Introduction
With the ongoing Zionist genocide in Gaza and fierce Palestinian resistance taking priority, the January 21, 2024 centenary marking the death of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin was missed by many. This was not the case among the international group of pro-Palestine activists commemorating the date with a conference at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, New York. With publicity clothing the Bolshevik leader in the Palestinian flag, organizers argued that solidarity with liberation struggles “exemplifies the essence of Leninism,” which “has never been more relevant and necessary” (Flounders and Moorehead, 2024). The spirit of these words historically shaped the understandings and actions of Palestinian revolutionaries, with the Arab hazima (defeat) or naksa (setback) of June 1967 often seen as a watershed, accelerating an intense period of armed struggle and revolutionary political culture. In the years to follow, Lenin appeared on pamphlet covers in the hands of fida’iyyin in training camps in the Jordan desert, through quotations in leftist pamphlets and posters, and on the front cover of the newspaper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Hadaf (the target; al-Hadaf, 1970, 1974). Al-Hadaf editor Ghassan Kanafani epitomized and vocalized the fusion of Marxism-Leninism with Arab national liberationism.
From his leading positions in the PFLP, Kanafani was at once its spokesperson and theoretician, authoring, co-authoring, or editing most of the Front’s key texts until his assassination by the Zionist Mossad in Beirut on 8 July 1972. Charting the influence of Lenin, this study takes as its pivotal theme Kanafani’s concept of al-hizbiyya, translated by Barbara Harlow and Nejd Yaziji as “party activism” (Kanafani et al., 1990: 152), seen by Kanafani as the route to mobilizing the creative power of the masses, and especially youth, after June 1967. In Lenin’s centenary year, al-hizbiyya is here taken as one key strand of the Leninist thought channeled by Kanafani and his comrades in the period of reemergent anticolonial struggle known as the Palestinian Revolution. Arriving in large part through the Palestinian study of liberation movements in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, where Lenin’s ideas had found fertile ground, Kanafani helped shape the PFLP worldview on the path to liberation. Wielding scientific socialism would enable their understanding of imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, armed struggle, organization, and a range of other questions. Following a section providing background to this process, key strands of Leninist thought will be traced here through articles, strategy documents, and interviews from 1967-72, also drawing on earlier ANM-linked publications. Placing his work in the context of collective struggle and leadership, I argue that Kanafani led the establishment of Leninism as the lifeblood of a revolutionary Palestinian critique of capitulationism. Through a critique of standpoints seeking to separate the Marxism of oppressed nations with “classical” tradition, I see revolutionary theory as a “mobile body” of resistance in the face of Zionist colonization. The example offered by a past generation of Palestinian revolutionaries illuminates a present where the people of Palestine remain subject and resistant to the same violent regime of systemic, colonial, and class oppression that formed the object of Kanafani’s Leninist critique.
Palestine, Liberation, and Scientific Socialism
Histories of Palestinian communism unfolded along nonlinear paths, entangled but essentially defined by the confrontation between Zionist colonization and indigenous action. This article will not deal with the claims of kibbutzism and other sections of the “settler” movement to socialist or leftist labels, but Kanafani’s major work on the 1936-39 revolution, written between 1971 and 1972, is revealing of the role played by communist organizing in the years prior to the 1948 Nakba (Kanafani, 2015: 377–459). Communists had taken part in physical clashes against Zionist militias as early as May 1, 1920 but – by the time of the 1936 uprising – the largely Jewish Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was isolated, having failed in its stated mission to Arabize. Arab communists did, however, throw “all their weight” into the revolutionary movement, particularly in rural areas (Kanafani, 1972a). 1 The Palestinian revolution was disarmed by outright terror on the part of the British and their Zionist cadets during this period, paving the way for the war of ethnic cleansing, which birthed the Israeli state in 1948.
The Communist International (Comintern) facilitated the training of Palestinian leaders in Moscow in the 1920s. By 1930, with Zionist migration momentarily stagnant and Jews accounting for less than one fifth of the population (Khalidi, 1987: 842–43), the Comintern called for the replacement of the PCP’s European Jewish leaders by Palestinians, and for communists to organize separately to bourgeois nationalist forces (Offenberg, 1975: 363). This situation evolved with the adoption of popular front tactics at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, 25 July–20 August 1935. Representing the PCP delegation in Moscow, Ridwan al-Hilu, known as Comrade Yusuf, told the Congress: “Our task is not to ignore the national-revolutionary and national-reformist elements but to go to them, to organize with them a united front on the basis of a resolute struggle with English imperialism for the independence of Palestine” (Yusuf, 1935). At the same time, al-Hilu spoke against Palestinian “big landowners,” who simultaneously opposed the class struggle and “contributed to the strengthening of Zionism and imperialism in the country.” While it is beyond the scope of this article to detail the trajectory problems of PCP – whose Palestinian and Zionist splits both supported the 1947 UN partition plan – al-Hilu’s description of the treachery of bourgeois “Arab chauvinists” finds currency in the positions later taken by the PFLP, as we will see below. Kanafani gives the examples of union leaders, Sami Taha and Michel Mitri, killed by the forces of Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the wake of the 1936–39 revolution (Kanafani, 1972a: 16).
A 21-year-old George Habash had been among the tens of thousands expelled from Lydd in the bloody Zionist conquest between July 9 and 13, 1948. Habash (nicknamed al-Hakim, “the wise,” or “the doctor”) remembers that a year later, while he studied at the American University of Beirut, his nascent group of Palestinian and Arab radicals competed in student elections with Mansur Armaly’s Lebanese Communist bloc. The latter, he writes, had “accepted partition and favored coexistence with Israel” (Habash, 2019: 65). Nevertheless, as leading participants in al-’Arwat al-Wathqa (the firmest bond 2 ) and then the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), Habash, Wadi’ Haddad, Hani al-Hindi, and others, moved in circles entered into by organized Marxists, including those dismayed by the positions and tactics of “official” communist parties. Syrian activist Adnan Helou, who later became a close friend of Kanafani and al-Hadaf contributor, was recruited to a Marxist-Leninist standpoint from a young age, but organized with others disenfranchised by the Syrian Communist Party, which they found “lacking on the question of the Arab liberation struggle.” 3 Based on the displaced and dispossessed, new generations of Palestinians involved in post-Nakba activism made it a priority to hold Arab rulers to account for failing their country in 1948. The self-styled “official” communism represented by compromised local parties was seen as inadequate to this task.
The reflections of Habash and Helou are insightful of the centrality of questions of national liberation in the immediate post-war period and suggest that Palestinian and Syrian activists – of whom there had been many fighting on the frontlines in Palestine in the 1930s – shared heightened consciousness of the need to liberate the land for revolution to become a possibility. Kanafani was recruited to the ANM by Habash and his comrades in the early 1950s and contributed to a written output that saw socialism as the solution to the region’s problems. This vision was influenced by Nasser and, for a period, tied the fortunes of Palestinian refugees to the rising challenge to imperialism and Zionism posed by Egypt and the United Arab Republic (UAR). In private notebooks Kanafani hailed this unification of Egypt with Syria in February 1958 as heralding a period of “revolutionary transition,” instilling belief among Arab citizens in their abilities to create a more just society (Kanafani, 2015: 127). Amidst such shifts, Kanafani developed a growing output as a writer of political stories, accompanied by an abundant publication of articles representing ANM positions, first with al-Ra’i and al-Tali’a newspapers, in Syria and Kuwait, before his 1960 move to Beirut to become political affairs editor of the ANM central organ al-Hurriyya. Three years later, he became editor-in-chief of al-Muharrir, editing its influential Filastin supplement from October 1964.
According to many accounts, including those of Habash, Kanafani, and Leila Khaled, the defeat of Nasser-led forces at the hands of the Zionist conquest in June 1967 was a decisive turning point. Khaled explained that “The Arab masses had for over a dozen years pinned their hopes on Nasser to liberate them from Zionism and from their local oppressors. In 1967, after the June tornado, Nasserism lay in shambles” (Khaled, 1973: 48). Having seen the UAR as the vehicle of regional liberation, ANM activists found renewed faith in the Palestinian masses as leaders of the struggle, inspired by examples where Marxism-Leninism was allied to the progressive, anticolonial nationalism of occupied, indigenous peoples. Remembering the effect of the Naksa on the consciousness of Kanafani, Helou recalls: “His development from Nasserist to Marxist thought came in the context of the transformation of the ANM, with and after the 1967 defeat.” The PFLP was formed in this context as an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organization, founded with the communist-led national liberation movements in ascendancy in Vietnam, and having achieved victory in Cuba and China. Interviewed in Damascus in 1998, Habash revealed:
My real commitment to Marxism came after the 1967 war. My Marxism grew deeper during my [1968] imprisonment in Syria. I am indebted to my jailer, ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jundi, who kept me in solitary confinement for nine or ten months, thinking he would break me. I spent that entire period reading all the collected works of Marx and Engles, of Lenin, also of Ho Chi Minh and Mao. It was after that that I wrote the declaration of the [Popular] Front’s second national convention (Soueid, 1998).
Nasserism defeated and bruised, Kanafani resigned from the boards of al-Muharrir and Filastin in July 1967, joining Habash and the Palestinian ANM branch in the alliance that made up the early PFLP. 4
For many Palestinians active during these years of radicalization, commitment to scientific socialism and interest in Marxism did not, however, occur overnight on June 10, 1967. In a 1972 interview, Kanafani explained that he had admired Soviet literature from an early age and that his sister’s husband had encouraged his interest in communism (Kanafani, 2024: 29–30). As early as 1958, he had formulated arguments in his notebook that revolutionary theory must be scientific, “not being emotionally absorbed, but rather the continuous planning of battles and assuming the plans of the opposing front” (Kanafani, 2015: 165). 5 Though he had been privately critical of communism during this earlier period, Anni Kanafani points out that her husband’s half-decade of working in Kuwait after 1956 was a time of intellectual exploration: “All his spare time was spent painting, writing and reading – mainly political works: Marx, Engels, Lenin and others” (Kanafani, 2022: xxii). Unconstrained by the social democratic paths taken by the official Arab parties, the activist, intellectual environment of the ANM became a breeding ground for a rejuvenated Palestinian Marxism.
A particular interest in anti-colonial Marxism flourished among Palestinians organized around ANM publications, developing lines of inquiry that differed from Nasserism, particularly after the ruptures in the UAR following the Syrian exit in 1961. A harbinger of things to come, guerrilla warfare became a key theme of articles in Filastin, the Palestine-focused supplement of al-Muharrir newspaper. Throughout 1965, Kanafani led the publication of a series of articles by unnamed writers, looking in-depth at the Chinese (January 14, 1965), Vietnamese (January 29, 1965), and Cuban (October 7, 1965) experiences, drawing on theories developed by Guevara, Mao, and Giáp. Other essays homed into particular concepts of revolutionary armed struggle, including the “storm” (al-’asifa; February 11, 1965) and the ambush (al-kamin; February 25, 1965), with the latter continuing the discussion on the “art of guerrilla warfare” with a summary manual of surprise tactics when dealing with an occupying army.
The question of armed struggle was established and would remain within the core thinking of Kanafani, Habash, and their comrades, but the communist influence did not end there. In 1965, al-Muharrir sponsored Kanafani’s first of two trips to revolutionary China, observing, interviewing political figures, and detailing his journey extensively in the pages of the newspaper; he also visited and wrote about India and Thailand. He’d write about Chinese history, the guerrilla innovations of the Mao leadership, and described Chinese socialism as “treading fateful footsteps to its own future and the future of the world” (Kanafani, 2015: 301–302). Kanafani’s later writings showed that he had closely read Mao’s writings on issues of communist organization, theory, military strategy, and the question of class in the national liberation movement. Indeed, Mao’s posing of the questions “who are our enemies?”, “who are our friends?” – also appearing in the work of Hồ Chí Minh – shaped the PFLP Strategy for Liberation in 1968-69. But the realities of the Palestinian context led the organization to reject in practice the Sino-Soviet schism, recognizing the value of the Soviet Union as “a major supporter of the Arab masses in their fight against imperialism” in recent years (PFLP, 2017: 92). At the 1935 Congress of the Comintern, al-Hilu had linked the tasks of the class struggle with “smash[ing] the power of English imperialism and its chief agent – Zionism” (Yusuf, 1935), and following the socialist examples of the Soviet Union and burgeoning Chinese movement. This spirit was developed by the PFLP in an international context where colonized nations were fighting imperialism with the tools of indigenized Marxism and – in the cases of China, Cuba, and Vietnam – winning earth-shaking victories. The path towards the adoption of communist thought among this group of Palestinian and Arab activists was therefore nonlinear and allied to a process of internationalist study.
A number of false assumptions on Kanafani and the PFLP approach to Marxism can be debunked with a broader view of this intellectual path and written output. Such claims include, for example, the loaded assumption that the anticolonial theories of Habash and his comrades were “not the classical Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky with its emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class” (Lavalette, 60: 2020), that Kanafani was categorically “not a nationalist” (Jamjoum, 2023), or to the patently inaccurate view that Kanafani was reluctant to support armed struggle (Abu Manneh, 2016: 88). As we show in “Reflections on the early works of Ghassan Kanafani” (this issue), the Marxist journey of Kanafani and his comrades was constitutive of the Palestinian experiences of working in Arabist and communist circles, with both impacting the guiding ideology of the PFLP. Malek Abisaab points out that this drew from ANM activists’ realization that “they would not win the war against imperialism if they did not position the movement within the struggle of social classes fighting for dignity, bread, and life.” This reflection was made by Kanafani in 1972, describing the involvement of the working class as necessary to defeat imperialism, a path that “would lead directly to socialism” (Kanafani, 2024: 28).
Discussing Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, Abu Manneh claims that the novel’s “narrower and more overtly ideological Palestinian nationalist tropes (like war and armed struggle) come to jar against broad humanist commitments” (Abu Manneh, 2016: 77), which he claims were “more inclined to favor a moral rather than a military confrontation” (Abu Manneh, 2016: 88).” There is no basis in reality for the latter assertion, particularly when the many pages of “The Resistance and its Challenges” (Kanafani, 2024) or columns in al-Hadaf arguing for the centrality of the armed struggle are taken into account. Kanafani’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism operated alongside a literary approach where the Palestinian case was seen as representing “human experience” more broadly (Kanafani, 1974). His view of the trajectory of this experience was inseparable from the sibling ideologies of militant Leninism and progressive, liberationist nationalism, and the culmination of editorial roles where he had placed guerrilla struggle within the milieu of the Palestinian cause. We will see in the next section how this commitment solidified into his championing of Leninist organization within a strategy for liberation. For now, it is worthwhile to note that the affirmative conclusions towards armed struggle of Returning to Haifa, Umm Saad, The Lover, and other fictional texts were analogous to Kanafani’s non-fiction writing, editing, and visual arts over the same period, including PFLP posters and graphics directly sloganizing such forms of resistance, declaring that “the path of armed struggle is the path to a liberated Palestine” (1969) or calling to “smash the [Jordanian] fascist tanks” (1970). In one metalwork sculpture from the same period, Kanafani molds a northwards-facing rifle, held closely by a pregnant figure enveloping the map of historic Palestine (Kanafani, 2015: 477).
The logic of the position arrived at with the re-emergence of the Palestinian Revolution was crystallized in Kanafani’s writings for the PFLP:
At this point, the Palestinian battle becomes organically linked to the principle of building Hanoi, or Arab Hanois, and the two causes become inseparably tenacious.
This dialectical process must be pushed towards its climax by the armed struggle, requiring 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 realization of this programme more than the current situation. Nor is it evident that there is a more suitable entry-point for this realization 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 (Kanafani, 2024: 158).
The Palestinian case showed that, in the course of the post-Nakba decades and their upheavals, the journey of Palestinian activists to Marxism was not dissimilar to those of Cuban and Vietnamese fighters, whose paths encountered and embodied the anticolonial nationalism arising from the clash between the oppressed country and its oppressor. Castro, Guevara, and Hồ had all harbored nationalist viewpoints towards the armed liberation of the country before study and experience led them to see Marxism-Leninism as a guiding ideology. It was also true that forms of socialist patriotism proved crucial after or on the brink of liberation, with slogans of “homeland or death” (Castro) and the “patriotic struggle against US aggression” (Hồ, 2022: 48) linked to the defense of the social and national revolution. The false separation of anticolonial and “classical” Marxism ignores these histories, being based instead on the opportunist assumptions of social democrats who privilege economic battles over the revolutionary struggles of oppressed nations. Opposing the dismissals of Trotsky and others of the 1916 Irish revolution, Lenin warned: “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it” (Lenin, 1974b: 354). Ignoring this warning, British social democrats have been quickly dismissive of such phenomena as the Cuban revolution, Vietnamese liberation, and Irish or Palestinian armed struggle, while preaching on acceptable modes of resistance.
The arguments referenced here are fundamental in grasping the failure of broad sections of the social democratic left to appreciate both the novel theories of revolutionary thinkers in colonized nations and the real-life examples of resistance they offer to progressives internationally. As we seek to redress the gap between basic knowledge of Kanafani and recognition of his role as a political theorist, we are reminded that the same applies to differing extents to the works of Hồ, Guevara, and many others who combined theory with committed, collective action. Questions of war and armed struggle had formed part of Kanafani’s Marxist reading and analysis of communist-led liberation movements. Following the earlier explorations of the Filastin supplement, his writing after 1967 developed in conversation with “classical” Marxist theory, with Hồ, Lukács, Mao, and Stalin all proving referential to the task of forging a Palestinian path to liberation and socialism. The next section will explore the organizational foundations of PFLP Marxism, locating Kanafani’s role as leading theoretician within this process.
Al-Hadaf, al-Hizbiyya, and Kanafani’s Palestinian Path
Outlining the Role of Ghassan Kanafani
Everybody says that Ghassan wrote the Strategy, or the text from the Afro-Asian [conference]. He contributed to them, no doubt, but he didn’t write them [alone]. The PFLP was not a one-man show and neither was the ANM. Al-Hakim was among the leaders and [Ghassan] wasn’t going to go above their heads … The [Afro-Asian] conference document, ok, maybe he worded it, but that doesn’t make it his. (Leila Kanafani 6 )
A component part of the incomplete cataloging of works written by Ghassan Kanafani comes through clarifying debates over which texts were authored by him during his PFLP membership. In one example, the Kanafani family expressed frustration that the Strategy for Liberation, published in February 1969, is often attributed in whole to Kanafani. With Habash and Basil Kubeisi among leading contributors to the Strategy alongside Kanafnai, 7 discussions around the text provide ammunition for Leila Kanafani’s assertions. This statement should be borne in mind when discussing the Kanafani output more generally and be taken as a presaging guide to the following discussion.
Among the PFLP texts attributed solely and openly to Kanafani are “The Resistance and its Challenges” of 1970 (Kanafani, 2024: 124–163) and, according to Anni and Leila Kanafani, a pamphlet on liberation and democracy; the latter is one of a number of texts eluding PFLP archives subject to many challenges. Condensing the former text, Kanafani was editor of, and contributor to, The Underlying Synthesis of the Revolution, a 1972 book on the organizational weapon, drawing explicitly from the Vietnamese experience (Kanafani, 2024: 167–176). Helou adds that “Tasks of the New Stage”, the resulting document of the third PFLP conference in March 1972 (PFLP, 2023), was authored by Kanafani. This is in addition to dozens of articles in al-Hadaf, major and short form, published both under his name and as unsigned editorials, from its first, July 26, 1969, issue, until his martyrdom three years later. He would also continue to produce saccharine political and cultural critique under Fares Fares and other pseudonyms in al-Hawadeth and elsewhere, as he had in al-Muharrir in years prior. Among other journals, Kanafani also published studies and analyses under his own name in Lotus, al-Anwar (until 1969), and Shu’un Falastiniyya. Far from representing autonomous individualism, much of this work sprang from PFLP-led study, including the organization’s confrontation with Zionist narratives in Denmark, where Kanafani visited the family of his wife Anni (“Denmark: a Study in Media Experience,” Kanafani, 2024: 204–224), his underappreciated analysis of the historic roots of the crisis (The 1936-39 Revolution in Palestine, 1972), and his posthumously released final 1972 essay on social, media, and academic questions attached to the Palestinian struggle (“Concerning the Case of Abu Hamidu and Issues of Media ‘Exchange’ with the Enemy,” Kanafani, 2024: 227–244), all published in Shu’un Falastiniyya.
While he would both justify and lament that his political work had taken him away from novelistic writing (Zogby, 1975: 27; Kanafani, 1974), Kanafani would nevertheless complete Umm Saad (1969), Returning to Haifa (1969), and the play, The Hat and the Prophet (1969; published 1973), in tandem with al-Hadaf editorship and other roles, and leave the unfinished novels April Plums (1971–72) and The Blind and the Deaf (1972), also published posthumously. Throughout, he committed himself according to the principles of democratic centralism, as a member of the Central Media Committee and spokesperson of the PFLP. Often, he was tasked by the collective in conveying in writing the standpoints emanating from debates within the Front, having played a vocal part in shaping these standpoints himself. When positions and “party lines” are referred to, therefore, it bears remembering that Kanafani did not merely parrot the views of a top-down leadership, but represented a star in its constellation.
The Front and the Question of Organization
The invariable factor in Marxism is its dialectical scientific approach in viewing things in their state of continuous motion and change. This method is Marxism in its essence (PFLP, 2023: 51).
The genius … for whom the true essence, the living, active main trends of an age are clear, sees them at work behind every event of his time and continues to write about the decisive basic issues of the whole epoch even when he himself thinks he is only dealing with everyday affairs (Lukács, 1977: 10).
Habash reveals that, in the early 1950s, the group forming the ANM already had a firm awareness of organizational questions in ways that answered back to claims that their concern was not the “self-emancipation” of the masses. With the rise and huge popularity of Nasserism among Arab working classes, displaced Palestinians and regional intelligentsias, the organization had to deal with the question of whether to dissolve their structures and actions under Nasser’s leadership. Trends towards this tendency exerted particular pressure in this direction with the foundation of the UAR, encompassing Egypt and Syria from February 1, 1958 to September 28, 1961. Having built the movement throughout Bilad al-Sham, and finding support in Yemen and other countries, Habash explains that the position of himself and other leading ANM organizers was that Nasserism constituted the “official leadership” of a revolutionary movement for Arab unity (Habash, 2019: 94). Rejecting suggestions of the ANM’s direct merger with this official project, however, the ANM represented the “popular leadership of the Arab revolution,” referencing the concept of al-sha’biyya, the “popular” or “people-centered” movement coming to form the crux of PFLP strategy. There was a difference, he wrote, between speaking for and organizing to mobilize the masses. Opposing the Syrian exit from the UAR, for example, the ANM called for rebuilding Arab unity on a democratized basis and reoriented itself towards class struggle. By not dissolving itself under the banner of the UAR, the ANM did not delegate the power of the people it sought to mobilize to a body above. This explains how studies in Marxist-led guerrilla strategy were raised during a period when the latter was anathema to the leadership strategy of Nasserism, while ANM journals simultaneously displayed strong loyalty to the Egyptian leadership. The organizational question returned with a vengeance after 1967.
With the onset of this post-hazima era in armed resistance and literary prolificacy, Kanafani had appeared at Beirut’s Dar al-Nadwa on March 11, 1968, nine months on from the June defeat and ten days before the epochal Battle of Karameh, in which the resistance claimed victory over Zionist forces. Entitled “Thoughts on Change (and the ‘Blind Language’),” 8 this lecture interrogated the crisis facing the Arab movement, offering some indicators towards the strategy taken by the PFLP in the months ahead. As Rabab Abdulhadi suggests, the 1988 republication by al-Hadaf at the height of the intifada raised the question of organization in a new context of mass action. Far from being a call to the kinds of horizontalist, non-hierarchical structures that became fashionable in some quarters in the West, she writes:
Kanafani’s emphasis on the necessity of a cadre organisation and the respect “genuine democracy” and “multiplicity of internal opinions” goes hand in hand with a party of youthful renewal that rejects sectarianism, detects all the “blind language” of repression, breaks the chains of oppression, and brings about a steadfast new dawn in “universities, cultural and intellectual circles and families and communities” (Kanafani, 2024: 63).
Seeing the Lebanese environment as particularly susceptible to revolutionary ideas and youth action, Kanafani emphasizes the limitations of spontaneity, rejecting the “automatic” or “coincidental” definition of political priorities. The absorptive potential of the masses should be realized rather “through free discussion, thus focusing the rapid developmental movement throughout the entire region and providing the necessary conditions for the crystallization of its effective powers” (Kanafani et al., 1990: 155). The crisis gripping the Arab movement in 1968 could not be solved merely by intellectual critique, but only through al-hizbiyya, defined by Harlow and Yaziji as “party activism.” Formerly organized as the Palestinian branch of the ANM, the PFLP was clearly seen here as the vehicle of travel, where hizbiyya should be “true, effective and productive” within a democratic internal framework, in dialogue with external forces (Kanafani et al., 1990: 152).
Kanafani paints the masses as a volcano, threatening to erupt at a time of crisis, with current waves of resistance representing the mere “labor pains” of a revolution waiting to be born. We may see this prophetically, with al-Karama rumbling and exploding just days later. In his conclusion, he points directly to the Russian experience, comparing the present moment of Palestinian and Arab struggle with the mass insurrection of 1905, referred to by Lenin as the “dress rehearsal” making the October 1917 revolution a possibility and necessity (Lenin, 1966: 27). In Russia, the intervening years had seen waves of war, mass and armed struggle, and repression under a constitutionally reconfigured Tsarism. Crucially, on the part of the revolutionaries, the period had been defined by debate and a solidification of the Bolshevik concept of the party, or what we may see as a sustained period of hizbiyya. Setting the scene and leading the way through a critique of Menshevik reformism, one target of Lenin’s early critique was the slogan “from below,” envisaging the upward pressure of the masses upon the bourgeoisie as the route to socialism. Lenin draws on the earlier analysis of Engels to conclude that the concept amounted only to anarchism and a “limitation” on revolutionary pressure. Moreover:
Every “serious revolutionary situation” confronts the party of the proletariat with the task of giving purposive leadership to the uprising, of organizing the revolution, of centralizing all the revolutionary forces, of boldly launching a military offensive, and of making the most energetic use of the revolutionary governmental power (Lenin, 1962: 481).
The point here is not to draw an equivalence between the concrete conditions pertaining to two very different historic examples but to show the broader view taken by Kanafani in locating the tasks of Palestinian revolutionaries. Lenin’s assertions were arguably borne out in the cases of the socialist-led liberation movements – which inspired the PFLP, including Cuba and Vietnam, whose revolutionary organizations had galvanized a high degree of popular participation. Kanafani referred to this interplay between the vanguard and the mass in the months before his Beirut lecture when, shortly after the June defeat, he called for the mobilization of the Palestinian people, “either through coercion or free will,” in a regional movement for liberation. Inherent in the fight for Palestinian statehood – itself no “solution to the Palestinian cause” – would only be realized through the “creation of a fighting people” (Kanafani, 2024: 58). As we find in the contributions in the works of Guevara and Hồ, the revolutionary organization becomes inseparable from its tasks of raising the consciousness of the masses.
An equally pervasive point here is encompassed in the above quote by Lenin, namely viewing the elements and tactics of struggle as constitutive of a wider totality, rather than being fragmentary or detached from one another. Hungarian communist György Lukács was among the figures drawn on by Kanafani, appearing in pamphlet references and al-Hadaf analyses during his period of editorship. He read History and Class Consciousness, emphasizing its argument that “Politics cannot be separated mechanically from organization” (Lukács, 1972: 295) – a point Kanafani expanded upon in “The Resistance and its Challenges” in 1970, where the questions of organization, theory, and military tactics form a resistant triangle:
The reality of the resistance is like that of any other movement, made up in actuality of many component parts, linked together through dialectical and continuing threads. There is no doubt that a fatal, critical sin is committed when a state of silence is imposed upon one part of that reality. Doing so only means the immediate repetition of a series of mistakes: separating this component arbitrarily from an infinite number of others, before pacifying it forcibly, then studying, criticizing or assessing it in isolation from the dialectical relationship between action and knowledge (Kanafani, 2024: 128).
In his cogent and influential text on Lenin, Lukács stresses the concreteness of Marxism, in seeing the question of revolution as the basis of raising all other questions. Indeed, the very intellectual foundations of historical materialism were, in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, “no more than the conceptual expression of the necessary transition of society from capitalism to socialism under the leadership of the working class” (Lukács, 1977: 10). Where Marxism is cleansed of its revolutionary content by academics and opportunists wishing for normality and social peace, its living core is constituted by the revolution of the working class. But, notes Lukács, the concrete expression and theoretical conception of this reality only come into view when the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism are “already on the historical agenda as a practical reality; when, in the misery of the proletariat, in Marx’s words, was to be seen not only the misery itself but also the revolutionary element ‘which will bring down the old order’” (Lukács, 1977: 11). Hence, with Russia in revolt and a polarizing world of imperialist capital in crisis, Lenin saw the approaching revolution as the fundamental problem of the era: “The actuality of the revolution: this is the core of Lenin’s thought and his decisive link with Marx.”
The theme of totality is central to Lukács’ conceptualization of Leninism. Here, the inseparability of political questions from each other and their context of historic development also means, for communists, their inseparability from the horizon of revolution:
[F]or every genuine Marxist there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than isolated facts and tendencies – namely, the reality of the total process, the totality of social development (Lukács, 1977: 18).
What does this mean for the question of organization, class, and leadership in the revolutionary struggle? In taking such a panoramic view, Lukács suggests, Lenin’s Marxist standpoint meant understanding the period of imperialism – the era of war and revolution – as catalyzing the vanguard consciousness present only in the class-conscious proletariat. But the consciousness to build a revolution does not arise on its own and Lenin is credited by Lukács as being the first figure to thoroughly address the question of organization. The communist party forming the revolution’s organizational vanguard comes about only with the development of revolutionary conditions, which, by implication, require the existence of a revolutionary organization. The form of organization is dictated by the needs of the proletariat in furthering its own class consciousness. Opposing the “old idea” that a revolution can be “made” or “conjur[ed] out of nothing,” Lukács emphasizes that the role of the party is to “prepare” and “accelerate” the revolution, as both producer and product of revolutionary conditions:
[T]he masses can only learn through action; they can only become aware of their interests through struggle – a struggle whose socio-economic basis is constantly changing and in which the conditions and the weapons therefore also constantly change. The vanguard party of the proletariat can only fulfil its destiny in this conflict if it is always a step in front of the struggling masses, to show them the way. But only one step in front so that it always remains leader of their struggle (Lukács, 1977: 35).
Also utilizing the language of conjuring, the PFLP had in its Strategy offered a withering assessment of official Arab communists, who attempted to wave Marxism-Leninism academically, as a “fairy wand” for victory, rather than applying its revolutionary content as a “theoretical weapon to our actual living circumstances,” as “a sound strategy” for leading the battle ahead (Kanafani, 2024: 115). Concretizing the demands of the organization in the months to come, Kanafani saw three priorities arising from the triangle of resistance: a “broad national front” of Palestinian factions; a “strategic horizon at the level of the Arab nation”; and “a progressive dimension based on class” (Kanafani, 2024). Realizing this programme, he wrote, would be arduous: “History is not produced by a magic wand but is transformed by the masses who understand it and are determined to change it” (Kanafani, 2024: 163).
For Lukács, Lenin’s realization of the “actuality of the revolution” set him aside from his contemporaries, as the genius able to envelop an era in theory and practice, not least in leading the world’s first successful socialist revolution. Kanafani, Habash, and other Palestinian Leninists of their era operated in appreciably unfavorable conditions. It is certainly true that the post-1967 era saw the galvanization of broad swathes of dispossessed Palestinians behind the reemergent liberation struggle, and heralded a flood of young, hungry recruits to the armed struggle and its organizations of fida’iyyin, alongside a renaissance in popular resistance culture. At the same time, the path of struggle meant dealing with the many social contradictions arising from the Palestinian condition in an era and region which, despite the formal independence of many of its constituent parts, remained continually subject to all manner of imperialist interventions.
Drawing on Mao, and in particular his writings on class struggle during the period of the Chinese war against Japanese colonialism, Kanafani sees the importance of fighting class capitulationism as having “even greater truth” in the Palestinian and Arab cases, “when imperialism and its agents in [Arab] regimes prey upon the masses’ instincts towards national and class liberation on an equal footing” (Kanafani, 2024: 137). At a time when the PFLP had vocally opposed capitulation and “peace talks” with Zionism, we see in Kanafani’s words an awareness of the regional balance of class forces, and a harbinger of arguments on the Madrid and Oslo “peace” agreements. By wielding this Marxist critique, the organization aimed to fulfill the vanguard role Lukács describes. One method adopted for this purpose by the PFLP after 1968 was the cadre school, a camp of disciplined recruits for training in Marxist thought, alongside their military training. Kanafani saw this as following:
a military, pedagogical, political and cultural programme on the highest levels. The [cadre school] is the first of its type, worthy for the graduation of ranks of political fighters at the level required for the tasks of revolutionary work (Kanafani, 2024: 125).
A reading of Lenin’s theory of imperialism was among the central components of the cadre education program. Its application by anticolonial movements had formed a starting point for understanding the interests of regional forces. This analysis was evident in Kanafani’s acute registry of the role played by regional regimes: “We consider the Arab governments two kinds … the reactionaries, who are completely connected with the imperialists,” and “military petit bourgeois governments” (Kanafani, 2024: 198). The former included Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Morocco, while the nationalist republics of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Algeria represented governments of the military bourgeoisie.
Though the struggle of the era was defined under the umbrella of the Palestinian Revolution, Kanafani’s [Resistance and its Challenges] provided a wake-up call, and a reminder that the path ahead would be protracted and bloody. Grasping the fact that the present was, in fact, the “preparatory phase” (marhalat i’dad - مرحلة إعداد) of the revolution meant working to resolve the triangular organizational, theoretical, and military dilemmas facing its committed revolutionaries:
Any critical view of the resistance in its present stage evidently requires an awareness of the totality of the parties to this dynamic relationship as they relate to the issue as a whole. It presupposes a view of the reality faced by this resistance from the angle of its mutual relations, and of its movement, modification and development. The dialectical method is itself, in its essence, both critical and revolutionary, as Marx says, and undoubtedly continuous. Hence, the critical process is merely one component of a totality whose mutual, strained or contradictory relations constitute the continuous movement of history (Kanafani, 2024: 128).
The Lukácsian Kanafani railed against the many societal “diseases” of a colonized region, against which organizations were failing to fortify themselves, leading to “subjectivity at the expense of objectivity,” the rejection of scientific method, and reverence of individual leaders over collectivity. The latter may have been aimed at Arafat and other personifications of the movement’s bourgeois tendencies. Interestingly, while some have insinuated that Kanafani’s own broader significance threatens the image of his being “property” of the PFLP (Samman, 18: 1992), his writings show him intensely occupied with “building an organization.” But, during this period in the political development of the PFLP, no walls partitioned the question of organization from other questions, nor from their context as a whole. The task of organizational building should not slide into fetishism, but must “arm itself with an organizational dynamism that is compatible with their surrounding dangers and expectations” (Kanafani, 2024: 148–149).
The 1969 PFLP Strategy had promised “to outgrow the problems of this stage of the organization’s life to face the problems of a more advanced and more revolutionary stage” (Kanafani, 2024: 117). By 1972, with two splits behind it, 9 the organization grappled with a new reality, impacted upon by two bloody battles with the Jordanian state (September 1970 and July 1971) and the consolidation of imperialist overtures towards Egypt, compounding the difficulties of a struggle to liberate historic Palestine, occupied in its entirety since June 1967. These and other factors heralded a period of impasse for the resistance movement.
Within the PFLP a storm was brewing. A group styling itself as the leftist trend within the organization had attacked the leadership, seeking to apportion blame for the Jordan defeat, which had led to the cross-factional expulsion of resistance fighters. According to Helou, the dissenting group had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Kanafani, eventually leading to another, minor split. 10 Debates had climaxed at the Third National Congress of the PFLP, held in al-Beddawi refugee camp, northern Lebanon, on March 6-9, 1972. Helou reports that, having initially intended to remain in Beirut at al-Hadaf, Kanafani would end up leading the discussion, refuting the opposition trend, and galvanizing the majority of the organization:
If the left of the Front consisted of the progressive, leftist thought that the Front carried with it during its transformative phase – expressed in its literature, publications, positions and its newspaper – then there is no doubt that Ghassan played a major role in the left. Those of this ideology deliberately referred to themselves as the “resistance trend” (Interview with the author, October 2023).
Building on the central committee report to the congress on goals and developments since its February 1969 conference, Kanafani was tasked by the meeting with writing its resulting document, the Tasks of the New Stage. Its arguments bore the hallmarks of his work in The Resistance and its Challenges (1970), The Underlying Synthesis of the Revolution (1970), and, arguably, the interest in anti-colonial Marxism developed in ANM publications years prior to 1967. As in Vietnam, the path to a free Palestine would be protracted in nature:
We view the Palestinian liberation struggle as a long-term people’s war extending over tens of years. It cannot achieve victory except through a people’s revolutionary struggle. Such a struggle must be led by a revolutionary organization, itself built through struggle, and must be based on a revolutionary, theoretical perspective together with a proletarian determination which knows no despair (PFLP, 2023: 119).
The resistance movement had “created a revolutionary situation among the Palestinian masses and the beginnings of a feeling of agitation among the Arab masses as a whole” (PLFP, 2023: 120). Though this remained true – and while the resistance had attracted a level of international support – the document identified a “wave of despair” among the masses in the wake of battles with the Jordanian regime, calling for scientific understanding of the new objective conditions. Subsequent passages analyzed this reality according to the interests and actions of imperialism, Zionism, and Arab regimes in the region, charting in particular the confrontation with the Jordanian state and Egypt’s drift towards US policy.
The discussion also outlined what it saw as the subjective conditions regarding the resistance movement, which “in its present state” did not possess the prerequisite conditions to “defy imperialism.” As in Lenin, the imperialist system stood behind colonialism, and must therefore be the objective target of the liberation struggle. This section built its analysis – and by extension, its conclusions on the way forward – around the unresolved question of organization. It was here that the “transformative phase” envisaged by Kanafani and the resistance trend hinged on a Leninist understanding of the revolutionary vanguard:
The resistance, because it is not led by a revolutionary party representing the working class, has no such theory when facing the difficulties of the battle and their solution for the benefit of the revolution and the provision of the subjective conditions necessary for victory. These are:
A revolutionary theory to provide a clear vision of the battle.
A solid party to lead the battle.
A wide national front led by this party which mobilizes all class and political forces under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party.
An organizational structure which creates in the consciousness of the revolutionary individual discipline, efficiency and honorable conduct toward the masses. In this way [the revolutionary] becomes both an example to and a leader for the people (PFLP, 2023: 129).
The liberation movement had thus far been headed by bourgeois and petit bourgeois forces, leading to political and intellectual oscillation and organizational instability, negatively impacting the revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, left factions had “not completed their development into real Marxist-Leninist organizations on the intellectual, organizational and combative level,” were diverted into internecine battles, and were unable, by virtue of their size and effectiveness, to exert a major theoretical, political, or military influence.
“Tasks of the New Stage” opposed the strategy of seeing the revolution as purely Palestinian, instead embracing working classes oppressed by Arab regimes, and particularly Jordan. The leadership of the resistance had thus far done the opposite, making alliances with Arab reactionaries, and had sought “capitulationist solution[s]” towards a purely bourgeois vision of statehood (PFLP, 2023: 131). The document expanded on Kanafani’s post-June 1967 argument for Palestine to become the cornerstone of a wider revolutionary movement (Kanafani, 2024: 58), now seeing the Arab liberation movement as having the ability “solve an essential part of [the Palestinian struggle’s] problems” (PFLP, 2023: 132).
Moves towards “national unity” (placed in parenthesis) had so far been composed of emotional appeals and vague slogans, avoiding clear political and organizational structures for a combative programme. The Arab regimes had been the main factor in fragmenting the Palestinian movement, while the resistance failed to adopt a “minimum shared programme” (PFLP, 2023: 133) for confronting the tripartite enemy of Zionism, imperialism, and reaction.
[T]he existence of a revolutionary party which adopts the theory of the proletarian revolution is one of the main conditions for the victory of the masses in its war against the imperialist, Zionist, reactionary and superior enemy (PFLP, 2023: 132).
Confronted with monumental challenges in maintaining the momentum of the armed struggle, building mass consciousness, and facing down both the capitulationist tendencies of the PLO leadership and trends positioning themselves as to the left of the PFLP, the Front refocused on the organizational challenge. For Kanafani, the latter had formed one tip of a triangular dilemma, along with the challenges of theory and military action, in the “preparatory phase” of the Palestinian revolution. Perhaps signposting the influence of his journey a half-decade prior, Kanafani had begun to quote Mao rather extensively towards the end of the decade, looking, in particular, at the period of Chinese confrontation with Japanese colonialism. In multiple texts, Mao’s metaphor of a boat and river (Mao, 1965: 150) is utilized to show the need for a vanguard communist party: the “river” of challenges could not be crossed without a solid vessel for arriving at the destination of victory. In the Palestinian case, organizational “fetishism,” emotionalism, and bureaucratic rigidity had held up the development of a revolutionary vanguard:
We notice with ease, unfortunately, that this organizational dynamism, and the flexibility it entails, is to a large extent an issue that is not properly taken care of by some resistance organizations, which behave as if they are “legitimate” movements – when measured against the regimes around them and the enemy which stalks them daily – while, on the contrary, such organizations require a level of dynamism and flexibility capable of elevating them to multiple levels of activity, clandestine or open, direct or indirect, visible or hidden, cumulative or diffuse (Kanafani, 2024: 149).
The organization to lead the revolutionary struggle must, in this view, be capable of constant adaptation to shifting regional and international circumstances, characterized by the “flexibility of the resistance organization to shift to a different organizational form which may be imposed at any moment by developments in the battle” (Kanafani, 2024: 150). The Tasks of the New Stage solidified this vision of a leading party, clearly suggesting that the PFLP itself was equipped to play the role of a vanguard. Twelve years prior, in the Third National Congress of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, Hồ had praised the history and membership of the organization, while calling for relentless action against “these shortcomings: subjectivism, dogmatism, empiricism, bureaucratic style of work, and individualism.” Solutions would only come through the renewed, creative application of Marxist thought and learning from the experiences of other struggles:
These shortcomings are hampering the progress of our comrades. We must endeavor to study Marxism-Leninism, strengthen ideological education in the Party, and struggle to overcome these shortcomings. We must further heighten the class character and vanguard character of the Party, constantly strengthening the Party’s ties with the masses and uniting with all patriotic and progressive people in order to win victory in the construction of socialism and the struggle for national reunification. We must strive to learn, in a creative way, from the experiences of the fraternal Parties. We must never fall into arrogance and conceit; we must be modest, as Lenin taught us (Hồ, 2022: 301).
For Leila Khaled, “Scientific socialist thought is the way for the liberation of Palestine,” yet, “we don’t think that importing a theory is the way to liberate the country” (1970). In an al-Hadaf tribute to Kanafani attributed to S. Marwan, the writer had described his fallen comrade’s conceptualization of imperialism as “a mobile body, an octopus which colonizes and exploits, spreading itself over the world through western monopolistic enterprises” (Kanafani, 1972a: 66). It is equally clear from a reading of Kanafani’s arguments on organization that the Front needed to defeat imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reaction must be a doubly “mobile body,” capable of mounting the kind of challenge that had seen the victory – against all odds – of the Vietnamese people. As in the speeches of Hồ, Kanafani’s vision of mobility was grounded in a vision of Marxism-Leninism, as the underlying theory and methodology for understanding and confronting the triangle of challenges identified during ferocious regional battles. Like Mao, Lenin, Marx, and Engels had argued before him, Kanafani saw scientific socialism as a “guide to action,” rather than a stencil to be grafted onto the Palestinian situation:
And when revolutionary theory, by virtue of being a guide to action in the first place, is able to capture the nature and character of the period through which the struggle is passing, then this should be immediately reflected on the organization, on the priorities of its tasks, and on its working method at that stage (Kanafani, 2024: 172).
Producing specials on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in April 1970 and November 1974, and posterizing Hồ in May 1975, al-Hadaf provided a reflection of these discussions, arming readers with relevant quotes and lessons from the lives of Marxist revolutionaries and their victories, alongside columns on Palestine and its latest confrontations. Like Hồ and other revolutionary leaders of colonized nations, the politics and imagery of socialism were blended with the nationalism of the oppressed. The newspaper’s twin slogans “all truth to the masses” (coined by Wadi’ Haddad) and “Arab politics” appeared adjacent to a map of the Arab region, with Palestine in bold red – a visual implementation of the 1972 conference pledge to “represent the working class” at the forefront of the national cause.
The Front evolved through the war on Lebanon during the 1970s and early 1980s, through the tremors of struggle in Palestine, the intifadas, and the Oslo “peace” process. It may be said that the questions raised with urgency after 1967 remain unresolved, with the capitulationist trend highlighted by Kanafani having led their position to its logical conclusion, represented in open Palestinian Authority connivance with the occupation. It is equally true that, though the national movement faces an unresolved crisis, the convictions of Kanafani and other Palestinian Leninists remain alive in the minds of many. That, due to the nature of this “clashing contradiction” between the liberation movements and the alliance of imperialism, Zionism, and bourgeois reaction, “there is only one way to solve it, and that is through the people’s armed struggle” (Ghazi, 1971). Sha’ban emphasizes the key point made by Kanafani in 1971, that “the organisational issue had proved the fatal weakness in the struggles of the Arab world.” (Kanafani, 2024: 167) At the same time – writing 200 days into the Zionist genocide on Gaza – the occupation and its imperialist backers have proven incapable of defeating the “mobile body” of Palestinian resistance.
Conclusions
It would be unscientific, absurd and ridiculous to reduce the question to personalities … Any serious explanation calls, in the first place, for an economic analysis of the significance of present-day politics, then for an analysis of their fundamental ideas, and, finally, for a study of the historic trends within socialism (Lenin, 1974a: 441).
This article has charted the development of scientific socialism among the proponents of an important trend within the Palestinian national liberation movement. In particular, it has focused on the written engagement of Kanafani with questions of organization, showing that he viewed Marxism as the supreme “guide to action,” and the lens through which to analyze the interests of a range of actors with regard to the Palestinian struggle. I have argued that these principles did not emerge spontaneously after June 1967, but were rooted in an earlier phase of ANM-led activism and intellectual work. As Leila Kanafani emphasizes – and as Lenin himself indicates in the quote above – the leading contributions of revolutionary thinkers do not transpire in bubbles of individual study. The historic development of revolutionary thought, wrote Mahdi Amel in 1973, represented “not an individual, but collective, consciousness. It is generated through a complex process of class struggle, which must be led by a working class organized through a revolutionary organization” (Kiblawi, 2020: 125). Conclusions reached in the Palestinian case were wrought through a process of collective radicalization that found roots in the earlier struggles of the ANM. Moreover, Kanafani, Habash, Haddad, Khaled, and others of their generation were influenced deeply by the socialist-oriented liberation movements that had proved capable, by creative and tenacious forms of struggle, in defeating those presumed to be the world’s most powerful forces, finding particular inspiration in the recent victories won by Vietnam.
The organization envisaged by Kanafani and his comrades stood for the liberation of Palestine and the building of a socialist society on a decolonized land. Marxism, in their understanding, meant Palestinianizing questions of class and national liberation in the context of a world shaped by the same global forces identified by Lenin. The era of crisis-ridden, parasitic imperialism has continued, with Leninist principles on the rights of nations to self-determination having persistent relevance to those struggling under the jackboots of this warmongering system. For Palestinians in the period 1967–72, this meant grounding the methods of revolutionaries in conversation with histories of socialist-led liberationism. Leninism enabled them to address the fundamental contradictions of class within and beyond the movement they sought to build, where capitulation represented the mirror opposite of the political-organizational conception of a Palestinianized Marxism.
As this article has argued, in relation to existing analyses, the turn to Marxism-Leninism did not mark an aberration from a supposedly separate classicism. Indeed, Hồ, Guevara, Mao, and others had formed a series of indigenous currents in Marxism-Leninism. The PFLP sought to emulate their work in a new context. Classic communism, writes Palmer, was “forged in the struggle against opportunism” during the clash of Lenin and other revolutionaries with the social democratic forces who supported the first imperialist world war (Palmer, 2007). While, in the colonizing countries, opportunism was based on the bribing of a compliant labor aristocracy by the superprofits of imperialism, opportunism was represented in the Palestinian case by bourgeois forces pulling the movement towards pacification and a negotiated settlement of the confrontation. Kanafani analyzed this and other phenomena through a class-based framework, sharply demarcating the roles of differing social forces. Through a reading of Mao and the lessons of anticolonial revolutions, the forces of revolution and capitulation were positioned in clear contradistinction. Opposition to capitulationism was thus rooted in Marxist class politics.
Arguments made by Kanafani, Habash, and their comrades in the wake of June 1967 envisaged solutions through an intensive hizbiyya, or party activism of a new type, affirming in the debates to follow that this meant building a revolutionary socialist organization. With the longstanding organizational conundrum unresolved in the context of Arab liberation – and with theory and military struggle, a triangular tip of the tripartite challenges the PFLP saw itself facing – the weapon of a Marxist “guide to action” had the power to elucidate the coming battles of and within the project to free Palestine from Zionist colonization. Imperialism stood behind this genocidal regime, and behind the fiefdoms of collaborating bourgeois Arabs. The warnings of Kanafani on negotiation with this enemy – a “conversation between the sword and the neck” – were harbingers of Oslo, famously dubbed a “Palestinian Versailles” by Said (1993).
Such were the vivacious debates of a movement aiming to resolve the region’s violently “clashing contradiction” in favor of the oppressed and colonized. In the preparatory phase of the Palestinian revolution, organization, theory, and military action could and must be welded together: the bold, red, triangle of resistance. The logic of this analysis found echoes in the years to follow and continues to resound in massacred, colonized, but undefeated Palestine today.