Fabricating Dr George Habash

The founder and former leader of the leftist Palestinian resistance organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Dr George Habash, died of a heart attack in Jordan on January 26 at the age of 82.

Not surprisingly, he got very short shrift in The Australian: Notorious Palestine 'defender' dies at 81 (28/1/08). But things weren't much better over at Fairfax either. When The Sydney Morning Herald decided to run The New York Times obituary (27/1/08) on him, whoever pared it down left out the vital contextualising paragraphs of the original. The header, Dead at 82: Palestinian marxist who took terrorism to the sky (28/1/08) said it all.

On the cutting room floor lay the following paragraphs, the 'why' of Dr Habash, without which the reader can be forgiven for thinking that he was simply off on some mad, aerial frolic:

"A number of accounts say Mr Habash was born in Lydda, Palestine, which is now Lod, Israel. The son of a...[Greek Orthodox] grain merchant, he was known as a hard-working and serious student...He studied medicine at the American University in Beirut, but his studies were interrupted in 1948 when he left...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..."

To understand George Habash and his people one must understand 1948 - but of course that is a temporal bridge too far for our native ms media hacks. The NYT's pale reference to 1948 notwithstanding, its obituary is still woefully inadequate, and one wonders why it is that we recycle so much American media hackery.

An infinitely more erudite, informative and objective assessment of the man, by veteran British Middle East correspondent and author, David Hirst, appeared on the website of The Guardian (27/1/08):

"In his later years, George Habash...was often known as 'the conscience of the Palestine revolution'. He had been one of the very earliest founding fathers of that movement, which pioneered armed struggle and revolutionary violence as the sole means of liberating Palestine. Since it first emerged, in the 1960s as a potent new force on the Middle East stage, the movement suffered all manner of vicissitudes, and its ambitions were eventually reduced, almost out of recognition, to an endless series of surrenders to the exigencies of Pax Americana. But, out of sincerity, rather than the opportunism which has tainted other, lesser radicals of his kind, 'Al Hakim' (the doctor or wise man) remained faithful to his original conviction that by force - and force alone - could the Palestinians recover their rights."

After charting Habash's career through to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance movement from Jordan in 1971, Hirst concludes:

"Moving to Beirut, along with the rest of the PLO, Habash persisted in some of the more spectacular, publicity-seeking acts of violence - with the 1972 massacre of tourists at Lod (once Lydda and now Ben Gurion) Airport by Japanese Red Army terrorists as perhaps the most successful, if ignoble, of them - but to less and less affect. The whole guerilla movement was moving away from random terrorism of that kind, and, at the same time, looking more and more to diplomacy, first as a supplement to, then as a substitute for, military action. Habash, the radical, made it his business to resist every new stage of this growing moderation. But when, at the Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting in 1988, Arafat made his historic offer of a two-state solution to the Palestine problem, Habash did not walk out of the PLO altogether. Nor did he, 3 years later, when the PNC agreed to go to the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. He said he would respect the will of the majority, however fiercely he opposed it. That loyalty to Palestinian national unity, along with his personal modesty and simplicity, made him perhaps the most liked of the small, still surviving band of the revolution's original chiefs. He stood down as PFLP leader in 2000, 4 years before the death of Yasser Arafat, and 6 years before the Islamicists of Hamas won their victory in the Palestinian election. Pax Americana meanwhile continues to make paltry progress in its regional diplomacy, and many of those who now so grudgingly support it may well in due course conclude that the 'conscience of the revolution' had always been right in opposing it - and the whole concept of Palestinian moderation."

Now there's food for thought!

I can't help but wonder if this staunchly secular, Christian Palestinian revolutionary ever became aware in his later years of his makeover as a forerunner of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of the late, deranged Italian Islamophobe and 'journalist', Oriana Fallaci. Did he, I wonder, ever remember the interview she conducted with him back in 1970 in Amman, or read it in the now defunct Life magazine, under the heading: A leader of the fedayeen: 'We want a war like the Vietnam war'? (The opening sentence reads: "The man I was facing was responsible for most of the acts of terror the Arabs have committed in Europe.")

Certainly, Islamofabulist Fallaci did - sort of. According to the account in her 2004 book-length rant, The Force of Reason, she interviewed him in Jordan in 1972, "while a conscientious bodyguard protected him by pointing his sub-machine gun at my head. Habash explained to me that the Arabs' enemy was not Israel alone: it was the whole West. Among the targets to hit he cited in fact Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland...'Our revolution is part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine...The time has come to admit that we want a war like the war in Vietnam. That we want another Vietnam, and not only for Palestine but for all the Arab countries'...The Palestine problem is not an aside problem. A problem separated from the Arab Nation's realities. Palestinians are part of the Arab Nation. Therefore the entire Arab Nation must go to war against Europe and America. It must unleash a war against the West. And it will. America and Europe don't know that we Arabs are just at the beginning of the beginning. That the best has yet to come. That from now on there will be no peace for the West...To advance step by step. Millimetre by millimetre. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet'."

She claims that at the time, she did not grasp the full import of his words, but now realises that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country [Europe!] from its citizens...In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism...The Islamic holidays, the 5 prayers' interruptions, the halal meat, the face covered also on the identity papers...The Islamic marriage, the polygamy, the stoning of women..." (pp 131-133)

Before the century is out, Fallaci frets, the Mediterranean Sea could become an Islamic lake, as an Islamized Europe to the north joins the Islamic world to the south to form the jihadist global Islamic umma.

There's only one problem - Habash said nothing of the kind, and the text of Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with him gives her lunacy the lie. To begin with, the interview took place in 1970, not 1972, the Palestinian resistance having been purged from Jordan by July 1971. Then there's the nonsense about the gun.

In the introduction to the 1970 interview she had written, "We met at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp. The room contained one desk and a few chairs; outside the closed doors, armed fedayeen stood guard. Inside there were only 4 of us: Habash, myself, a photographer and the man who had driven us there."

As for the words she alleges he uttered in The Force of Reason, Habash is quoted in the Life interview as saying that, "Our enemy is Israel, plus the Zionist movement that controls many of the countries which support Israel, plus imperialism. I mean specifically British imperialism from 1918, and American imperialism from 1948 on. If we had to face Israel alone, the problem would have been almost a simple one: but we have to stand against whoever supports Israel economically, militarily, politically, ideologically. This means the capitalist countries that have conceived Israel and are now using it as a bulwark to protect their interests in Arabia. They include the US, and almost every country in Europe."

In response to her question, "How far are you planning to go? Do you want to make war on three-fourths of the planet?", Habash replies: "What we want is a war like the war in Vietnam...not just in Palestine, but throughout the Arab world. Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, and what we need is for the whole Arab nation to enter the war; which will occur anyway, within 3 or 4 years [Habash's timing was prophetically correct: 3 years later in October, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a war to reclaim occupied territory in the Sinai and the Golan Heights]. By then, if not before, the revolutionary forces in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon will rise to our side in a total war. Our struggle has barely begun, the worst is yet to come. And it is right for Europe and America to be warned now that there will be no peace for them until there is justice for Palestine."

Habash went on to reassure Ignorantissima (as the Italian newspaper, La Republica, called her) that "we will do our best not to harm Europeans," and stressed that "The goal of our struggle is not only that of restoring the nationhood of Palestine, but to transform it into a socialist state as well."

In explaining the essence of guerilla warfare to her, Habash is quoted as saying: "The main point is to select targets where success is 100% assured. To harrass, to upset, to work on the nerves through unexpected small damages. Brute force is out; this is a thinking man's game. Especially when one is as poor as the Popular Front is. It would be silly for us to even think of waging a regular war; imperialism is too powerful and Israel is too strong. The only way to destroy them is to give a little blow here, a little blow there; to advance step by step, inch by inch, for years, for decades, with determination, doggedness, patience."

It is clear throughout that Habash's models are China, Cuba and Vietnam, that his strategy, as Che Guevara had enjoined, is "To make two, three, many Vietnams," and that his primary focus is the liberation of Palestine. Fallaci's 2004 revision of her 1970 interview with him, to fit her twisted and paranoid Islamophobic fantasies, is nothing less than grotesque.

Fallaci's 1970 interview also makes clear just what it was that launched Habash on his revolutionary career - the Lydda death march of 1948, one of the many war crimes that make up the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) about which our ms media are supremely ignorant. Even here, however, Fallaci can't get her dates right, substituting 1967 for 1948. Habash is speaking: "Then it was 1967 [sic: 1948] and they [the Israelis] came to Lydda and...I don't know how to explain this...what this still means for us not to have a home, not to have a nation, or anyone who cares...They forced us to flee. It is a picture that haunts me and that I'll never forget. Thirty thousand human beings walking, weeping... screaming in terror...women with babies in their arms and children tugging at their skirts...and the Israeli soldiers pushing them on with their guns. Some people fell by the wayside, some never got up again. It was terrible. One thinks: this isn't life, this isn't human. Once you have seen this, your heart and your brain are transformed."

Unfortunately, thanks to the recycling ad nauseam of Fallaci's febrile fantasies on innumerable crank websites, it is the fabricated Habash, rather than the real, that most people will be exposed to.