The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine promptly claimed responsibility for yesterday's shooting of the Israeli Tourism Minister, Mr Rehavam Ze'evi.
In a phone call to a Beirut news agency a senior spokesman, Mr Ali Jaradat, stated: "We vowed to avenge the killing of \the front's leader Abu Ali Mustafa and we fulfilled our promise . . . The Israeli Government, by killing Abu Ali Mustafa, has opened the gate of hell on itself and now the fire is approaching." The secretary general of the front (PFLP), Mr Mustafa Zibri, whose nom de guerre was "Abu Ali Mustafa", was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile into his office on August 27th.
It is not surprising that the PFLP should be the first Palestinian faction to kill an Israeli cabinet minister in the half century since the Jewish state was established. Nor is it surprising that the Popular Front should adopt a Chicago-style "hit" for yesterday's operation. The movement has always been the most resourceful of the Palestinian resistance groupings.
The PFLP was established after Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The Front's founder was Dr George Habash, the Palestinian head of the Arab Nationalist Movement which in the 1950s and 1960s strove for Arab union under the then Egyptian President, Mr. Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In 1969, the PFLP made global headlines by launching a campaign of airliner hijackings to publicise the Palestinian cause. This culminated in a spectacular weekend in September 1970 when the PFLP staged four - one failed and three successful - hijackings to a disused airstrip in Jordan, precipitating a Palestinian-Jordanian civil war which led to the expulsion of Palestinian resistance groups from the country.
Thereafter, Dr Habash lived between Cairo and Damascus, where is is now based. Consequently, Syria can expect to be blamed by Israel for harbouring the PFLP and another 10 dissident Palestinian groupings. Between 1970 and 1993 the PFLP was the second most important Palestinian resistance grouping in the occupied territories. Its leadership and cadres, made up of intellectuals and professionals, played a major role in the first Palestinian uprising, 1987-1993.
But following the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993, the influence of the PFLP and other secular rejectionist groupings waned while the power of the Islamists waxed.
Israel's killing of Mustafa enhanced the standing of the PFLP among ordinary Palestinians in the territories. While he opposed the Oslo process, which has failed to deliver Palestinian statehood, he was a moderate.
His successor, Mr Ahmad Sadat of the West Bank town of al-Bireh adjoining Ramallah, represents the radical wing of the movement. Yesterday's operation is likely to boost, once again, the PFLP's credibility with Palestinians as well as Mr Sadat's personal popularity and undermine the already severely weakened Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
