In February, 2024, German police discovered a rare political specimen behind the door of an apartment in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Claudia Ivone, sixty-five years old, appeared to live a quiet existence. She practiced capoeira, tutored children, and helped people draft letters to the authorities. She also possessed a Czech submachine gun, a dummy grenade launcher, a cache of ammunition, a quarter of a million euros in cash, and a kilogram of gold. At the police station, she made a startling declaration: “I am Daniela Klette of the R.A.F.” Klette was one of the last remaining members of the Red Army Faction, sometimes known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which, in various iterations, rampaged through Europe in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, attacking right-wing newspapers, bankers, and NATO installations, and, most spectacularly, hijacking commercial airliners.

Klette’s trial is ongoing in a small town in Lower Saxony. She stands accused of participating in a string of armed robberies, thought to have been undertaken with two other R.A.F. members, and faces a charge of attempted murder relating to a heist. She is also suspected of terrorist operations, including a sniper attack on the U.S. Embassy in Bonn in 1991, in protest against the first Gulf War. In the courtroom, Klette has drawn scrutiny for wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh. In Germany today, where mainstream newspapers have likened kaffiyehs to Nazi garb, her attire is a reminder of the ties between the Western left and Middle Eastern militants and of shared revolutionary dreams that never came to pass.

Jason Burke’s “The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s” (Knopf) is a timely history of this coupling. It returns to the decade when West German radicals, disillusioned by the political outcome of the 1968 protests, turned to violent measures against the West German state, which they viewed as a colony of American capitalism run by Nazi veterans. Meanwhile, Palestinian militants reeled from Israel’s growing dominance. The mutual attraction between the Palestinians and the Europeans was not hard to fathom. The Palestinians offered the Europeans weapons training at military camps; the Europeans offered the Palestinians publicity. For a brief season, both sides shared a Marxist-Leninist vocabulary and a romantic faith that they could transform their societies. Airplane hijackings panicked Western governments and vaulted the Palestinian problem to the forefront of international radical politics.

Burke, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Guardian whose previous books include a study of Al Qaeda, writes that he is interested less in “the individual psychology” of his subjects than in the “worldview that motivated these attackers.” His book displays an ambition far exceeding its subtitle and features a huge cast of characters. It also raises one of the puzzling questions of the history of the Middle East: Why were the avowedly secular nationalist and Marxist groups of the period supplanted by Islamist movements, which were initially quite small? How did a decade that began with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s head, Yasir Arafat, preaching revolution with a gun over his shoulder end with the Ayatollah Khomeini presiding over a revolution in Iran with his hand on the Quran?

Instead of focussing on Arafat and his party, Fatah, Burke concentrates on a more radical faction within the P.L.O., the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Like many of the Palestinian militants Burke writes about, the P.F.L.P.’s leaders, George Habash and Wadie Haddad, came from the professional classes—both were doctors—and had suffered a double defeat. In 1948, they experienced the obliteration of their towns, as Zionist forces expelled much of the nascent state’s Arab population; the more recent humiliation was the Six-Day War, in 1967, in which the Israel Defense Forces trounced the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in just a week, seizing territories that more than tripled Israel’s size.

It was clear that the Arab nationalists—such as Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser—could do little for the Palestinians, so Habash and Haddad placed their bet on Marxism-Leninism. They reasoned that, as in China and Vietnam, the most promising chance to seize power was by developing a vanguard party that could act decisively in the right conditions. Habash and Haddad co-founded the P.F.L.P., in December, 1967, as an organization that would use violence—the more eye-catching the better.

One target in particular suggested itself to Haddad: commercial airliners. Flying was still a rarefied form of travel, not yet encumbered by standardized security checks. With the right kind of swagger, the holder of a first-class ticket could stroll onto a jet with few questions asked. In 1969, Leila Khaled, a twenty-five-year-old P.F.L.P. recruit, was one of a pair who hijacked a T.W.A. flight to Tel Aviv and redirected it to Damascus, where they released the passengers and blew up the nose of the plane. The operation was effectively a press release backed by guns and explosives: the Palestinians had taken their fate into their own hands in the form of a chic, press-savvy young Arab woman.

The following year, Khaled took part in a larger plan, the simultaneous hijacking of multiple planes. She and Patricio Argüello, a Nicaraguan American Fulbright scholar and Sandinista, were to commandeer an El Al flight out of Amsterdam. Khaled, by now a celebrity, underwent plastic surgery to make herself less recognizable, but her mission did not go as planned. The Israeli pilot nose-dived, throwing the un-seat-belted attackers off balance. Argüello was mortally wounded by an Israeli air marshal, and Khaled was arrested once the plane landed. Two other aircraft, both hijacked the same day, landed at Dawson’s Field, a desert airstrip in Jordan, where King Hussein, as part of his penance for losing the 1967 war, had allowed Palestinian guerrillas, the fedayeen, to run training camps. “All of us are fedayeen,” Hussein had declared.

That a handful of revolutionaries could collect airliners worth millions of dollars and hold Western passengers ransom made it appear the Palestinians had history on their side. They dubbed Dawson’s Field “Revolution Airport.” The French writer Jean Genet, who spent time in Jordan’s Palestinian camps and wrote a book about it, told militants that the pyrotechnics “had won the admiration of all the young people in Europe.”

One European audience was particularly impressed: a group of radical West Germans calling themselves the Red Army Faction. The R.A.F. grew out of the student-protest movement, and many of its members, like their Palestinian counterparts, came from educated backgrounds. Ulrike Meinhof was a well-known journalist and the daughter of two art historians. Gudrun Ensslin was a literature student from an anti-Nazi evangelical family. Early operations were small-scale. Ensslin and her lover-collaborator, Andreas Baader, bombed two department stores in Frankfurt in 1968, landing themselves in prison. In 1970, the year that the R.A.F. officially announced its existence, Meinhof, Ensslin, Baader, and other members were invited to train with the fedayeen in Jordan. For the Palestinians, the aim was to plant their cause in the hearts of the German radicals. For the Germans, it was a chance to learn from people they viewed as heroic rebels against Western imperialism—and also, Burke suggests, fulfilled a middle-class wanderlust.

The R.A.F. is now routinely derided for its perceived naïveté. “The Revolutionists,” conjuring a time when it inspired real terror and did not shy from killing people, generally refrains from condescension, but there’s no hiding the fact that its members were not cut from the same cloth as their Palestinian brethren. At a camp in Jordan, Khaled encountered European students who, she observed with amusement, “honestly believed they were making a ‘revolution’ if they undressed in public, seized a university building, or shouted an obscenity at bureaucrats.” Genet asked one European trainee what kind of revolutionary regime should take over Jordan. “One based on the Situationists, for instance” was the answer. After German authorities tracked down Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in 1972 and imprisoned them, Baader dismissed the “second generation” R.A.F. members who risked their lives trying to free him as people who couldn’t be trusted to “buy bread rolls in the morning.”

Meinhof died in her prison cell in May, 1976; the next year, on a single night in October, Baader, Ensslin, and their associate Jan-Carl Raspe met the same fate. Officially ruled suicides—a verdict much challenged—the deaths sent despair and bitterness coursing through much of the West German left. The director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was distraught when he heard that Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were dead. But he came to believe that the R.A.F.’s provocations had not weakened the state but made it stronger. Two years later, he made the black comedy “The Third Generation,” in which an R.A.F.-like group is an object of ridicule bordering on scorn. Fassbinder has a character say, “Capital invented terrorism in order to force the state to protect it better.”

How seriously to take the R.A.F.? Burke cites a poll conducted in West Germany in 1971: “Forty per cent of the respondents agreed that the RAF’s violence was ‘political’, eighteen per cent approved of their motives, and six per cent said they would shelter a member of the group for a night,” Burke writes. East Germany’s Communist regime welcomed the radicals as a nuisance for the West and provided them refuge and occasional backing. But, for the East Germans, as for the Soviet Union, the R.A.F. was also a classic example of what Lenin had denounced as “adventurism”: revolution, he insisted, was likeliest in regimes like tsarist Russia, where soldiers might switch sides, not in the Western democracies, where institutions were more stable. In the nineteen-seventies, the vulnerable-looking regimes were in the Middle East.

Until the seventies, Arab nationalists such as Nasser and Hussein had supported the Palestinian fedayeen. When two P.F.L.P. hijackers were released from a Greek prison and sent to Cairo, Nasser had flowers and a thank-you note waiting for one of them at the Semiramis Hotel. In 1968, Hussein went so far as to join his army with fedayeen units in battle, when the I.D.F. attacked the Jordanian border town of Karameh. The united forces dealt severe blows to Israeli units, whose ranks included the young Benjamin Netanyahu.

But, for the more hard-line Palestinian militants, the support was not enough. Tensions broke into the open in the autumn of 1970, when Hussein’s army turned against the fedayeen, which had become a diplomatic liability and a threat to his own rule. In response, Palestinian guerrillas formed the Black September Organization, an outfit more extreme than Fatah or the P.F.L.P. It made itself known with the assassination of the Jordanian Prime Minister, Wasfi Tal, in Cairo in 1971. The following year, it launched its most notorious operation, the attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics, in which Black September members took hostage, and eventually killed, eleven Israeli athletes and coaches. A sign of the international aspirations of Black September is the fact that the attackers’ demands included the release of Baader and Meinhof from prison.

The Munich operation revealed the inadequacy of ordinary policing in dealing with sophisticated attacks and forced Western governments to develop a new strategy. No more would they bargain with hostage-takers. Instead, they trained élite units to strike back. “The ‘theatre of terrorism’ now had a rival,” Burke writes. “A ‘theatre of counterterrorism.’ ”

The way was led by Israel. When a team of Palestinian and German militants hijacked an Air France flight out of Athens and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, Israeli soldiers were dispatched to kill the hijackers. Only one Israeli soldier was lost in the raid: Yonatan Netanyahu (Benjamin’s older brother), who became a national hero. In perhaps the most degraded episode in the annals of the German left, the hijackers separated Jewish passengers from the rest, without seeming to reflect on whose methods this resembled.

The following year, the German government pulled off a feat of its own. Under direction from Haddad, operatives hijacked a plane and forced it to land in Mogadishu, Somalia. For hours, a German diplomat strung the hijackers along with false promises, buying the time needed for a strike force to kill them and save the passengers. As Burke notes, such operations required not only special training but also delicate diplomacy with hostile third-party states, which had to be persuaded to allow foreign forces to carry out missions on their soil.

Burke suggests that the most cunning achievement of states in the seventies was the propagation of the concept and term “terrorism” itself. “To propose that terrorism had anything to do with broader social, political or economic factors was seen as a moral failure, even cowardice,” Burke writes. “Despite its flaws and the many dissenting voices who opposed it, this new analysis rapidly became very influential in policy-making circles.” When Benjamin Netanyahu edited a collection of essays on terrorism, the Wall Street Journal hailed its findings. “The first political task at hand,” the reviewer wrote, “is to cut the idea of terrorism loose from the connection it now has in many Western liberal minds with notions of national liberation and social justice.”

No figure of the seventies did more to meet the definition of “terrorist” than Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan agent better known as Carlos the Jackal. He trained with the fedayeen—“I’ve been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews,” he told a family friend—and, in 1973, became an operative for Haddad. But he quickly proved himself to be reckless, after he botched the murder of the Jewish president of Marks & Spencer in London, blew up a Paris boutique, and shot and killed two French policemen.

Carlos was the most flamboyant of the period’s ultras, with a taste for haute couture, seduction, and fast cars. But, as Burke writes, his career “did not reveal the strength of the international revolutionary ‘armed struggle’ so much as its incipient decline.” There was a new player in the Middle East. After the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated, in 1981, Carlos was infuriated, assuming that some other radical-left outfit had beaten him to it. In fact, Sadat had been killed by a group soon to be known as Islamic Jihad, and Carlos was not alone in not having heard of it.

In 1975, the C.I.A. reported that the “revolutionary era” in the Middle East was over. It would be more accurate to say that it had changed shape. For decades, Islamist groups in the region had tried to gain traction, but their numbers were relatively small. This shifted during the economic slowdowns of the seventies, as the models of the Soviet Union and the nationalist Arab states showed severe signs of wear.

Although hardly the weakest Middle Eastern state, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran was, besides Israel, the most obviously tied to Western interests. But the Shah believed that his gravest threats came from the left rather than from Islamists. The Ayatollah Khomeini spied an opening. The key was to combine the forces of the left with the growing popular discontent of everyday mosque-goers. Burke writes, “Having never previously admitted the existence of tabaqeh or ‘class’ as an analytic category, Khomeini began using the concept in his speeches.” When protests in support of Khomeini erupted on the streets of Tehran in 1979, they stunned observers with their sheer size. Earlier Islamists, such as Sayyid Qutb, had tried to oust secular nationalists by means of an élite vanguard of believers. But Khomeini’s ability to reach ordinary Muslims enabled him to harness the latent power of Islamic society.

Khomeini momentarily won admiration across the Shiite-Sunni divide. He, too, considered himself a partisan of the Palestinian cause, but, once in command of the state, he set his forces against the elements of the left that had helped him take power, discarding them like spent rocket boosters. “Khomeini and his followers approached the Palestinians primarily from an Islamic standpoint, and secondarily from a revolutionary one,” the Egyptian journalist Fahmy Howeidy wrote. “No one noticed that the two sides were working from different perspectives.”Relations between Khomeini and Arafat frayed further when Arafat strategically supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and then refrained from condemning the Soviet Union’s war against the Afghan mujahideen.

The decisive blow to the secular phase of Palestinian resistance came from Israel. In 1982, the I.D.F. invaded Lebanon, to rid Beirut of Arafat’s forces. Despite George Habash’s eager prediction of an “Arab Stalingrad,” the war shattered what remained of the P.L.O., hurling its fragments as far afield as Tunisia, where Arafat accelerated his transformation from armed revolutionary into pliant diplomat. President Ronald Reagan decried the Israelis’ operations as a “holocaust,” and the main thrust of resistance shifted to inside Palestine itself—the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the West Bank—where a new, much deeper popular revolt, closer in form to Khomeini’s uprising and initially independent of the P.L.O., would yield the first intifada, in 1987. By then, the identity of the main threat to the American presence in the Middle East had declared itself, when an explosives-laden truck slammed into a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, killing two hundred and forty-one servicemen. The suicide driver was not a Marxist but a young Islamist militant.

Burke’s history ends with Osama bin Laden and other figures who emerged in a region where liturgies of the left had given way to radical Islamism. (One of bin Laden’s mentors, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, had been dismayed by celebrations of Lenin’s birthday while training in a fedayeen camp.) The attacks to come would be bigger. Leila Khaled now lives in Amman. Wadie Haddad died in East Berlin in 1978, perhaps poisoned by Mossad. In the recent Gaza war, the P.F.L.P. has put aside its differences with the Islamists of Hamas to form a united front against Israel, but it is a shadow of its former self.

“The Revolutionists” is likely to stand for some time as the most absorbing history of the P.F.L.P. and its multifarious allies. The book’s flaw, perhaps unavoidable, is that, despite a determination to see beyond glamour and theatrics, it cannot help focussing on the dramatic actions of a handful of high-flying revolutionaries, while more quotidian state violence, especially toward Palestinians, comes off as background noise. The militants appear to be the prime movers of the age, when they were more like an endangered species. They become more comprehensible when viewed as spasmodic reactors to what they perceived as an intolerable political arrangement. That may be why a kaffiyeh on a graying woman in a small town in Germany can still signal defiance. ♦