Michael Lavalette looks at the life and works of the Palestinian writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani and reviews two recent collections of his political writings

Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian activist, novelist, artist, journalist and theoretician. He was active in the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in the 1960s before helping to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967. He was assassinated by an Israeli undercover unit in Beirut on 7 July 1972 when a car he was driving with his young niece blew up as a result of a Mossad car bomb.

‘Our style of operation is not an invention of a person but the result of our situation. If we could liberate Palestine by standing on the borders of South Lebanon and throwing roses on the Israelis, we would do it. It is nicer. But I don’t think it will work’ (Ghassan Kanafani).

The upsurge in the Palestine solidarity movement over the last sixteen months has led to a revival in interest in the life and works of Ghassan Kanafani. His picture has appeared on posters and t-shirts and there has been increasing awareness of, and engagement with, his ideas in strategic debates over the direction of the Palestine liberation movement.

Collections of Kanafani’s short stories and novels have been available in English for a number of years (for example the collections Men in the Sun, All that’s Left to You, and Returning to Haifa), but in recent months Pluto Press has published some of his political writings in English for the first time and 1804 Press (from New York) have published a revised translation of his important history of the Palestinian ‘Great Revolt’ of 1936-9. Both of these are welcome additions to the vast literature on Palestinian history and liberation struggles and to establishing Kanafani’s position as one of the great thinkers and writers of Palestinian liberation.

Who was Kanafani?

Ghassan Kanafani was born in the port city of Akka (in English: Acre) on 9 April 1936. Akka is in Haifa Bay in the Galilee, on the Northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine48. It is roughly half-way between the city of Haifa and the Lebanese border. He was the third child to be born into the Kanafani family, and would eventually be joined by a further three siblings. The family were comfortably well off. His father was a lawyer and, like many Palestinian children from his background, Ghassan was sent to a French missionary school where he was taught in French rather than Arabic.

Kanafani’s birth coincided with the start of what is known as al-thawra al-kubra (the Great Revolt) of 1936-9. This was the most important anti-colonial struggle against British rule in the Middle East in the inter-war era.

On 13 April 1936, against a background of escalating Jewish-Arab skirmishes and the imposition of a state of emergency by the British colonial power, Palestinians launched a general strike that would last six months. The strike was coordinated through ‘national committees’ which sprung up in villages, towns and cities across the country. On 25 April, a Higher Arab Committee was established and presented their demands to the British. These demands were (1) end European Jewish migration to Palestine, (2) stop land sales (i.e. of Palestinian land) to Jewish organisations and settlers, and (3) grant Palestine its independence.

The Revolt quickly spread and became an armed uprising. It would last until 1939. By the middle of 1938, the insurgents had control of the highlands (the central part of Palestine from Ramallah and Nazareth and up towards Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem) and most Palestinian urban centres. The British responded with their customary brutality. Twenty thousand troops were deployed. The RAF was unleashed on Arab centres and Zionist auxiliaries were recruited, armed, trained and used to enforce colonial ‘law and order’: the armed European settler community acting in both their and their imperial master’s interests.

The British and their Zionist auxiliaries introduced a series of special regulations (many of which continue to be used by the Zionist state against Palestinians today). The British used human shields in Nablus, they introduced collective punishment and the destruction of Palestinian homes, they used extensive road blocks and check points to disrupt Palestinian movement and introduced ‘administrative detention’ (detention without trial) for those suspected of having any links with the liberation movement.

As an interesting aside: the British started to stop and arrest anyone wearing a keffeya as they thought that the keffeya was the headwear of choice of Palestinian rebels. In the towns, the traditional male headwear was the Fez. So the Arab High Command asked all men to start wearing the keffeya as an act of solidarity with the rebels, making it far more difficult for the British to arrest people. And so the keffeya established its place as a symbol of Palestinian resistance!

Kanafani’s father and several relatives were actively involved in the revolt as it spread across the country. Thus, Kanafani’s early years were immersed in the developing Palestinian struggle for freedom. Later, Kanafani would write the first significant history of the Great Revolt (now republished by 1804 Press). Kanafani identified, in the defeat of 1936-9, the three great forces that would (and which continue to) plague the Palestinian freedom struggle.

The Nakba

In the years 1936-9, the Palestinian revolutionary movement was dealt a devastating blow by the three formations that have since evolved to become the major forces working against the people of Palestine: reactionary Palestinian leaders, Arab regimes surrounding Palestine, and the alliance between Zionism and imperialism. This ‘enemy’ triumvirate has left its imprint on the history of the Palestine liberation movement (Revolution, p1).

Like all Palestinians, Ghassan’s life changed directly as a result of the ethnic cleansing of 1947/48. On his twelfth birthday (9 April 1948), Zionist forces attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. The massacre that took place in the village is perhaps one of the better known episodes of the Nakba. The date of Deir Yassin’s destruction was etched on the minds of all Palestinians. According to Anni Kanafani, Ghassan’s widow, Ghassan would never celebrate a birthday again after what happened when he was twelve.

The following month the Nakba came to Akka. The city had shown great resilience in the face of shelling from Zionist forces. But then the Hagana (a paramilitary organisation set up in Mandate Palestine) resorted to biological warfare.

The city’s main water supply, an aqueduct from the Kabri springs, was injected with typhoid. The International Red Cross were guarded about apportioning blame for the sudden outbreak of the deadly disease, but stated it was the result of ‘outside poisoning’. The British forces in the city concluded the infection was undoubtedly waterborne, and not due to over-crowding or unhygienic conditions as the Hagana claimed. Indeed 55 British soldiers had to be transferred from the city after they were struck with the disease.

The Jewish forces soon attacked the city. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, they attacked with shells and started to blast the city with loudspeakers telling the inhabitants to ‘surrender or commit suicide’ otherwise ‘we will destroy you to the last man’. In the face of intensive shelling, typhoid and the loudspeaker threats, people started to flee.

Twelve-year-old Ghassan took to the road with his family. He was now a refugee. The family travelled first to a village in southern Lebanon, then on to Beirut, onwards to the mountains outside Damascus, before finally settling in the Damascus ghetto.

Like most Palestinian refugees, the Kanafanis thought they would return home soon enough. But this was to be a permanent exile: their former comfortable life was replaced with one of poverty and hardship.

The teenage Ghassan started to paint, draw and write notes about his life and what he saw about him amongst Palestinian refugees. In Damascus, he returned to schooling. After completing his initial studies, he worked as a teacher at an Unrwa school.

Whilst teaching, Kanafani enrolled at Damascus University to study Arabic literature. At the University, he started to write short stories about the plight of Palestinians. He joined a literary society called the League of Literature and Life. Amongst his university colleagues within the League, he was noted for the determination he had to get his stories published. His stories spoke of the immediate, of the plight of Palestinians and Arabs more generally. He was determined they should be published in magazines or journals because they spoke to the Palestinian crisis, because, as he said, for him ‘politics and the novel are an indivisible case’.

University also brought him to more directly active political engagement. Whilst a student, Kanafani came into contact with George Habash (1926-2008), at the time the leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement. Habash was to become a significant Palestinian leader and a significant influence on Kanafani. Their political relationship developed during the second half of the 1950s, but Kanafani would work closely with Habash throughout the rest of his life.

Habash was born in Lydda, part of present day Tel Aviv, to an Orthodox Christian family. In 1948, he was at the American University in Beirut when the Nakba took place. He rushed home to act as a medical orderly as the Zionist forces advanced on his town and cleansed it of its Arab inhabitants. After displacement, he went back to his studies and in 1951 he graduate as a medic.

Arab nationalism

The Arab Nationalist Movement was formally set up in Amman in 1956. It was a pan-Arabist movement whose slogan was ‘Unity, Liberation, Revenge’. The slogan referred to the ‘unity’ of Arab peoples and countries, ‘liberation’ from Western imperialism, whilst ‘revenge’ meant the recovery of a free Palestine.

Pan-Arabism was particularly significant in the early Palestinian movement. This was partly because of the scale of the defeat inflicted on the Palestinians by the Nakba, and the resultant discrediting of the former Palestinian leadership. Together, these two elements meant that many activists were drawn to pan-Arabism as the road to Palestinian liberation; it seemed to offer the prospect of liberation through the combined forces of Arab states and armies (rather than merely relying on the self-activity of Palestinians themselves). Pan-Arabism was attractive for a number of reasons.

First, it emphasised Arab unity. It asserted that the common history, culture and language of the Arab peoples created the possibility of close political union and, as a result, greater collective power on the global stage. Further, for hundreds of years, the Levant had been seen as a single entity with various regional centres. For many Arabs, ‘Balad Al Shams’ (the country of the left) referred to a single entity that covered present day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan (and is sometimes captured in the notion of ‘Greater Syria’).

Second, linked to the idea of Arab unity, was the notion that a unified Arab block could effectively stand alongside other ‘post-colonial’ societies to create an alternative political network (part of the ‘Third World’) that would not be committed (or under undue pressure from) the two great imperial powers ‘East’ and ‘West’ (the US and the USSR) in the Cold War era.

Third, in Egypt, and in the persona of Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, pan-Arabism had a strong political leader. Nasser had overthrown a corrupt King (in 1952), chased out the French, British and Israeli forces from Suez (1956), adopted ‘socialist economic measures’ (very broadly meaning land reform, nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the building of the Aswan Dam, greater ‘demand management’ of the economy and limited social reforms) and, in 1958, joined with Syria to establish the United Arab Republic (UAR). The UAR then entered a looser federation with Yemen. With the Iraqi revolution of 1958, there was the possibility of Iraq joining the UAR. For a brief period (until its dissolution in 1961) the dream of political unity seemed a very real possibility. And a United Arab Republic, for some, established a strong counterweight to the military power of Israel.

Finally, for some pan-Arabists, this, in turn, was reinforced by the successes of a range of post-war anti-colonial struggles which erupted in the post Second World War era. The success of the revolutions in, amongst others, Ghana (1957), Cuba (1959), Kenya (1960), Algeria (1962) and Yemen (1962) alongside the Vietnamese struggle against first the French, then the Americans, provided inspiration for those involved in anti-imperialist conflicts. They pointed to the possibility and potential for armed struggles to liberate colonies from their imperial masters.

However, for the majority of those who described themselves as pan-Arabists at this point, Palestinian liberation would come through alliances with strong Arab leaders, not (yet) through commitment to the armed struggle.

Palestinian liberation movement

Between 1955 and 1960, Kanafani was teaching in Kuwait. Whilst in Kuwait he started writing novellas and short stories, including Letter from Gaza (1956) and The Land of Sad Oranges (1958). The pan-Arabist Kanafani sets out in his writing to do three key things. First, to tell the Palestinian story, to ensure the Palestinian voice was heard and not forgotten. Second, to establish the reality of the place, Palestine, to assert its history and the Palestinian sense of belonging. Third, to give expression to the dislocation of exile, and to the contradictory feelings and sense of self this creates.

These themes are captured powerfully in a series of short stories (and a very good starting point for anyone interested would be the collection Men in the Sun). In 1960, George Habash persuaded Kanafani to move to Beirut to become a journalist. He began working on the pro-Nasserist daily paper al-Muharrir (The Liberator), which included a weekly supplement which he also edited called Filastin (Palestine). He was also invited to join the editorial board of Habash’s political journal al-Hurriyya (Independence).

The Palestinian political situation gradually started to shift in the mid-1960s. In 1964, the Arab League moved to set up a separate Palestinian entity, which they called the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The PLO was initially under Egyptian control. For its first four years, it would be seen as a weak and quite ineffectual organisation.

Equally significant (at least with hindsight) was the notice that was given to Beirut newspapers on New Year’s day 1965 called the ‘Al-Asifa Communique Number One’. Essentially this was the first announcement of military action by, at the time, a small Palestinian grouping called Fatah, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Throughout 1966, Arafat’s organisation undertook a number of military actions against Israel.

This led to an increasing debate in Palestinian circles over guerrilla warfare and the armed struggle. A number, including Kanafani, started to look at other Third World anti-colonial liberation struggles for inspiration. The ideas of Mao started to gain a foothold amongst some activists. Indeed, Kanafani made two visits to China in 1965 and 1966. The attraction of Mao, for many Palestinian fidayeen, was the apparent commitment to militant struggle for liberation, and ‘living the revolution’ based on ideals of simple egalitarian peasant living and hard work.

Many of these debates were aired in the bi-monthly magazine Filastin which Kanafani was editing at the time. These debates would eventually result in Kanafani helping to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967.

Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine

Soon three events were to reshape Palestinian liberation politics fundamentally. First, there was the Six Day War of May 1967. Referred to as the Naksa, the swift Israeli military victory dealt a massive blow to those who looked to the Arab regimes, especially Egypt and Syria, to help liberate Palestine. The war was a catastrophic defeat for the Arab states. It allowed the Israelis to expand their borders (taking the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai peninsula from Egypt). Of course, it also led to a second wave of Palestinian displacement.

These events led many to re-evaluate their approach. George Habash would recall:

‘I think that the first time we saw that they [i.e. Fatah] were right was after 1967. Only after that did we feel that the conditions were right for a Palestinian armed struggle.’

As a result Habash, with the support of Kanafani, formed the PFLP in December 1967. In its inaugural statement of 11 December, the PFLP declared:

‘The only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence … the historic task is … [to open a fierce struggle against the occupier] thereby turning the occupied territories into an inferno whose fires consume the usurpers.’

Kanafani became one of the key leaders of the organisation. The PFLP adopted Marxism, committed itself to the armed struggle and set itself against any solution except the liberation of Palestine48 – ‘from the river to the sea’.

The PFLP’s official political stance was ‘Marxism-Leninism’. What this meant is perhaps best revealed by the reading Habash undertook when he was imprisoned in Syria for ten months in 1968; near the top of the list were works by Ho Chi Minh and Mao. The ‘Marxism’ of Habash and the PFLP was, then, heavily influenced by Third World, anti-colonial, armed struggles. This was not the classical Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky with its emphasis on the ‘self-emancipation’ of the working class.

Second, although the Six Day War was a disaster for the Arab regimes, it did not stop guerrilla attacks on Israel from Palestinian militants. In fact the number of cross-border skirmishes (from Jordan and Lebanon) increased. Palestinian fighters were becoming better trained and armed. The Israelis vowed revenge against the fighters.

In March 1968, Israeli forces (15,000 troops and tanks) massed on the Jordanian border. Their mission was to destroy the Palestinian base at Karameh, in west-central Jordan. The Jordanian government urged a tactical retreat. Arafat, however, drew his fighters together and reportedly told them:

‘Our Arab nation has been escaping and fleeing continuously. … We have to prove to the Israeli enemy that there are people who will not flee. We are going to confront him in the same way that David confronted Goliath.’

Fighters from the PFLP moved into the hills, where they took Israeli paratroopers by surprise. The Jordanian army pounded the Israeli lines, while 300 Fatah fighters stood their ground against the Israeli frontal assault. One of the fighters wired himself up as a suicide bomb and hurled himself at an Israeli tank. Seventeen men dug themselves in and confronted Israeli tanks with rocket-propelled grenades: all but one died. The seventeen became immortalised in the name of Arafat’s future security service ‘Force 17’.

After heavy fighting, the Israelis withdrew: 28 Israelis had been killed, 69 were injured and 33 tanks had been destroyed. Although ninety Palestinians were killed and the Palestinian camp at Karameh had been destroyed, the battle was a huge ideological victory for the Palestinian fighters, and Fatah in particular.

For a democratic, secular state

Finally, as Fatah grew, so did the influence of Arafat. In January 1969, the PLO finally came under the control of the guerrilla organisations, and of Arafat. Arafat wanted the PLO to be a united front of Palestinian organisations and so it gradually became an umbrella organisation, under the control of Fatah, but with the PFLP and other Palestinian groups in its ranks.

Shortly after the Six Day War, in June 1967, Kanafani left his job on al-Muharrir to join the daily al-Anwar (The Lights) as editor of its weekly magazine. By 1969, he’d moved again. He was now playing a leading role within the PFLP. He was their media spokesperson and he moved to found and edit the PFLP journal al-Hadaf (The Goal). His journalistic writing was insightful and a first line defence of the armed struggle and of the PFLP.

This included defence of the PFLP tactic of hijacking Israeli and Western airplanes to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinian refugees. This was a controversial tactic and drew criticism from other Palestinian groups as well as from the international solidarity movement. However, Kanafani was unrepentant, describing the hijackings as ‘one of the most correct things we ever did.’

He was responsible for the official PFLP statement, that appeared in Der Stern on 16 September 1970:

‘When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we kill a hundred Israelis in battle. For decades world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now.’

Kanafani was also outspoken in his opposition to talks with the Israeli government. Famously, in a 1970 interview broadcast with the Australian broadcaster Richard Carleton (and reproduced in the collection published by Pluto Press), Kanafani described the prospect of peace talks between Israel and Palestinians as a ‘capitulation’ and akin to a conversation between ‘a sword and a neck’.

Kanafani at this time helped develop the PFLP’s commitment to a ‘democratic, secular state’ as the solution to the Palestinian crisis. The PFLP believed it would take a people’s revolution to obtain it, but it would be a state where Jews, Muslims, Christians and people of no faith could live with equal rights. Of course any such state would mean the destruction of the racist ‘Zionist entity’ – and for his writing, and his leadership role within the PFLP, Kanafani was a wanted man.

On 8 July 1972, Kanafani got in his car to travel to the shops. His niece Lamees got in the car with him. When he turned on the ignition, the booby-trapped car exploded. Ghassan Kanafani, murdered by the Israelis, became a martyr for Palestine.

In his obituary in the Lebanese Star, he was described as ‘a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was the ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.’ Kanafani was a writer attuned to the political, social and human realities that characterise the lives of Palestinian refugees. He offered a voice for the refugee and a political perspective on the Nakba and its consequences. But his writings are not stuck in time. They continue to speak to us of the plight of refugees and the dispossessed across the Middle East. And the questions he poses: about refugee rights and the right of return, of the impact of settler-colonial conquest and the possibilities of establishing a secular, democratic Palestine remain as relevant today as they were on that fateful day when the Israelis tried, but failed, to silence him for ever.

The publication of Kanafani’s selected political writings is a very welcome addition to the literature on Palestine. It includes his reflections on pan-Arabism, the role of literature, the founding statements of the PFLP, his interviews with the Western media and his thoughts on Arab socialism. Taken alongside his brilliant history of the Great Revolt of 1936-9 they represent a welcome re-engagement with one of Palestine’s great activist intellectuals.

For more on Kanafani’s novels and short-stories see Michael Lavalette’s book Palestinian Cultures of Resistance, available from the Counterfire online shop.