Revolutionary Terrorism in the 20th Century

While terrorism became a major tool of 19th-century revolutionary politics, it took on new and more terrible forms in the post-World War II era, forms that remain with us today. Susie Linfield reviews a recent history of that violence, Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, providing much detail about the connections between the German New Left and Palestinian terrorist groups, the contemporary residue of that 20th-century terrorism, and why Israel was doomed to play a central role in that history.