During the 1960s and 70s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) made a name for itself with airplane hijackings and other acts of terror; its members also carried out suicide bombings and other forms of murder during and after the second intifada. But only in 2002 did the European Union designate the PFLP as a terrorist organization, and it now faces pressure from both Palestinian groups and far-left EU parliamentarians—who share the PFLP’s Marxist-Leninist ideology—to remove it from the list, or at the very least to restrict the terrorist designation to the group’s so-called military wing. Jan Kapusnak comments:

A standard ploy used by terrorist groups to disguise their true nature is to cast themselves as comprising distinct “military” and “political” wings—the former engaged in “legitimate acts of resistance,” the latter in promoting purely political goals. Falling for this ploy, in 2013 the EU designated Hizballah’s “military wing” as a terrorist organization while sustaining a working relationship with its “political wing.” . . . Similarly, a recent report by [the compulsively anti-Israel] Human Rights Watch described the PFLP as a political party with “an armed wing that attacked Israeli civilians.” . . .

In reality, the PFLP’s two wings—the Political Bureau and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades—are interdependent parts with only one leadership. . . . And while the group has persistently sought to reinforce the illusion of two distinct wings by carrying out terror attacks under the Brigades banner, its political leadership has regularly supported indiscriminate violence against Israeli civilians.

Thus, Deputy Secretary-General Abu Ahmad Fouad stated that “the occupation and racist settler colony [i.e., Israel] perched on our land cannot be defeated without a long-term people’s liberation war, in which armed struggle is in the forefront.” He added that “attempting to negate revolutionary violence as a leading method of struggle against the occupier only perpetuates the existence of the occupation.”

[In] September 2017 Leila Khaled [the group’s best-known member and the first woman to hijack an airplane] was invited to speak at a European Parliament conference in Brussels, organized by the Spanish delegation of far-left Izquierda Unida as part of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left bloc in the parliament [along with various EU-funded pro-Palestinian groups, including] the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Lambasting the EU for considering the PFLP a terrorist group, Khaled asked the audience to pressure their respective governments to end this practice since “there cannot be peace while there is even one Zionist on the Palestinian territory.”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.