Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Logo

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a designated terrorist organization and "a hard-line Marxist group that shocked the world with a campaign of airline hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s". The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was founded in 1967 by George Habash."

Praise from Abbas Hamideh

Abbas Falasteen Hamideh has "expressed strong support for Rasmea Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was convicted of planting the explosives used in two 1969 Jerusalem bombings. In April 2018, Hamideh tweeted about The Islamic House of Wisdom honoring Barbara McQuade, “who’s responsible for stripping away Rasmea Odeh’s citizenship & deportation recently.” He called Odeh “a tremendous Palestinian woman who…worked tirelessly for her people.” In January 2016, Hamideh expressed his support by tweeting, “I proudly stand with my fellow Palestinian, Rasmea Odeh! Long live Palestine! #Justice4Rasmea.”

Saadah Masoud Connection

From an article titled "Palestinian Activist Pleads Guilty to Antisemitic Assaults" dated November 27, 2022:

"Last week, Saadah Masoud pleaded guilty to one count of participating in a conspiracy to commit hate crime acts, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The charges came in connection with Masoud’s “repeated physical attacks of Jewish victims” in New York City between 2021 and 2022. He was arrested in June.

Canary Mission, which had compiled a file on Masoud based on his incitement to violence against supporters of Israel and spreading of antisemitic conspiracy theories, was able to identify Masoud as the man on video assaulting a victim who was wearing an Israeli flag on a Manhattan street, leading to his arrest. He faces up to five years in prison.

Masoud, a 29-year-old Staten Island resident, is involved with Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a virulent antisemitic and anti-Israel group and offshoot of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in New York City.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that Masoud, along with others, “deliberately targeted three victims because of their religion and nation of origin.” As part of his plea, Masoud admitted to three assaults, including one on a victim wearing a kippah and other Jewish clothing, and one wearing a Star of David necklace.

“We are satisfied that Saadah Masoud is being penalized for his violent hate crimes, but his is not an isolated case,” Canary Mission wrote in a statement, asking authorities to pursue charges against Nerdeen Kiswani, a co-founder of New York City’s branch of SJP, who has engaged in calls for the death of Zionists and for Israel’s destruction, in addition to glorifying intifada violence and honoring leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group.

“While Masoud has rightly been convicted of hate crimes, what about his mentor and leader, Nerdeen Kiswani?” Canary Mission wrote. “Her hate-filled rhetoric includes a call for ‘Resistance, By Any Means Necessary,’ and that ‘We need allies that are gonna help us achieve a victory, not allies who are gonna to tell us to be non-violent.’ ”

2016 delegation

Florida State Sen. Dwight Bullard, wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh, or headscarf, at the Democratic National Convention, July 2016

The Dream Defenders Palestine delegations were connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Florida State Senator Dwight Bullard visited Palestine in May 2016, under the aegis of a Miami-based civil rights group, Dream Defenders. His delegation met with a founder of the anti-Israel BDS movement and were led by a tour guide identified with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a State Department-designated terrorist group.

Bullard’s trip is unusual in that it joins a lawmaker from a district with a substantial Jewish population – the Democrat represents a chunk of Miami-Dade country – with a cause, BDS, considered anathema for most of the mainstream Jewish community.

On June 3 2016, Bullard spoke at an event that explicitly linked the Black Lives Matter movement to the Palestinian cause titled “Struggles for Liberation: Injustice from Ferguson to Palestine.” Sabeel, a Christian group that endorses BDS, sponsored the event.

“As an African-American born to a mom who lived through Jim Crow and some of those things, people born in a certain place should be afforded political rights,” Bullard said Tuesday in an interview with JTA, explaining why he accepted the invitation to attend the Dream Defenders tour. “People should not be viewed in two different lights.”

His tour group met with Omar Barghouti, a founder of the BDS movement, among others. Pro-Israel groups object that BDS not only singles out Israel, but that it supports a single binational state — essentially a denial of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state.

Bullard said he did not know until after the West Bank trip that its tour guide, Mahmoud Jeddah, was affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During the same trip Didier Ortiz, a Green Party candidate for the Fort Lauderdale City Council, posted on Instagram a photo of Jeddah and noted his PFLP affiliation. (Ortiz also said in another Instagram posting from the trip, from a checkpoint in Hebron, that “Zionism must be eradicated.”)

Bullard told JTA that he joined the Dream Defenders trip seeking facts, and was ready to engage with Jewish and pro-Israel groups as part of his constituency outreach, as well as travel to Israel with a pro-Israel group.

“If a pro-Jewish organization said if you want to go to Israel, I’d go,” he said. “I’m open to talk to anybody about my experience of what I saw.”

Bullard said he was alarmed by the vitriol he encountered subsequent to the trip.

“I want to be a public servant, open-minded,” he said.

Bullard said he traveled with Dream Defenders in his quest to learn more about people suffering from discrimination; he had once traveled to Morocco with the State Department for similar reasons.

“For people who are indigenous to an area, they deserve rights and protections they are not afforded,” Bullard said, referring both to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.

“The reality is a person born of Palestinian heritage in Nazareth does not have the same rights as someone born of Jewish heritage,” he said.

Bullard said he did not have a position on a two-state or one-state outcome, preferring to focus instead on enfranchising the marginalized.

“As an elected official,” he said, “I’m not in a position to advocate against a two-state or one-state solution.”

Dwight Bullard was one of 14 Latinx and Black activists, artists, ministers, students and educators who in May traveled throughout the West Bank to build connections with Palestinian organizers and see the effects of Israeli land control. The trip was the second in two years organized by the Dream Defenders and participants came from Black Lives Matter Toronto, BYP 100, Puente Arizona, [PICO National Network] and other groups focused on racial justice.

2016 delegates

The trip, which took place from May 10th to 20th, dovetailed with the 68th commemoration of the Nakba, the displacement of roughly 75 percent of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in May 1948. In the West Bank the group met with artists, youth organizers and refugees living under military occupation and Israeli settlement. In East Jerusalem, they heard from the African Palestinian community and families facing eviction. Within Israel, they met with Palestinian civil rights activists and marched with Bedouin Palestinians in the Naqab Desert facing the demolition of their villages.

Delegation members

• Dream Defenders May 2016 Palestine delegation;
• Florida State Senator Dwight Bullard
• Dream Defenders and Green Party of Florida spokesperson Didier Ortiz
• Maria Castro, an organizer with Puente Arizona
• Steven Gilliam, Jr., an organizer with the Miami Dream Defenders
• Rachel Gilmer, the Dream Defenders’ chief of strategy
• A Dream Defenders staff member who focuses on criminalization, Jonel Edwards
• Minister, organizer and Princeton Ph.D. student Nyle Fort
• Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Janaya Khan
• Dream Defenders co-founder Ahmad Abuznaid

Obituary of PFLP Founder George Habash

From his Obituary at the New York Times dated January 27, 2008 by Edmund L. Andrews and John Kifner:

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a hard-line Marxist group that shocked the world with a campaign of airline hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died Saturday of a heart attack in Amman, Jordan. Although accounts varied, he was believed to be 82.

“He had a severe heart attack, and he died instantly,” Leila Khaled, a longtime Front associate and herself a high-profile airplane hijacker in 1969, told Al Jazeera by telephone from the Jordan Hospital, where Mr. Habash had been a patient. He also had cancer.

The Palestinian ambassador to Jordan, Atala al-Khairy, said Mr. Habash had been in the hospital for a week and that he died after a surgical procedure to implant a stent.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered three days of mourning and flags lowered to half-staff in the Palestinian territories.

Mr. Habash was best known as the Palestinian leader who adapted modern terrorist tactics as a weapon in the conflict with Israel. From the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 to the simultaneous hijacking of three Western airliners to Amman, Jordan, in September 1970, the Front stayed in the news with high-profile attacks that other Palestinian groups never seemed able to match.

“When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we kill a hundred Israelis in battle,” he told the German magazine Der Stern in 1970. “For decades, world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now.”

But his list of enemies did not stop at Israel. He was sharply critical of existing Arab governments, most of which he said should be overthrown; of a long series of attempts at peace negotiations; and of his longtime rival, Yasir Arafat. A stubborn opponent of the Oslo accords, Mr. Habash refused to set foot in the areas under the nominal control of the Palestinian Authority.

In turn, he earned the enmity of King Hussein of Jordan, who in 1970 expelled all the Palestinian guerrilla factions who had been threatening his rule most notably that of Mr. Habash in a brief but fierce civil war remembered by Palestinians as Black September.

Although his tactics softened somewhat in the 1980s, and his organization receded from the headlines, Mr. Habash remained a determined Marxist who continued to denounce Arab governments he felt were too closely aligned with the West and Palestinian leaders he suspected were ready to make concessions to Israel. In an interview in 1970, he remarked that he would not accept money from Arab countries that “stink of American oil,” and he frequently argued that victory over Israel would only come when the traditional Arab governments had been replaced with revolutionary regimes.

A number of accounts say Mr. Habash was born in 1925 in Lydda, Palestine, which is now Lod, Israel. The son of a well-to-d0 grain merchant who was Greek Orthodox, he was known as a hard-working and serious student who was introverted in his youth. He studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, but his studies were interrupted in 1948 when he left school to help his family flee Palestine as violence deepened between Arabs and Jews.

That experience of the nascent Israeli Army driving the Palestinians from their homes had a profound effect on the young medical student, who began organizing Palestinians as soon as he returned to medical school, graduating first in his class in 1951. In 1953, Mr. Habash was among the founders of an organization in Jordan called the Arab Nationalists' Movement. Backed with financing from Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the group established a medical clinic in Amman and promoted the broader goal of a unified Arab superstate.

In 1957, however, the Arab Nationalists' Movement was implicated in an attempt to overthrow King Hussein, and Mr. Habash and his followers were fled to Syria. But the group was also forced from that country in 1963, two years after Syria withdrew from a political union with Egypt.

Mr. Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December 1967 in the bitter aftermath of the Israel’s stunning defeat of the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Mr. Habash later remarked that the Arab defeat that year convinced him of the need to adopt a strategy like that of the Marxist guerrillas in Vietnam. “By 1967, we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples,” he said in an interview in 1969.

Beginning with the hijacking of an Israeli El Al airliner in June 1968, the Front embarked on a series of bombings and hijackings of civilian targets. In 1969, it planted a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two youths and wounded 20 others. Also that year, Mr. Habash took responsibility for blowing up Tapline, a pipeline owned by the Arab-American Oil Company that carried oil from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean.

The struggle of the Front, he said, was “not merely to free Palestine from the Zionists but also to free the Arab world from remnants” of Western colonial rule. All Arab revolutionaries, he said, “must be Marxist, because Marxism is the expression of the aspirations of the working class.”

Establishing Jordan once again as his base of operations by the late 1960s, Mr. Habash’s guerrillas became embroiled in bloody battles with the Jordanian Army. In June 1970, the Front seized 60 foreigners in two downtown hotels and held them hostage, threatening to kill them if Jordan’s army kept fighting.

In September that year, the Front hijacked three Western jets to a disused dirt airstrip outside Amman and held the several hundred passengers and crew hostage aboard the planes in the desert. They were eventually released, but the planes were blown up. Angered by the appearance that he no longer controlled events in his country, King Hussein declared martial law and unleashed his army and Bedouin loyalists against the Palestinians in Jordan, driving the guerrillas into Lebanon and Syria.

Mr. Habash is believed to have been behind a machine-gun attack in May 1972 by Japanese Red Army terrorists at the international airport near Tel Aviv that killed 26 people. In June 1976, the Front hijacked an Air France airliner to Entebbe, Uganda, leading to a dramatic rescue mission by Israeli troops in which four civilians were killed.

When the Palestine Liberation Organization was expelled from Beirut after the Israeli invasion in 1982, he refused to go to Tunis with Mr. Arafat and the others, living for a time in Damascus and moving to Jordan, his wife’s homeland. For the past 10 years, he had mostly stayed in that country. Plagued by illness, he stepped down as leader of the Front in 2000.

Mr. Habash, whose nom de guerre was Al Hakim, which means either “the Doctor” or “the Wise One” the double meaning was deliberate was married to a cousin, Hilda Habash, in 1961. She survives him, as do their two daughters, Mesa Habash, a doctor, and Lama Habash, an engineer.