The Revolutionists

Christopher Owens 🔖 Five decades on, events that took place in the 1970’s continue to have a reverberating effect on today’s world.

No more so than in the Middle East.

A lot has been written about events since October 7th. But few have really sought to understand the history, the nuances and the missed opportunities that have come and gone over the years.

Quite the tall order and, producing a book that runs nearly 700 pages, it’s a task that journalist Jason Burke has clearly relished as he has given us a tome that not only tells the story of Palestinian resistance but also how secular Marxism ended up being replaced with theocratic Islamism.

Beginning in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel as well as the Nakba, Burke looks at the history of Leila Khaled, George Habash, Wadie Haddad and what motivated them to fight for Palestine as well as the actions that would shock the world as well as taking in the likes of Carlos the Jackel (or Ilich Ramírez Sánchez to his mother), Yassar Arafat, Ali Hassan Salameh, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Fusako Shigenobu, Wilfried Böse, Saddam Hussein, Ruhollah Khomeini and many, many others.

What is particularly illuminating is how early combatants and victims did not fit into the orthodox Israeli Jew/Palestinian Muslim roles that would be commonplace later on in the decade: the Israeli Olympic team killed at Munich were not particularly religious, Habash and Haddad came from Christian families and Mohsen Sazegara (founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) grew up in a Tehran household that detested mullahs. Little details such as these demonstrate how the idea of this being a religious war (at least in the early days) gave the wrong impression about the aims of the PLO and their various offshoots, although the Iranian revolution would bring this misconception to life.

Some of it is unintentionally hilarious, especially the period in the mid/late 70s whenever identity politics usurped revolutionary aims. As one such example, when surveying the capabilities of the second generation of Red Army Faction members around the time that they were ordered by Baader and Ensslin to break them out of prison, Burke notes in pithy fashion that:

The RAF was scattered across West Germany: two militants in Heidelberg, half a dozen or so in the so-called Black Forest group in Karlsruhe, four or five in Frankfurt and three slightly ineffectual young women known derisively as ‘the Hamburg Aunties’ in the northern port city.

Burke is also not afraid to note the various issues that were never resolved: antisemitism, tensions between secularism/Marxism and Islamism and how public intellectuals and left wingers allowed themselves to be seduced by prominent activists only to be either let down at how vacant they were (Jean-Paul Sartre meeting Baader) or with egg on their faces when their true intentions were revealed (Foucault and Sartre praised Khomeini).

Of course this is nothing new. Writing in 2015, Don Milligan talked about this grand left-wing tradition being:

…a simplistic response towards imperialism. It is common for people on the left to engage in elaborate apologetics or even smile upon dictatorial regimes and reactionary movements of many different stripes as long as they can be described as ‘anti-imperialist’.

And it’s not a surprise that this carries on to this day.

Demystifying folk heroes/villains, laying out the various fragile alliances in the Arab world, the influence of Soviet/US intelligence and demonstrating how legends were created, Burke has given us one of the finest books of 2025.

Jason Burke, 2025, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Bodley Head. ISBN-13: 978-1847926067

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.