October 7, 2023 brought the Palestinian liberation struggle to the forefront of international politics. Western colonial and imperial powers, led by the US, immediately came to the defense of the Zionist entity in Palestine, confirming their animosity to the Palestinian people and their support of the Zionist entity’s continuing flagrant violations of international law, international humanitarian law, and UN relevant resolutions pertaining to Palestine and the creation of the Zionist entity in Palestine through ethnic cleansing. UN Resolution 194 passed in 1949, which calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes in Palestine, is but one instance of Zionist violations.
The ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Zionist entity in which the US and multiple European states are complicit, especially the UK, France, and Germany, has created a groundswell of support for Palestinian liberation worldwide. Zionist propaganda regurgitating falsities against the Palestinian people fell flat on its face, as Zionist armies perpetrated daily bombing attacks against civilians in Gaza, murdering mostly children, women, and elderly. Zionist targeted – bombing continued its atrocities while the UN and most of the states around the world simply watched. Many of these states feel powerless to oppose US policy vis a vis the genocide since they are Intimidated by US global dominance and its veto power in the UN Security Council.
However, several states, such as Egypt and the Maldives, broke those shackles and supported South Africa in the charges of genocide against the Zionist entity before the International Court of Justice.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming popular support for Palestinian liberation continues to grow and the Palestinian narrative is dominant in most parts of the globe. It has made huge holes in what were previously considered traditional havens (the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) for Zionist propaganda. University campuses in the US, the UK and Europe exploded with condemnation of the Zionist genocide and Western complicity in it, and in support of Palestinian liberation. The narrative in support of Palestine took many forms. Art, music, poetry, essays, chants, films, and videos of demonstrations posted on social media have been instrumental in disseminating the anti-Zionist narrative.
This huge scale of opposition to genocide and its perpetrators, did not materialize automatically, but incrementally. Edward Said, for instance, had been a major force in challenging the monopoly of the Zionist narrative, but only after the defeat of the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the 1967 war started by the Zionist entity.
Opposition to colonial and Zionist machinations against the Palestinian people, traces its origins to the early twentieth century. George Antonius (1938) was among the first to warn against such nefarious plans in his book, The Arab Awakening. Those efforts spread in the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt against British colonialism. Oral tradition had been critical in the opposition to Zionist machinations in Palestine and took the form of poetry both in colloquial and standard Arabic, debates, and rallies. Opposition also took the form of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books.
The 1948 Nakba, resulting from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist gangs that established the Zionist entity in May of that year, was a qualitative transformation in modern Palestinian history. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed huge transformations in the Palestinian liberation struggle, especially beginning on January 1, 1965, the day the contemporary Palestinian revolution was born. The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (PNLM, known in Arabic by FATEH) was the first movement to begin the armed struggle. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was preparing its guerilla force for the fight. After the Arab defeat in June 1967, The PFLP began its operations against the Zionist entity.
The development of the Palestinian narrative was indispensable in mobilizing Palestinians. It expressed and reflected the travail of the Palestinian people in the diaspora and Palestinians under Arab and Zionist rule (East Palestine – the West Bank – under the Jordanian monarchy, Gaza under Egypt, and 1948 occupied Palestine). The first stage of the development of the narrative after the Nakba was between 1948-67. The second stage was ushered in with the defeat of the Arab armies in the June 1967 war. The third stage began on October 7, 2023. In each of those stages, the narrative took multiple forms. Poetry, art, short stories, novels, theater, music, newspaper editorials, film, articles, expressed the direction in which the Palestinian people had decided to pursue liberation.
Ghassan Kanafani, had been a towering figure in depicting Palestinian lives in the diaspora. His contemporaries such as Mahmoud Darwish, Poet Laureate of Palestine, and Samih al-Qassem, another major poet who remained in 1948 Palestine living under Zionist rule, contributed tremendously to the narrative of liberation. Ghassan Kanafani was unique in that he was versatile in his contribution to that narrative. He was a novelist, short story writer, artist, poet, essayist, editor of PFLP political publications, theoretician of revolutionary thought, and more. Above all, however, he was a revolutionary. For that he paid the ultimate sacrifice. Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated along with his teenage niece by a car bomb planted by the Zionist Mossad in Beirut, Lebanon in 1972.
The articles and essays in this Special Double Issue of ASQ present Ghassan Kanafani the revolutionary, in a critical stage of his development along that trajectory. He was prolific in his intellectual production. His theoretical contributions to revolutionary thought in that period of the twentieth century were important to the development of the PFLP as part of the Palestinian liberation movement.
Kanafani contributed to the development of the narrative of Palestinian liberation towards the end of the first stage and in the second stage until his martyrdom. The period of the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the rise of Arab nationalism, beginning with the revolutionary situation in Egypt after the Nakba, culminating in the July 23, 1952, military coup, and the rise of Nasser as an Arab nationalist leader. The defeat of the 1956 Tripartite invasion (the Zionist entity, Britain, and France) of Egypt catapulted Nasser as the dominant leader of Arab nationalism.
The Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), led by George Habash, had branches in multiple Arab states. The decision to transform the ANM into separate Marxist organizations, led to the formation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) under the leadership of Habash. Kanafani’s transformation from an Arab nationalist to a Marxist had been a part of that organizational history. He also contributed significantly to the development of the PFLP as a revolutionary Marxist organization dedicated to Palestinian liberation.
It is important to be aware of the qualitative changes that have occurred in Palestinian liberation since the martyrdom of Ghassan Kanafani. But it is equally critical to note the relevancy of Kanafani’s intellectual trajectory to the present moment. Suffice it to say at this point that Ghassan Kanafani had a deep understanding of Palestinian society and was an organic part of the revolutionary struggle. His narration of Palestine stemmed from his examination of Palestinian life as experienced by ordinary refugees. His understanding and study of international politics and revolutions around the world facilitated his belief that the Palestinian revolution is part of a worldwide movement for liberation and emancipation against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In this regard, the current understanding of Palestinian liberation shows that the struggle is connected to the global movement for the emancipation of the human race from oppression, exploitation, colonialism, and tyranny.
At this stage of Palestinian liberation, it is even more necessary to understand the development of Kanafani’s thought. The PFLP is part of the ongoing liberation struggle in all of Palestine, including Gaza and East Palestine. Kanafani, was an advocate for unity of the Palestinian organizations regardless of ideology. We are currently witnessing this unity in the current battles against the Zionist armies in Gaza and East Palestine.
Liberation is the paramount demand among the Palestinian people. Ghassan Kanafani believed that it must be led by those who do not compromise with Zionists, colonialists, and imperialists. Such compromise or negotiations, as he aptly put it, “is like having a conversation between the sword and the neck.” What unites groups in the struggle for liberation is their belief based on their understanding of material reality and the conditions of life that the Palestinian people have been undergoing. His understanding of material reality led Kanafani to remain steadfast in his belief in the service of his people.
For Ghassan Kanafani Marxism was not an ossified thought or a set of principles that one can apply mechanically, as many detractors of Marxism would like to say. Marxism rests on dialectical and historical materialism, at the center of which is human agency. Marxism also examines the material conditions of life at any moment in time to derive an estimation of the situation that would guide revolutionaries in designing their strategy and tactics that suit the situation extant to achieve the goals set to move Palestinian liberation forward.
Liberation struggles require the marshaling of all human and material resources in a unified manner to achieve the revolutionary goal. This understanding is currently dominant among the main Palestinian groups in all of Palestine who also recognize that the struggle for Palestine is not merely the responsibility of the Palestinians, but also of all peoples under Western domination and exploitation. Consequently, the “unity of the battle fields” was the Palestinian call in 2022 for engaging the enemy on all the Palestinian fronts. “Unity of the fronts,” as a strategy, also became critically important, especially after October 7, 2023. That slogan became real with the coordination among the Palestinian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Syrian (especially occupied Golan), and the Southern Lebanon fronts against the unified fronts of the Zionist entity (the US, the UK, the EU, and NATO). Furthermore, the struggle for Palestine became a human issue, as witnessed by the deluge of global support for Palestinian liberation under the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be Free.” Mass demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience in the West became a critical part of the fight against the Zionist narrative and imperialism. The Palestinian narrative became the weapon of choice in opposition to the Zionist and Western narratives of domination.
In conclusion, these rapid developments on the global scene confirm the significance of presenting Ghassan Kanafani’s universal revolutionary thinking as a sine qua non for the present moment.