Short read: The lessons of the terrorist violence of the 1970s

It has been more than two years since the deadly October 7^th, 2023, terror attacks in Israel and Israel’s retaliatory attacks in Gaza. Here’s a new book that aims to take us back to the beginning of the emergence of militant outfits in the region – the 1970s. The Economist reviews The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent.

“The idea was to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. The defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 had resulted in the displacement of between 300,000 and 500,000 people. So in 1969 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist nationalist militant group, hijacked a plane travelling from Rome to Tel Aviv. The aircraft was blown up after landing in Damascus; its passengers were evacuated unharmed. The poster child of the attack was Leila Khaled (pictured), an elfin-faced young woman. A picture of her in a keffiyeh, smiling and brandishing an AK-47, was published all over the world.”

The Economist calls the book gripping with the author drawing upon decades of research and interviews with terrorists:

“He tells the story of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), its subgroups and associated network of militant organisations, such as the Red Army Faction (raf) in Germany, the Italian Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army. Revolutionaries from Europe flocked to training camps run by Fatah, part of the plo, to learn the ropes.

The book covers the turbulent period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The cold war that pitted the Soviet Union and its satellites against the West shaped the worldview of its characters. But the most notable change over the period was the shift in the terrorists’ motivations. The PLO and its offshoots, such as the Black September Organisation (BSO), which carried out a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, were never explicitly religious. But violent Islamism took hold after the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.”

The review credits the author’s character portrayal of key terrorists that make it a page turner, most notably the notorious Carlos the Jackal:

“But pride of place for sheer vileness must go to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or “Carlos the Jackal”. After a privileged upbringing in Caracas, and stints as a student in London and Moscow, he trained with the PFLP in Beirut. In 1975 he led an attack on OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna. Three people were murdered and 40 hostages abducted. (He was accused by Haddad of making off with the ransom payment.)

Ramírez spent the next two decades hanging out in communist-bloc countries and as a guest of the Middle East’s most notorious tyrants, eating in the best restaurants and carrying out bombings and murders both to order and on his own initiative. Extraordinarily vain, he would drive members of his team to distraction by preening for hours on end. He posed as a zealous revolutionary. He was undoubtedly a virulent antisemite. But most of all, he was a narcissist and a cold-blooded killer. (He later boasted that he had murdered 80 people.) In 1994 he was finally captured by French agents in Khartoum while unconscious after surgery on a testicle. He remains locked up in a French jail to this day.”

The review refers to the distinction the author draws between the terror outfits of the 70s to those operating today:

“…the apocalyptic millenarians of al-Qaeda, Islamic State and the ideologues of Hamas are not cut from the same cloth. Their mainly secular forerunners had largely political aims. They were committed to the classical terrorist idea that change could be effected through the propaganda of the deed. When confronted with failure, irrelevance and the latent coercive power of the modern state, they either died or faded away.

The same cannot be said of their even more violent successors. Despite defeats, Islamic State remains a threat in Syria and its affiliates are a growing scourge in Africa. Meanwhile, sympathisers, often self-radicalised online and hard for security services to spot in advance, continue to carry out attacks on civilians—especially Jews, as in the recent Hanukkah shooting on Bondi Beach in Sydney. That is one thing that has not changed.

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