(Excerpted from The Electronic Intifada, 30 Jan 08)
I lived more than half of my life in the US and I never felt the alienation that I felt on the day I read George Habash, the Palestinian revolutionary who passed away last week, labeled as a “terrorism tactician” in a front page obituary in The New York Times. What do you when they want to convince you that a kind and gentle man you met and respected as a person is a terrorist when you know otherwise? Do you go back and see how they wrote glowing obituaries for Zionist militia leader and later Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a man whose record of killing civilians is as horrific and grotesque as that of Osama Bin Laden, former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Fatah Revolutionary Council founder Abu Nidal or Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet? But they can’t invent facts, and they can’t distort the narrative of Palestinian history.
George Habash embodied an era that extended from the Nakba, or mass expulsions of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, until the ending of the first phase of the Lebanese civil war in 1976, when the decline of the Left, and the launching of Sadatism began. Up until that time, when a deep ideological transformation took place in the Arab world, Habash was a major actor on the Arab political stage. He was feared by Arab regimes, and respected and loved in the refugee camps. If there is a world revolutionary symbol for the second half of the 20th century, it should be George Habash. Habash is one of the main makers of Arab contemporary history and one of the handful of names who changed the course of the Palestinian political struggle.
It is often said that Habash’s “Christianity” — as if he was religious — was the only reason why he was not the leader of the Palestinian national movement, instead of Arafat. I never agreed with the view. Habash’s sincerity, honesty and integrity were the reason why he did not lead the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), while Arafat’s “skills” kept him in power for all those decades.
George Habash was shaped by the Nakba. He was born in al-Lydd, Palestine, and his middle class family, like thousands of other families, were violently evicted from their homes by Zionist militias led by Yitzhak Rabin. As a student, Habash joined forces with his fellow AUB medical student, the brilliant tactician Wadi’ Haddad and other students to form the Movement of Arab Nationalists. This movement was one of the early political and organizational echoes of the occupation of Palestine in 1948 and left a mark on Arab contemporary politics, inspiring and initiating political organizations throughout the Arab world.
After the war, Habash founded the PFLP which quickly become the second most important Palestinian organization after Fatah, and held that place until the rise of Hamas and the Islamization of Palestinian and Arab politics in the 1980s. The Movement of Arab Nationalists had effectively decided to transform into Marxist-Leninist organizations and adopted the belief that guerrilla warfare against Zionism would achieve the final liberation of Palestine.
The PFLP argued that the liberation of Palestine would be impossible without the liberation of Arab countries from the regimes imposed by the West and Israel. Looking to Vietnam, Habash called for Arab “Hanois,” and stated that the liberation of Palestine passed through every Arab capital. “Armed struggle” was the major path to liberation. Earlier in 1970, Habash and the PFLP became famous worldwide when the group orchestrated the hijacking of several airliners to Jordan, releasing all passengers and crew before the planes were destroyed. I once met a German flight attendant who told me that she became a supporter of the Palestinian cause after she heard Habash speak in English to a group of hostages in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman — and she was one of the hostages.
George Habash was hit hard by the Mossad’s assassination of his PFLP comrade the writer Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, and he suffered a debilitating stroke. Habash himself survived several Israeli assassination attempts; in one, Israel hijacked a plane that it thought carried Habash (he had switched planes only minutes before the flight).
In 1974, Habash froze the PFLP’s membership in the PLO when he realized that Arafat was working for the two-state solution. Habash was instrumental in forming the Rejectionist Front which advocated a non-compromising stance on the liberation of “every millimeter of Palestine,” as Habash was fond of saying in his public speeches.
The Rejectionist Front was disbanded in 1977 when Syria and Iraq briefly reconciled following Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. This period marked the beginning of the decline of the Left and the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Habash began a gradual withdrawal from politics.
George Habash lived his life for Palestine — every minute of it. He represented a model of revolutionary struggle that is exemplary in its dedication and asceticism. No matter what one thinks of the PFLP or its long political and military experience, it should not detract from an appreciation of the profound influence of the PFLP’s founder who helped shape the politics and worldview of a generation. The present political scene is devoid of any leaders of such character