2025-10-24
36 分钟This is The Guardian.
In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany.
They sought military training, though they had barely handled weapons before.
They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe,
but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store.
They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer.
Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan.
Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin.
The better-known members, Ulrika Meinhoff, a prominent left-wing journalist,
and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Enslin and Andreas Bader,
had faced a more complicated journey.
First, they'd had to cross into East Germany.
Then they took a train to Prague, where they boarded a plane to Lebanon.
From Beirut, a taxi took them east across the mountains into Syria.
Finally, they drove south from Damascus into Jordan.
They were not the first such visitors.
Among the broad coalition of activists and protest groups known as the New Left,
commitment to the Palestinian cause had become a test of one's ideological credentials.
Israel was no longer seen as a beleaguered outpost of progressive values surrounded by despotic regimes dedicated to its destruction.
After its victory in the 1967 war and subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank,