Today, the far left across the globe holds opposition to Israel as one of its signature issues. While radical leftists once romanticized, apologized for, or embraced the murderous ideology of Bolshevism, today many do the same for jihadism. No individual embodies this transformation more than Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known to the world as Carlos the Jackal. After an over-two-decade career in terrorism, Sánchez was arrested in 1994 and remains in a French prison. He recently granted a rare interview to two Israeli film directors, Yaron Nisi and Dani Liber. They write:

Sánchez . . . was born in Venezuela to a wealthy family. His father was a devout Communist who hated the West and—against the objections of his wife—even named his son after the Soviet leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Already from a young age, Carlos was involved in political struggles, and according to his own confession was only fifteen when he first kidnapped and killed someone.

His terror activities led to the deaths of over 1,500 people, mostly while working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to which he was first exposed after getting expelled from university and joining a training camp for foreign volunteers of the PFLP in Jordan in 1970. He experienced the events of Black September firsthand when King Hussein had thousands of Palestinians, who had set up military training camps in Jordan, massacred.

Carlos fought on the Palestinian side and later joined the PFLP as a member. During this time, he terrorized targets in Israel and Europe.

Sánchez describes himself thus:

I am a Communist, just like my father, a Stalinist Communist. I believe in God. I am a Sunni Muslim. I believe in the goal of Palestine. I was the first non-Arab person to join the Palestinian struggle. I have killed at least 83 people myself, and between 1,500-2,000 have been killed at my command.

The PFLP appears to have expelled Sánchez after he reportedly pocketed millions of dollars in exchange for releasing hostages and refraining from assassinations. As comfortable with entrepreneurship as he is with religion, this self-professed Stalinist then started his own terrorist group that sold its services to the highest bidder.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.