Ahmad Jibril, who is said to have fled to Tartous or perhaps elsewhere in Syria, is a name that cannot be forgotten. The Palestinians, Syrians and the Lebanese will remember him for a very long time, because he was always involved wherever the imperial tendencies of Hafez al-Assad's regime went. This man, who began his life as an officer in the Syrian army, was never a Baathist, unlike the Palestinians in As-Sa'iqa. In other words, he had no ideological ties to the Assad-Baathist regime. Although the Syrian regime supported him and rewarded him by putting him at the heart of Palestinian politics, the regime did not make him from scratch, like it had done for instance with Fatah al-Intifada which split Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Indeed, the name Jibril goes back to the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) which he founded in 1965. Jibril was not just a gun for hire that switched sides, like Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal), for example, was. To be sure, he had established a minimum level of an organization which he called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). In addition, his attitudes remained essentially pro-Syrian, from the beginning to the end. And, even if he had worked for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi or others at times, he would have been doing so only to follow an order issued by Damascus. It is this pro-Syrian inclination of his that put him in permanent antagonism with Yasser Arafat, an advocate of “independent Palestinian decision-making." Before that, he broke with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which George Habash had made into the house of Palestinian political mysticism, so to speak, and one that was poor in both politics and meaning. Jibril, naturally, was not impressed by the intellectual feats of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) either, and thus did not lose once his compass that always pointed in the direction of Assad “the pragmatist" and his regime. Ahmad Jibril is in a league of his own. He is the quintessential symbol of the Syrian, nay exclusively Syrian, policy of commandeering the Palestinian cause. One may even say that he is the symbol of the firm belief in the worth of that policy. He is so, without being known to harbor any nationalist Arab fixation, of the kind that has plagued some of his contemporaries who have clung on to the premise that Palestine is the southern part of Syria, or that both Palestine and Syria are parts of “the same Arab homeland." Instead, his political awareness stops at him being an explosives officer! Pursuant to the policy of commandeering the cause, with this not being subject to a specified timeframe, it has been known in advance where Jibril would stand in any Palestinian clash with the Syrian regime: Against Arafat, against Habash and against the people of the Yarmouk refugee camp. And, because of his excessive and unparalleled loyalty, he was given a small, albeit influential, role in the so-called strategy of the Lebanese resistance, sponsored by Syria and Iran. Such a junior partnership with Hezbollah was not bestowed on any other pro-Assad Palestinian or Lebanese faction. Ahmad Jibril has spent many long years (he is 75 years old) playing this role. Today, it seems that the old age of the role is intersecting with his old age himself. Indeed, the deception has been exposed, as the march towards Palestine took Jibril to many places, all mired with blood, but never to Palestine itself. Here, the Palestinian political consciousness is required to ask itself the following burning question: How, in the name of Palestine and its cause, a phenomenon like Ahmad Jibril ever came to emerge? And how did he continue to occupy a leadership position, decade after decade? To be sure, this question may allow us to put our finger on the place whence the deception of the Palestinians came, generation after generation and in the name of their cause. As the deception is exposed, the children of the Yarmouk camp are being burned alive, while Ahmad Jibril flees to a safe place. That is to say, safe so far.
