Today I remember Palestinian revolutionary socialist, journalist, editor, artist and novelist Ghassan Kanafani who was assasinated on this day 1972, Ghassan was born in the city of Acre, Occupied Palestine on April 8 1936. His father was Fayiz Kanafani, a
lawyer,who was active in the national movement that opposed the British
occupation of Palestine, and his mother was A’isha al-Salim. He had four brothers, Ghazi,
Marwan, Adnan and Hassan; and two sisters, Fayzah and Suha.
He attended the Frères School in Jaffa. As a boy, Kanafani was already shadowed by death: He was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. When he was twelve years old, following the Nakba
he and his family were forced to leave Jaffa before it fell to the
Zionist forces in 1948; they sought refuge in Lebanon. The family then
left Lebanon for Syria and settled in Damascus.
It was while working
in refugee camps that Kanafani began writing his novels, and he later
took an interest in Marxist philosophy and politics while living in
Beirut.
“My political
position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned,
politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically
state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not
the opposite,” he had stated at one point.
When his interest in communism grew, he turned away from pan-Arab nationalism, and towards the Palestinian struggle.
“The Palestinian
cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every
revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed
masses in our era,” he said.
Most
of his fictitious works focused on the lives of Palestinians and the
challenges they faced living under Israeli occupation. In exile, he worked at a printing press; he later distributed
newspapers and worked in a restaurant. In the daytime and at night he
pursued his studies until he obtained the intermediate school
certificate in 1953, and then he worked as an art teacher in UNRWA
schools in Damascus.
His journalism and
writings were deeply rooted in Arab-Palestinian culture, and inspired a
whole generation both during and after his lifetime.
His contact with Arab political activists who had established the
Arab Nationalist Movement began in 1953. After he met George Habash, he
began to write for the weekly magazine al-Ra’i.
After obtaining his secondary school certificate, Kanafani joined his
sister in Kuwait in 1956 where he worked as an art and athletics
teacher. While working as a teacher, he enrolled in the Arabic
Department of Damascus University for three years while also being
active in Kuwait in the Arab Nationalist Movement and at the Arab
Cultural Club, which was dominated by the movement. He also wrote for
the weekly magazine al-Fajr, which was published by the movement. In 1957, he published his first story, “A New Sun.”
In 1960, the year before his marriage, he relocated again, this time to Beirut.A year later Kanafani met Anni Hoover, a Danish teacher who had come to
Beirut to study the Palestinian refugee situation; in two months they
were married. “School teaches nothing. It only teaches laziness. So leave it and plunge into the frying pan with the rest of humanity.” (‘Men in the Sun’)
In 1963 he became editor of the daily al-Muharrir and in charge of its monthly supplement Filastin.
1964 saw the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to be
soon followed by the launch of the armed struggle to regain Palestine.
“Vietnamese revolutionaries have been struggling against imperialism
for tens of years. They will transfer their revolution to other places;
first, because their revolution is continuous, second, because they are
internationalists . . .” - Ghassan Kanafani
In 1967 he became the editor of the weekly supplement of the daily al-Anwar, remaining in that post until 1969. Kanafani, a novelist
who first deployed the notion of “resistance literature” in the context
of Palestine. to refer to Palestinian poetry written in Occupied Palestine , a now recognized genre within the Arabic literary sphere. Mahmoud Darwish,arguably Palestine's national poet
who dedicated one of his own works, The Palestinian Wedding, to
Kanafani, writes in an introduction to a volume of Kanafani’s literary
critical studies that, “It was Ghassan Kanafani who directed Arab public
opinion to the literature of the occupied land […] the term
‘resistance’ was not associated with the poetry until Ghassan applied
it, thereby giving the term its special significance."
Kanafari , was also a leading member of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).Kanafani took part in founding the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine in December 1967 and was elected to its political bureau.
He then became its official spokesman and was in charge of its media
activities and in 1969 became editor of al-Hadaf, the movement’s magazine. He remained in that post until his assassination in 1972.
In the PFLP’s Marxist
vision, not only Palestine but the entire Arab world would be liberated,
not just from foreign colonialism but also from archaic attitudes and
social forms. The Palestinian resistance fighter was a revolutionary
figure of the romantic type—a keffiyeh-wearing version of Che Guevara.
Ghassan Kanafani was a man of great originality and many talents. He
wrote short stories, novels, and plays as well as journalistic articles
and analytic studies; Arab publishing houses (including Dar al-Tali‘a,
Mu’assasat al-Abhath al-‘Arabiyya, and Manshurat al-Rimal) have
published editions of his collected works. Many of his works have been
translated and published in sixteen languages.In 1966, the Friends of the Book Society in Beirut awarded Kanafani its annual prize for his novel All That’s Left to You.
He was also a talented painter. After he was assassinated, some of
his novels and stories were turned into feature films or shorts, such as
his classic first novel of dispossession, opportunism, and migration—Men in the Sun, which in 1973 was adapted into a feature film entitled The Deceived. This
film was directed by the Egyptian Tawfiq Salih and produced by the
General Film Institution in Damascus. The film won the Golden Prize at
the Carthage Festival for Arab and African cinema in 1973. Many critics
consider this film as one of the most distinguished political films of
world cinema, occupying tenth place in the list of the 100 most
important movies of Arab cinema since its beginnings. This list was
compiled after a survey of hundreds of critics and was announced at the
Dubai International Film Festival in 2013.
Ghassan Kanafani -Untitled 1964-
Ghassan Kanafani - Women , 1968
Kanafani was assassinated in Beirut on 8 July 1972. The Mossad Israeli intelligence agency had placed an explosive charge in his car, which killed him and
his his 17-year old niece Lamees Najim who happened to be with him.
His killing by the
Israeli secret forces was in response to the Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion
International) massacre on May 30, 1972.26 people, including
17 Puerto Ricans, were killed by members of the Japanese Red Army who
had been enlisted by the PFLP in the assault.
Despite his support for the armed struggle, neither Kanafani nor his
17 year-old niece, were involved in planning the series of ongoing
attacks organised against “imperialist targets” at the time. Whatever responsibility the PFLP may have borne for Lod, Kanafani carried none of it – certainly not enough to justify his murder
by the Israeli state (if anything could justify such barbarity)
Ghassan Kanafani was buried in Beirut and was posthumously awarded the World Union of Democratic Journalists
prize in 1974 and the annual Lotus Prize for literature by the Union of
Asian and African Writers in 1975. In 1990 the PLO awarded him the
Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature.
His obituary in
Lebanon's The Daily Star shortly after his death stated, "He was a
commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and
his arena the newspaper pages.”
Mahmoud Darwish, wrote in his eulogy to Kanafari : “They
blew up you, as they would up a front, a base, a mountain, and a
capital, and they went to war with you, as they would an army. Because
you are a symbol, and a civilisation is a wound. And why you? Why you?
Because the homeland in you is real and transparent, and innovation for
rivers whose waters are carved from the blood of migrants. Its streaks
are always burnt, in which the late olive shade blends between memory
and earth.”
Khanafari's short works, particularly Men in the Sun (1963) and Returning to Haifa (1970),
continue to resonate down through the decades, inspiring engaged
responses in visual art, celluloid, on the stage, and in other novels. In 1977,
Israeli authorities banned the performance of a theatrical adaptation
of Men in the Sun set to be staged in Nazareth. But it is Kanafani’s controversial and beloved Returning to Haifa that continues to spark the keenest discussion, literary reaction, and re-interpretation.
The impact of both his life and death highlights is a clear reminder of his effect on the Palestinian people. his life also embodied the unbreakable spirit of the Palestinians, a resilience that will persist long after their liberation.
Kanafani's assassination should be situated within a broader strategy of
Israeli military and intelligence policy during the 1970s and 1980s to
target, and inevitably remove influential Palestinian leaders. Another voice silenced by the Mossad was Naji al-Ali. The latter was a
journalist and caricaturist who is best known for creating one of the
most iconic Palestinian symbols, Handala.
Cultural and political assassinations
continue till this day; recent cases are the loss of prominent thinkers,
authors and activists: Basel al-Araj and Nizar Banat.
Like Kanafani, both of these men had a
significant impact on their surroundings and were viewed as pioneers of
resistance. Al-Araj was killed by an Israeli ‘counter-terror' unit,
allegedly facilitated by the Palestinian Authority, and Nizar Banat, killed less than one month ago,
at the hands of the US-trained PA forces. Both these men were referred
to as martyrs who resisted through education and writing, and they both
had suspicions that they would meet their end because of it.
Sadly decades after Kanafani's death Palestinians continue to this day to pay the price for holding on to their identity and persisting in the fight to exist equally and with their full human rights. The struggle for freedom continues.
Bibliography
Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine’s Children,
Translated and Introduction by Barbara Harlow & Karen E. Riley (2000)
Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun
Video
Watch Ghassan Khanafani in Interview in Beirut in 1970: on the Conversation between the sword and the neck…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_drCmG2iM
Interview with PFLP spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani, 1970, by upitn reporter Michael Nicholson about the recent guerilla demands for which they would release their hostages
“To us to liberate our country to have dignity to have respect to have our human rights is something as essential as human life itself” Ghassan Kanafani
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ObkyyBhDMg
Stories online
Letter from Gaza (1955) by Ghassan Kanafani
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kanafani/1956/letterfromgaza.htm
Ghassan Kanafani, The Land of Sad Oranges
http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/sad_orange.pdf
Kanafani’s The Stolen Shirt
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31937
Ghassan Kanafani, Excerpt from Returning to Haifa
“Ghassan Kanafani: The Symbol of the Palestinian Tragedy,” by Rasem al-Madhoon,
