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> Al Fatah, the largest, has an estimated membership of 6,700, of whom some 2,000 are active fighters. Al Fatah—an acronym derived from the transposed initials for Palestine Liberation Movement in Arabic—was founded in 1956 by a group of young Palestinians in Gaza. Among the students was Arafat (his code name is Abu Ammar), who has led the organization since 1968. Al Fatah has a broad base of middle-class support and no definable ideology other than the liberation of Palestine. Since its first raid into Israel on New Year's Eve 1965, Fatah has carried out mostly routine guerrilla missions. The most recent target was the Israeli seaside town of Nahariyeh, where three guerrillas last June went ashore in a rubber boat, killed four Israelis and then were shot down. Fatah is generally opposed to overseas commando operations.
Among the offshoots of Al Fatah, however, are the notorious Black September teams, whose exploits outside the parent organization include the Munich massacre of 1972, in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed, and the slaying of one Belgian and two American diplomats in Khartoum in March 1973. This secret subgroup took its name from September 1970, when King Hussein forced a showdown with fedayeen groups that had been encroaching on military and political power inside Jordan. The King's soldiers not only chased the commandos out of the country but in the process killed at least 2,000 commandos and civilian Palestinians.
> The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, second largest of the commando groups, has an estimated membership of 3,500. It was founded in 1967 by George Habash, a Lydda-born physician who was educated at the American University of Beirut. Habash's group is more flamboyant than Fatah. Marxist-Leninist in outlook, the P.F.L.P. despises the kingships of Hussein and Faisal almost as much as it hates Israelis and Western (meaning U.S.) "imperialism." The P.F.L.P., known to Western diplomats in Beirut as "P-Flippers," has carried out some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks, including the simultaneous skyjacking of U.S., British and Swiss airliners to the Jordanian desert in 1970. It also skyjacked a Lufthansa 747 two years later and collected a $5 million ransom for plane and passengers. The P.F.L.P. is allied with the far-left "Japanese Red Army," three of whose members shot up Israel's Lod Airport in 1972 and slaughtered 27 people.
Habash, the most intellectual of the commando leaders, feels that revolutionary violence is the only means of achieving the P.L.O.'s goal of a new secular, democratic Palestine to replace Israel. Suspecting that Arafat was getting soft on the enemy, Habash recently pulled the P.F.L.P. out of the P.L.O.'s executive committee (many Palestinians are still trying to get him back in). Prior to the Rabat summit, he warned against the dangers of "capitulating" to the U.S. and Israel on the Palestine issue, and threatened to set up a new radical liberation group that would oppose the P.L.O. Habash's hard stand was backed by Iraq, which, along with Libya, forms part of the so-called rejection front, which stands