Nayef Hawatmeh

Nayef Hawatmeh (born November 17, 1938, Al-Salṭ, Jordan) is a Jordanian-Palestinian leader who founded the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and has been its secretary-general from 1969.

Born in Jordan, Hawatmeh was born into a Melkite Catholic clan that spanned Transjordan (now Jordan), the British mandate of Palestine, and Syria. Hawatmeh attended the Arab University of Beirut in Lebanon, where he became a militant in the Arab Nationalist Movement, which at its 1967 congress adopted Hawatmeh’s Marxist “scientific socialism” as its platform. Hawatmeh joined the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1969 but later that year split with the PFLP to form the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the name was shortened to Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1974.

Politically, Hawatmeh’s position eventually came close to that of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He favored the creation of a Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and was an early proponent of United Nations Resolution 242, which called for Arab recognition of Israel and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, he criticized Arafat’s conciliatory position toward Jordan’s King Hussein, whose 1970 repression of Palestinian commandos (Black September) resulted in many DFLP casualties. Hawatmeh favored armed attacks, but he opposed violence (such as hijackings) against targets outside Israel. He was the first Palestinian guerrilla leader to make contact with Israeli Marxists. He led a DFLP delegation to Moscow and was highly regarded by the Soviets as a solid Marxist, without the middle-class orientation of Arafat’s Fatah movement.

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Hawatmeh opposed the peace process with Israel in the early 1990s, and after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 his party joined with other rejectionist groups to form the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF) in Damascus; the DFLP left the alliance in 1996. In 2004, after the second intifada (2000–05) effectively paused the Oslo process, he met with members of the left-wing Israeli political party Meretz to propose an alternative peace process for a two-state solution that included Palestinian organizations that were not part of the PLO. After the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007, Hawatmeh pushed reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, and Palestinian unity became his primary concern in the years that followed. On October 7, 2023, the armed wing of the DFLP in the Gaza Strip participated alongside Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian militant groups in conducting an attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, primarily Israeli citizens, and took more than 240 people hostage. Although Hawatmeh had largely left the public eye in the 2010s and his level of day-to-day activity in leading the DFLP was unknown, he was still the secretary-general of the DFLP at the time of the attack.