Introduction by Louis Brehony
Contributing to the special edition of al-Hadaf which marked the 50th anniversary of Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination, Yusra al-Ghoul writes, “The cause refines writers and artists into relentless fighters” (2022: 11). Though this truth carries its burdens, she adds, glory awaits those who dedicate themselves to the struggle for liberation. In the first decades after the Nakba catastrophe, the process whereby Palestinian revolutionary thought was “refined” (tusqulu - تصقلُ) or positively altered was shaped by collective experiences, observations, alliances, and events that made necessary an almost total rethinking of political strategy. In 1972, Ghassan saw in political works he had written a decade earlier an underdeveloped “analysis and understanding of society,” compared to his earlier development as a novelist (1974). 2 At the point of reflection, his commitment to Marxism-Leninism was well known, as a leading spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and editor-in-chief of its weekly newspaper, al-Hadaf. The life-and-death nature of armed struggle, he said, meant that novelists now had other priorities (Zogby 1975: 27). This was Ghassanuna, “our Ghassan,” according to PFLP cultural figurehead and leader in Lebanon, Marwan ‘Abd al-’Al. 3
Though marginally incomplete, publications, and translations of Ghassan Kanafani’s literary works – novels, short stories, play scripts, poetic studies – have often given the impression that his political writing was secondary. A note should be added here to state the obvious but frequently unrecognized fact: all of Ghassan’s works were political, and his stories arguably constituted writings of resistance as much as any of the more “direct” materials he wrote as editor of al-Hadaf. But, though these literary works are voluminous, they constitute a minority of Ghassan’s writings: as editor, board member or contributing journalist, his work with Palestinian, Lebanese and Pan-Arab publications spanned 17 years, brutally cut short by his assassination at the hands of Golda Meir’s Mossad on July, 8, 1972. These years included writing for daily publications, and generating whole indexes under at least six pen names, most notably Fares Fares. The prolificacy of his political writing was bound with the intense environment at al-Hadaf, the weekly newspaper for which he had left behind higher-paid positions at the Dar al-Sayyad publishing house. A leading member of the PFLP central media committee (he would be appointed to its political bureau posthumously), Ghassan was the organization’s de facto cultural and media ambassador, and built an unmistakably avant-garde, Marxist, and revolutionary Arabist culture.
Following the publication of newly translated political works The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (2023) and On Zionist Literature (2022), our new volume, Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024), makes a further contribution to addressing an imbalance between published fields in the works of Ghassan Kanafani. But – being a selected works, with all that this entails – the publication contains its own imbalances. One of these is a focus (though not a complete one) on materials produced by Ghassan in the period around and after June 1967, itself a watershed and turning point in the Palestinian revolutionary struggle. This phase marked a coming of age for many and it is a firmly held view, including by contributors to our project – and by Ghassan himself – that his PFLP era saw the culmination and crystallization of his political maturity. Consolidating his Marxist standpoint, which had developed profoundly during trips to socialist China in 1965 and 1966, and which (like Mao) he saw as a “guide to action,” this period infused the works of Ghassan and other contributors to al-Hadaf with a concrete internationalism. Following the strides taken by the Vietnamese people, a model of revolutionary organizational practice through which the seeds of victory may be planted in the region.
Though it intensified tangibly, Ghassan’s tendency for prolificacy had always been there. Alongside his first half-decade in political journalism, he produced many other writings and notebooks, as significant in his output as Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or Ché’s Latin American diaries were to theirs. Though Ghassan chose not to publish these works – and looked back at what he saw in them as youthful underdevelopment – reading them with hindsight offers unparalleled insight into his thought process and trajectory. Despite his best intentions, selections of these writings did make their way into publication, years after his death; some had even accessed them privately upon his martyrdom on July, 8, 1972 (Hajjar, 1974). Edited by his brother Adnan Kanafani, Ma’rij al-Ibda’ (The rise to ingenuity) contained articles, draft speeches, radio sketches and even poems from the period 1951–60 (2009: 181); some of these works were unfinished and undated, raising question marks over the certainty of when they were drafted. For the majority of the period defined by Adnan, Ghassan was an Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) activist and writer, and this selection of writings provide a window into his political development alongside Habash and the radical Arabist milieu. The inspiration of Nasser is clear, while the fierce critique of many political trends had much in common with Ghassan’s later writings as Fares Fares. We learn that, for all of his adult life, Ghassan considered himself a socialist. While this would later mean, like Ché, the creation of “many Vietnams” – or, for Ghassan and the PFLP, “Arab Hanois,” – his earlier conceptualization of socialism meant many Cairos, or at least accepting Cairo’s leadership. Though others in the Kanafani family were rather nonplussed by Adnan’s selection and publication of these earlier materials, 4 the writings made available through Ma’rij al-Ibda’ present a window into Ghassan’s revolutionary morality at an important historical moment.
Two of Ghassan’s longer notebooks from his early 20s were published in Arabic as chapters in al-Dirasat al-Siyasiyya: al-Majallad al-Khamis (Political Works: Volume 5; 2015), 5 namely “Marxism in theory and practice: a discussion,” and “The Arab cause during the era of the United Arab Republic.” Presented alongside a selection of published works from Ghassan’s PFLP period, and his epic journalistic work on China and India, Thumma Ashraqat Asiya … (Then shone Asia …) from 1965, the contents and positions of the two private notebooks date their composition to the same period covered in Ma’rij al-Ibda’. But, like the latter collection, there were issues with how Ghassan’s unpublished works were presented. The Volume 5 introduction, for example, dated the critical notebook on Marxism as being written in 1970, 6 forming the basis of a series of articles based on this assumption, which skewed a real understanding of Ghassan’s development. This false assumption has also led to a number of miscomprehensions on Ghassan’s later role – it would have meant that his private notebooks were written in opposition to his publicly stated position and role as PFLP spokesperson and raised questions of his loyalty to the “party line.” We are now able to clarify for the first time publicly that the notebook, “Marxism in theory and practice: a discussion,” had actually been written in the mid to late 1950s. 7
A further issue complicates translation, publication, and even republication of existing texts. According to Kanafani family members, both “Marxism” and “The Arab Cause” should never have been published in Arabic, since Ghassan had chosen not to publish these texts himself and may not be included in subsequent printings of the 2015 Arabic volume. As we will see below, and as these notebooks suggest, Ghassan’s interest in Marxism pre-dated the official transformation of the ANM, showing particular concern for how socialism was applied or understood by socialists internationally, with some focus on socialist construction in the Soviet Union.
As objects of study, Ghassan’s early writings offer many opportunities for understanding the origins and course of his revolutionary politics, and show the beginnings of a transformation, in comradeship with Habash, Basil Kubeisi, Wadi’ Haddad, and many others. The reflections in this article are based on our translations of three early essays Ghassan wrote as a member of the ANM, roughly between 1957 and 1961, and which he chose not to publish during his lifetime. It should be underlined that Ghassan Kanafani was martyred at the age of only 36-years-old. He was still the “young Kanafani” – learning and growing with the pulsations of repression and resistance – at the time of his assassination. The prolificacy and breakneck speed of his development, therefore, should be seen in this context.
I: A Methodology for Implementing Arab Socialism
Kanafani on the Use and Abuse of Socialism by Amira Silmi
For two centuries, the word socialism has represented the solitary bread for the dreams of hungry workers and one column of people after another have fallen in devotion for higher, socialist ideals. Today, when we find ourselves facing the problem of building socialism in the United Arab Republic (UAR), we feel, in an astonishing manner, how far removed all the books released by twentieth century publishers have been from us. And we feel, in a similarly astonishing way, that socialism requires – before we fully comprehend the machine – a prior comprehension of life, for any civilized work that is without human roots will be spontaneously rejected by humanity. 8
In the short and incomplete essay, “A methodology for implementing Arab socialism,” Kanafani displaces any mechanization or technicalization of the term socialism, attempting to retrieve its deeper meaning as a philosophy of life, a mode of being, one that is concerned first and foremost with life, and with the human being as life, rather than a machine or a force of production and/or consumption. For Kanafani, socialism means that people live their lives enjoying their basic rights, but such a meaning can be used and abused by different and disparate actors to further their interests. Socialism thus becomes a site for manipulation and a property over which different parties with contradictory agendas fight.
While recognizing that socialism at one point in history could have been the dream of the hungry worker, it is still associated with the machine and this association with that which is mechanic, that is, that which is lifeless or lacking in life is among its weakest points. Socialism thus has to be reattached to life and measured according to its requirements, that is, it must be freed from the mode of being imposed on humans by the machine. Kanafani here seems to be seeking that other, not yet achieved socialism, that which has been defined with the fulfilment of human needs and capacities, rather than that which reduces the human into an economic machine, whose needs are as well reduced to that which reproduces them as productive forces, which translates moreover to humans turned into cogs in the productive machine, as Marx had it (Marx, 2010: 288).
Positioning the human being as the measure for socialism, Kanafani cannot be at ease with a socialism that takes experiment and error as its principle, for it is human beings and their lives that are and were subjected to experiment, and were the ones who would (and did) pay the price for any errors that might or did occur.
Good intentions and noble goals are not justification enough for such an experimentation in the human: ends do not justify the means for Kanafani. But this then poses the question of the means – here the means is socialism – and the question becomes how we reach the truth, or achieve that true socialism that fulfils the needs and capacities of the human, without degrading the human into an object of experimentation and at the same time reduce him to a machine, or part thereof, which is fuelled with basic needs.
The problem for Kanafani lies in becoming blinded by the goal, to the extent of becoming unable to distinguish errors when they take place. He, just like Marx writing against capitalist modes of doing, is worried about another capitalist inversion in which errors themselves become the way, becoming something inherent to what socialism is. The idea (i.e., socialism), then, is no longer a positive force, but rather a blinding ideology that obstructs our ability to change the path when it leads to more errors while promising a truth from which it moves away. To keep on a path, which we blindly see as leading to truth, and in which human life is annihilated, is “to bury the voice of human consciousness under thundering ideas,” 9 writes Kanafani.
Kanafani does see socialism as the road to happiness, but again it is the human individual and their happiness that is at stake for him. It follows that, with Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, a revolutionary movement cannot march in a straight line without stopping to revise where that line is leading to; the path cannot be assumed from the beginning, for the march itself is a process and, as such, what was perceived as the end of the line at the beginning of the movement might not remain the same during the movement (Marx, 1978: 14). Moreover, the history created by that movement is the history of the human race as a whole. This means that other peoples do not start from scratch or a point zero, they rather join a process that has already started, but joining this process does not mean that they blindly add themselves to what is already there, or march in a parallel line, imitating an existing formula that repeats the same process with the same errors. Rather, their joining the process means that they create points from where the process can be revised, displaced, shifted, and hopefully redirected towards the idea that is no longer a mere justification for a process that involved human debasement or annihilation. Joining the process thus cannot be a peaceful one, it is one that will be based on conflict and struggle, for it takes the force of revolutionary violence to redirect a path that justifies itself by the truth it claims as its end.
This revolutionary violence is not and cannot be an ideological construct. For it to have the power of creation (and not be a mere force of destruction), it has to stem not from a universal abstract idea, but since life is its beginning and end, it then has to be derived from the particular materiality of people’s lives. This too cannot be reduced to an abstract formula. For Kanafani, the material is not only money, nor food, or what are universally declared as basic needs, but includes the deep forces of conviction and feeling that lie within people. These are unquantifiable, and any revolutionary movement seeking socialism should be able to recognize and mobilize feelings and convictions, rather than dismiss them following a capitalist presumption of a homo economicus. Moreover, these forces should be mobilized on their own terms, i.e., as forces of life and not those of a machine.
What mobilizes belief in Kanafani cannot be a superficial, external motivation: people do not sacrifice their lives for basic needs that have been defined for them by external entities, but are willing to fight, and even sacrifice their lives, for a cause that addresses the holes and gaps that make their lives less than what they should be. Religious belief had that power, for religious belief did address the limitation of their lives, it was able to fulfil their needs in their integrity rather than reduce them into mere parts of what they are. Of course, in Kanafani, it is not belief as a blinding weakening force that can be the force of mobilization, but belief as a source of a deep energy that is integral of the being of the human, the belief with which comes a certainty that overcomes the feeling of lack and helplessness rather than an ideological belief that feeds on and nourishes these feelings.
Kanafani is not calling for a regressive movement – in fact he is writing against repetition – but, while he is indeed not calling for a return to the past, it is the endless repetition of a present moment that is of concern to him, a revision, or a look into the past or in that which is deep inside our lives, could in fact allow us to see how we are trapped in an endless repetition of the same, as one main feature of a capitalist world. What Kanafani seeks here is a revolutionary mobilization of people that would be able to overcome and move beyond that which is stagnant in the present.
Speaking about how the Soviets had to invoke Christian and Tsarist heroes of the past to mobilize the people to fight a Soviet war, is not a call for a return to a chauvinist nationalism based on mythic heroes of the past, but rather it is to remind the people of their descent from a heroic past. This past cannot be repeated, for, as Marx wrote, it would only be a caricature of what it was (1978). But recalling the past, or some of its heroic moments, constitutes a motivational force, a mobilization of deep buried roots, that allow people to fight for a cause that is theirs, and which they perceive as one of life, rather than for an abstracted idea, or entity such as the state or the political party.
Kanafani is neither a liberal bourgeois intellectual searching for a transcendent free willing individual, who can transgress all obstacles, neither is he that socialist who perceives of the people as a herd or an aggregate of anonymous individuals to be led and employed in a “revolutionary” machine, which is fuelled by the masses consumed by it. 10
In the final part of this essay, Kanafani points to Gamal Abdel Nasser, as the “possible” influential hero, who embodies the “hero-principle” formula that Kanafani puts forward. Nevertheless, while the essay ends here posing a question that is left unanswered about Nasser, Kanafani, did find his “influential hero” among the people, 11 for his hero is of the people and within them: his hero is the asheq (‘lover’) in his story al-Asheq (1994), a peasant and a fighter with a gun, a horse, and nothing else. This hero is also one found in his Of Men and Guns (1987): ordinary peasant men who will fight for the land, for their freedom, and for their lives with whatever means they have available. These are not men concerned with the abstract world of things – neither that of money or basic needs, defined as the limitation of the lives of human beings – these are men whose whole energies are mobilized in their fight for a life of integrity and freedom, in their most immediate and particular form, i.e. in and through the people’s being on the land and their relationship with it.
II: The Arab cause during the era of the United Arab Republic
Seismic changes and shifts by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo
Colonialism and Israel constitute two enemies, of course, but so far share common plans based on mutual interests. The reactionaries, opportunists and regionalists constitute special types of enemy, who attempt to preserve their conditions through personal struggles, and who were forced to cooperate with colonialism in the face of the fierceness of the battle and the weakness of their influence within it (Kanafani, 2015). 12
In some ways, Ghassan Kanafani’s ideological evolution followed a similar path to that taken by many Palestinian and Arab socialists at the time. This essay is a testament to this assertion, as the young Kanafani emerges as an Arab nationalist. The political discourse articulated here is a reflection of the period in which Kanafani’s intellectual formation took place, years before the radical intellectual fully embraced the PFLP’s Marxist structure. Kanafani’s socialism, at the time, was fully justifiable as part of rational historical dialectics, inspired, in no small part, by Nasser’s pan-Arab vision – one that is situated within a socialist framework and guided by revolutionary ideals. Though Nasser’s socialism was rationalized as part and parcel of historical materialism, the Egyptian, pan-Arab leader did not share the Soviets’ view of internationalist socialism. Then, many pan-Arab socialists agreed. Kanafani was one of them.
Like other Palestinian socialists, Kanafani’s ideology was not a mere intellectual exercise, with no clear, definable goals. It was a direct outcome of his status as a refugee. His goal, then, until his assassination by the Israeli Mossad in July 1972, was the liberation of Palestine through an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle against Israel and its imperialist benefactors internationally, but also regionally. These ideals were perfectly suited for George Habash’s Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) and its three core principles: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and Arab nationalism.
At the time of writing this essay, Kanafani’s ideas of a pan-Arab nationalistic project directly clashed with those of the Arab Communist Parties, which considered the notion of nationalism as a “bourgeois product.” In his critique of the Communists of the time, Kanafani went as far as listing them among the “hostile camps,” along with colonialism, Israel, reactionaries, opportunists, and regional currents.
Though Kanafani intellectually morphed and ideologically shifted with time, the core of his ideals and values remained unchanged. Throughout his life, cut short at the age of 36, his struggle remained committed to fighting colonialism, Israel and Zionism, and the reactionary forces, which, in his view, served as de facto colonial agents. In his mind, there seemed to be total clarity regarding the mutual benefits that these “hostile camps” obtain as a result of the direct or indirect cooperation of colonialism and Zionism.
His criticism of the Communists, however, was placed in a different context, or did “occupy a specific position.” 13 They constituted “a new type of enemy which has recently entered the battlefield, in remarkable harmony with the plans of the right, attempting to make full use of the ingenuity of colonialism in blocking the great tide.” The young Kanafani defined his rejection of Communists based on their seemingly blind allegiance to the Soviet Union and also on what he saw as their rigid understanding of class division. Like many engaged Palestinian intellectuals, Kanafani was fully aware of the Soviets’ early recognition of Israel, three days after its establishment, and their failure to appreciate the creation of Israel as a center for global imperialism in Palestine.
Kanafani hints at the Communists’ “failure in the cause of Palestine in 1948,” attributing that failure to their inability to “think with their own mentality, but with the mentality of Soviet strategy:”
First, this mentality absolutely rejects the idea of fighting on a national basis. Second, it is a source of pain for such a mentality that people may live in dignity by means other than through the class struggle; that is, by avoiding the division of society into classes (1974).
Only two years after the writing of this essay, the ANM inched closer to “Nasserism” and its view of the Arab national project. Kanafani strongly embraced the ideological shift and moved to Beirut to work as an editor for al-Hurriyya, the daily newspaper of the Movement. More dramatic changes followed, motivated partly by the seismic political shifts underway in Palestine, and the region as a whole. In 1967, Kanafani would become one of the leading members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a wholly Marxist movement, established by Habash himself.
But Kanafani’s intellectual roots in his principled fight for the liberation of Palestine remained unchanged. In 1972, around 14 years after the writing of this essay, and shortly before his death, he wrote The Revolution of 1936-39 in Palestine, where his priorities remained the same: the liberation of Palestine through an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle. More experienced and intellectually grounded, Kanafani, however, placed his analysis in a Marxist view of history. The enemies remained the same but articulated in a less abstract way: “the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy.”
Though some may rashly attribute Kanafani’s ideological shifts to blind allegiances to Habash and the PFLP, to the lack of intellectual maturity at the time or to other things entirely, Kanafani explained his position in full, weeks before his assassination. In a 1972 interview with a Swiss journalist, which appeared for the first time in July 1974 – two years after his death – Kanafani discussed his position:
[I]n our society and in the ANM, we were very sensitive to Marxism-Leninism. This position was not the result of our hostility to socialism, but the result of the mistakes made by the communist parties in the Arab world. That is why it was very difficult for the ANM to adopt Marxism-Leninism before 1964 (Kanafani, 1974).
Indeed, in the 1960s, relations between the Soviet Union and Israel started to deteriorate. The Soviets attributed this deterioration to “the anti-human, reactionary essence of Zionism” which, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, is an “overt and covert fight against freedom movements and against the USSR.” 14 US sources, however, explain the historical breakup based on something else entirely. According to a report issued by the Office of the Historian Bureau of Public Affairs of the United States Department of State in 1964, “Israel launched an intensive effort to obtain modern US tanks to counterbalance Soviet-equipped UAR forces” (Office of the Historian, 2000). As Israel emerged as the closest Western ally in the Middle East, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union listed the “main posits of modern Zionism” as “militant chauvinism, racism, anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism.”
Whether the Soviets’ anti-Israel rhetoric was mere political opportunism or an outcome of ideological conflict between Soviet socialism and Israeli Zionism, or both, the outcome was the same. This resulted in a change in the conversation among Palestinian intellectuals and political movements. Indeed, the intellectual migration to socialism, resulting largely from the internal discussions between the “right” and “left” within the movement itself, was seamless:
In each round, the left came out on top because our position on anti-imperialism and reactionary standpoints was preferable [to the position of the right]. This resulted in the adoption of Marxism-Leninism (Kanafani, 1974).
Reading this essay by Kanafani furthers our understanding of a particular moment in history when seismic changes and shifts at a geopolitical level had a direct impact on the theoretical construct of the influential Palestinian intellectual. Kanafani demonstrated the famous maxim by Niccolò Machiavelli, showing a certain degree of flexibility when it came to the means, without compromising on the final end: the liberation of Palestine and the defeat of imperialism and colonialism anywhere in the world.
III: Marxism in Theory and Practice: A Discussion
The pivotal issues of class and nation by Malek Abisaab
Every human intellectual effort is a small victory for mankind over its crisis, and is a new brick in the grand building of humanity. 15
A new class of people began to rise on the backs of the labors of the poor workers, a class that was later called the bourgeois class. Europe’s affairs seemed extremely complicated and the industrial revolution, with its accompanying production, consumption and employment, seemed to be the cause of all this chaos. It was obvious that this situation took up space in the thinking of philosophers. It was also obvious that thought would arise as a tool to serve life, or rather, as a means to remove it from its crisis.
Ghassan Kanafani left Palestine during the Nakba, when he was 11 years old. Born into a middle-class family, his father was a lawyer and Ghassan studied at a French missionary school, but, like many Palestinians, the social standing of the family was devastated as they became refugees. Kanafani worked afterward as a teacher in a local school to help his family and also to pay for his own secondary education. In Damascus, where the family sought refuge, he enrolled at the university of Damascus, where he studied Arabic literature, but he was expelled for political reasons. He moved to Kuwait and remained there for six years, during which he continued reading and began to write. In 1953, when he was 14 years old, he became interested in politics and in the same year he met in Damascus with George Habash (1926-2008), a founding member of the ANM and later the PFLP, which was established in 1967. Kanafani immediately joined the ANM after meeting Habash. In 1960 Kanafani moved to Beirut at the request of the ANM to work on the party newspaper, then in 1967 he was asked to join the PFLP, working as the editor of its newspaper al-Hadaf, from its founding in July 1969 until his July 8, 1972, assassination.
Initially, the ANM was a movement against colonialism, imperialism, and reactionary governments, and did not adopt a specific ideological line, according to Kanafani. 16 Its move toward socialism, he said, was inevitable, as the anti-imperialist struggle would eventually radicalize the movement if it did not stop the midst of the confrontation, and continued the struggle until victory. Leading members of the ANM realized 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. Their path would ultimately lead to socialism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the ANM and Arab societies more broadly were acutely sensitive towards Marxism-Leninism. This did not come from an abhorrence of socialism but was largely a backlash against the missteps committed by Arab Communist Parties. Reflecting in 1972, Kanafani refers to perceptions held by these parties – and the Soviet Union – on the 1947 UN decision to divide Palestine and the consequent creation of Israel in 1948.
Kanafani’s own sensitivity to Marxism during this earlier phase could be easily be found in “al-Markssiyyah fi al-Majal al-Nazari, al-Majal al-Tatbiqi: Munaqasha” (Marxism in Theory and Practice: A Discussion), a notebook he wrote in the mid- to late-1950s, according to his family. 17 From the first pages of this notebook, one can read where he stood at this moment, as he states that the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, in spite of their socio-economic and political accomplishments, could not defeat nationalism, which remained strongly rooted in the political discourse of the communists themselves. For evidence of the latter, he uses China, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union as examples. Further details, Kanafani asserts, would lead the reader to “undoubtedly decry Marxism” (Kanafani, 2015: 56). This statement set the tone of Kanafani’s perspective vis-à-vis Marxism.
In the first section of the text, Kanafani explains in an interactive and lucid style, possibly addressed to a cohort of adherents, the major theoretical premises of Marxism. His discussion in this section demonstrates a neutral approach, which leaves readers to decide their own response. In the brief section covering “Marxism in practice,” Kanafani chronologically outlines the major turning points in the development of Marxism, focusing on the Bolshevik Revolution. One central aspect of Marxism, Kanafani highlights, is its undogmatic nature, as Marx and Engels, and later Lenin emphasized that Marxism is not a dogma, but rather a guide to action. Marxism then is not a body of sacred texts and Marxists should incorporate in their visions what reality provides, and constantly verify their beliefs with experience. Kanafani concludes this section by raising a question: whether the economic achievements and progress in socialist Russia could be attributed to communism. The question implies, in my opinion, the uncertainty of Kanafani in Marxism as a viable revolutionary force and whether it was being genuinely implemented (Kanafani, 2015: 76).
In the final section of the notebook, dedicated for discussion of the themes of the first two sections, Kanafani points to what he then saw as the inappropriateness of the concept of class, a pivotal premise in Marxism, questioning in particular its methodological use in explaining societal realities in the colonized part of the world. Kanafani stated that anti-colonial sentiments, embedded in the consciousness of the colonized people, had been the driving force that galvanized colonized peoples into collective, revolutionary politics, rather than class struggle. Kanafani thus finds that Eastern societies are coherent and enjoy a “social peace” to an extent that possibilities for class contradictions and antagonism had no chance to emerge (Kanafani, 2015: 90). This statement, in my opinion, presents the limitations of Kanafani’s early criticism of Marxism, on the one side, and his favoritism, on the other, of an analytical method based on nation, rather than class, as the engine of history in the Eastern world. While the question of class, in my view, should not be separated from the question of the national struggle, Kanafani perceives the two variables as sovereign entities.
It was not until 1967, Kanafani asserts, that the PFLP openly embraced Marxism-Leninism, being the only party within the ANM that took such a step when the ANM changed its name to the Arab Socialist Action Party and its Palestinian branch became the PFLP. Kanafani continues his 1972 account on how Marxism-Leninism found its way into the PFLP by pointing to another factor that facilitated the transformation of the ideological doctrine of the PFLP. There had been, Kanafani concedes, a constant ideological strife within the ranks of the ANM and later PFLP between the right wing and the left, and that the positions of the left had always won out, since it had displayed such a solid and uncompromising stand against imperialism and reactionary governments. Implying hesitancy toward adopting Marxism-Leninism, Kanafani discloses that he does not remember if he leaned toward the right or toward the left then, because the differentiated line between them was tenuous or less clear cut as it is nowadays in developed political parties.
What he remembers though is that the ANM embraced young members, and he was among them, who ridiculed the senior members who were highly sensitive towards communism. Kanafani asserts, nonetheless, that the youth were not yet communists, but the extent of their sensitivity to communism was less than that of the senior comrades. Kanafani’s own predilection to Marxism had double origins: First, was his overwhelming love and admiration of Soviet literature and, second, was his communist brother-in-law, whom Kanafani looked up to as a role model. The first influence, Kanafani reveals, assisted the fading away of the jabal al-jalid (iceberg) which he, at the time, held toward communism. Moreover, he acknowledges, his early “animosity” toward socialism, and “our [ANM] sensitivity toward Marxism-Leninism,” evolved as a reaction to the mistakes committed by the Arab communist parties (Kanafani, 1974).
Thus, he believes that the young generation played a major role in causing the shift toward Marxism-Leninism of the PFLP. More importantly, Kanafani attributes the shift of the new generation of the ANM toward Marxism to their social background, as most of them belonged to poor classes, which cemented their political commitments and loyalty to the principles of the ANM. Their political and ideological roles became influential to an extent that they became the “pressure force” within the ranks of the ANM. Reversing his earlier position on class, he would write in 1970 that:
[B]ecause of the specificity of the Palestinian issue, in that one section of the people lives 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, in that 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 (Kanafani, 2024: 145).