when she was offered a post teaching young children English in Kuwait, she felt she had little choice but to accept.

Khaled had been working in Kuwait for four years when she heard that war had broken out between Israel and the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. She was so certain of victory she began stitching an embroidered picture to hang on the wall of the family home in Haifa to celebrate their return. When Khaled learned of the total defeat of the Arab armies in just six days, she was stunned. ‘I felt catatonic for a month,’ she remembered. ‘All hope was gone.’ She gave the embroidery to a friend who had family in the West Bank with instructions to somehow get it to her native city.

She was not alone. All across the Arab and Islamic worlds, Israel’s crushing victory in the war of 1967 prompted grief equivalent to a bereavement. Disguising the immensity of the disaster was impossible: the Sinai, Gaza, almost all of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and above all the holy city of al-Quds, or Jerusalem, had all been lost. A second major war between combined forces of multiple Arab powers and Israel had ended in a second crushing defeat. For many, the disappointment was all the more bitter for the euphoria with which they had greeted the outbreak of hostilities. Tawfiq al-Hakim, a leading Egyptian dramatist whose writing had influenced Nasser’s vision of Arab nationalism, described sitting ‘open-mouthed like a moron’. King Hussein of Jordan, who had reluctantly joined the offensive against Israel and lost the West Bank as a consequence, spoke of ‘a dream, or more a nightmare’. Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer whose monthly concerts were broadcast across the region to tens of millions of radio listeners, refused to leave her home for two weeks after the war’s end, emerging finally to sing of loss, disillusionment and betrayal, leaving her audience sobbing. That September, the Arab powers pledged ‘No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel’.

Through the rest of the summer, Khaled and other Palestinian colleagues discussed the new situation. Like many others, she recognised that the failures of the Arab armies and the expansion of Israel had fundamentally and irrevocably altered the politics of the Middle East. Those who had spent time in the territories newly occupied by Israel tended to believe that the communities there could rise up and somehow overcome the victorious Israelis. Anyone who had spent the summer elsewhere in the region, such as Khaled, was sceptical of such hopes and remained ‘frustrated, confused, dismayed’. There she was, in Kuwait, in a place of ‘eternal boredom’, doing nothing except running fundraising drives at her school in the small town of al-Jarrah, reading out Palestinian poems over its public address system, and trying to organise protests against rules that prohibited female staff from wearing short sleeves.

Khaled had already been asked by colleagues to join Fatah, one of the various Palestinian factions that had formed over the previous decade, committed to a violent campaign against Israel. Founded by Yasser Arafat and half a dozen other activists in the late 1950s, Fatah was by far the largest of them. But Khaled was not impressed when she attended Fatah’s meetings in Kuwait. The culture of the organisation struck her as hierarchical and overly deferential to authority. There was none of the cut-and-thrust that she had enjoyed at ANM meetings in Beirut, and she considered the oath of loyalty that Fatah required all its members to swear to be an insult. You acted for the revolution out of conviction, not because you had made a promise to someone, she complained to a friend. When Khaled asked about joining Fatah’s military wing she was told that, as a woman, she would be better employed in the effort to raise money for the fledgling social welfare system they were building.

In late 1967, Khaled returned to Lebanon to see her parents and seek out the leaders of the ANM. Most remembered her from her activism in Beirut half a decade before. Many were still frequent visitors to her family home. Once again, she asked to play a frontline role in the ‘armed struggle’ against Israel. To her intense disappointment, her request was denied.

One reason that the ANM could not accept Khaled as a frontline fighter was that the organisation, weakened by its internal divisions, had effectively collapsed following Israel’s military triumph that summer. A second was that the successor organisation that had just been set up was still uncertain about its objectives or strategy. This was not the time to be recruiting untested if enthusiastic schoolteachers, even if their ideological pedigree was impeccable.

The leader of the new group was George Habash, a charismatic, chain-smoking former doctor from a prominent Christian family in the town of Lydda, in what was now Israel. Habash had been studying medicine at AUB before the 1948 war but was radicalised by atrocities that he witnessed when he returned home during the conflict and was among the founders of the ANM in 1951. Sixteen years later, he remained fully committed to the Palestinian and Arab causes, but Marxist ideology had become a primary influence too. Habash had drawn a crucial lesson from the war in 1967: the Palestinians could not rely on the support of unwilling or incapable Arab states if they wanted to defeat Israel. Through the autumn of 1967, he worked to fuse the Palestinian branch of the ANM with three smaller factions to form a new group. In December, a statement addressed to ‘the Masses of our Arab nation and the Masses of our Palestinian people’ proudly announced the establishment of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The ‘only weapon left in the hands of the people with which to redirect history into its proper course, with which to bleed the resources of the enemy and eventually to overcome him, is revolutionary violence’, it read. And not only would the PFLP fight for the ‘liberation of Palestine’, it would be part of a broader struggle too: ‘a counter-alliance grouping all anti-imperialist forces throughout the world’.