 | Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: Encyclopedia II - Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - History of the PFLP
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - History of the PFLP
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Origins in the ANM
The PFLP grew out of the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab, or Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), founded in 1953 by Dr. George Habash, a Palestinian Christian, from Lydda/Lod in what is now Israel. The family had been forced into exile after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The 22-year-old Habash went to Lebanon to study medicine at the American University in Beirut, graduating in 1951.
In an interview with American journalist John Cooley, Habash identified the Arab defeat by Israel as "the scientific society of Israel as against our own backwardness in the Arab world. This called for the total rebuilding of Arab society into a twentieth-century society," (Green March Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs by John K. Cooley, London 1973, p. 135).
The ANM was founded in this nationalist spirit. "[W]e 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." (ibid.)
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Formation of the PFLP
The ANM formed underground branches in several Arab countries, including Libya, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, then still under British rule. It adopted secularism and socialist economic ideas, and pushed for armed struggle. In collaboration with the Palestinian Liberation Army, the ANM established Abtal al-Audah, Heroes of the Return, as a commando group in 1966. After the Six Day War of June 1967, this group merged in August with two other groups, Youth for Revenge and Ahmed Jibril's Syrian-backed Palestine Liberation Front, to form the PFLP, with Habash as leader.
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 newspaper, al-Hadaf (The Target), which was edited by Ghassan Kanafani.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Breakaway organizations
In 1968, Ahmed Jibril broke away from the PFLP to form the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC).
In 1969, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) formed as a separate, ostensibly Maoist, organization under Niaf Hawatmeh and Yasser Abd Rabbo, initially as the PDFLP.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - PLO membership
The PFLP joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella organization of the Palestinian national movement, in 1968, becoming the second-largest faction after Yassir Arafat's Fatah. In 1974 it withdrew from the organization's executive commmittee (but not from the PLO) to join the Rejectionist Front, 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.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - After the Oslo Accords
After the eruption 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 (1993-96) Hamas enjoyed rapidly rising popularity in the wake of their successful strategy of suicide bombings devised by Yahya Ayyash ("the Engineer"). Also, the fall of the Soviet Union together with the rise in the Arab world of Islamism - and particularly the increased popularity of the Islamist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad - led to a decline in support for Marxist-Leninist organizations, and has marginalised the PFLP's role in Palestinian politics and armed resistance. However, the organization retains considerable political influence within PLO, since no new elections have been held within the organization.
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 PA, including the Palestinian People's Party, 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.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Elections in the PNA
Following the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004, the PFLP entered discussions with the DFLP and the Palestinian People's Party aimed at nominating a joint left-wing candidate for the presidential elections. These discussions were unsuccessful, and the PFLP then decided to support the independent Palestinian National Initiative's candidate Mustafa Barghouti, who gained 19.48% of the vote. In the municipal elections of December 2005 it had more success in e.g. in al-Bireh and Ramallah, and winning the mayorships of Bethlehem and Bir Zeit. [1] There is some confusion about the political allegiance of Janet Mikhail, the new mayor of Ramallah, some reports describe her as a member of the PFLP although most describe her as an independent.
The PFLP is powerful politically in the Ramallah area, the eastern districts and suburbs of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the primarily Christian Refidyeh district of Nablus, but has far less strength in the rest of the West Bank, and is of little or no threat to the established Hamas and Fatah movements in Gaza.
The PFLP participated in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006 as the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa List. It won 4.1% of the popular vote and took three of the 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History of the PFLP", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
