Before the American Left Made Palestine Its Revolution, Japan Did It First
He was not Palestinian, Arab, Muslim or a refugee. He had never lost a home in the Middle East. He was a 24-year-old Japanese botany student from a respectable family headed by a school principal.
Yet in 1972, he travelled thousands of miles to murder strangers at Israel’s international airport in the name of “freeing Palestine".
Okamoto died in Beirut at 78. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization that planned his operation and protected him for decades - eulogized “Ahmad the Japanese” as a model of sacrifice who “never compromised nor faltered”.
His story is a warning about what fringe movements built on hatred, dehumanization and revolutionary absolutism can eventually produce.
Okamoto did not begin with a rifle.
He began with attending a university.
During the 1960s, Japanese universities were convulsed by protests against the Vietnam War, America’s military presence, the US–Japan Security Treaty, capitalism and Japan’s alleged subordination to American “imperialism”.
A radical minority concluded that protest and reform were useless. If the system itself was violence, they reasoned, then violence against the system was justified.
The Red Army Faction formally declared war on the Japanese state in 1969. Its members attacked police stations, robbed banks and sought foreign bases from which to ignite a worldwide communist revolution.
The ideology spread through university organizations, friendship networks, political meetings and revolutionary art. One of Okamoto’s earliest known activities was arranging a screening of Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, an agitprop film portraying Japanese communists and Palestinian militants as soldiers in one international army.
First came the images and slogans. Then came Lebanon.
Okamoto’s older brother, Takeshi, was already involved. In 1970, he joined eight other radicals in hijacking Japan Airlines Flight 351 to North Korea, where the surviving hijackers received asylum.
Meanwhile, a related but organizationally separate faction, the United Red Army, was torturing and murdering its own members. Fourteen radicals were killed during an internal purge for alleged ideological weakness before the group’s survivors were captured following the televised Asama-Sansō siege in February 1972.
The revolution in Japan was collapsing into paranoia, criminality and death.
Fusako Shigenobu decided that the answer was not to abandon the revolution but to export it. She moved to Lebanon in 1971 and joined forces with the PFLP, associated with George Habash and Wadie Haddad’s campaign of international hijackings.
To these radicals, Palestine was never about improving Palestinian lives. It was just the “weak link” through which the entire Western order might be broken. Zionism, capitalism, America, the Japanese government and the police were presented as components of one global system.
“Free Palestine”, they said and you could begin to “free the world”.
This alliance was not accidental. Palestinian revolutionary organizations actively cultivated foreign radicals because they supplied new recruits, international legitimacy and operatives who could evade the scrutiny applied to Arab militants. The communists received training, weapons, protection and a global stage. The PFLP received expendable foreign soldiers.
That arrangement brought Okamoto to Lod Airport.
On May 30, 1972, Okamoto and two other Japanese Red Army members - Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda - arrived on an Air France flight from Rome.
They looked like ordinary Japanese travellers. Their weapons were concealed in violin cases and luggage. Airport security was watching for Arab attackers, not Japanese communists.
After collecting their bags, the three removed Czech assault rifles and grenades and opened fire indiscriminately.
26 were murdered and approximately more 80 injured.
Seventeen of the dead were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. One was Canadian. Eight were Israelis, including the internationally renowned biophysicist Aharon Katzir.
They were pilgrims, scientists, airport employees and passengers standing beside a baggage carousel.
Two attackers died. Okamoto was wounded and captured.
He reportedly told a Japanese diplomat that he had nothing personally against his victims. He had merely fulfilled his duty as a “soldier of the revolution”.
That is the power of ideological brainwashing: it removes the need for a personal grievance. The victim ceases to be an individual and becomes a “Zionist”, “settler”, “colonizer”, “imperialist” or “class enemy”. Once people have been replaced by categories, killing them can be presented as virtue.
Okamoto would later express sorrow for the victims, but he never renounced the attack or accepted that it was terrorism. In 2017, he still described the massacre as “armed struggle” and praised such violence as effective propaganda. In 2022, he appeared at a Beirut ceremony commemorating the attack, laid a wreath for the other gunmen and gave supporters a victory sign.
He died without repenting for what he had done.
That is what successful indoctrination looks like: 54 years after opening fire on strangers and murdering many, the murderer can still see himself as the hero.
Fortunately, those around him did not.
Japan reacted with shock, shame and fury.
Delegations, many composed of young people, visited the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo to apologize. Japanese ambassador Eiji Tokura addressed Israelis on television in halting Hebrew, apologized for the crime committed by Japanese nationals and broke down in tears.
Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda called the massacre a dishonor to Japan. Education Minister Saburō Takami apologized for failures in the educational system. The president of Kyoto University, attended by two of the perpetrators, was summoned to the Education Ministry and publicly expressed his shame.
Japan sent a special emissary and offered approximately $1.5 million in compensation to the wounded and the families of the dead.
Most strikingly, Okamoto’s father wrote to Golda Meir and asked that his son be executed after a full investigation.
His father did not call him a resistance fighter. He did not argue that Israel had forced his son to fire into a crowd. He understood that no grievance or revolutionary slogan could absolve the deliberate murder of innocent people.
But the consequences did not remain in Israel.
The Palestinian alliance helped transform the Japanese Red Army into an international terrorist network, and Japanese citizens and institutions soon became targets and bargaining chips.
In 1973, JRA and PFLP operatives hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 404 and demanded Okamoto’s release.
In 1974, JRA members seized the French Embassy in The Hague.
In 1975, they took more than 50 hostages in Kuala Lumpur, occupying facilities that included the American and Swedish diplomatic missions.
In 1977, they hijacked another Japan Airlines flight to Dhaka, forcing Japan to release imprisoned radicals and pay a ransom.
In 1988, a JRA member bombed a USO club in Naples, killing five people.
Palestine had provided the revolution with its first foreign battlefield, but the revolutionary campaign was aimed at the wider democratic order. It eventually came home to Japan through hijacked Japanese aircraft, Japanese hostages, political coercion and decades of international police work.
The promised liberation produced corpses, prisoners, fugitives and broken families. It freed nobody.
Shigenobu was arrested in Japan in 2000 and dissolved the Japanese Red Army from prison in 2001. After completing a 20-year sentence, she acknowledged that she had hurt innocent people by placing “the struggle” above them.
Okamoto never reached that reckoning.
Israel had sentenced him to life but released him in the 1985 Jibril prisoner exchange. After passing through Libya and Syria, he settled in Lebanon. Lebanese authorities arrested him and four other JRA members in 1997 for forged documents and immigration violations. Four were eventually deported and taken into Japanese custody.
Lebanon (under the influence of the PLO, Hezbollah and Syria) protected Okamoto, granting him political asylum because his massacre was classified as “resistance”. Japan repeatedly requested his extradition; Lebanon repeatedly refused.
The PFLP protected him until his death.
Today, Palestinian political networks and Western socialist organizations are again building mutually useful alliances.
DSA publications describe Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement as “grassroots partners” (paid by the biggest tyrants in the world). DSA’s own statements speak of “comrades in Palestine” and promise to “break the gears of the US imperial war machine”.
The Palestinian cause supplies Western radicals with a morally intoxicating global struggle. Western radicals supply Palestinian movements with brainwashed foot soldiers, political influence, institutional access and useful mob to recruit even more lost youth.
At a City College encampment in 2024, an organizer told a YDSA publication: “We’re going to free Palestine, and we’re going to free the world too”.
The organizer connected Palestine to free tuition, capitalism, campus police and the American university system because “they’re all connected”. The same interview called for escalation and argued that working within the political system was ineffective.
The "omnicause" tends to radicalize people in this way, and that is remarkably close to the Japanese Red Army’s revolutionary synthesis.
Palestine stops being one conflict. It becomes the master explanation for every grievance and the imagined detonator for a wider war against capitalism, America, police, borders, universities, Jews and Western power.
This is why the encampments should not automatically be treated as benign expressions of youthful idealism. An encampment must be judged by what it teaches, tolerates and produces.
When organizers insist that every grievance is part of one revolutionary struggle; call for ever-greater escalation; describe Israeli civilians as “settlers” without civilian rights; romanticize “armed struggle”; punish dissent; attack Jewish students and professors on campus, and teach students that political opponents are outside the moral community, the tents are not benign. They are functioning as radicalization spaces.
A YDSA proposal for a national student strike explicitly called for “upending the very social fabric” of campuses and “weaponizing” students’ numbers against universities.
This is how the threshold moves:
A political opponent becomes an oppressor.
A disagreement becomes complicity.
A defensive missile system becomes “barbaric”.
A murdered civilian becomes a “settler”.
A massacre becomes “resistance”.
On October 7, DSA’s national statement said the attack was “a direct result of Israel’s "apartheid" regime” and “was not unprovoked”. It did not name Hamas. It ignored every fact on the ground, and its immediate instruction was for socialists to organize against Israel and American support for it.
The following day, a Times Square rally promoted by NYC-DSA and organized with other radical groups took place while Israeli families were still discovering who had been murdered and kidnapped. A speaker joked approvingly that the “resistance” had arrived by paraglider and captured people at the Nova festival. The crowd laughed.
Maurice Isserman, a historian and DSA member for 41 years, resigned. He had belonged to Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s and watched tightly organized revolutionary factions capture it before the Weathermen took their “armed struggle” underground.
As an historian, he recognized the pattern: ideological factions intolerant of dissent capturing a wider movement, imposing purity tests and moving its moral boundaries toward violence.
At its 2025 convention, DSA adopted “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA”, reinforcing anti-Zionism as an organizational requirement and treating some affirmations of Israel’s right to defend itself as potentially disciplinary matters.
The Japanese radicals also treated disagreement as betrayal and ideological weakness as corruption. Their purity system culminated in internal tribunals, torture and 14 murdered comrades.
That history should be read as a warning, not after the next Okamoto appears, but before.
There is one crucial difference between Japan then and the West now.
Japan’s political establishment drew a moral boundary. Its ambassador wept. Its government compensated victims. Its police pursued the perpetrators.
Today, parts of the European political class and elements of America’s Democratic Party increasingly echo the movement’s accusations, terminology and political demands. Instead of confronting radicalization, politicians calculate how many votes can be won by flattering it.
Ro Khanna’s July 2026 Judea and Samaria trip illustrates the incentive. While considering a presidential campaign, and after supporting a Nazi candidate that then also turned out to be a rapist, Khanna chose an exclusively Palestinian-led itinerary, refused invites from the Israeli government, called Gaza a “genocide” and Judaea and Samaria “apartheid”, and converted a disputed road confrontation into a national political spectacle. Khanna then (surprise, surprise) announced that the experience had made him more determined to consider running for president.
Political leadership once meant resisting a mob when it abandoned basic principles. Increasingly, it means studying the mob’s slogans, repeating them and hoping the performance converts into votes.
That collapse in standards matters. Fringe movements become more dangerous when elected officials validate their moral framework and reward their escalation.
The lesson of the Holocaust cannot merely be that the world should hold ceremonies after millions have been murdered.
The lesson must be to recognize radicalization and dehumanization before it reaches its final destination.
The Japanese Red Army remained small. It did not need millions of members. The PFLP needed only a handful of thoroughly indoctrinated young people willing to replace human beings with ideological categories and someone else’s war with their own identity.
Today, no one needs to fly Western students to a training camp in Lebanon. Propaganda reaches them through social media, university organizations, activist toolkits and political networks. It offers belonging, absolute certainty and permission to hate while calling that hatred justice.
That is why the answer begins with refusing to erase people.
Palestinians are human beings, not revolutionary props.
Israelis are human beings, not symbols of “settler colonialism” (nor they are colonialists).
Jews are not a metaphysical stand-in for capitalism, imperialism or the West.
Before anyone convinces himself that killing Israelis is liberation, he should come to Israel and see the people the slogans have erased.
Visit the kibbutzim attacked on October 7. Meet the families of the murdered and kidnapped. Walk through Israeli hospitals where Jewish and Arab doctors treat Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze and Bedouin patients. Meet Israeli Arabs, immigrants, refugees and foreign workers. Then meet Palestinians, hear their experiences and see their humanity too, and how they are being oppressed by Hamas.
Reality is more difficult than revolutionary propaganda because reality contains people.
People complicate hatred.
That is precisely why the ideologues replace them with labels.
The Japanese Red Army believed it would free Palestine and then free the world. It freed nobody. It helped Palestinian terrorists internationalize their war, inflicted violence far beyond Israel and left families across several countries to bury the results.
Kōzō Okamoto never truly repented because he never escaped the ideological machinery that turned murder into heroism.
We should not wait for another massacre - and certainly not for another catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust - before admitting that the machinery is being rebuilt.
Stop excusing dehumanization.
Stop treating radicalization as harmless campus theater.
And stop teaching young people that any political cause can make the murder of another human being righteous.
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