Every nation has its founding myths; few have been so thoroughly imprisoned and crushed by them. The Palestinian national imagination was not born, as its admirers suppose, from the organic memory of the “Nakba,” a dispossessed people finding its voice. But it was constructed in the late 1960s by a handful of Third World poets and militants who fused revolutionary Marxism with romantic nationalism and produced something unprecedented: a people whose very identity was indistinguishable from the act of armed struggle. That this identity was forged in the white heat of genuine suffering does not make it less artificial; if anything, it makes the artifice more tragic, because the suffering was real and the framework imposed upon it was not. What follows is an attempt to trace how this happened — how Palestine ceased to be a place and became a Revolution, and how a Revolution, by its very nature, could never become a place.
Habash was less a thinker than a pure vessel of revolt; his only constant was the guerrilla struggle itself. He was a Philosopher-King of insurrection without philosophy, a man whose successive causes revealed the poverty of the revolutionary identity: rebellion without end, direction, or final substance.
When Nasser’s armies were destroyed in six days in June 1967, the entire edifice of pan-Arab socialism collapsed with them. Egypt, which had served as the vanguard of Arab modernity since the nineteenth century, was suddenly exposed as a hollow state, its revolutionary promise reduced to rubble and charred metal in the Sinai. Into this vacuum stepped the Palestinian armed struggle, which offered the Arab world something Nasser could no longer provide: a living revolution, embodied not in a failing state but in a stateless people whose very dispossession seemed to guarantee their purity. Palestine became the site where the revolutionary promise could be renewed precisely because it had no territory to govern, no bureaucracy to corrupt it, no reality to test it against. The guerrilla replaced the officer; the fedayeen replaced the army; the refugee camp replaced Cairo. And with this transfer came everything that had defined the Arab revolutionary imagination, its Marxist vocabulary, its Hegelian confidence, its theology of historical destiny, now compressed into the figure of the Palestinian fighter.
In becoming the new Nasser, the Palestinian movement not only inherited his mantle but also his triumphalism, along with the vanguard position Arab Marxism had once conferred on Egypt. This was the natural triumphalism of Revolution itself: wherever Revolution appears, it claims inevitability. Once Palestine was declared to be the Revolution, its triumph was presumed assured, and the Palestinian intellectual automatically became an intellectual of Revolution. Within this structure of thought, the world runs on a stark linear axis of Revolution and reaction; Revolution alone carries the truth-value of history, and its victory is destiny. In a later act of self-criticism, Palestinian Marxist Faisal Darraj admitted the folly of this framework, observing in 1990 that Palestinians “believed that having a cause with a right makes it necessarily triumphant.” Such triumphalism produced utopian fantasies, unrealistic expectations, and, by the force of disappointment, inevitable despair.
There is nothing in Habash’s thought that justifies serious analysis. His real legacy was not philosophical but terroristic.
Much of this new reality, Palestine as the new incarnation of the Revolution, was expressed candidly in the words of George Habash, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and, after Arafat, the most important figure in the movement. In a lengthy 1970 interview with Life magazine—conducted just after his group launched its unprecedented campaign of airplane hijackings—Habash was pressed on why Western civilians were being targeted. His answer was blunt: “The capitalist countries that conceived Israel and are now using it as a bulwark to protect their interests in Arabia. They include the U.S. and almost every country in Europe.” He insisted that the Palestinian struggle was only one theater of a far larger historical drama: “We have to look at this scientifically and recognize that our revolution is a phase of the worldwide revolution. We have to be honest and admit what we want is a war like the war in Vietnam. We want a Vietnam war not just in Palestine but throughout the Arab world.” Finally, Habash anchored the struggle in the Marxist-Leninist genealogy of the era: “By 1967 we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples. There is no escape from this logic… Israel is a product of colonialism, colonialism is the product of imperialism, and imperialism is the product of capitalism.”
Published originally on February 9, 2026.
Read the full article at the Abrahamic Metacritique.
