Today I remember George Habash, the refugee doctor and founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP) and a revered leader of the Palestinian liberation
movement, died on January 26, 2008 in Amman, Jordan. The cause of death was
reported to be a heart attack.
Born on August 1, 1925 into a prosperous family of Greek Orthodox merchants, in Lydda, Palestine, then under control of the British Mandate,when Palestinians were facing the materialization of the colonial settler
project known today as Israel.
His father was Nicholas Habash, a well-known businessman; his mother’s
name was Tuhfa. He had six siblings: Rizq, Phoutine, Elaine, Angele,
Najah, and Salwa. His wife, Hilda Habash, was his cousin; she
accompanied him throughout his career and was his lifelong comrade at
all stages of his of struggle. He had two children, Maysa and Lama.
Habash completed his elementary education in Lydda and then moved to
the National Orthodox College in Jaffa for his secondary education; he
received his matriculation certificate at Terra Sancta College in
Jerusalem.
Habash returned to Jaffa where he worked as a teacher. He was then
barely sixteen years old. The general atmosphere in Palestine was
charged with anger and fear due to the policies of the British Mandate
and the increasing acts of terrorism by Zionist gangs like the Haganah,
the Irgun, and the Stern.
In 1944 Habash was admitted to the medical school of the American
University of Beirut. He was an exceptional student who divided his
university years between his study and his numerous hobbies such as
athletics, art, and music in addition to cultural and political
activities. The latter assumed growing importance especially in light of
events in Palestine and the UN Partition Resolution issued in November
1947.
The dominant influence on his thought and nationalist identity came
from contact with the thought and teachings of Arab history professor
Constantine Zurayk. Dr. Zurayk was a secular Arab unionist, nationalist,
and liberal thinker. During this period the university was full of Arab
students from all the Arab countries who carried with them their
national concerns and dreams. Their meeting place was the cultural
student society al-Urwa al-Wuthqa. Zurayk was its spiritual father, and Habash was elected its general secretary for the academic year 1949–50.
The real turning point in Habash’s life during his university years
was the Nakba of 1948, as one Palestinian city, town, and village after
another fell to the Zionist forces and its inhabitants were expelled.
Habash cut short his medical studies and in June 1948 went to Lydda, his
hometown, where he joined a medical clinic and acted as an assistant to
the surgeon who was treating the wounded civilians and defenders of the
town. Lydda and neighboring Ramla fell to the Zionists on 11 July 1948.
Its inhabitants (some sixty thousand) were expelled and forced under
gunfire to walk toward the interior of the country. Habash, his parents,
and his siblings were among those expelled. He treated the old, the
women, and the children who fell by the wayside.
Dr. Habash attended Anglican school and
then public school in al-Lydd during his early education; he then
studied at the Orthodox school in Yafa, before secondary school in
Jerusalem. He completed high school in 1942. During his childhood years,
he was deeply influenced by the situation in Palestine, including the
Palestinian revolution which took place between 1936 and 1939
Years later, Habash was to
observe:“It
is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their
homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you
cannot but become a revolutionary”.
Having fled to Beirut,
Habash pursued his studies in pediatric medicine at the American
University of Beirut and graduated first in his class in 1951. The same
year he was arrested after a demonstration. In 1952, he founded the Arab
Nationalist Movement (ANM) with Wsdi Haddad (a Palestinian), Ahmad
al-Khatib (a Kuwaiti), and Hani al-Hindi (a Syrian).
Determined to spread the movement abroad, Habash opened a Clinic of the
People and a school for Palestinian refugees in Amman at the end of
1952. He remained there until 1957 .Active during the events of 1956-57
in Jordan, he went underground in April 1957 after the proclamation of
martial law by King Husayn. Convicted in absentia, he fled to Syria
after it had joined with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic (UAR).
Attracted like many Arab nationalists to the ideas of Jamal Abd
al-Nasir, he looked to extend the influence of the ANM to different Arab
countries. For him, contrary to the cadres who formed Fatah, Arab unity
was the engine of the liberation of Palestine. The Syrian secession
from the UAR in 1961 and the subsequent return of the Ba'th to power in
that country forced Habash to take refuge in Beirut. In April 1964, he
created, within the ANM, a regional command for Palestine that regrouped
the Palestinian members of the organization.
Following the 1967 war when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza and
parts of Egypt and Syria, Dr. Habash founded the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist party. The program of the
PFLP calls for the establishment of a democratic, secular and socialist
state in all of Palestine.In
its December 1967 founding statement, the PFLP declared:
“The
masses are the authority, the guide, and the resistance leadership from which
victory will be achieved in the end. It is necessary to recruit the popular
masses and mobilise them as active participants and leaders . . .
“The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence . . .
“The slogan of our masses must be resistance until victory, rooted in the heart with our feet planted on the ground in deep commitment to our land. Today, the Popular Front is hailing our masses with this call. This is the appeal. We must repeat it every day, through every breakthrough bullet and the fall of each martyr, that the land of Palestine today belongs to all the masses. Every area of our land belongs to our masses who have defended it against the presence of the usurper, every piece of land, every rock and stone, our masses will not abandon one inch of them because they belong to the legions of the poor and hungry and displaced persons . . .
“The struggle of the Palestinian people is linked with the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world, the format of the coalition that we face requires a corresponding . . . coalition including all the forces of anti-imperialism in every part of the world.”
The PFLP grew to be the second-largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).The PFLP was opposed to any Arab concession to Israel because Israel was not ready to reciprocate. It was equally uncompromising toward the West and conservative Arab regimes, both of whom, together with Israel, were the enemies of the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation.Under
Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity
with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South
Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to
name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and
moral encouragement.
In 1968 Habash received an invitation from the Syrian authorities,
which turned out to be a trap. He was arrested and charged with forming
paramilitary cells. He spent 10 months in the worst prison in Syria, the
Shaykh Hasan prison, where he suffered considerable mental torture. In
prison, he devoted his time to reading the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, gaining deeper insights into Marxism. He was
sprung out of prison by his comrade Wadi Haddad, who organized an escape
that was startling in its boldness.
In 1969, Habash moved secretly to Jordan to join the resistance
groups taking shape there in guerrilla bases following the defeat of the
regular armies in 1967. In the years that followed, guerrilla activity
from Jordan against the occupying forces inside Palestine steadily
increased.
Under Wadi Haddad’s supervision, the PFLP adopted, in addition to
armed struggle, the tactic of hijacking Israeli and western airliners
(while attempting not to harm passengers) as a means to draw world
attention to the two tragedies of 1948 and 1967 and to place the
suffering of the Palestinian people squarely on the agenda of
pro-Israeli western capitals and the international fora.
Soon, escalating guerrilla activities, violent Israeli reactions, and
the irresponsible behavior of some Palestinian factions led to
increased tension between the Palestinian armed groups and Jordanian
security forces. In 1970, Dr. Haddad organized the hijacking of three
western jumbo jet airliners; they were landed in a desert airfield in
Jordan, the passengers and crew were evacuated, and the planes were
blown up. This incident led to armed clashes between the Jordanian army
and security forces and the Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan. Fighting
moved from Amman to the forests of Jarash, where battles raged until the
end of 1971. Thereafter the Palestinian fighters and their commanders
withdrew to Lebanon.
On the personal level Habash suffered a near-fatal heart attack in
1972 and a severe brain hemorrhage in 1980 with which he coped through
strength of will. In 1972 the Israeli Mossad murdered his close friend,
the novelist and PFLP spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani, by placing a bomb
beneath his car seat in Beirut and in 1978 the Mossad used poison to
murder his lifelong friend and comrade Wadi Haddad. These two events
traumatized Habash, who had barely escaped assassination himself: in
1973 the Mossad hijacked a Middle East Airlines plane on which Habash
was a scheduled passenger but did not board because of a last minute
precautionary security measure.
At the organizational level, the PFLP announced in 1972 that it had
abandoned the tactic of hijacking planes; by then it, like other
Palestinian groups, became increasingly mired in Lebanese politics. A
game of alliances and balancing among the political forces in Lebanon
led to a split into two major camps, the one supporting and the other
opposing guerrilla activities against Israel. In 1975, a vicious civil
war erupted in Lebanon. Israel very quickly exploited the new situation
and worked to fan the flames, using the opportunity provided by its
interim agreement with Egypt (Sinai II Agreement, September 1975) and
then by the Peace Treaty (March 1979).
Egyptian-Israeli relations, in particular the separate peace,
constituted by far the most important regional developments in that
period, because it removed the strongest Arab military power from the
Arab-Israeli equation. Together with other nationalist groups, the PFLP
forcefully opposed these developments.
The Egyptian move greatly contributed to Israel’s decision in 1982 to
invade Lebanon and lay the siege to Beirut. The siege, a first for an
Arab capital, lasted eighty-eight days during which the city was
bombarded continuously by land, sea, and air. It ended when the
international community intervened, resulting in the withdrawal of the
Palestinian military forces, administrative cadres, and leadership from
Lebanon.
Habash left Beirut with the PLO led by Yasir Arafat, but, instead of
joining Arafat in Tunis, he headed to Syria, convinced of the need to
continue the struggle against the Israeli occupiers from a front-line
state, irrespective of the challenges involved. So he sailed from Beirut
with the other fighters but left the ship at the Syrian port of Tartus
and from there headed to Damascus. He chose Damascus as his residence
and as the headquarters of the PFLP throughout the eighties, making e a
number of trips to Arab and foreign capitals. During that decade, he
took active part in the meetings of the Palestine National Council held
in Algiers—the sixteenth (1983), the eighteenth (1987) and nineteenth
sessions (1988) —where he urged continued resistance.
During this period Habash was once again the subject of another
hijacking attempt by the Israelis. In February 1986, Israel’s air force
intercepted a private jet bound from Tripoli (Libya) to Damascus.
Habash, scheduled to fly on that plane, had cancelled his reservation at
the very last minute.
In 1993 he opposed to the Oslo Agreement warning that it particularly targeted a
central issue of the Palestinian national movement, the right to return.
In 1994 and 1995, he called for internal and external meetings for
Palestinian leaders and activists in exile, to launch campaigns and
establish al-Awda committees and right to return organizations
everywhere possible in order to protect this vital and central right for
Palestinian refugees in light of the new threat posed by Oslo and its
effects.,
Habash contributed to the
organization of the Damascus-based opposition, included for the first
time Islamist organizations outside the PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine convened its sixth conference in 2000, in which Dr. Habash
participated, delivering his last address as General Secretary, before
declaring his resignation from the post. He did this, providing an
example for allowing the transfer of leadership within an organization
through its democratic processes, which he upheld as a value that
strengthened, rather than weakened, organizations and movements. The
Front elected Abu Ali Mustafa to succeed Dr. Habash as General
Secretary.
From 2000 through 2008, Dr. Habash
established the al-Ghad al-Arabi center for studies and lived in Amman
near his daughters and family
Remaining intransigent, affectionately called
al-Hakim ("the Doctor" or "the Sage"), George Habash was known for his towering intellect who never wavered in his beliefs until the end, he maintained a great amount of respect among
Palestinians, notably for his consistent refusal to align his
organization with any Arab regime and for his revolutionary zeal in
pursuing his goal of liberating Palestine. All major Palestinian parties and organizations hailed Dr. Habash, as an historic leader of
the Palestinian struggle.
A Marxist, a Christian and a Palestinian, upon Habash’s death,
he was eulogized by various statesmen and politicians and the Palestinian Authority
declared three days of national mourning and the Palestinian flag lowered to half-mast in recognition of this great leader. The PFLP deputy Secretary-General, Abdel Raheem Mallouh, called Habash
an ‘historic leader’ and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh
described him as having ‘spent his life defending Palestine’
In his obituary in ‘The Guardian’, Habash is
cited as widely being known as ‘the conscience of the Palestine
revolution'.The BBC labeled him “Palestinian radical”. However the NY Times described him as a “Palestinian Terrorism Tactician”.
Overall, George Habash will be remembered most of all for his upstanding
character. Truly, he was completely and utterly incorruptible. The
Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, Jordanian, Emirati, Moroccan and
(then-Saddam-ruled) Iraqi regimes all tossed money at him in hopes of
swaying and controlling him. He never took a penny. Indeed, the Arab
dictatorships – all in the pay of Washington and “Tel Aviv” – despised
him with every fiber of their slave-like beings. The people of
Resistance throughout Palestine and the Diaspora, especially in
the Palestinian refugee camps… Adored him. This alone should tell you
anything and everything you need to know about the man and what kind of
human being he was
made him what he was — a major Arab revolutionary figure of our times.
a major Arab Revolutionary of our times,also made him what he was — a major Arab revolutionary figure of our times.
also made him what he was — a major Arab revolutionary figure of our times.
Not too long before he passed away, Habash said,
“You’ll see that the day will come soon when these borders will fall
and Arab unity will be achieved.”He was mourned by Palestinian’s the world over after he was lain to rest
after an open casket funeral at a Greek Orthodox Church in Amman, Jordan
Jan. 28. 2008. His funeral was attended by prominent Palestinian leaders, friends,
family, and comrades such as his daughters and his widow Hilda Habash,
longtime friend and comrade Leila Khaled, DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh,
PFLP politburo leader Maher Taher, Israeli Knesset member Ahmad Tibi,
head of the Palestinian National Council Saleem al-Za’anoun and Fatah
leader Faruq Qaddumi,.
He remains an example of steadfastness and revolutionary mind, who gave to the
Palestinian people the means to confront the occupation of their land. Al-Hakim. once famously said, “Palestine. All of Palestine. From the River to the Sea.” It is sad that he died without seeing either of his dreams materialising, Arab unity or an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, I long with many others hope that day comes one day soon,
“There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones”
(Bertolt Brecht, )
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