Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), one of several organizations associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); it engaged in acts of terrorism primarily in the 1970s and ’80s and originally maintained a Marxist-Leninist orientation, believing the peasants and the working classes should be educated in socialism in order to bring about a democratic state of Jews and Arabs free of Zionism and imperialism.

Originating in the leftist swing of the 1960s and founded by Nayef Hawatmeh, a member of a Jordanian-Palestinian Christian clan, in 1969, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (as it was originally named) was envisioned as a political movement distinct from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which had been founded to provide an umbrella group for militant Palestinian groups. The DFLP stood ideologically to the left of the PFLP and claimed that its enemies were Zionist upper-class colonists. In 1974 it took responsibility for an especially brutal terrorist attack in Maʿalot, Israel, in which several dozen schoolchildren were taken hostage and a number of them killed, and another raid in Beit Sheʾan.

The DFLP was wary of becoming too closely associated with Arab governments and was critical of other pro-Palestine groups for ignoring conservative forces within the Arab world. Its leaders were among the earliest proponents of a Palestinian “national authority,” which eventually evolved into a call for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The PLO adopted this proposal in 1974 and the Hawatmeh was one of the architects of the PLO’s declaration of independence in 1988. The DFLP nonetheless opposed the conclusion of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, largely because it monopolized the peace process in the hands of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and lacked the backing of a Palestinian national consensus. That year the party joined other rejectionist groups to form the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF) in Damascus, although it left the alliance in 1996. In 2004 Hawatmeh attempted, but failed, to start a peace process for a two-state solution that would serve as an alternative to the Oslo process and include all Palestinian organizations. 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 240 people hostage.

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