Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism

That a handful of revolutionaries could collect airliners worth millions of dollars and hold Western passengers ransom made it appear the Palestinians had history on their side. They dubbed Dawson’s Field “Revolution Airport.” The French writer Jean Genet, who spent time in Jordan’s Palestinian camps and wrote a book about it, told militants that the pyrotechnics “had won the admiration of all the young people in Europe.”

One European audience was particularly impressed: a group of radical West Germans calling themselves the Red Army Faction. The R.A.F. grew out of the student-protest movement, and many of its members, like their Palestinian counterparts, came from educated backgrounds. Ulrike Meinhof was a well-known journalist and the daughter of two art historians. Gudrun Ensslin was a literature student from an anti-Nazi evangelical family. Early operations were small-scale. Ensslin and her lover-collaborator, Andreas Baader, bombed two department stores in Frankfurt in 1968, landing themselves in prison. In 1970, the year that the R.A.F. officially announced its existence, Meinhof, Ensslin, Baader, and other members were invited to train with the fedayeen in Jordan. For the Palestinians, the aim was to plant their cause in the hearts of the German radicals. For the Germans, it was a chance to learn from people they viewed as heroic rebels against Western imperialism—and also, Burke suggests, fulfilled a middle-class wanderlust.

The R.A.F. is now routinely derided for its perceived naïveté. “The Revolutionists,” conjuring a time when it inspired real terror and did not shy from killing people, generally refrains from condescension, but there’s no hiding the fact that its members were not cut from the same cloth as their Palestinian brethren. At a camp in Jordan, Khaled encountered European students who, she observed with amusement, “honestly believed they were making a ‘revolution’ if they undressed in public, seized a university building, or shouted an obscenity at bureaucrats.” Genet asked one European trainee what kind of revolutionary regime should take over Jordan. “One based on the Situationists, for instance” was the answer. After German authorities tracked down Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in 1972 and imprisoned them, Baader dismissed the “second generation” R.A.F. members who risked their lives trying to free him as people who couldn’t be trusted to “buy bread rolls in the morning.”

Meinhof died in her prison cell in May, 1976; the next year, on a single night in October, Baader, Ensslin, and their associate Jan-Carl Raspe met the same fate. Officially ruled suicides—a verdict much challenged—the deaths sent despair and bitterness coursing through much of the West German left. The director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was distraught when he heard that Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were dead. But he came to believe that the R.A.F.’s provocations had not weakened the state but made it stronger. Two years later, he made the black comedy “The Third Generation,” in which an R.A.F.-like group is an object of ridicule bordering on scorn. Fassbinder has a character say, “Capital invented terrorism in order to force the state to protect it better.”

How seriously to take the R.A.F.? Burke cites a poll conducted in West Germany in 1971: “Forty per cent of the respondents agreed that the RAF’s violence was ‘political’, eighteen per cent approved of their motives, and six per cent said they would shelter a member of the group for a night,” Burke writes. East Germany’s Communist regime welcomed the radicals as a nuisance for the West and provided them refuge and occasional backing. But, for the East Germans, as for the Soviet Union, the R.A.F. was also a classic example of what Lenin had denounced as “adventurism”: revolution, he insisted, was likeliest in regimes like tsarist Russia, where soldiers might switch sides, not in the Western democracies, where institutions were more stable. In the nineteen-seventies, the vulnerable-looking regimes were in the Middle East.

Until the seventies, Arab nationalists such as Nasser and Hussein had supported the Palestinian fedayeen. When two P.F.L.P. hijackers were released from a Greek prison and sent to Cairo, Nasser had flowers and a thank-you note waiting for one of them at the Semiramis Hotel. In 1968, Hussein went so far as to join his army with fedayeen units in battle, when the I.D.F. attacked the Jordanian border town of Karameh. The united forces dealt severe blows to Israeli units, whose ranks included the young Benjamin Netanyahu.