I need to declare an interest in the Guardian's publication of an interview with Samir Kuntar today. The piece first appeared (at considerably greater length) in the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv on Friday. I was contacted by its translator who told me that the paper would like to place it internationally. On their behalf, I approached the Guardian.
I have read a longer translation of the original Ma'ariv interview, which should be available online in the next day or two. I will leave it to Norm to discuss the ethics of Kuntar's self-justifications. What interested me was the account Kuntar told of his own life, which, in the longer version, has additional information about his political affiliations in Lebanon in the 1970s. By his own admission, Kuntar came from a wealthy family and was educated at private schools. He is not Palestinian, he is Druze. Despite or perhaps because of his bourgeois background, he became involved in the Marxist-Leninist organizations of that period.
Kuntar fits no model of the impoverished refugee driven to despair by occupation. Nor can he be seen within the context of Iranian-backed Islamism. When he emerged from prison last week it was as a relic of a bygone age: of that era of self-appointed middle-class revolutionaries, like the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof Gang.
In my own youth I occasionally met people like Kuntar, their heads addled with Marxism-Leninism. Doris Lessing's novel The Good Terrorist anatomizes the mindset. But no one ever gave them, as they did Kuntar, a Kalashnikov, or military training, and so they escaped Kuntar's fate, lacking the opportunity.
At the age of 13, Qantar persuaded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to allow him to enlist. "Each afternoon at 5, a car would collect me and take me to the training camp. That's where I shot a gun for the first time - a Kalashnikov. It was fantastic."
Kuntar invented himself as a revolutionary at an early age, and his ardour for the struggle has not dimmed after nearly 30 years in prison. Individuals like him - affectless, without empathy - have always played leading roles in revolutionary movements. Drawn to political organizations of the far left and far right, they are people who have the passion and the excitement for violence, the glamour of violence. Those who are motivated by a desire for the alleviation of poverty or the redressing of injustice, lack the thirst for blood. (Linda Grant)