HABASH, GEORGES

born 1925, Lydda, Palestine Palestinian politician and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Habash fled Palestine in 1948 and earned a medical degree at the American University in Beirut. In the early 1950s he was active in the Youth of Vengeance group, which advocated violent attacks on traditional Arab governments. Habash founded the militant PFLP after his goal to destroy Israel through Arab unity proved unrealistic following the Arab nations' defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. Under the leadership of Habash, the Popular Front staged several airplane hijackings, including that of a U.S. jet blown up in September 1970, which triggered King Hussein's crackdown on Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan. Habash, a Marxist, visited China in 1970, finding Chinese leaders critical of the PFLP's foreign operations, and Moscow in 1972. Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Habash became the leading voice of the Rejection Front, four Palestinian groups who opposed any diplomatic settlement to the conflict with Israel. He attacked the defeatist attitude of the Palestine Liberation Organization's leadership, whose attempts at reconciliation with King Hussein he sharply criticized. Under his leadership the PFLP successfully organized clandestine cells in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Habash was the target of several assassination attempts, one of which partially paralyzed him.