Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), organization providing an institutional framework for militant organizations associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), notable for its Marxist-Leninist ideology and its hijacking of a number of aircraft between 1968 and 1974.

The PFLP was established in 1967 in an amalgamation of three different guerrilla groups by the militant Palestinian leader George Ḥabash. Conflicts within the organization over ideology led to several splits and generated independent factions, most notably the PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC) established in 1968 by Aḥmad Jibrīl. Each of these factions engaged in guerrilla activity against Israel and often undertook acts of terrorism against the Jewish state and Western interests. The PFLP itself carried out or organized many notorious attacks against Israeli and Western targets, most notably the hijacking and destruction of several commercial airliners in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The PFLP rejected political compromise with Israel—it opposed the peace process begun with Israel in the 1990s—and pledged to replace that state with a secular, democratic state in Palestine. It took a vigorously anti-Western and anticapitalist stance on other Middle Eastern questions. Ḥabash retired as head of the organization in 2000; his successor, Abū ʿAlī Muṣṭafā, was killed by Israeli forces in the PFLP’s West Bank offices in 2001. Its subsequent leader, Aḥmad Saʿadāt, was imprisoned in 2002. Although overshadowed by Fatah and Hamas amid the ascent of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, the PFLP remained the most active leftist movement in Palestinian society well into the 21st century.