The Hindawi affair: how should socialists see it?

Labour Briefing no. 33, December 1986, p. 11

Transcribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.

The severing of diplomatic relations between Britain and Syria was the dramatic culmination of the El Al bomb plot affair.

The prosecution claim during the Hindawi trial was that Hindawi had been in the pay of the Syrians, and that the bomb, carried by Hindawi's unwitting girlfriend, had been provided by the Syrian embassy. The guilty verdict gave Thatcher the opportunity she wanted to break off relations with Syria, with the gleeful support of the Reagan administration.

Legitimises

The whole business fitted in perfectly with the Reaganite political offensive which posits terrorism as the major enemy of the West, and which legitimises the US cold war posture. Thatcher has toddled along behind this political offensive, oblivious to the fact that its main intention is to bring Europe to heel behind US leadership.

The reluctance of the EEC to fall in behind the British position on Syria was symptomatic of West European refusal, at least for the time being, to have its own positions in the Middle East further compromised.

Thatcher

For Thatcher taking a tough stand against "terrorism" serves any number of useful political objectives, reaffirming the image built up during the Malvinas war, and cranking up reactionary sentiments at home. The declaration of a 200-mile fishing cordon around the Malvinas serves much the same purpose, with the added bonus that there might be some nasty little clashes in time for the election.

It might be tempting, therefore, to see Hindawi as a victim of crude political calculation, with the British courts helping Thatcher create a new "terrorism" scare. But things are rather more complicated than that.

Long shot

Any "frame up" thesis is frankly a long shot in this particular case. Hindawi's defence was exceedingly weak, consisting of the assertion that he thought he was smuggling drugs, not planting a bomb.

Even if the real facts are at this stage unknown, it would be entirely characteristic of the very nasty Syrian security service to utilise a Palestinian like Hindawi to carry out its dirty work.

Weakness

Terrorist actions, like random bombings, air hijackings, and attacks on Jewish restaurants and synagogues, are a symptom of the weakness of the Palestinian movement. Even when carried out by sincere Palestinian militants, driven to desperation by the blows which the Palestinian population has suffered at the hands of Israel, Shi'ite fundamentalists, and others, many of these actions cannot possibly be supported from either a political or moral point of view.

Reactionary

Bombing a synagogue in Istanbul is simply a reactionary act, based on a confusion between Zionism, the zionist state, and the Jewish people. Apart from being an attack on innocents, such activity only strengthens the Zionist equation between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. In the Hindawi case, how can it possibly be claimed that anyone travelling to Israel on an El Al plane is a legitimate target for assassination? That is to adopt the morality of the oppressors of the Palestinians.

To state these facts bluntly is not at all to excuse the hypocrisy of Thatcher and Reagan who keep quiet about the hundreds of deaths among the Palestinians over the past five years at the hands of the Israelis, and the Shi'ite movement Amal in Lebanon, which is keeping the refugee camps under constant seige. But random terrorist attacks are no solution to the problems of the Palestinian people, and in certain cases even set their struggle back.

Secrecy

Another problem with terrorist tactics is that by their very nature they require utter secrecy. They are carried out by groups not under any kind of democratic control. This renders them wide open to manipulation and provocation by state security agencies.

The Abu Nidal group, responsible for many terrorist actions, is based in Damascus, and kept under tight Syrian control.

Terrorist groups, especially those under the control of reactionary governments, very easily degenerate from having clear political-military objectives, to simply trying to carry off "successful" operations — generally measured by the degree of international publicity, and not by whether they actually succeed in promoting the struggle of the oppressed.

Every day

Every day the Palestinian camps in Lebanon are under attack from Amal, the Shi'ite-led movement. And who is behind these attacks? None other than Assad, the Syrian leader, the main political and financial backer of Amal. Assad does not want a strong independent Palestinian movement. On the contrary, he sees it as a threat to his own control of Lebanon. It is a sad commentary on the fate of the Palestinian resistance that desperate militants now align themselves with a mortal enemy like Assad.

Problem

Terrorist actions pose a particular problem for socialists in the imperialist countries. They are magnified out of all proportion by the imperialist politicians for their own ends. Moreover, socialists have generally supported — and rightly so — armed struggle by oppressed peoples against imperialism. But we have to face the fact that many terrorist groups, from the Red Army faction and its successors in Germany, to the Red Brigades in Italy to the Palestinian splinter groups, have nothing whatever to do with popular armed struggle, which requires mass mobilisation.

Abu Nidal

Abu Nidal has little in common with the original fedayeen fighters or the active service units of the Irish Republican movement. If that is true for small terrorist formations, it is doubly true for the ruthless state security agencies of countries like Syria and Libya.

Our enemy's enemy is not always our friend. We should be wary about giving any credence or support to reactionary terrorist activities, just because their perpetrators carry them out in the name of "anti-imperialism".

transcribed from the page image, 2 Nov 2026; spelling as printed (seige; "zionist state" lower case beside "Zionist equation"). By-line "By Phil Hearse" at the head of the first column; three columns on the "Debate" page, complete, no jump. The word "socialists" is italic in the printed headline. Left out: photos and captions ("Hezar Hindawi", credit Labour Party Photo Library; "Grosvenor Square: demonstration against US bombing") and Anthony Arblaster's Socialist Society column "Who's against terrorism?" on the same page.