By Alexander Howard
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East, replacing Iran’s Western-backed leader with an Islamic Republic.
It transformed modern political extremism. Now, more than 40 years later, the Israeli–US attacks have killed the country’s supreme leader, creating the possibility of regime change. It reminds us these fault lines are far from settled.
In his riveting new book The Revolutionists, Guardian international security correspondent Jason Burke treats the Iranian Revolution as a catalyst for “a new and different energy” that would surge through the Middle East. In its aftermath, he argues, religious extremism accelerated across the Islamic world. Older, leftist revolutionary currents were pushed to the margins.
Among those currents was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Its most recognisable face, Leila Khaled, participated in two aircraft hijackings, an activity pioneered by Palestinian militants at the end of the 1960s to draw global attention to their cause. Today, of course, that cause is on the world stage again.
Another current was the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, which fought the Iranian regime from within from 1971 to 1979. It was part of a broad coalition, spanning left-wing radicals and right-wing religious extremists, that supported the revolution.
Key member Hamid Ashraf, shot dead a few years before the shah’s fall, had become an “obsession” to Iran’s leader, due to his track record in avoiding ambushes and his long survival under intense persecution.
Burke digs into the history of both kinds of extremism. For him, they are not discrete eruptions, but successive phases of what he describes as “a broader revolutionary moment”.
He profiles many of the 1970s’ most high-profile terrorists, operatives and ideologues, unpicking the myths and legends surrounding them. They include Khaled, Ashraf, Venezuelan leftist militant Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as Carlos the Jackal), West Germany’s radical left Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and members of the Japanese Red Army. It’s a fresh, richly detailed portrait of a pivotal decade.
But Burke’s project is not simply to revise the biographies of a handful of notorious characters. He also reconstructs the vast transnational ecosystem they operated in. Drawn from across continents and ideologies, his subjects are united less by doctrine than a shared conviction that existing power structures could be overturned by force. Ideological struggle and international militancy fused into new and troubling configurations.
Lives of radicals
Burke’s sweeping transnational account of political zealotry moves across four continents and more than two dozen countries. It follows radicals from remarkably varied social worlds: students and dropouts, refugees and aristocrats, opportunists and hired killers. Together, Burke argues, their actions formed a historically tangled arena of revolutionary currents, comprising two distinct but overlapping eddies of extremism.
The first emerged from the secular, often leftist revolutionary movements that proliferated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly around the Middle East and the Palestinian cause.
The second, gathering force toward the end of the decade spilled over into the 1980s. The rise of violent Islamist militancy was directed against Western political influence and secular modernity. But it also targeted regimes and fellow Muslims deemed corrupt or insufficiently pious. This was shaped, in part, by the failures, displacements and unintended legacies of the earlier revolutionary wave.
Despite their ideological divergence – one secular and anti-imperialist, the other religious and theocratic – both streams sought the violent overthrow of established political and social orders.
Both were embedded in the wider transformations of the era: from rapid media expansion to the covert infrastructure of superpower rivalry. Extremists, weapons and money circulated across borders. West Germany’s RAF trained with Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan, for instance.
Burke’s “revolutionists” were not aberrant fanatics. They were committed to radical and irrevocable social transformation. Violence was not an end in itself, but an essential tool for remaking the political order.
Hijackers or skyjackers?
Burke begins in 1967, with the conflict that reordered the political landscape of the Middle East. Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War shattered the prestige of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the same breath, it dealt a decisive blow to the secular pan-Arab nationalism associated with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In its wake emerged a more militant politics, centred on Palestine, driven by displaced and radicalised young activists. Organisations like Fatah and the PFLP came to prominence. Their strategy marked a shift in scale and theatre. The Palestinian struggle was staged beyond the region, directed toward a global audience capable of exerting pressure on Western governments aligned with Israel.
Leila Khaled, born in Haifa, was displaced as a child in 1948. She came of age in exile. By the late 1960s, she had joined the PFLP and committed herself to armed struggle.
Aircraft hijacking transformed the conflict into a new sort of international spectacle. There was, Burke points out, not even an “agreed vocabulary” to describe the people who carried out such acts. Air bandits or air pirates? Hijackers or skyjackers? No one could decide.
Burke recounts Khaled’s first hijacking – the 1969 commandeering of a TWA flight from Rome to Israel’s Tel Aviv – with a degree of dry irony. After landing in Damascus, Syria, Khaled ordered the crew and 120 passengers to evacuate immediately, claiming the aircraft had been wired to blow. “This was not true,” Burke writes,
but it meant terrified passengers slid down the emergency slides and onto the rocky, briar-strewn ground very quickly. Only then, with the aircraft empty, were explosives placed and detonated, neatly destroying much of the nose of the craft and causing $10 million in damage.
After the blast, Khaled cheerfully attempted to distribute sweets and cigarettes to the shaken hostages. The gesture of revolutionary courtesy, to her apparent surprise, was met with a distinctly “frosty” reception.
Undeterred, she launched into a speech on the runway, explaining the hijacking was meant to “tell the world about the crimes the Israelis inflicted upon our people”. She justified the targeting of US-owned TWA on the grounds that America was an “imperialist country” backing the Israeli state.
The following year, she reappeared in Haddad’s most ambitious undertaking yet: the coordinated hijackings of September 1970, known within the PFLP as Operation Revolution Airport.
Altered almost beyond recognition by elective plastic surgery and travelling under false documents, Khaled attempted unsuccessfully to seize an El Al flight departing Amsterdam. She was overpowered by air marshals and detained in Britain, before being released as part of a prisoner exchange. Now in her eighties, she has spent decades in exile in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. She remains active in Palestinian politics.
Plane hijacks ‘tarnished’ the cause
The combination of passenger jets, helpless hostages and camera lenses served up a largely bloodless media spectacle that was shocking and initially effective. The early campaign had forced the Palestinian question onto the world stage.
But it “came at the considerable cost of undermining much of the relatively new support in the West and elsewhere for the resolution of their grievances”, Burke writes. Long after militants turned their backs on plane hijacking, “the Palestinian cause would remain irredeemably tarnished by it”.
The hijackings provoked a violent backlash from the very Arab regimes that had previously tolerated – and at times supported – Palestinian militant operations. In Jordan, where fighters had come to behave with near autonomy, King Hussein moved to reassert control. It signalled the end of the fragile allegiance between Palestinian soldiers and their state hosts.
Out of this rupture emerged a more secretive and lethal organisation. Banding together under the name Black September, militants from Fatah moved from hijacking to assassination, and mass-casualty attacks against Jordanian and Israeli targets abroad.
In September 1972, members of the Israel Olympic team were seized in Munich and massacred – an atrocity organised by Black September operatives closely tied to Fatah’s leadership. The hostage-takers demanded the release of not just Palestinian prisoners, but jailed European militants.
Munich transformed international perceptions of Palestinian militancy. It hardened attitudes, draining away much of the sympathy the cause had recently gained. And it forced Western states to reassess the scale and character of the threat they faced. It accelerated the shift from ad hoc crisis management toward coordinated counter-terrorism, specialised security units and a more uncompromising doctrine of response.
Not all left-wing revolutionary movements embraced violence. Many operated through protest, organising and political agitation.
The US university movement Students for a Democratic Society, for example, mobilised mass protest against the Vietnam War before a small, militant faction broke away to form the Weather Underground. Other groups, like West Germany’s RAF, radicalised over time: moving from symbolic attacks – like the firebombing of empty department stores – to bank robberies, abduction and murder.
By the end of the 1970s, the revolutionary fervour that had animated large swathes of the Western left had largely ebbed. Political violence assumed new ideological forms and centres of gravity.
Ignore extremists at our peril
The 1979 Iranian Revolution showed that militant religious political mobilisation could topple a major regional order – and defy existing global superpowers.
Iran’s trade unions, left-wing political parties and student radicals joined right-wing Islamist clerics to make it happen, and to found the Islamic Republic – though the left soon found itself purged by the new regime.
This seizure of power saw extremist behaviour begin to take forms we might recognise today.
The largely theatrical violence of the early 1970s was designed to attract attention, rather than maximise casualties. But by the early 1980s, Burke writes, terrorists were driving vehicles packed with explosives into crowded targets, convinced they were enacting divine, rather than secular, revolution.
This is the form of terrorism most familiar to Westerners now: mass-casualty atrocities justified in religious terms, directed against civilian populations.
But we shouldn’t dismiss extremist violence as the irrational product of fanatic ideology, Burke warns. It was taken up by actors who saw it as “an essential means of bringing about the radical and necessary transformation of society”. He concludes:
We may strongly disagree with the changes that violent men and women seek, but we fail to understand their motivations at our peril.
Alexander Howard is a Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney. This article was first published by The Conversation
