No one knew what to call them. For some they were “skyjackers”, for others “air bandits”. Neither name stuck, but by 1970, these figures were fixtures of the western political landscape. It helped that hijacking planes was easy. Bag checks, metal detectors and frisking at airports were proposed, only to be dismissed as overkill.
The result was a lethal carnival of transnational terrorism that peaked in the 70s, when commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history.
Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs. Kōzō Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army, for instance, was an eccentric with two obsessions: cherry blossom and DDT. The German women of the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, to the chagrin of their Palestinian hosts.
But there is a darker undertow. A male Berlin commune member likened women to horses: “One guy has to break her in, then she’s available for everyone.” And this is how Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan Marxist who abandoned his studies at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University to join the Palestinian cause, summed up his training: “I’ve been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews.”
If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke’s antiheroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What counted was the excitement of the escapade, not the utopia it was meant to bring about. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an interpretative thread running through the disparate material: the failure of the left, Burke argues, left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by Islamism.
At the beginning of the period, the prototypical radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the US as Israel’s armourer. No lives were lost; prisoners were exchanged. By the end, it had become the pious jihadi, unbending and undeterred by the prospect of bodies piling up. Where leftist hijackers wanted publicity for Palestine, among other causes, Islamist suicide bombers embraced the annihilation of infidels.
This was less the radicalisation of Islam than it was the Islamisation of radicalism. The fear that tropical communism – revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan – struck into Middle Eastern capitals ensured that oasis communism was nipped in the bud. Islamism, meanwhile, was accommodated as a counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom bankrolled Islamist terror.
The intellectual groundwork had already been laid by the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb, who shifted the target from capitalism to “westernisation” and “world Jewry”. The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented a climax. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime, having crushed the Iranian communist party in strongholds such as Abadan, suddenly found itself outflanked by Islamists rallying to Ruhollah Khomeini, who sidelined moderate Shia clerics such as the grand ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari. Sunnis subsequently carried the torch further, ushering in anti-western, antisemitic movements shaped more by Bin Laden than Lenin.
Palestine looms large in this study. It was outrage over the Nakba, occupation and western backing of Israel that drove much of the militancy of the period. But attempts to internationalise the struggle backfired: the hijackings eroded Arab sympathy and led to the expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970. In the west, initial solidarity from the New Left soured as bombings alienated opinion. So, too, did Arafat’s maximalist aims and refusal to seek a modus vivendi with Israel; in the end, he was forced to renounce revolutionary violence for a diplomatic solution, but by then it was too late.
The Soviet Union is noticeably absent in The Revolutionists. It remained cautious during détente and therefore reluctant to endorse leftwing terrorism. So, ironically, it was Islamist revolutionaries who ended up reshaping the west: no longer the god-fearing foil to godless communists, it was recast as the secular bulwark against religious fundamentalism.