As I was reading this very book, terrorism was again taking its toll. The Bondi Beach attack of December 14 last year provided a chilling reminder that there is an undercurrent of violent hatred in this world, directed most starkly against Jews but also against the West in general.
The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke provides a sober, disturbing and enlightening account of the rise of terrorism in the final decades of the past century and its evolution from Palestinian activism, focused against Israel and the West, to a broader and more diffuse radical Muslim assault.
“We may strongly disagree with the change that violent men and women seek, but we fail to understand their motivations at our peril,” Burke argues.
“This is a book about violence and people who use it in an effort to bring about radical change. Specifically, it deals with the violent expression of political and religious extremism between the late 1960s and the early 1980s that we have come to call terrorism.”
The Revolutionists focuses on Europe and the Middle East in 1967-83. Initially, we saw the emergence of a new kind of transnational terrorism.
“Enabled by mass media and air travel, an unprecedented wave of spectacular violence spread around the world. Its epicentre was the Middle East and the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, but its extent was much greater. For the most part, it was informed by a secular, often left-leaning revolutionary view of the world,” Burke writes.
He recalls a different world, before mass access to air travel, “when spies met contacts in bars in Beirut or Rome or Paris, when international phone calls were luxuries and credit cards almost unknown; when terrorists casually dropped hand grenades into French bistros, planned spectacular attacks while reading newspapers on a terrace in a Roman piazza, and made demands that powerful elected officials not only debated but frequently granted”.
His research covered four continents and drew on sources in 12 languages: English, French, Arabic, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Serbo-Croat and Hebrew.
“I spoke to hijackers, soldiers, activists and ideologues, retired and active security officials, single and double agents, smooth former diplomats, regretful ex-ministers, protagonists who had been famous, others whose acts had never been known, and victims on all sides who still grieve lost husbands, wives and children. It was an extraordinary and powerful experience, as history should be, full of noise and emotion, shouted exclamation and moments of reflection, violence and its opposite, hope and pain, despair and reconciliation, courage and anger, cowardice and compromise.”
Among the figures whose stories are told is Palestinian activist Leila Khaled, who was born in 1944 in the port city of Haifa in what was then British-run Palestine. Recently, she was the favoured candidate of the City of Johannesburg to be commemorated by a renamed Sandton Drive in Johannesburg, where the US consulate is located. This book recalls some of her exploits as the glamorous poster girl for Palestinian terrorism, participating in the hijacking of planes and other exploits of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
It provides a reminder of how frequently, and sometimes bloody, the hijacking of aircraft was in the days before airport security became so thorough. One of the more dramatic incidents — so dramatic that they made a film about it — was the hijacking of an Air France flight from Israel to Paris, which was captured on June 27 1976 during a stopover in Athens and ended up at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
On July 3, Israeli commandos rescued 102 of the 106 hostages from the Ugandan airport. All seven hijackers and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed, as well as Yonatan Netanyahu — the brother of the present Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu — who was the commander of the Israeli unit. The raid infuriated the Ugandans, but it is not difficult to imagine what might have happened to those hostages who were rescued had Israel not acted.
Another headline-grabbing incident of terrorism, by the Palestinian group Black September, which has also given rise to film and TV dramatisations, was the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Two members of the Israeli contingent were killed when terrorists stormed the complex in which they were staying, and a further seven died during a botched rescue attempt, in which five of the terrorists and a German policeman were also killed. Three further terrorists were captured, only to be released the next month in a hostage exchange after a German airliner had been hijacked.
Burke notes that “the CIA had predicted that the Israelis would launch a campaign of ‘counter terror’ in the aftermath of Munich. British diplomats in Tel Aviv thought something similar.
“‘The Israelis can be just as, if not more, ruthless than the Arabs, certainly more efficient,’ one diplomat wrote, pointing to Israel’s efforts to trace and capture Nazi war criminals as proof.
“The [British] foreign office later opened a file on the Israeli response to the attack in Munich, which it labelled ‘Israeli terrorist activities’.”
The Revolutionists suggests that the overthrow of the shah in Iran in the late 1970s and the subsequent installation of the despotic regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini marked a turning point in the tapestry of terror.
“Within months of the events in Iran of 1978 and 1979, a new and different energy surged through the Middle East. This broke old alliances and created new ones, dealt a swingeing defeat, both physical and ideological, to both superpowers, caused a war [between Iran and Iraq] that killed at least half a million people and presented Israel with an unexpected and dangerous enemy.
“Perhaps most significantly, it accelerated and intensified the growing religious extremism across the Islamic world while simultaneously marginalising leftist forms of political activism that no longer appeared relevant to hundreds of millions of Muslims.
The ayatollah died in 1989, and his regime was facing the threat of being overthrown by mass protests as I was writing this review, but his influence persisted long after his death and helped to catalyse some of the terror attacks that have taken place this century, most notably the 9/11 attacks.
This book does cover Osama bin Laden’s initial radicalisation and his founding of the al-Qaeda terror group but does not go into much detail about the 9/11 attack and the US’s response in its “war on terror”.
There is also no analysis of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent conflict in Gaza, though we do read about the formation of Hamas.
Without excusing or defending the actions of some of the main protagonists, The Revolutionists provides a lot of fascinating detail about some of the key figures in global terror.
While some were puritanical, others lived in five-star hotels, dined in the finest restaurants and ensured that the ample funding, which was offered by Middle Eastern and North African leaders for their illicit activities, also provided for lavish lifestyles.
It also details the lives of members of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army.
Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat is also referred to extensively and comes across as someone who was willing to embrace diplomacy as well as terror.
Then there is the shadowy Venezuelan who originally went by the name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez.
Burke is to be commended on his scholarship, a forensic grasp of detail and his thoroughness in producing this fascinating and disturbing book. However, I found it a tough read, as it is very long and detailed, and my other concern was that I found the ending rather too abrupt.
The analysis at the beginning was useful, but it might have been helpful to have repeated some of this in the conclusion, with additional thoughts on the evolution of global terrorism in the 21st century. Unfortunately, as we continue to watch, listen to and read about the latest atrocities, there is no shortage of material for a sequel.
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