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      Kanafani’s 1936–1939 Revolt in Palestine: A Revolutionary History

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            I first read Ghassan Kanafani’s pamphlet, The 1936-1939 Revolution in Palestine, as a university student and anti-imperialist activist, becoming involved in the Palestine solidarity movement over 20 years ago, during the rise of the al-Aqsa Intifada and the imperialist wars in Afghanistan, and then looming over Iraq. At that time, Kanafani’s work had fallen out of print in English, at least in North America, and had not yet been digitized. A dear friend, movement mentor and revolutionary artist shared a photocopy of one of the pamphlet’s previous printing, run off on a library copier.

            Kanafani’s brilliant and incisive class-based analysis of the great uprising against British and Zionist colonialism in Palestine, the armed struggle of Ezzedine al-Qassam and the six-month strike of Palestinian workers, and the devastating compromises of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, had first been published in English in the pages of the PFLP Bulletin, the English-language broadsheet of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), of which Kanafani was a co-founder, leader and spokesperson. The Bulletin, distributed around the world in the 1970s through local supporters as well as direct mail, spoke to a global audience engaged in revolutionary action and anti-colonial struggle. This was a time when the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon were centers of global organization and action, and when revolutionary movements in the imperial core were directly engaged with Palestinian revolutionary organizations, particularly the PFLP, in popular and armed struggle alike.

            The pamphlet was later collated and published in several editions in English, one by the Committees for a Democratic Palestine in the United States in 1972, and another by the Tricontinental Society in London in 1980. The latter also included an English translation of a tribute to Kanafani published in al-Hadaf after Kanafani’s assassination, which itself contains many of his best-known quotes on internationalism and revolution.

            That Kanafani’s work was no longer widely available in the early 2000s was, of course, not coincidental. It came alongside the so-called “peace process” of Madrid and Oslo, and the dismantlement of much of the world’s socialist bloc, alongside the proclamation of the “end of history” and the triumph of US imperialism and capitalism.

            The Oslo Accords, signed against this background, and the subsequent creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) signified a new era of liquidationism targeting the Palestinian cause, under US sponsorship and auspices. The creation of the PA and the dismantlement of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its institutions was not only felt on the ground inside occupied Palestine, but also outside Palestine, in exile and diaspora, where PLO institutions and even the infrastructure of Palestinian left political parties were largely dismantled, starved of people and starved of resources, in an attempt to end them once and for all. Kanafani’s work did not fall out of print in English in a natural process; it was, like the entire Palestinian revolutionary project and the global working-class and revolutionary movement, targeted for extinction and elimination by a triumphal imperialism.

            Of course, the material realities in Palestine, the Arab nation and throughout the region meant that this was a fiction propped up by overwhelming military and economic power. The failure of the Oslo process and the creation of the PA to quench Palestinians’ revolutionary will, despite the interests of a sector of Palestinian capitalists aligned in “economic peace” with the Zionist occupation, was vividly apparent in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and the failure of US imperialism – with its Zionist partner – to dominate the region was exposed shortly before, in May 2000, with the great victory of the Lebanese resistance, led by Hezbollah, and the expulsion of Zionist troops from Southern Lebanon.

            In this context, amid the pending war drive targeting Afghanistan and then Iraq, threatening Iran and Syria for the creation of a “new Middle East,” Kanafani’s clarity and precise understanding of the class forces involved in Palestinian struggle was electrifying. Having read and discussed the work, I also eagerly photocopied and distributed the piece to comrades in our student/community Palestine solidarity and anti-imperialist organization. We quickly made the decision to digitize the book, both the central work and corollary pieces, then a more labor-intensive task than now, using often-inaccurate free OCR software or simply hand-typing the words from the photocopied old editions, and preparing them for display on the web in simple HTML.

            We did this then, having read this piece at a time of great struggle in Palestine, imperialist hegemony, and regional resistance, amid the conciliation of a bourgeois comprador layer in Palestinian society and the diversion of the Palestinian people’s sacrifice toward yet another round of “negotiations.” We felt that everyone else in the burgeoning global anti-war and anti-imperialist movement should also have the opportunity to become acquainted with Kanafani’s work, both to understand the historical precedent and to understand the current situation in occupied Palestine, the role of Zionism and imperialism, and the threat of a collaborationist bourgeois force to undermine the struggle of the masses of workers and farmers, the popular forces of Palestine.

            It is a testament to the enduring power and correctness of Kanafani’s analysis that, in the ensuing two decades, Kanafani’s piece has since been published and republished and now enjoys several new translations from the original Arabic. Palestinian resistance is on the rise, from Gaza to Jenin inside occupied Palestine, inside the Zionist prisons, and in exile and diaspora. In fact, many Palestinians first encounter Kanafani’s political writing (in Arabic) inside the occupation prisons, from their fellow detainees. The Lebanese resistance has recorded yet more victories over the Zionist war machine, while regional forces of resistance have built a strong alliance stretching throughout the area. Globally, de-dollarization and a decline in US hegemony and that of its imperialist partners once again highlight that the “end of history” was nothing more than the wishful thinking of the ruling class. And Kanafani’s work is perhaps more widely read in English than at any time in the past, within this context of growing resistance and revolutionary struggle.

            The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine begins by identifying “three separate enemies that were to constitute together the principal threat to the nationalist movement in Palestine in all subsequent stages of its struggle: the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy” (Kanafani, 1972: 10), as it aims to understand the roots of the Nakba.

            These remain the enemy forces confronting the Palestinian liberation movement, as they were in Kanafani’s time, and in the 1930s that he studied. The republication of this piece, alongside Kanafani’s other political and literary works, comes at an urgent time, not only for the clarity of his analysis and understanding, but for the solution that he presented: organized, revolutionary struggle to confront all of these enemy forces, on the Arab and international level alongside the Palestinian front.

            References

            1. (1972). The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine. New York, Committee for a Democratic Palestine; London: Tricontinental Society (1980). Accessed August 9, 2024. https://pflp-documents.org/documents/PFLP-Kanafani3639.pdf

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Journal
            10.13169/arabstudquar
            Arab Studies Quarterly
            ASQ
            Pluto Journals
            0271-3519
            2043-6920
            26 September 2024
            : 46
            : 3-4
            : 234-236
            Affiliations
            [0001]Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network
            Article
            10.13169/arabstudquar.46.3-4.0234
            9315ee23-471d-4ee8-b2cd-9da79cca9596
            © 2024, Charlotte Kates

            This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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            Social & Behavioral Sciences

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