Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) (Arabic: الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين, al-Jabhah al-Sha`biyyah li-Taḥrīr Filasṭīn) is a secular Palestinian Marxist–Leninist and revolutionary socialist organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO, founded in 1964), the largest being Fatah (founded in 1959).

Ahmad Sa'adat has served as Secretary-General of the PFLP since 2001. He was sentenced in December 2006 to 30 years in an Israeli prison. The PFLP currently considers both the Fatah-led government in the West Bank and the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip illegal because elections to the Palestinian National Authority have not been held since 2006. As of 2015, the PFLP boycotts participation in the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian National Council.

The PFLP has generally taken a hard line on Palestinian national aspirations, opposing the more moderate stance of Fatah. It does not recognise the State of Israel, it opposes negotiations with the Israeli government, and favours a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The military wing of the PFLP is called the Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades. The PFLP is well known for pioneering armed aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to PFLP Politburo member and former aircraft-hijacker Leila Khaled, the PFLP does not see suicide bombing as a form of resistance to occupation or as a strategic action or policy and no longer carries out such attacks. The PFLP has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and the European Union.

From its foundation the PFLP sought both superpower and regional patrons, early on developing ties with the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union and, at various times, with regional powers such as Syria, South Yemen, Libya and Iraq, as well as with left-wing groups around the world, including the Kurdistan Workers' Party, 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 fluctuated – it 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.

Biography

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed as a resistance movement by the late George Habash after the occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1967.

Combining Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology, the PFLP saw the destruction of Israel as integral to its struggle to remove Western capitalism from the Middle East.

During the 1970s the group fostered links with militant groups across the world, including the German Baader Meinhof organisation and Japan's Red Army.

Working with other groups, the PFLP pioneered aircraft hijackings as a high-profile means of drawing attention to their movement, most notably with the capture of an Air France plane in 1976.

The plane was flown to Entebbe in Uganda where, after a stand-off, Israel launched a dramatic commando raid to rescue nearly 100 hostages.

During the 1970s, the PFLP was the second largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), but pursued a markedly different strategy to Yasser Arafat's dominant Fatah organisation.

While Fatah attempted to build support for the Palestinian cause from Arab countries, the PFLP became disillusioned with what it saw as inertia among Middle Eastern leaders. Instead, the PFLP enlisted backing from the USSR and China.

But the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s undermined the PFLP, and the group lost ground to Islamist movements, particularly Hamas.

Attempting to bolster its position after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, the PFLP added its weight to a disparate group of Palestinian organisations opposed to the deal.

It boycotted Palestinian elections in 1996, but three years later the PFLP accepted the formation of the Palestine Authority and sought to join Yasser Arafat's administration.

The group's deputy secretary general and former military wing commander, Abu Ali Mustafa, was allowed by the Israel authorities to return to the West Bank from Syria.

Considered a moderate within the group, Mustafa succeeded the ailing Habash in 2000. However, he was killed the following year when an Israeli military helicopter fired rockets at the PFLP's office in Ramallah - a sign, said some analysts, of how Israel saw the PFLP as a continuing force.

Indeed, the group struck back by shooting dead Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, leader of a right-wing party, in Jerusalem.

Mustafa's hardline successor, Ahmed Saadat, was accused by Israel of ordering the killing. In 2002 the Palestinian Authority imprisoned him in Jericho after he and four others were convicted by a makeshift court with police officers acting as judges and lawyers.

Saadat was one of three PFLP candidates to win election to the Palestinian parliament in January 2006, but two months later Israeli troops besieged the Jericho prison and seized him and the four others so they could be put on trial in Israel.

The PFLP leader was subsequently sentenced to 30 years in an Israeli prison for heading an "illegal terrorist organisation" but was never charged with Zeevi's murder due to a lack of evidence.

Saadat's incarceration did not stop the PFLP's military wing, renamed the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, launching attacks on Israeli targets.

During the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, it carried out five suicide bombings between 2002 and 2004.

In recent years, the group has been involved primarily in firing rockets and mortars from the Gaza Strip at communities in southern Israel. It has also claimed responsibility for numerous attacks targeting Israeli forces patrolling the Gaza frontier.

In 2011, two men affiliated to the PFLP were convicted of killing five members of the Fogel family at the Jewish settlement of Itamar, near the West Bank town of Nablus. Despite their links to the group, Israeli prosecutors said they had carried out the attack on their own initiative.

It was also not clear how involved the PFLP leadership had been in the attack in November 2014 that saw two members of the group armed with axes storm a synagogue complex in West Jerusalem and kill four rabbis in the middle of their morning prayers.

A statement by the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades praised the "heroic operation" by Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, but did not specify whether the cousins had been instructed to carry out the attack.

Although the PFLP has in the past called for the "liberation" of all of historic Palestine, the group's national congress declared in 2000 that it accepted the "new realities" created by the Oslo accords could not be ignored.

The PFLP developed contacts at this time with Islamic fundamentalist groups linked to Iran – both Palestinian Hamas, and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah – a detour from its avowedly Marxist orientation. 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.

It instead sought the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers to the 1967 borders, the dismantling of Jewish settlements on occupied territory, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

However, in 2010 Saadat warned against peace talks with Israel and said the Middle East conflict could only be resolved through the creation of a state shared by Palestinians and Jews.

He said negotiations were "nothing but a cover for the continuation of an Israeli policy built on the continuation of occupation".