George Habash

George Habash (born 1926) was a founder of the Arab Nationalists' Movement in 1952 and of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967.

George Habash was born in Lydda (now Lod) in 1926 to a family of Christian Palestinian merchants. When Arab-Jewish fighting broke out in Palestine in 1948, he was a medical student at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He returned home to Lydda to try to help his community, but was forcibly expelled from Lydda by the advancing Jewish forces.

Like others in Palestine and the Arab states, Habash was embittered by the Arabs' defeat in 1948 and sought a way to redeem Arab honor. In 1950, back at his classes in Beirut, he joined with other students from many different Arab countries to form the Arab Nationalists' Movement (ANM). The ANM preached that only the unified actions of all the Arab people could liberate the Arab world, including Palestine. Because the movement rejected the Islamic fundamentalism then rife in the Arab world, it attracted much support from the minority of Arabs who were Christians. It also rejected such socially divisive ideologies as socialism and communism, as well as the splitting up of the Arab world into separate states.

During the 1950s Habash had criticized Yasser (or Yasir) Arafat's Fateh (also transliterated as Fatah) organization and other Palestinians who were guilty of what the ANM considered to be "Palestinian separatism" from the pan-Arab cause. It was not until 1964 that the ANM started doing systematic political work in the Palestinian community.

Many of the ANM's ideas and aims were shared by Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who came to power in Egypt in 1952. From 1954 through 1967, the ANM worked closely with Nasser, pursuing their joint aims throughout the Arab world. In 1967, however, Nasser was humiliated by his country's defeat in the Six Day War with Israel, so Habash and his colleagues started rethinking their alliance with him.

The shock of the 1967 defeat caused the ANM's leaders to rethink some of their other ideas, too. In December 1967 the ANM decided to found its own Palestinian organization, which it called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Habash became its general secretary.

The PFLP was always smaller than Fateh. At the beginning the PFLP's leaders considered that the only way they could compete with Fateh for popular attention was to stage large-scale terrorist operations against Israeli and pro-Israeli targets. The most spectacular of these was the hijacking of four Western airliners to a desert airstrip in Jordan in September 1970. This action gave the Jordanian government the opportunity to crack down on the Palestinian guerrillas who then moved to Syria.

Shortly thereafter the PFLP sought inclusion in the Fateh-dominated Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). At some stage in the early 1970s Habash's official PFLP leadership disavowed the terrorist operations that were still being carried out by PFLP extremists. But the PFLP maintained its hard-line political stance. In 1974 it vehemently opposed the PLO mainstream's shift toward calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in just part of historic Palestine and formed a new alliance of PLO oppositionists called the "Rejection Front."

In 1978 the Rejection Front was dissolved, as Palestinian nationalists united their ranks in opposition to the Egyptian-Israeli peace process. Five years later, however, it was the PLO's Fateh-based leadership which was seeking a peaceful settlement with Israel, and once again the PFLP moved to the opposition. In 1984 the PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) formed the backbone of a new coalition of Palestinian hardliners called the Democratic Alliance.

Since his rejection of Arafat's (PLO) plan for peace with Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Arab State, Habash moved his headquarters to Damascus, Syria, where his PFLP was tolerated by Syrian leader, Hafes Assad. Habash continued to deny Arafat's leadership and opposed peaceful co-existence with Israel - although he agreed to accept the Palestine National Council's decisions.

Habash was known to Palestinians as al-hakim (the Doctor). Possessed of a high degree of charisma, he kept the PFLP intact through many internal schisms and failed alliances. In the late 1960s he had announced his conversion from pure nationalism to Marxism, and he maintained some relations with the Soviets after the early 1970s. He was married and had two daughters. In 1980 he suffered a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. While he was undergoing treatment for the stroke, the PFLP suffered massive internal faction-fights, but his return to the helm apparently restored some stability.

The partial paralysis resulting from his 1980 stroke moderated Habash's political fervor and limited his influence within the PFLP and on Arab politics in general. The silver-haired Habash, however, still posed a threat to peace in the Middle East. In the mid-1990s, he travelled to Libya to confer with Muammar Qadhefi, while Naef Hawatmeh, leader of the DFLP, flew to Iraq for a meeting with Saddam Hussein. Both national leaders alledgedly support and finance terrorism, including high-tech weaponry and terrorist training camps. As the political climate in Syria changes, Habash could be planning to move the PFLP headquarters to Iraq.

Further Reading

An account of PFLP and ANM politics can be found in Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World (1975); Leila Khaled's My People Shall Live:the Autobiography of a Revolutionary (1973) is the account of a close Habash colleague who herself participated in many PFLP hijacks; The political development of the PFLP is recounted in Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization:People, Power and Politics (1984).

Additional Sources

U.S. News and World Report, March 25, 1996, p. 44

Washington Post, March 13, 1997, p. A26.

Biographies of Habash can be found in Yaacov Shimoni's Biographical Dictionary of the Middle East (1991); and The Cold War, 1945-1991, Volume 2 (Gale Research, 1992).

1925 -

Leading Palestinian activist; former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

George Habash (also known as al-Hakim, the sage) was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox Palestinian family in Lydda in Mandate Palestine. After completing his education in Jerusalem, he worked as a teacher and then attended the Faculty of Medicine at the American University of Beirut (AUB), graduating with distinction in 1951.

Habash witnessed the expulsion of Lydda's population on 13 July 1948 and saw his sister die through lack of medical care. Although some sources indicate that he immediately volunteered with Arab forces active in Palestine, all agree that in 1949 he helped establish the Partisans of Arab Sacrifice (Kataʾib al-Fida al-Arabi), which attacked Western targets in Beirut and Damascus until it was dissolved by the Syrian authorities in mid-1950. Back at the AUB, Habash joined the Society of the Firm Tie (Jamʿiyyat al-Urwa al-Wuthqa), a student literary club inspired by Arab nationalist writers such as Constantine Zurayk and Sati al-Husari. An eloquent and forceful personality, in 1950 he was elected president of the group's executive committee. In 1951, this committee became the nucleus of a new, clandestine pan-Arab movement, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM; Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab). Habash emerged as ANM's leader.

In 1952, Habash left for Amman to develop ANM's Jordanian branch. He opened a clinic for the poor and established the Arab Club to combat illiteracy and serve as a discussion and recruitment center. He was forced underground in 1954, remained in Jordan until the nationalist Nabulsi government fell in 1958, then fled to Damascus, and again to Beirut when the Bʿath Party took over in Syria in 1961.

At this stage, the ANM viewed Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser as the best hope for Arab unity and the restoration of Palestinian rights. When specifically Palestinian nationalist organizations began to emerge in the 1960s, Habash condemned them as regionalists who had abandoned general Arab interests and whose guerrilla activities would provide an excuse for Israel to attack the Arab states before they were ready for the challenge. However, in 1964, confronted with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Habash established the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine within the ANM, and in 1967 Nasser's stunning defeat prompted him to dissolve the ANM and create the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, of which he became secretary general. The Popular Front adopted a radical Marxist-Leninism, an approach Habash had fought against in the ANM when pressed by a Marxist-Leninist faction led by Nayif Hawatma and Muhsin Ibrahim.

The Popular Front nearly disintegrated in 1968 while Habash was imprisoned in Syria for sabotaging the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, although after his escape to Amman and later to Beirut it developed into the most important Palestinian rival to al-Fatah. Its uncompromising stance toward Israel, the West, and conservative Arab regimes was based on an insistence that the Palestinian revolution could succeed only as part of a regional and international struggle committed to radical social and political change. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Popular Front's willingness to pursue its agenda through military strikes - and until 1973 through the hijacking of civilian airliners - won it wide support among frustrated Palestinian refugees but unleashed harsh responses from Jordan (notably in Black September); from Lebanese opponents, provoking the civil war of 1975 through 1976; and from Israel until the 1980s, when Habash fled to Damascus.

Habash called a halt to many of the Popular Front's military and terrorist tactics at the behest of the Palestinian National Council in 1973, but he remained convinced that such actions were both legitimate and necessary. Believing Israel to be un-prepared to reciprocate Palestinian concessions, the Popular Front has launched armed and terrorist attacks on Israelis during both intifadas.

Once the leading radical rival to PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, Habash appeared poised at several critical junctures to displace him. Habash has suffered from heart trouble since the 1970s and was increasingly marginalized by both the rise of Islamist movements and the Oslo peace process, of which he has been a consistent critic. In the late 1990s, he appeared prepared to consider flexibility toward the Western powers, but brief hopes of a reconciliation with Arafat in 1999, which were supported by the Popular Front majority, proved illusory, and he resigned from the declining organization to establish a research center.

Bibliography

Abukhalil, As'ad. "Internal Contradictions in the PFLP: Decision Making and Policy Orientation." Middle East Journal 41 (1987): 361 - 378.

Cubert, Harold. The PFLP's Changing Role in the Middle East. London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Gresh, Alain. The PLO: The Struggle Within: Towards an Independent Palestinian State, revised edition, translated by A. M. Berrett. London: Zed, 1988.

Ismael, Tareq Y. The Arab Left. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1976.

Kazziha, Walid W. Revolutionary Transformation in the ArabWorld: Habash and His Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism. New York: St. Martin's, 1975.

Moois, Nadim. "The Ideology and Role of the Palestinian Left in the Resistance Movement." Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1991.

Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab - Israeli Conflict, 4th edition. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin's, 2001.

— MOUIN RABBANI
UPDATED BY GEORGE R. WILKES

George Habash
Alternate name(s):	al-Hakim (The Wise or the Doctor), Abu Maysa
Date of birth:	August 2, 1926(1926-08-02)
Place of birth:	Lydda, British Mandate of Palestine
Date of death:	January 26, 2008 (aged 81)
Place of death:	Amman, Jordan
Movement:	Arab nationalism, Marxism-Leninism
Major organizations:	Arab Nationalist Movement Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Religion:	Greek Orthodox Christianity
Influences	Nasserism

George Habash (Arabic: جورج حبش‎) also known by his laqab "al-Hakim" (Arabic:الحكيم — the wise one or the doctor) (August 2, 1926 – January 26, 2008) was a Palestinian nationalist. Habash, a Palestinian Christian, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which pioneered the hijacking of airplanes as a Middle East terror tactic. Habash served as Secretary-General of the Palestine Front until 2000, when ill-health force him to resign. He died in Amman, Jordan in 2008.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 3 Black September 4 Oslo agreement 5 Death 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Habash was born in Lydda (today's Lod) to a Greek Orthodox Palestinian family.^[1] As a child, he sang in the church choir. ^[2] Habash, a medical student at the American University of Beirut, was visiting his family during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In July 1948, the Israeli military captured Lydda from Jordanian and Arab Liberation Army forces. Habash and his family became refugees and were not allowed to return home until the fighting ended in 1949.

In 1951, after graduating first in his class from medical school, Habash worked in refugee camps in Jordan, and ran a clinic with Wadie Haddad in Amman. He firmly believed that occupied Palestine must be liberated by all possible means, including armed resistance.^[3] In an effort to recruit the Arab World to this cause, Habash founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1951 and aligned the organization with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist ideology.

He was implicated in the 1957 coup attempt in Jordan, which had originated among Palestinian members of the National Guard. Habash was convicted in absentia, after having gone underground when King Hussein proclaimed martial law and banned all political parties. In 1958 he fled to Syria (then part of the United Arab Republic), but was forced to return to Beirut in 1961 by the tumultuous break-up of the UAR.

Habash was a leading member of the Palestine Liberation Organization until 1967 when he was sidelined by Fatah leader Yasser Arafat. In response, Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

In 1964 he began reorganizing the ANM, regrouping the Palestinian members of the organization into a "regional command." After the Six-Day War in 1967, disillusion with Nasser became widespread. This prompted the foundation, led by Habash, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as a front of several Palestinian factions, like the "heroes of return" and "Palestinian Liberation Front", along with the ANM on December 11, when he also became its first Secretary-General. Habash was briefly imprisoned in Syria in 1968, but escaped. In the same year, he also came into conflict with long-time ally Wadie Haddad, but both remained in the PFLP.

At a 1969 congress the PFLP re-designated itself a Marxist-Leninist movement, and has remained a Communist organization ever since. Its pan-Arab leanings have been diminished since the ANM days, but popular support for a united Arab front has remained, especially in regard to Israeli and western political pressures. It holds a firm position regarding Israel, demanding its complete eradication as a racist state through military struggle and promotes a one-state solution (one secular, democratic, non-denominational state).

The 1969 congress also saw an ultra-leftist faction under Nayef Hawatmeh and Yasser Abd Rabbo split off as the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), later to become the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). During Habash's time as Secretary-General, the PFLP became known as one of the most radical and militant Palestinian factions, and gained world notoriety after a string of aircraft hijackings and attacks against Israel affiliated companies as well as Israeli ambassadors in Europe mostly planned by Haddad. The PFLP's pioneering of modern international terror operations brought the group, and the Palestinian issue, onto newspaper front pages worldwide, but it also provoked intense criticism from other parts of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1970, Habash was evicted from Jordan due to the key role of the Popular Front in the Black September clashes. In 1974, the Palestinian National Council adopted a resolution recognizing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict^{[citation needed]} and Habash, who opposed this, formed the Rejectionist Front from several other opposition parties.

Habash aligned the PFLP with the PLO and the Lebanese National Movement, but stayed neutral during the Lebanese Civil War in the late 1970s. After a stroke in 1980, when he was living in Damascus, his health declined and other PFLP members rose to the top.

After the Oslo Agreements, Habash formed another opposition alliance consisting of Rejectionist Front members and Islamist organizations such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, that became prominent during the First Intifada. In 2000, he resigned from his leadership post of the PFLP due to poor health and was succeeded by Abu Ali Mustafa. He continued to be an activist for the group until 2008, when he died of a heart attack in Amman.

Black September

The PFLP ignored tensions with the mainstream leadership of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, and instead focused on bringing about revolutionary change in Jordan. Habash expressed the opinion that what proceeded was not "only military but also psychological warfare" and one had to "hold the Israelis under permanent pressure".^[4]

In 1970, Habash masterminded the hijackings of four Western airliners over the United States, Europe, the Far East and the Persian Gulf. The aircraft were blown up, after the passengers and crews were forced to disembark. Habash was also behind the hijacking of an Air France airliner to Entebbe, Uganda and an attack on Israel's Lod airport in which 27 people were shot to death.^[5] Forty-seven people were killed in the bombing of a Swissair jet in 1970.^[6] The Dawson's Field hijackings of 1970 were instrumental in provoking the Black September crackdown, which came close to destroying the PLO. The hijackings led King Hussein of Jordan to carry out a major offensive against the Palestinian militants in his kingdom, killing thousands of them.^[7] In autumn 1970, Habash visited Beijing. After Black September, the PLO fedayeen relocated to Lebanon. In 1972, Habash experienced failing health, and gradually began to lose influence within the organization. The Palestinian National Council's (PNC) adoption of a resolution viewed by the PFLP as a two-state solution in 1974, prompted Habash to lead his organization out of active participation in the PLO and to join the Iraqi-backed Rejectionist Front. Only in 1977 would the PFLP opt to rejoin, as the Palestinian factions rallied their forces in opposition to Anwar Sadat's overtures towards Israel, pro-U.S. policies and fragmentation of the Arab world. During the Lebanese Civil War that broke out in 1975, PFLP forces were decimated in battle against Syria Later, the PFLP would draw close to Syria, as Syria's government shifted, but PFLP involvement in the Lebanese war remained strong until the U.S.-negotiated evacuation of PLO units from Beirut in 1982, and continued on a smaller scale after that.

In 1980 Habash suffered a severe stroke and with his consistently poor health younger members of PFLP began up to assume greater responsibilities. During this time Habash lived in Damascus, Syria and the PFLP neared the Syrian Ba'thist regime of Hafez al-Assad, united by the common opposition to Yasser Arafat's increasing concessions including the refusal to tie the PLO position with Syria's claims on the Israeli occupied Golan Heights and the concession of water rights, port access, and recovery of land occupied by Israeli settlers. In 1992 Habash left Damascus to return to Amman.

Oslo agreement

After the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, Habash and the PFLP again broke completely with Arafat, accusing him of selling out the Palestinian revolution. The group set up an anti-Arafat and anti-Oslo alliance in Damascus, for the first time joined by such non-PLO Islamist groups such as, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had grown to prominence during the First Intifada. After finding the position sterile, with Palestinian political dynamics playing out on the West Bank and Gaza areas of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Habash carefully sought to repair ties to Arafat, and gain a hold in post-Oslo politics without compromising PFLP principles. However, there is no indication that he ever accepted the two-state solution. This balancing act could not save the PFLP from being eclipsed by the militant Islamist factions on the one hand, and the resource-rich Fatah with its PNA patronage network on the other. The significance of the PFLP in Palestinian politics has diminished considerably since the mid-90s. The PFLP participated in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006 as Abu Ali Mustafa won 4.2% of the popular vote.

In the late 1990s, Habash's medical condition worsened. In 2000 he resigned from the post as Secretary-General, citing health reasons. He was succeeded as head of the PFLP by Abu Ali Mustafa who was assassinated by Israel during the Second Intifada. Habash went on to set up a PFLP-affiliated research center, but he remained active in the PFLP's internal politics. Until his death he was still popular among many Palestinians, who appreciate his revolutionary ideology, his determination and principles, the rejection of the Oslo Agreements and his intellectual style.

Death

Habash died on January 26, 2008, at the age of 81 of a heart attack in hospital in Amman, Jordan. The President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas called for three days of national mourning.^[8] Habash was buried in a suburban cemetery of Amman with processions by the Greek Orthodox Church.^[9]

Abbas said Habash was a "historic leader" and called for Palestinian flags to be flown half-mast. The current PFLP deputy Secretary-General Abdel Raheem Mallouh, called Habash a "distinguished leader... who struggled for more than 60 years without a stop for the rights and the interests of his people".^[8] Hamas leader and dismissed Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya sent his condolences, saying Habash "spent his life defending Palestine".^[9]

References

1. ^ Arab Gateway: Palestine Who's Who (C-M)
2. ^ Terrorism's Christian Godfather
3. ^ BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Palestinian radical founder dies
4. ^ ‘’Aziya i Afrika segodnya’’ -- cited in edition ‘’Välispanoraam 1972’’, Tallinn, 1973, lk 129 (‘’Foreign Panorama 1972’’)
5. ^ Palestinian party founder George Habash dies - USATODAY.com
6. ^ BBC NEWS | Middle East | Palestinian radical founder dies
7. ^ Tales of Black September - Haaretz - Israel News
8. ^ ^{a b} Palestinian radical founder dies BBC News
9. ^ ^{a b} PFLP founder George Habash dies Al-Jazeera

External links

• A Visit With George Habash: Still the Prophet of Arab Nationalism and Armed Struggle Against Israel, By Grace Halsell, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 49, 136
• BBC Report of Habash Death
• BBC Obituary
• Obituary in The Times, January 28, 2008
• Obituary in The Guardian, January 29, 2008
• NY Times Obituary
• Al Jazeera Obituary
• George Habbash - short overview on auhrenia.com

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