Ghassan Kanafani could be considered the most contemporary of all Palestinian writers. Despite his assassination nearly 52 years ago, his writing, style, analysis, and incisive vision remain as sharp today as ever, and the questions he raises remain the central questions for our Palestinian liberation movement, for the Arab cause, and for internationalists everywhere. This is particularly true of the past seven months, since the great battle of October, amid the ongoing Zionist genocide in Gaza. In his writing, Kanafani returns to Gaza time and again, contributing art and posters, political analysis, novels, and short stories, all inspired by the Palestinian people in Gaza, and by the siege, impoverishment, and occupation they confronted – and the resistance they forged and engendered, and which they continue today.
We see in Kanafani’s work how his revolutionary political thoughts were relevant then and remain, perhaps, more relevant than ever: when we look at the posters he designed, calling for support for the Palestinian resistance and to break the siege on Gaza; when we see his drawings of the battles of Maghazi; when we read his writings on the active resistance in Gaza and how he perceived it, it is as if any of these could have been designed, drawn or written today. Not just in his political articles and thoughts, but also in his art and novels. Kanafani often expressed political thoughts through literature, and even described himself as a novelist trying to make a political statement. When he wrote his second novel, All That’s Left to You, 1 he spoke about the conditions of siege in Gaza. This novel was written nearly 60 years ago, and yet it still powerfully conveyed the presence of siege, the ever-present threat of the occupation, and the resonant dream of liberation. His portrayal of siege was not confined to the military and material aspects, but also to what he called the “psychological siege” imposed on Gaza.
Kanafani visited Gaza only once, and realized then how well-known he was, and how widely his writing was known. He wrote on November 29, 1966:
I am more well-known here [in Gaza] and I, would almost say, much more “beloved” than I expected, and this is something that usually embarrasses me, because I know that I will not have time to live up to people’s expectations, and that in all cases I will fail to be what they expect of me. Day and night, I am received with a warmth that increases the feeling of coldness in my limbs and mind, and the shortness of my journey for these people and for myself. I feel more than ever that the whole value of my words is an impudent and trivial compensation for the absence of weapons, paling before the insurgence of real men who die every day for a cause I respect. All of this brings upon me feelings of death-like alienation and the happiness of the dying person after years of faith, torment, but also astonishing sacrifice. 2
Kanafani also exemplified the commitment of the Palestinian revolutionary intellectual to the impoverished and oppressed, and saw that Gaza was the place that perhaps most clearly crystallized their experience, from impoverishment and siege, to bombings, attacks, and wars, and – just as clearly – that this is where that revolutionary potential had the greatest ability to rise. He saw this best exemplified in the form of fighters, Of Men and Guns. 3 As we look back from our vantage point in 2024, the relevance of Kanafani and his work is not that of a person but of a cause. He wrote about the cause, for the cause, and, for him, the human was the cause. This is why Kanafani always remains relevant; he was not taken up by the development of momentary events, but dedicated himself consistently to the cause, its principles, its future, and its victory.
When writing about “the unity of the guns,” Kanafani gave a new, different and clearly revolutionary orientation to the slogan and understanding of national unity, that has remained for the Palestinian people and cause today in the unity of the fields. When Kanafani wrote of the betrayal of the Palestinian people by a sector of society co-opted and corrupted to serve the interests of the enemy, this was expressed in the character Zakaria in the novel All That is Left to You – a rapist and collaborator with Israel. And for the characters living through oppression, misery, poverty, under siege: their salvation is the right to return to their land and to their homes. Kanafani did not try to lecture his characters, Maryam and Hamid, about improving their conditions, but instead knew there was nothing that could improve their situation except to live for a cause, for a noble idea.
As we read Kanafani’s writing today amid our ongoing battle of October, amid the Zionist genocide and the daily heroism of the Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza, it is clear that the people who are largely seen as nameless are those who are enlivening the Palestinian people, the men and the guns. Today, these young Palestinian men are returning Palestine to life. Their faces are covered, and their voices are obscured. They defend their land and people, they fight for liberation, they die for their cause, and they return Palestine and the cause to the center of the region and the world.
If we re-read Kanafani’s brilliant short story, “Letter from Gaza,” 4 he describes Nadia, the young Palestinian girl who lost her leg. If you omit the date and publish it today, people will believe that this short story was written yesterday. In the story, written as a letter, he speaks of a young girl who tried to protect her brothers and sisters and lost her leg. This has happened hundreds of times in Jabaliya, in Maghazi, in Rafah, in every place in Gaza. It may have been nearly impossible to imagine the circumstances of today, the severity and technological intensity of the genocide carried out against the Palestinian people. But we can be certain that, if he were alive today, he would once again dedicate his pen to their dignity, steadfastness, and resistance, and exposing the illusions of a “new administration” of Gaza, or the “two-state solution” for Palestinians. Kanafani’s writing, in both its artistic form and its political form, consistently rejected illusion and wishful thinking in favor of the revolutionary potential of the popular masses emerging from their material conditions.
It was that project – of casting away illusions and revealing reality – to which Kanafani dedicated much of his political writing. As a co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the author of its positions and the developer of its relationships with revolutionaries around the world at the height of the Palestinian revolution, between 1967 and 1972, his writing and work, most notably his contributions to the Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, did not represent solely the views of an individual, a theorist, and an intellectual.
Kanafani represented a clear line in the Palestinian revolution and in the Palestinian left. It is a line that was targeted for assassination and exclusion and a line that retains its relevance today for the same reason: its clarity and commitment to the popular classes and to a scientific understanding of history, society, and the revolutionary struggle. Kanafani’s work did not merely reflect sentiment or opinion. He was a committed Marxist-Leninist, using the tools of Marxism to understand class struggle and society, and applying those understandings to change reality in practice, in an organized and collective front. All of this has given Kanafani’s work lifetime after lifetime, with a precision that continues to contribute to every revolutionary struggle, from the resistance in Gaza to the fighters in Jenin camp, who enliven Kanafani’s vision today.
It should come as no surprise that many of the events that Kanafani predicted or warned of have come to pass today. He anticipated, for example, the rising power of Asia – China in particular – and his own writing was strongly influenced by the Chinese revolutionary experience (along with those of Cuba and Vietnam). On the other hand, he also anticipated that the Palestinian bourgeoisie would sell the Palestinian cause to the highest bidder, finding common cause with Zionism and imperialism. In his studies to understand the background of al-Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967, he did not refrain from clearly identifying the class lines in Palestinian society that posed a great threat to the interests and liberation of the Palestinian masses.
Today, as Palestinian Authority security forces engage in “security coordination” with the occupation, as the segment of Palestinian bourgeoisie that has linked its interests to Zionism and imperialism through the Oslo project maintains its complete and destructive grip over what remains of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Kanafani’s clear understanding of the threat posed by those class forces who would join the enemy camp remains strikingly relevant and clear.
The Palestinian official leadership, in line with that analysis, has only expanded and cemented Kanafani’s concept of the enemy camp, relying on the imperialist powers in the US and the EU to fund and train their “Authority” and siding with the most reactionary Arab regimes, like that of Saudi Arabia in its war on the people of Yemen. And today, of course, it is the people, government and armed forces of Yemen that are leading the way among the camp of revolution and resistance by boldly confronting the US, Britain, and the Zionist regime, and cutting the supply lines of genocide, entirely in line with the analysis Kanafani made 55 years prior. It was Kanafani’s clarity on the enemy camp that so distinguished his work; he classified the sectors of the enemy camp explicitly and clearly, understanding their interactions and providing a strategy for revolutionary alliance as well as revolutionary action.
Throughout a life cut short, Kanafani developed his analysis consistently, with a tremendous ability for self-criticism and review of his own ideas. In his commitment to cast away illusions, he did not hesitate to renew his own understandings in light of material reality. In the years of his youth, Kanafani was a committed Arab nationalist, who became a Marxist-Leninist and internationalist firmly committed to Arab liberation. He was taken from the Palestinian people, the Arab nation, and the internationalist world at the age of 36, just three years after the publication of the Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.
Kanafani and his comrade, Wadie’ Haddad – whose innovative revolutionary actions Kanafani often represented as the spokesperson of the Front – represented a strong left leadership of the Palestinian revolution at the time, with a commitment to the Palestinian masses and a refusal to accept the crumbs of the bourgeoisie or reactionary regimes. It is for precisely this reason that Kanafani and his comrades were targeted for assassination by the Zionist regime.
In the months and years following Kanafani’s assassination, the Zionist regime pursued this same policy against his comrades Basil al-Kubaisi and Mohammed Boudia. The revolutionary voices in Fateh and other Palestinian resistance organizations – those, like Kanafani, who forged internationalist and anti-imperialist ties – were similarly targeted for assassination.
This external attack was also combined with the growing dominance of the Palestinian right wing, with the support of Arab reactionary regimes, in the Palestinian liberation movement as a whole and even within the Palestinian left. As Kanafani, al-Kubaisi and Boudia were assassinated, Wadie Haddad was expelled from the Front, in part because he refused to end revolutionary operations outside Palestine and its immediate borders, particularly those in the West. Politically, he also refused to accept that “national unity” with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership should limit the boundaries of revolutionary resistance, a decision that was posthumously retracted after Haddad’s assassination in the German Democratic Republic in 1978. Both Kanafani and Haddad were later proven correct in their analyses, as later reality has shown.
Kanafani’s assassination has done nothing to dull the flame of his relevance, clarity, and revolutionary vision, a vision that he directed toward collective action, party organization, and the Palestinian masses as a whole. While the intellectuals of the PA are alive, untouched by the occupation, their words and vision are dead. Kanafani and his ideas, on the other hand, remain alive and vital despite his assassination.
Today, Kanafani would be speaking and writing against normalization, because he understood that there can be no dialogue between “the sword and the neck.” His relevance does not remain simply because of his technical brilliance, creativity, or creative turns of phrase as a writer, but because he wrote in service to the fida’iyyin and the revolution, rather than expecting them to serve his personal ambitions and goals.
The questions raised by Kanafani were not those of an individual. Indeed, the questions of today’s strategy for the liberation of Palestine – from exposing the so-called “two-state solution,” to the advancement from resistance to revolution – are collective questions that require collective answers. The march that Kanafani and his comrades walked continues, as Palestinians, in their new generation of resistance, proceed forward upon that path, until the liberation of Palestine.
The sons and daughters of those who were fighting in the 1970s and in the great popular Intifada that ignited in 1987 – and which itself began in Gaza – are fighting today to resist the genocide and advance the liberation of Palestine. They are continuing the battle of those who came before and, indeed, of Kanafani himself. The man holding the gun in Gaza today, beyond ideological background or organizational affiliation, is the same man who was holding the gun of 1968 and 1969, for the same cause: the liberation of Palestine.
The operation of October 7, 2023, may be described by some as the revolt of the prisoners; it may be described as a tactical offensive. It may be called the Palestinian armed uprising. All of these descriptions can accurately describe October 7, but at its heart, Kanafani’s living legacy is to recognize the October 7 operation as a glorious day in the life of the Palestinian people, when the Palestinian people decided not only to break the chains and to break the siege, but to break the silence of a world that has been watching them die under siege for decades, without a moment of attention to their suffering, their crushed dreams, their martyrdom, and their destruction. Indeed, on October 7, the Palestinian fighters chose life for themselves and for their people.
It is the Israeli regime that is the rapist, the beheader, that daily tears the heads from Palestinian children with its drones and F-35s. What it wants is not only the heads of Palestinian children, but the heads of the Palestinian resistance and of the Palestinian people, the same policy that spurred Kanafani’s assassination. They have sought to destroy the people and the cause, and that is why they carry out this genocide today, with the support, funding, and assurance of the imperialist powers. The enemy camp Kanafani illustrated so clearly in 1969 is today the perpetrator in Gaza, vividly illustrated before the world. And so, too, is his famous quote on internationalism, which remains not only a prescient analysis but an urgent call to action at this critical moment: “Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.” 5