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.