In 1969 the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its 25-year-old agent of chaos Leila Khaled hijacked a passenger flight headed to Tel Aviv from Rome. After ordering the captain to land in Damascus, Khaled and her accomplice Salem Issawi evacuated everyone onboard and blew up the plane’s nose. She distributed sweets and cigarettes among the passengers, then told them the attack aimed to “tell the world about the crimes the Israelis inflict upon our people”. Khaled and Issawi returned to Jordan, where the PFLP was based, as heroes.
The hijacking had been an operational and propagandistic success. More than that, it suggested that some form of recurring organised spectacle would be more effective at changing the state of play in Palestine than the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab states and expanded its borders.
The intention of most terrorist attacks in the early 1970s was not to kill. It was to broadcast Palestinian injustice through strictly defined acts of military resistance. But as the decade progressed, the global proliferation of images quickly rendered these shocking acts obsolescent. To retain the world’s attention, terrorism became riskier, more expansive and more violent. The sanctity of life was forgotten as political objectives were articulated in a more fundamentalist way, until they reached the ultimate expression of commitment – suicide bombing. This transition is the subject of The Revolutionists, the journalist Jason Burke’s magisterial new book (recently shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction) on the people “who hijacked the 1970s”.
Burke draws on more than a decade of research and dozens of interviews with those who participated in attacks or were present at them. It tells the story of how the failure of broadly progressive, secular, leftist, pan-Arabist movements contributed to the emergence of Islamic extremism. But Burke’s stance is analytic. He shows that extremist violence was not some “unthinking product” of ideology but one “tool” to help bring about the transformation of society.
In the 1960s Yasser Arafat, leader of the nationalist, secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO, of which the PFLP was a member), knew that raids from its adopted home of Jordan were not enough to return Palestinians to their homes. Even on the rare occasions they could best superior Israeli forces, they could not keep what they took, nor had they inspired a popular revolution. But through limited, incisive attacks they could “win political influence and leverage through violence”, Burke writes. Wadie Haddad, one of the PFLP’s leaders, theorised that a “war for territory did not necessarily have to be fought on that territory”. This new type of insurgency would be fought in different sites, such as 29,000ft in the sky, what Burke calls an “anarchic zone beyond the reach of soldiers, policemen or spies”.
Their cause was taken up by left-wing extremists, affiliated with the PLO, across the Middle East and Europe. One assemblage was the “violent activists, polemicists, self-publicists, adventurers and intellectuals” of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof may have drawn most of the attention but their theorist was Gudrun Ensslin, whose rural Protestant background belied her alienation from postwar consumerism and Germany’s disinclination to work through its Nazi history.
The RAF emerged from the bohemian communes of Berlin and Munich, after the failures of the New Left and the unrest of 1968. Unwilling to engage in the humdrum community and consciousness-raising work that true social transformation requires, it sought instead to inspire and punish the system through campaigns of bank robbery, arson and bombings. In 1970, the trio flew to a PLO training camp in Lebanon. Their hippy-adjacent libertinism clashed with more conservative Palestinians, who considered their topless sunbathing a sign of insufficient commitment. Baader was insufferable, “prone to sulking” and “foul-mouthed rants”, and his capacity on assault courses was hindered by a refusal to give up his tight velvet trousers. The Germans’ unwillingness to surrender certain freedoms was emblematic of a general theoretical confusion: their activism was not only a critique but, unwittingly, an endorsement of the very liberalism they set out to demolish.
Indicative of the new globalised terrorist was the most notorious of them all: Carlos the Jackal, or José, Johnny, Saleem, Adolfo, depending on which country he was in. By the late 1970s Carlos, real name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was credited with “scores of killings perpetrated on almost every continent”, even if little of it was accurate. His most elaborate and audacious turn was the abduction in 1975 of the Opec nations’ oil ministers from a Viennese meeting room. The team, organised by Haddad, was given a jet by Austrian authorities desperate to be rid of the problem. Carlos flew his hostages to Algiers, then Tripoli, before the farce fizzled out back in Algiers.
Confusion in objective and praxis was as much a hallmark of Carlos’s modus operandi as the theatricality of the act. Before and after the Opec siege, his many plots “attained very few” of their aims and often foiled themselves with comical incompetence. Though Carlos talked a good show about freedom from imperialism, his real goal was his own notoriety. He leached off terrorist organisations and rogue states, staying in five-star hotels for reasons of “safety”, spending hours preening himself in the bathroom, and spraying his Mercedes gold. Inevitably, his dissidence ended in dissonance: a futile one-man war against France has left him in a prison outside Paris since the 1990s.
When the PLO formally renounced terrorist violence in 1974, it was rewarded with “observer status” at the UN: the Palestinian cause could now be furthered by less controversial means. This, along with the deaths or imprisonment of left-wing radicals, undermined the fanatical socialist movements. But a new extremist ideological cogency began to replace it in the Middle East. It extracted the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist rhetoric from socialism and added to it the total commitment of extremist Islam. As secular states like Lebanon and Iran imploded into civil war, the sense of political alienation left a huge population desperate enough to find the jihadist logic of radical preachers and Muslim intellectuals attractive. Faith would succeed where Marxist-Leninist theory had failed.
Figures like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb reinterpreted the leftist struggle in theological terms as a “the battle between Islam and capitalism”. Other thinkers justified attacks against soldiers and civilians alike. Terrorism became about maximalising loss of life, because everyone was a legitimate target.
Burke submerges his readers in the inky, internecine swamps of extremism. His staggering command of detail draws complex, contoured characters who inspire neither admiration nor outright condemnation. Yet he spends little time defining precisely what “revolutionists” are. This becomes a problem with the chapters, fascinating though they are, on Israeli state terrorism – such as the Mossad’s excursions across western Europe and North Africa in pursuit of those they considered responsible for the Black September group’s massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Though the public assassinations and bombings were designed to terrify pro-Palestinian activists and project an aura of Israeli durability and invincibility, it is harder to describe them as the labours of revolutionary struggle.
The failure to define his parameters also makes the absence of other prolific terrorist groups of the 1970s, such as the IRA, Italy’s Red Brigades or ETA’s Basque separatists, difficult to fathom. Burke’s interest in certain actors seems to be due to their orbit of the PLO, or with radical Islam from the late 1970s – though members from both the Red Brigades and the IRA are alleged to have received weapons from the PLO, and spent some time training in PLO camps.
But if its sprawling nature is the source of structural foibles, it’s also what makes The Revolutionists such an engaging, intelligible guide through a dense geopolitical period.
The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s
Jason Burke
Bodley Head, 768pp, £30
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[Further reading: GB News will never love Kemi Badenoch]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats