GHASSAN KANAFANIWhile Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, militarily and diplomatically supported by the U.S. and Western powers, imperialist rhetoric shapes the ongoing slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And although it was written decades ago, Ghassan Kanafani’s impeccable and distinguished writing still articulates the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle with amazing clarity.
Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (Pluto Press) was published in October 2024, a year after Israel’s genocide in Gaza began. Through a translated selection of Kanafani’s political writings, the reader is able to understand Palestinian anti-colonial resistance through his analysis. In the words of editors Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi from the book’s introduction, this resistance is “a confrontation between imperialism and an anti-imperialist liberation movement against brutal settler-colonialism.”
The writings are grouped into five main themes, each chapter distinctively showing how language is essential in conveying the meaning of anti-colonial resistance, the perils from within, and the necessity of looking at Palestinian anti-colonial resistance in terms of what it faces regionally and globally. Each of Kanafani’s translated works is accompanied by the translator’s introduction and contextualization, making this book an invaluable resource.
Kanafani is synonymous with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and renowned for his literary works. It was not until 2005 that Israel admitted to killing him in a targeted assassination by a car bomb in Beirut in July 1972.
In light of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Kanafani’s succinct description of what Palestinians are up against holds absolute relevance.
Speaking to Mondoweiss, Brehony and Hamdi illustrated the importance of contextualizing Gaza within Kanfani’s writings.
“The political writings of Ghassan Kanafani hold so much depth and analytical sharpness that I think it would be impossible for us to truly understand the contours of the current confrontation without referencing his work,” Brehony says. “This is at least true from the perspective of those of us who see ourselves as leftists, socialists or Marxists; the sidelining of his work is done by forces hostile to Marxism and revolutionary outlooks.”
Brehony considers Kanafani’s work as prophetic and notes that Gaza particularly stands out. “Kanafani visited Gaza and, in a letter to Ghada Samman dated November 29, 1966, he wrote of his own feelings of worthlessness alongside the guerrillas who were confronting the Zionist stating directly: ‘I feel more than ever that the whole value of my words is an impudent and trivial compensation for the absence of weapons, paling before the insurgence of real men who die every day for a cause I respect’,” Brehony explains.
After 1967, Brehony notes, Gaza became “the vanguard of the armed struggle,” which was reflected in Kanafani’s editorial decisions for the PFLP’s newspaper, al-Hadaf.
“Under his editorship, space was devoted in the PFLP newspaper al-Hadaf to operations against the occupation, including actions led by revolutionary fighters like Mohammad al-Aswad, trained in socialist China and dubbed the ‘Guevara of Gaza.’ In the studies in our book, we read that in 1970, Kanafani referred to ‘the great value of the violent resistance raging in the Gaza strip’ and the place where the PFLP was driving the foremost glories of the armed struggle. According to his comrade Adnan Badr Hiliou, Kanafani was responsible for the text of the 1972 PFLP conference, known as ‘Tasks or the New Stage.’ In the document, Gaza is described as the only place where the vanguard of the Palestinian revolution had proven capable of launching an effective people’s war, taking account of international histories of national liberation.”
Expounding upon Gaza, Hamdi describes Kanafani’s relevance in understanding today. “Palestinian people face the threat of extermination at the hands of the genocidal Zionist entity. Kanafani’s vision for the liberation of Palestine is inherently tied to key concepts central to his thought, such as the creation of new men and women, a resilient and fighting people, the combatant writer, the toiling classes, unity of the fronts, national unity, resistance literature, and rootedness. These ideas form part of a revolutionary ethics grounded in the anti-colonial struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, which also entails a complete rejection of the politics of surrender promoted by Arab reaction/reactionary regimes.”
Kanfani’s precision is also rooted in rejecting external impositions of what Palestinians are facing. In an interview with ABC journalist Richard Carleton, Kanafani’s answers not only assert the Palestinians’ cause but also correct terminology. When Carleton attempts to sway the narrative away from Kanafani using the term ‘liberation movement’ saying, “Well, whatever it might be best called,” Kanafani answers, “It is not ‘whatever’, because this is where the problem starts.”
About the ABC interview with Kanafani, Hamdi says, “For Kanafani, there are no halfway measures—no negotiations with the enemy, no signing treaties of surrender or capitulation with the Israelis. He described such actions as a ‘conversation between the sword and the neck.’”
Hamdi continues, “Kanafani viewed the liberation of Palestine and its people as part of a broader anti-imperialist movement in the Arab world and beyond. He recognized the interconnectedness of revolutionary struggles against colonialism, just as he emphasized the unity of Palestinian armed factions, underscoring that weakness in one fida’i organization would inevitably affect the others. Kanafani believed in the absolute unity of these organizations, despite their ideological differences, because, as he often argued, the armed struggle for liberation depends on the urgent unity of the fronts.”
While Kanafani’s writings directly relate to Palestine, they are also relevant in terms of internationalism. Brehony explains, “Much of what Ghassan wrote is directly relevant to Palestinian and Arab activists, progressives, and fighters as they seek to maintain their confrontation with the Zionist state and the imperialist forces which stand behind it. We could say that Ghassan’s writings also have a kind of global universality for revolutionary socialists, as contributions to the liberationist theories developed in national revolutionary struggles from Vietnam and China to Algeria and Ireland, and moreover to the Marxist revolutionary theory thrown up by experiences of socialism in Cuba, or in the belly of the imperialist beast by the Black Panthers and other trends.”
Unity, Hamdi notes, featured prominently in Kanafani’s writings. This applied to both Palestinian factions, as well as anti-colonial resistance movements around the world, since all share the foundations of a similar struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
Echoing Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle against U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, Kanafani also expounded on the need to create a new social consciousness.
“An important question today is: After 53 years since Kanafani’s assassination in Beirut, has the Palestinian struggle for liberation met the prerequisites he outlined for realizing the liberation of Palestine—from the river to the sea? The obvious answer is no, as the divisions we see today are precisely what Kanafani fiercely opposed,” Hamdi explains. “His progressive, Arab Marxist platform sought to counter the divisions and sectarianism that plague the Arab world today—divisions deliberately engineered and supported by Western imperialism, Arab reaction, and their media outlets to manufacture consent and divide Arab populations along religious, sectarian, and ethnic lines, as we see in the “new Syria” today. Kanafani was adamant in his opposition to turning the ‘struggle with imperialism and its international apparatus, Israel, into a racial, religious confrontation.’”
Back to Gaza, Hamdi notes that Kanafani gave it much prominence in his political and literary writings.
“Kanafani saw great promise in the resistance and resilience of Gaza, themes to which he often returned in both his political writings and fiction. In a 1971 interview with Fred Halliday, Kanafani commented on Gaza’s resistance under siege: ‘There is also a psychological factor: Gaza is surrounded on the west by the sea, on the south by Sinai, on the east by the Naqab, and on the north by the Israeli state. The Palestinians there are psychologically besieged and accustomed to difficulty … In Gaza, they were tougher and more professional”. Kanafani believed that siege and besiegement made a people stronger, tougher, and more resilient. Contrary to the enemy’s intentions, the brutal siege and bombardment of Gaza produced a fierce, fighting people whose defiant resistance and sumud remain incomprehensible to the outside world.’”
In his short story “A Letter from Gaza,” published in 1956, Kanafani depicted the people of Gaza as deeply rooted to the land, their resilience defying even the most brutal conditions. Their sacrifice, resistance, and resilience highlighted the degrading and humiliating politics of surrender from Arab reaction, which continue to be evident today. In this example of Kanafani’s resistance literature, the narrator tells his friend in the U.S. that he will not join him. Instead, he urges his friend to return to Gaza to learn from the people there “what life is and what existence is worth,” despite the destruction, devastation, and the countless lives lost due to the continuous Israeli bombing. In his exploration of resistance literature, Kanafani consistently emphasized a deep-rooted connection to the land and cause. For Kanafani, flight and escape were signs of defeat.”
In terms of the wider Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, not just Gaza, Brehony notes, “It is interesting to see how the role and significance of the West Bank has evolved in the period since Ghassan’s writing. During this period, he described the region as a ‘human barrier’ between the Zionist state and Jordan, which was at that time a major front in the Palestinian liberation movement. The Jordanian state played a particular role in crushing the resistance around al-Wihdat and other camps, and Ghassan and his comrades exposed this in words, actions, and culture. The accelerated colonization of the West Bank that we have seen since Oslo has been made by the pernicious role of Arab bourgeois reaction, critiqued in detail in this work. At the same time, Ghassan and other Palestinian revolutionaries were firm that Palestinian liberation could not be limited to Gaza and the West Bank.”
The Palestinian Authority’s rejection of armed struggle is contrary to Kanfani’s steadfastness. Hamdi notes, “Liberation and return to the homeland require war, as his character Said tells his wife Safiyya in Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa. Palestine belongs to those willing to fight and sacrifice for it, as Said’s son Khalid demonstrates in this novella:
For Khalid, the homeland is the future. That’s how we differed, and that’s why Khalid wants to carry arms … Men like Khalid look toward the future, to put right our mistakes and the mistakes of the world. Dov is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honor. Didn’t I tell you from the beginning that we shouldn’t come—because that was something requiring a war? Let’s go!”
“A revolutionary movement to liberate a homeland cannot disavow armed struggle and embrace normalization with the settler-colonial entity—that is surrender and defeat, the chosen position of the defeatist PA and Arab regimes,” Hamdi asserts. “Today, Gaza stands as the exemplary symbol of resistance and the sought-after liberation that, as Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti states in his memoir I Saw Ramallah, would enable the ‘return of the millions, that is the true return.’”
With one parting nod to the importance of honoring the writer’s true message, Brehony warns, “Kanafani’s work is deliberately hidden by opportunist academics who oppose Palestinian national liberation in practice while offering lip-service and posturing as ‘solidarity.’ The importance of Kanfani’s work within imperialist entities like Britain, the U.S. or EU comes in the lessons it can offer towards building revolutionary consciousness. It gives anti-imperialists a model of Palestinian Marxism to challenge liberal, opportunist attempts to avoid supporting armed struggle, or to paint Zionism as some all-controlling phenomena that stands behind the system.”
“Ghassan was clear that there are no liberal solutions. The future could only be built through an all-out confrontation with imperialism.”