of The Iranian Revolution of 1979 reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East, replacing that of Iran Western backed leader with an Islamic Republic.
It transformed modern political extremism. Now, more than 40 years later, Israeli-US attacks have killed the country the supreme leadercreating the possibility of regime change. It reminds us that these fault lines are far from resolved.
In his gripping new book, “revolutionaries”The Guardian’s international security correspondent Jason Burke treats the Iranian Revolution as a catalyst for “a new and different energy” that would sweep through the Middle East. After him, he argues, religious extremism accelerated throughout the Islamic world. The old revolutionary leftist currents were pushed to the margins.
Among those streams was and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Her most famous face, Leila Khaledparticipated in two hijackings, one activity pioneering by Palestinian militants in the late 1960s to draw global attention to their cause. Today, of course, this cause is back on the world stage.
Another stream was Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrilla Organizationwho fought the Iranian regime from within from 1971 to 1979. It was part of a broad coalition, including left-wing radicals and right-wing religious extremists, that supported the revolution.
Principal member Hamid Ashrafwas shot to death a few years before the fall of the Shah, had becomes an “obsession” against Iran’s leader, because of his record of avoiding ambush and his long survival under intense persecution.
Burke delves into the history of both types of extremism. For him, they are not discrete explosions, but successive stages of what he describes as “a broader revolutionary moment”.
It profiles many of the most high-profile terrorists, operatives and ideologues of the 1970s, revealing the myths and legends surrounding them. They include Khaled, Ashraf, Venezuelan leftist militant Ilich Ramírez Sanchez (better known as Carlos the jackal), the West German radical left Faction of the Red Army (RAF) and members of Japanese Red Army. It’s a fresh, highly detailed portrait of an important decade.
But Burke’s project is not simply to review the biographies of a handful of infamous characters. It also reconstructs the wider transnational ecosystem in which they operated. Drawn from all continents and ideologies, his subjects are united less by doctrine than by a shared belief that existing power structures can be overthrown by force. Ideological warfare and international militancy have fused into new and disturbing configurations.
Lives of Radicals
Burke’s comprehensive transnational account of political zeal moves across four continents and more than two dozen countries. It follows radicals from wildly different social worlds: students and dropouts, refugees and aristocrats, opportunists and hitmen.
Together, Burke argues, their actions formed a historically tangled arena of revolutionary currents, comprising two distinct but overlapping eddies of extremism. The first emerged from the secular, often leftist, revolutionary movements that spread in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly in the Middle East and Palestinian cause.
The second, gathering strength by the end of the decade, spread in the 1980s. The rise of violent Islamist militancy was directed against Western political influence and secular modernity.
But it also targeted regimes and Muslim peers deemed corrupt or insufficiently pious. This was shaped, in part, by the failures, displacements and unintended legacies of the previous revolutionary wave.
Despite their ideological divergence – one secular and anti-imperialist, the other religious and theocratic – both currents sought the violent overthrow of established political and social orders.
Both were embedded in the era’s broader transformations: from rapid media expansion to the hidden infrastructure of superpower rivalry. Extremists, weapons and money flowed across borders. The West German RAF trained with Palestinian guerrillas Jordanfor example.
Burke’s “revolutionaries” were not unseemly fanatics. They were committed to radical and irreversible social transformations. Violence was not an end in itself, but an essential means of remaking the political order.
Abductor or sky grabber?
Burke begins in 1967, with the conflict reshaping the political landscape of the Middle East. Israel’s overwhelming victory in The Six Day War destroyed the prestige of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the same vein, it dealt a decisive blow to the secular pan-Arab nationalism associated with the Egyptian president. Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In its wake emerged a more militant, Palestine-centered politics led by displaced and radicalized young activists. Organizations like Fatah and the PFLP became popular. Their strategy marked a change in scale and theater. The Palestinian struggle was organized beyond the region, aimed at a global audience capable of putting pressure on Western governments aligned with Israel.
Leila Khaled, born in Haifa, moved as a child in 1948. She came of age in exile. By the late 1960s, she had joined the PFLP and devoted herself to armed struggle.
The hijacking transformed the conflict into a new kind of international spectacle. There was, Burke points out, no “agreed vocabulary” to describe the people who committed such acts. Air Bandits or Air Pirates? Abductor or sky grabber? No one could decide.
Burke recounts Khaled’s first hijacking—the hijacking of a TWA flight in 1969 from Rome to Tel Aviv, Israel—with a degree of dry irony. After landing in Damascus, Syria, Khaled ordered the crew and 120 passengers to evacuate immediately, claiming the plane was rigged to blow up. “This was not true,” writes Burke,
but that meant terrified passengers were sliding down the emergency slides and onto the rocky, razor-sprayed ground all too quickly. Only then, with the plane empty, were the explosives planted and detonated, neatly destroying most of the ship’s nose and causing $10 million in damage.
After the explosion, Khaled cheerfully tried to distribute sweets and cigarettes to the shocked hostages. The gesture of revolutionary courtesy, to her apparent surprise, was met with a distinctly “cold” reception.
Undaunted, she launched into a speech on the runway, explaining that the kidnapping was meant to “tell the world about the crimes the Israelis inflicted on our people.” She justified the targeting of US-owned TWA on the grounds that America was an “imperialist country” supporting the Israeli state.
The following year, it reappeared in Haddad’s most ambitious undertaking: the coordinated kidnappings of September 1970, known within the PFLP as Operation Revolution Airport.
Altered almost beyond recognition by elective plastic surgery and traveling under false documents, Khaled unsuccessfully tried to catch an El Al flight departing from Amsterdam. She was seized by air marshals and detained in Britain, before being released as part of a prisoner swap.
Now in her eighties, she has spent decades in exile in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. She remains active in Palestinian politics.
The hijackings ‘tainted’ the cause
The combination of passenger jets, helpless hostages and camera lenses made for a largely bloodless media spectacle that was shocking and initially effective. The early campaign had forced the Palestinian cause onto the world stage.
But this “came at the significant cost of undermining much of the relatively new support in the West and elsewhere for redress of their grievances,” Burke writes. Long after the militants turned their backs on the hijacking, “the Palestinian cause would remain irrevocably tarnished by it.”
The kidnappings provoked a violent reaction from the very Arab regimes that had previously tolerated – and sometimes supported – Palestinian militant operations. In Jordan, where the fighters had come to behave with near-autonomy, King Hussein moved to reassert control. It signaled the end of the fragile allegiance between Palestinian soldiers and their state armies.
Out of this rupture emerged a more secretive and deadly organization. Joining under the name Black SeptemberFatah militants switched from kidnapping to assassinations and mass-casualty attacks against Jordanian and Israeli targets abroad.
IN September 1972members of Israel’s Olympic team were captured in Munich and massacred – an atrocity orchestrated by Black September operatives closely linked to the Fatah leadership. The hostage-takers demanded the release not only of the Palestinian prisoners, but also of the imprisoned European militants.
Munich transformed international perceptions of Palestinian militancy. It hardened attitudes, draining him of much of the sympathy the cause had recently gained. And it forced Western states to reassess the scale and character of the threat they faced. It accelerated the shift from ad hoc crisis management to coordinated counter-terrorism, specialized security units and a more uncompromising response doctrine.
Not all left-wing revolutionary movements embraced violence. Many acted through protest, organizing and political agitation.
The university movement in the USA Students for a democratic societyfor example, mobilized mass protest against the Vietnam War before a small militant faction broke away to form Underground weather.
Other groups, such as the West German RAF, became radicalized over time: moving from token attacks – such as the firebombing of empty shops – to bank robberies, kidnappings and murders.
By the late 1970s, the revolutionary fervor that had animated large parts of the Western left had largely faded. Political violence took new forms and ideological centers.
Ignore extremists at our peril
The Iranian revolution of 1979 showed that militant religious political mobilization could topple a major regional order—and challenge existing global superpowers.
Iran’s trade unions, left-wing political parties and student radicals joined the right-wing Islamic clerics to realize it and establish the Islamic Republic – although the left soon found itself purged by the new regime.
This power grab caused extremist behavior to take the forms we can recognize today.
The largely theatrical violence of the early 1970s was designed to attract attention, rather than maximize casualties. But by the early 1980s, Burke writes, terrorists were driving vehicles packed with explosives into crowded targets, convinced they were waging divine, not secular, revolution.
This is the form of terrorism most familiar to Westerners now: mass-casualty atrocities justified in religious terms, directed against the civilian population.
But we should not dismiss extremist violence as the irrational product of bigoted ideology, Burke warns. It was taken up by actors who saw it as “an essential tool to bring about the radical and necessary transformation of society”. He concludes:
We may strongly disagree with the changes that violent men and women demand, but we fail to understand their motives at risk.
Alexander Howard is a senior lecturer, discipline of English and writing, University of Sydney
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
