The Decline of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: A Historical Analysis Terry James Buck Poster reads: “The Path of Armed Struggle - The Path of Liberated Palestine”. By Ghassan Kanafani, 1969. Accessed on the Palestine Poster Project website. ii Table of Contents Table of Contents iii Acknowledgements iv Preface vi Introduction 1 I. The Popular Front in Jordan: Liberation, Confrontation, and Dispersal 5 The Arab Nationalist Movement: Unity, Liberation, and Vengeance 7 The Palestinian Liberation Movement: Resistance until Victory 12 Unity of the Palestinian and Jordanian Masses: Down with the King 20 II. The Popular Front in Lebanon: Revolution, Cooperation, and the Sectarian Divide 31 The Arab Nationalist Movement in Lebanon 32 After the War: The Palestinian Presence in Lebanon 38 The Lebanese Civil War 46 III. The Popular Front in the Territories: Resistance, Autonomy, and Collaboration 56 The Gaza Strip under Occupation 58 The West Bank under Occupation 67 The Prisons of the Occupation 76 Rising up and Throwing off: al-Intifada 83 Conclusion 90 Appendix One: Glossary of Acronyms and Organizations 94 Appendix Two: Glossary of Terms 96 Appendix Three: Glossary of Names 97 Appendix Four: The Palestinian Student Left: A Diagnosis of the Fall 100 Bibliography 106 iii Acknowledgments To start, my committee transformed a mess of facts and opinions into an essay with, at maximum, a half dozen theses. Aaron Berman, as a historian, an advisor, a supporter, and a friend, shaped this project with hundreds of useful edits and suggestions and much needed encouragement. Hiba Bou Akar challenged me to think outside the narrow terms of a historian, adding layers of meaning to this essay, while also bringing humor to every meeting. Carollee Bengelsdorf, though only part of my committee in the fall, has been my most consistent, supportive, and brutally honest teacher since my first year tutorial, “Imagining Latin America”. Though not on my committee, professors Margaret Cerullo, Sayres Rudy, Kay Johnson, Jose Castro Alves, Omar Dahi, and Sa’d Nimr all contributed enormously to my understanding of the world and are all in some way responsible for my ability to write this essay. My family, though I haven’t seen a lot of you this year, are of course my most consistent and loving base of support. I shouldn’t have to name you because it should be obvious I’m talking about all four of you when I say that I couldn’t possibly have done this without you. Mom, it’s your strength and your generosity. Dad, it’s your creativity and your humor. Henry, it’s your passion and your commitment. Sarah, it’s your friendship and your general awesomeness. I love and miss you all and you should come out here more often. Also Grandma and Grandpa, you collectively provided an example of how to be a writer and an observer in the world. Over the past two years, the folks I live with have gone from total strangers to my closest friends. I’m so grateful to know you all and to have suffered through Division III with some of you. Sarah (2), you’re wonderful and I’m so glad I’ve gotten to really know you this year. Willow, you’re awesome and you shouldn’t worry, we’ll all come and bother you every day this summer, even and especially when you’re tired of us. Martin, finish your goddamn Div III before we’re all a thousand years old. Also, you’re a great friend and good luck next fall. Panda, Daniel, and Ian, you’ve been suffering through your own non- academic struggles this year but I appreciate you all making our house a fun and fairly livable place. Also extraordinarily important to me are all of the activists in Students for Justice in Palestine. For the past two years you’ve taught me so much and been so wonderful to work alongside. Jenna, you’re so filled with passion and love and brilliance, I can’t wait ‘til next year to hear about and read the incredible things you will have done. Dede, you’re amazing. There is literally not one person I would rather waste iv hours in the Roost with, arguing over and celebrating everything from radical theory to music. Emily and Alex and Jules and everyone who’s ever passed through SJP, you are the most beautiful and passionate comrades any radical could ever wish for. My friends and comrades in Birzeit were extremely important in devising and developing this project. Nasser, Ashraf, Diaa, and Alaa, rifaqi, your support, your hospitality, and your friendship were more than any traveler could hope for. All of you and Arafat, Hamza, Hassan, wa qulhom bil-Qutub, your commitment and your spirit is an inspiration. Mabruk lal-intikhabat! I’m excited to see where we go from here. Marwa, your beauty and your friendship kept me sane when everyone else was driving me crazy. Someday long from now, I suspect we’ll gossip about our spouses, our kids, our grandkids. And the Rehan family, you treated me like a son even when I acted like a fool, even when I could hardly speak ten words of Arabic. You fed and clothed me when I demonstrated that I didn’t really know how to do either myself. I will never forget your generosity. Carina, I know we haven’t been as close this year as in the past, but you’ve been my closest friend all through Hampshire and this definitely would not have happened without you. Talia, it’s been wonderful getting to know you and distracting you this year. I swear I will single-handedly prevent you from ever finishing your Div III when the time comes. Natasha, thanks so much for all of your help in setting up, essentially conducting, and translating interviews for me. You’re a great friend. Everyone in my seminar, you were really helpful in making my Div III readable for folks who don’t study the Middle East. Manvendra, it was really exciting reading your Div III. Thanks for responding to my emails. Everyone who works in the Five College Library system, especially Hampshire, deserves an enormous thank you for all the dozens of books I requested that they delivered promptly and without complaint. Courtney Crosby, who manages InterLibrary Loan requests, in particular, thank you. The PVTA drivers kept me from being stranded in Northampton all semester, so thank you for that. All the staff who keep Hampshire functional, thank you. Anyone who helped in any way, thank you! Of course, every mistake is my own and the best parts are probably plagiarized. Everyone who’s helped make this possible, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. v Preface In a 1987 essay, As’ad AbuKhalil called for a serious, book-length, English-language appraisal of the PFLP’s history and ideology. A decade later, Harold M. Cubert met the bare minimum of that call in writing The PFLP’s Changing Role in the Middle East. A skim of the academic reviews of Cubert’s book betrays the weaknesses of that author and the meager value of that work. Yezid Sayigh’s nearly 1,000-page behemoth Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, also published in 1997, tells a far more nuanced history of the PFLP in its footnotes alone. But the PFLP is only one of many organizations featured in Sayigh’s book, which is primarily a military history with a minimum of critical analysis, and so that work did not fill this gap in the literature, either. Almost five decades since the Popular Front’s founding and two decades since its great defeat, the Oslo Accords, the definitive history of the PFLP is yet to be written. However, in the past decade, a resurgence of interest in the PFLP, or at least in its most prominent members, has become apparent in the non-Arabic publishing world. It began with the fiction of Ghassan Kanafani, former spokesperson of the PFLP, collections of whose novels and short stories were translated and released in three books in 1998, 2000, and 2004. In 2005, a Dutch collective published the second Western-language history of the PFLP, PFLP - guerrilla in Palestina, as part of their Bibliotheek van de Guerrilla series. In 2008, George Habash, the Secretary-General of the PFLP, left his name in the author’s spot for the first time in a Western language when Fayard published a collection of interviews between Habash (or Habache) and George Malbrunot as Les révolutionnaires ne meurent jamais. In 2009, Verso published a collection of cartoons by Naji al-’Ali, a member of the PFLP assassinated in 1987. Through five episodes in 2009 and 2010, a Danish miniseries, Blekingegade, recounted the bank robberies committed by the “Left Wing Gang” to fund the PFLP. A 2010 French miniseries, Carlos, recounted the spectacular operations of a former PFLP hijacker. And in 2012, Pluto Press vi published a biography of Leila Khaled, the infamous PFLP plane hijacker, by Sarah Irving. Not all of the examples listed are academic or political, at least in their intention, but they reflect the appeal of the PFLP’s daring and the real challenge it once represented to the centers of power in the Middle East. Though many leftist commentators, including As’ad AbuKhalil, Khalid Amayreh, and Hisham Bustani view the PFLP as a shell of its former self, clearly something about the Popular Front allows it to generate a level of interest today which it hasn’t had since the 1970s.