The Popular Front is best known in the non-Arab world for its hijackings in September 1970. A lot of criticisms of the hijackings have been made. Some of these are bourgeois criticisms. But there are two others which I would like to pose here. The first criticism has been made both by people within the Palestinian resistance, such as the Central Committee spokesman Kamel Radouan, and by people outside: it is that the hijackings gave Hussein an excuse to attack the resistance at a time when he would not otherwise have done so. The second criticism is made mainly by people outside the resistance movement. This is that the hijackings gave an illusory sense of power and confidence to the Palestinian masses, which was far in advance of their real organizational and military strength. The hijackings were thereby a substitute for organizing the masses, and were a theatrical event that encouraged fantasy. This is not to deny that the hijackings had the positive effect, of giving you a world audience on television, to whom you could explain the purpose of the Palestinian resistance. This point is not in question. But do you now defend the highjackings?

First of all, I appreciate the fact that you reject bourgeois moralism and obedience to international law. These have been the cause of our tragedy. Now, I would like to answer your questions. I want to talk in general about this kind of operation. I have always said that we don’t hijack planes because we love Boeing 707s. We do it for specific reasons, at a specific time and against a specific enemy. It would be ridiculous to hijack planes at the present moment and land them in Cairo, for example, or in Jordan. It would have no meaning now. But you have to analyse the political situation in which we carried out these operations, and the aims we wanted to achieve. Let us recall the situation. On July 23rd Nasser accepted the Rogers plan, and a week later the Jordanian government did so too. Once again the Palestinians were put on the shelf. If you read the Arab and international press between July 23rd and September 6th, you will see that the Palestinian people were again being treated exactly as they were between 1948 and 1967. The Arab papers started writing about how ‘heroic’ the Palestinians are, but also how ‘paralysed’ they were, and how there was no hope for these ‘brave heroes’. The morale of our people in Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza was extremely low. On top of that a delegation from the leadership of the Palestinian resistance movement, the plo Central Committee, went to Cairo to negotiate with Nasser and his government; they spent days and days discussing whether they would allow us to restart broadcasts from Egypt again, after the closing down of our radio in mid-August. The delegation then complained to the Arab League and tried to get them to discuss the question. Before July 23rd the Palestinian resistance was pictured in the Arab press as the great hope of the Palestinian people; at the same time all Arabs consider the Arab League to represent the lowest form of politics, the most paralysed political body, in the Arab world. Now we had the highest form of politics approaching the ‘dirty shelter’ of the Arab League. This showed that the revolution was threatened with liquidation, whether Hussein smashed it physically or not. Everyone—including those who criticized the pflp operations—was convinced that the destruction of the resistance was an essential part of the Rogers plan.

You agree that Nasser and the Egyptian régime supported this?

The Egyptian régime was one step removed from direct participation in this liquidation, since it had no direct contact with the Palestinians; it was in a safer position. The only way the Egyptian régime could help Hussein was by keeping silent: and that it did, to the extent that it could resist the pressure of the Arab masses. For the first three days of the fighting in September the Egyptian government, and all the other Arab governments, were silent, because they thought that the resistance movement could not survive for more than three days. Then they were forced to move, because the people in the streets of Egypt, Syria and Lebanon were angry at the massacre; but the first five thousand Palestinian victims fell in Amman in silence, and no-one complained.

The Rogers plan presupposed the liquidation of our movement, and this was now approaching in an atmosphere of Palestinian submissiveness. Therefore, something had to be done; first of all, to tell the world that we were not going to be put on the shelf for the second time, and secondly to tell the world that the days when the us and reactionary Arabs could dictate to our people were over. Moreover there was the question of the morale, the fighting ability, of our own people. We could not let things remain like that when a massacre was on the way, even if we had sat down quietly on the steps of His Majesty’s palace, and kissed his hand.

So you don’t accept the notion that Hussein himself was unsure of what to do, but that the army forced him to move.

Absolutely not. This is complete rubbish. It is true that there are still parts of the resistance movement who think it is possible to ‘neutralize’ the Jordanian régime; but this is nonsense. As for the argument that the hijackings provoked and accelerated Hussein’s attack, the short answer to this is that the Jordanian régime had already stopped guerrilla actions south of the Dead Sea, blocked forces moving towards Eilat, and prevented our units attacking the Naharin dam in the North of the West Bank. At the same time the Jordanian army put mines at most of the points where guerrillas crossed the Jordan river, and forced the guerrillas to go through certain specific corridors; these corridors were ambushes. They were sending us to be killed anyway. This was all happening before the September massacre; it was a massacre in another form.