Published: 9 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IN THE EARLY 1980S, Israeli forces stormed several Palestine Liberation Organization command posts in southern Lebanon, seizing a wide array of documents detailing various military operations. Among the papers were letters orchestrating the PLO’s dispatch of officers to East Germany, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, North Korea and China for military training from the mid-’70s.
Hidden among the letters was a three-page manual for handling and assembling explosives. The pages detail (in Mandarin) how to build mines using barbed wire, cement, gunpowder and other materials.
The instructions arrived in Lebanon in one of several shipments of Chinese arms to the PLO that took place in the ’60s and, according to documents obtained by Haaretz, were part of a greater Chinese effort to support the Palestinian liberation movement.
Shortly after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, recognised the State of Israel. However, by the 1960s, the communist regime started to enjoy warmer relations with the Palestinians, seeing the Palestinian struggle through the lens of a larger fight against imperialism.
FULL STORY Weapons and ideology: Files reveal how China armed and trained the Palestinians (Haaretz)
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Photo: Armed Palestinian fighters from the PLO read copies of "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (or "Little Red Book") in Jordan, 1970 (Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty)
