Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

PDFLP

12/12/2006

The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine is nothing more than a splinter of the PFLP. Under Secretary General Nayef Hawatmeh's leadership, the faction broke away in 1969 because Hawatmeh thought George Habash had become too focused on terror at the expense of politics. His PDFLP was the second of a series of splinters. Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command had split away in 1968, thinking that the Habash had slighted terrorism in favor of politics. Despite their different priorities, all three groups were considered to be Fedayeen - or a modern incarnation of Hasan's Islamic Assassins.

By sometime in 1974, the PFLP, PDFLP, and PFLP-GC were essentially realigned. They were all incorporated into the PLO and accepted the Palestinian National Council's Ten Point Political Program as drafted in Cairo and adopted by Fatah on June 8, 1974. But then disputes fueled by Syria, Libya, and Iraq, caused some of the most ruthless jihadists to spar with Yasser Arafat. This turf war was swept under the carpet when Fatah called for the first Intifada against Israel in 1978 because an Islamic lust for killing Jews was the one thing they all had in common.

By the 1980s, with the decline of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the Marxist Muslim factions of the Palestinian terrorist movement like the PDFLP were destined for irrelevancy. Those which didn't merge into the more fundamentalist PLO or the Salafist HAMAS, faded away. But those factions which joined their Muslim brothers during Fatah's al-Aqsa Intifada in 2001 became implements under which the PLO, PA, Fatah, and HAMAS could do their bidding.