On this day 53 years ago in Beirut; on 8 July 1972, Palestinian communist writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was martyred alongside his niece, Lamis Najm, after his car was blown up by a bomb placed by Mossad agents.

Ghassan Kanafani was killed at a time when Zionist intelligence services waged an intense campaign of assassinations targeting senior leaders of the Palestinian national movement, in a desperate attempt to suppress the Palestinian revolution which had now spread far beyond the borders of occupied Palestine. The targeting of Ghassan Kanafani, the writer and thinker, the commando who never fired a gun, shows just how impactful and important his writings and revolutionary theory were, and to what extent he was able to counter the Zionist propaganda machine.

Ghassan Fayez Kanafani was born in 1936 in Akka. He spent the first 12 years of his life in Palestine until 1948, when he was among 750 000 Palestinians who were forcefully displaced from their homeland by the Nakba war waged by Zionist gangs against the Palestinians, in order to create the Settler-Colonial Israeli entity. The Kanafani family spent a short time in the refugee camps in Lebanon before moving to Syria, where Ghassan lived and completed his studies. Kanafani would then move to Kuwait in 1956, and then back to Lebanon in 1960 where he would remain until his martyrdom. By the time he was martyred at age 36, Kanafani had a trove of literary works to his name, including studies, short stories and fiction novels, the most famous among them being “Men in the Sun”, “Return to Haifa” and “Umm Saad”.

In his late teens Kanafani was already engaged in political struggle; joining the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in 1953 after meeting with Georges Habash. During this time, Kanafani was, like many others of his generation, a pan-Arabist, who saw Arab nationalism as the only path capable of liberating his homeland. Indeed, Kanafani was heavily influenced by the Nasserist appeal to Arab unity, especially during the reign of the United Arab Republic, the short-lived union between Syria and Egypt from 1958 to 1961.

However, the 1967 Naksa, and the subsequent renegations of Arab States who would cease to uphold the slogan of a liberated Palestine, effected a radical transformation of the political consciousness of the Arab and especially the Palestinian masses. Since then, it became clear that the liberation of Palestine will not be achieved at the hands of ruling Arab regimes and their conventional forces, but at the hands of Palestinian popular resistance in alliance with the revolutionary vanguards in Arab countries and in the world, paving the way for the upsurge of Fida’i action.

At the onset of the Naksa, Kanafani had already adopted Marxism-Leninism as a “guide to action”, influenced by his travels to Cuba and China in the 1960s. As the ANM remade itself within this new environment, Kanafani became a founding member of its rebranded incarnation, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967, and became its official spokesperson. With the Front, Kanafani took part in writing a number of important texts and documents, including the PFLP’s foundational text, the “Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine”, first published in 1969. He also founded “al Hadaf” magazine, the mouthpiece of the PFLP, and remained its editor-in-chief until his martyrdom.

Based on his Marxist-Leninist principles, Kanafani stressed the importance of the combination of revolutionary theory and praxis, in order to build an effective revolutionary resistance movement. In a text titled “The Resistance and its Challenges: View of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine”, Kanafani says: 

‍“The fundamental error begins with the separation of theory and practice, and of erecting barriers between the two, for this leads to doctrinal stagnation on the one hand, and, on the other, to a mechanistic understanding of history, and practically empiricist attempts to change it.”

Kanafani’s conversion to Marxism-Leninism didn’t lead him to abandon his national cause, unlike certain other revisionist or dogmatic “marxists”, including the intellectuals of the so-called “Israeli Communist Party”, who reduced Palestine’s anticolonial struggle to an economistic struggle, which placed the colonized on an equal standing with his colonizers. 

To Kanafani, Marxism-Leninism was a tool to wage a war of national liberation from colonization, as had happened in China and Cuba, and as had been still happening in Vietnam. He also stressed the revolutionary potential of the popular masses in Arab countries: 

‍“There is no contradiction in emphasizing the importance of these two dimensions [The national and the class dimension] together on the same plane, as may be imagined by those plagiarising artisans. 

‍Discussing the dimension of national liberation is not a discourse of chauvinism, or on the search of the bourgeoisie for a framework to justify its presence in authority and control over productive relations. Rather, the discourse concerns the shared historical characteristics and common destiny of the Arab working classes, who share a primary interest in the battle for liberation, and for the defeat of their tripartite enemy: Israel, imperialism and reaction. 

‍Discussion of their singular battle is not only an objective reality imposed by their affiliation with one nation but is also a reality determined by the battle itself. [...] Because of the complexities of the Palestinian cause, the need for a guide to revolutionary action becomes more urgent than anything else. 

‍It follows that because of the specificity of the Palestinian issue, that is, one section of its people live under colonialism and the other remains uprooted from their land, the national dimension of the battle becomes a pivotal issue. 

‍And because of the specificity of the Palestinian issue, that is, one section is tied to the limb of imperialism, while the other languishes under the chains of exploitative regimes tied more or less to the wheels of imperialism, the class dimension in the battle becomes a pivotal issue as well. 

‍And because of the specificity of the Palestinian issue, that is, one section falls under the vanguard of the rich, technologically advanced, exploitative world, and its other is shackled in the Arab region by the restrictions of backwardness, the war of popular liberation becomes a pivotal issue as well."

Kanafani thus considered that the revolutionary popular classes seeking liberation were faced with three enemies: the first two being Zionism and Imperialism - the relation between the two is obvious, considering that the Zionist colonial entity represents an outpost for Western Imperialism in our Arab region. Hence, this entity fulfills the interests of Western imperialist forces which, in its turn, seek to guarantee the continuity of this entity, which would not have been established in the first place without European colonialism and Western imperialism. 

The third constituent is reaction. Kanafani is here specifically talking about Arab reaction, as he had discussed its functional role in serving the interests of the Zionist project in a text he had written in the 1950s: 

‍“There is no doubt that reactionaries, opportunists, secessionists and sectarians - knowing that the term reactionary also means sectarian - intersect, in their interests, with the interests of Israel and colonization, whether purposefully or unpurposefully… The reality is that Israel and the colonizers almost fully rely on these three… And it is natural for their plans to be based on cooperation with these three in the implementation of all their projects.”

The writings of Ghassan Kanafani, published more than 50 years ago, still retain the power to analyze events and help us comprehend our present reality. In an article published in Al-Hadaf magazine in 1971, titled The Specter of the Palestinian State, Kanafani discussed how the Zionists, along with their imperialist allies and reactionary Arab forces, exploited the "shock" caused by the Black September massacres against the Palestinians to promote the idea of establishing a Palestinian state that, in reality, would be a hollow and impotent entity, subservient to imperialist and Zionist agendas. While this is indeed what the path of normalization initiated by the Oslo Accords ultimately led to –following the defeat of the First Intifada– through the establishment of what is known as the "Palestinian Authority," a functional entity less than a state and entirely submissive to the dictates of the Zionist entity and Western donor states. 

Some Western and regional powers, chief among them France and Saudi Arabia, are now attempting to exploit the "shock" caused by the genocide inflicted by the Zionist entity on the Gaza Strip, with unconditional support from Western imperialism and Arab reactionary forces. 

Their aim is to promote the idea of creating a "Palestinian state" that would include Gaza alongside the remaining enclaves of the West Bank, at the cost, however, of liquidating the Palestinian cause by dismantling the armed resistance. Kanafani states: 

‍“Proposing the “Palestinian state” at this time and in this way aims to seriously isolate the resistance and undercut its mass popular base. This is the way to impose surrender upon the Palestinian people, because such a surrender cannot be imposed so long as the resistance movement is able to hold its position as the sole representative of their will.

This is why the “Palestinian state” idea has been pushed prematurely as something that’s within reach, something on the verge of bursting forth as a reality. The effective aim of this push is to confuse and disrupt Palestinian popular loyalty to the resistance, to fragment this loyalty, and thus steal it away.”

He goes on to say that, “the primary mission that the resistance must tackle presently is to strengthen its position as the representative of the will of the Palestinian masses” by:

• - Identifying and mobilizing the common principles and objectives of all the militant revolutionary factions to build and maintain a Palestinian front for national liberation;
• - Escalating military action against the Israeli enemy, even if this translates into a phase of “tactical profligacy”;
• - Exerting political and militant pressure against the forces of reaction in Jordan; 
• Strengthening, institutionalizing, and deepening ties with Arab progressive and patriotic forces.

We revisit these manuscripts not to repeat them with blind, sanctifying reverence or to apply them literally, but to extract useful lessons from them and to find the most effective means of confronting the current conditions imposed on us, such as Jordanian reactionism, which remains unchanged, or perhaps even worse than before, with Jordan now directly participating in safeguarding the security of the Zionist entity and supporting efforts of genocide. The same holds true for Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, as well as for most of the ruling Arab regimes. This is precisely what many analysts overlook, as they continue to reduce the Palestinian cause to an identity-based conflict between Arabs and Jews. That is the very trap the Palestinian national movement fell into during the 1970s and 1980s, when the right-wing faction gained dominance over the left. In practice, this meant that the leadership of the national movement chose to collaborate and coordinate with the ruling Arab regimes instead of working to mobilize the popular masses, an approach that logically paved the way to the normalization path embodied in the Oslo Accords. 

Kanafani says: 

‍“The negative results at which we have arrived [...] were due to our choice of a hypothetical point of view, which considered the battle a purely Palestinian-Israeli battle. In reality, such negative results are inevitable if the basic hypothesis is false. However, these negative characteristics can be turned upon their heads, into positives for the revolution and its prospect of victory, if the matter is considered as an essential issue for the Arab masses, in confronting imperialism, Zionism and the tools they possess, as well as their direct or indirect allies.”

Finally, Ghassan Kanafani addressed the issue of media, particularly the way Western media deals with the Palestinian cause, stating: 

‍“Shifting the balance of media power in the West will only take place on the battlefield. [...] No television network would readily give a Palestinian a minute to express his opinion in the case of a dormant revolution, but would be obliged to open its network to the voice of the resistance when the combative and political magnitude of this resistance is considerable enough to enter or touch the daily lives of people in the West.”

This was evident fifty years ago; while some continue to invoke the "victimhood of the Palestinians," the facts clearly show that the Palestinian cause has not gained the sympathy and support of peoples around the world by appealing to the conscience of the Zionist colonizer, but through resisting that colonizer, by exporting this resistance and forging international alliances with leaders, organizations, and movements of liberation, progress, and revolution across the globe. This was reaffirmed once again after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, which revived the Palestinian cause in the eyes of people around the world and countered the effects of decades of propaganda aimed against the Palestinian people, their resistance, and their revolution.

“[What is required is] action with utmost force to tip the current balance of power in favor of the Arab and Palestinian national and progressive forces. We must admit from the beginning that all of this becomes impossible and illusory if it does not proceed from the belief that the battle is a long term war, led by the vanguard forces of the masses, at the level of the entire Arab nation. It seems clear that there is no situation that necessitates the initiation and realisation of this programme more than the current situation. Nor is it evident that there is a more suitable entry point for this realisation than the current situation, or that there is a more qualified instrument to initiate this shift than the armed Palestinian resistance movement. And it is apparent that there is no guide to action clearer and more effective than Marxism-Leninism, fused creatively with the militant coherence of Arab nationalism.”

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