Chapter 01 / 1925 or 1926–1948
The city and the march
George Habash was born in Lydda, a Palestinian city southeast of Jaffa, into an Arab Orthodox Christian family. Sources do not agree on the year. PalQuest gives 1 August 1925, while his 1997 interview in the Journal of Palestine Studies and several obituaries give 1926. This article records the disagreement instead of presenting a false certainty. [1][2][12]
He attended school in Lydda, Jaffa and Jerusalem, then entered the American University of Beirut in 1944 to study medicine. During the 1948 war, he returned to Lydda and helped treat the wounded as the city came under attack. Israeli forces captured Lydda in July and expelled most of its Palestinian population. Habash and his family joined the forced march eastward. [1][2][3]
The experience became the organizing fact of his political life. But it did not determine one inevitable response. Habash would make choices about ideology, organization and violence over the decades that followed. Those choices belong to the record too.
Chapter 02 / 1948–1951
The doctor in exile
Habash returned to the American University of Beirut and completed his medical degree in 1951. In Amman, he and fellow physician Wadi Haddad opened a clinic that treated poor and displaced patients. The title that followed him for life, al-Hakim, can mean both doctor and wise man. [1][2]
Medicine and politics were not separate stages. The clinic brought him into daily contact with refugees whose losses were material as well as national: injury, poverty, interrupted education, and dependence on states that did not restore their homes. His political circle treated the Palestinian catastrophe as part of a wider Arab crisis, one they believed could not be answered through charity alone.
Habash and Haddad would remain close collaborators, but their roles later diverged. Habash became a political leader and general secretary. Haddad became the figure most closely associated with the PFLP's external operations. That distinction matters, but it does not erase Habash's responsibility as the head of the organization. [1][5]
Chapter 03 / The 1950s and early 1960s
The Arab Nationalist Movement
At university, Habash joined a circle of students who argued that the defeat of 1948 exposed a larger political weakness across the Arab world. The group developed into the Arab Nationalist Movement, or ANM. It called for Arab unity, liberation from colonial influence, and the return of Palestinians to their homeland. [1][2]
The movement grew through clandestine networks in several Arab countries. It was influenced by the era's anticolonial currents and by the rise of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Habash practiced medicine, organized, published, and endured repeated confrontation with governments that saw the ANM as a threat.
A political network, not identical roles
The diagram shows documented organizational relationships. It does not imply that each person held the same authority, performed the same work, or bears the same responsibility.
The collapse of the short-lived political union between Egypt and Syria in 1961, followed by the Arab defeat of 1967, forced the movement to reconsider both Arab unity and the question of an independent Palestinian organization.
Chapter 04 / 1967–1969
Founding the PFLP
After Israel's June 1967 war and occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, Habash helped form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December 1967. The new organization brought together several armed Palestinian groups and soon adopted a Marxist-Leninist program. [1][5]
The PFLP argued that Palestinian liberation was tied to social transformation across the Arab world. Habash became its first general secretary. The organization joined the Palestine Liberation Organization while often challenging the strategy of Fatah and Yasser Arafat.
Syrian authorities imprisoned Habash in 1968 during a crackdown on Palestinian organizations. He escaped the following year. By then, his life was divided among underground work, regional alliances, illness, and the demands of leading an organization that combined political activity with armed operations. [1]
Chapter 05 / 1968–1972
A movement and its methods
The PFLP became internationally known through attacks and aircraft hijackings. Wadi Haddad directed many external operations. Habash led the organization and defended the strategy of making the Palestinian cause impossible for the world to ignore. The distinction between political command and operational planning is historically important. [2][6]
In September 1970, PFLP teams targeted multiple passenger aircraft. Planes were diverted to Jordan, passengers and crews were held as bargaining leverage, and three empty aircraft were destroyed after most hostages had been removed. The crisis helped accelerate the confrontation later known as Black September between the Jordanian state and Palestinian resistance groups. [6]
The stated objective
PFLP leaders described the operations as a way to publicize Palestinian dispossession and exchange hostages for imprisoned militants.
The civilian experience
Passengers and crews were seized at gunpoint, exposed to explosives, separated by identity, and held under threat. The intention was never to have casualties.
The PFLP executive committee decided to stop airplane hijackings in November 1970, according to a 1972 statement by Habash recorded in PalQuest's chronology. Haddad continued external operations and was later expelled. The PFLP's history of resistance did not end. [16]
Chapter 06 / 1970–1982
Jordan, Beirut and the PLO
The Palestinian resistance's presence in Jordan had developed into a state within a state. In September 1970, the Jordanian army moved against Palestinian organizations. The conflict killed many Palestinians and forced much of the movement out of Jordan. The PFLP relocated its center of activity to Lebanon. [6]
In Beirut, the movement built political, cultural and military institutions. Ghassan Kanafani edited the PFLP weekly Al-Hadaf and served as a spokesman until he was killed by a car bomb in 1972. Leila Khaled became one of its most recognizable members. Habash remained the leader connecting these different parts of the organization. [1]
Habash's health repeatedly intervened in his political life. He suffered a stroke in the early 1970s and later heart problems. He continued to lead through the Lebanese civil war, Israeli invasions of Lebanon, and the PLO's 1982 evacuation from Beirut.
Chapter 07 / 1982–2000
Against Oslo
From exile, Habash remained one of the most prominent critics of Arafat's diplomatic course. He opposed the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles, which created a process for limited Palestinian self-government while postponing questions including borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Habash argued that the agreement abandoned core Palestinian rights and exchanged liberation for administration under occupation. [8][9]
Habash stepped down as PFLP general secretary in 2000. Abu Ali Mustafa succeeded him. Habash then devoted more attention to the Al-Ghad al-Arabi Center for Studies, an archive and research institution concerned with the Palestinian movement and Arab politics. [1][12]
Chapter 08 / 2000–2008 and after
The record he left
George Habash died in Amman on 26 January 2008, aged 81 or 82 depending on which birth year is used. He left a wife, Hilda, two daughters, a political organization, and a history that still produces sharply different judgments. [1][12]
Physician.
Organizer.
Founder.
A life that cannot be reduced to one of those
words.
For supporters, Habash represented constancy, personal modesty and refusal to surrender the rights of refugees.
His life links three generations of this series. He led the organization in which Leila Khaled became internationally known. He worked with Ghassan Kanafani, whose writing gave the movement a cultural language that outlived both men. Yet Habash was neither simply the commander behind every act nor merely the doctor displaced from Lydda. The historical task is to examine the institutions he built, the ideas he defended, the authority he held, and the consequences that followed.
