Palestinian Literary Criticism in Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature

Abstract

In Fi al-adab al-sahyuni (On Zionist Literature, 1967)¹, the Palestinian writer and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani provides an analysis of Zionist literary production from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, situating it in a broader schema of Western imperialism, settler colonialism, and dispossession in Palestine. Through a treatment of the early Zionist texts, Kanafani’s study traces the evolution of literary representations of the Jewish subject and explores their utility in repudiating integration and advancing racial supremacist logics. The Zionist works in question venerate different relationships to land—extractive, romantic, fraudulent—in contrast to those of Palestinian literary and oral traditions; the former are connected to the ongoing, material efforts of colonizing Palestine. Kanafani’s study was drafted in Beirut and is a reflection of the broader sweep of Arab nationalist and anti-colonial cultural production during the 1960s and 1970s, which was targeted by an anti-communist West. These experiences were formative for Kanafani’s intellectual project, which sees literary criticism as a revolutionary tool and a direct extension of armed resistance, whereby a cultural reconstitution can be used in service of liberating both Palestinian land and people. Kanafani’s study suggests that the “weapons” of literary production will be most effectively brandished by the Arab youth who lead the struggle against Zionism.

Keywords:

• Zionism
• literary criticism
• Ghassan Kanafani
• historical materialism
• nineteenth century
• popular cradle
• resistance literature
• Arthur Koestler
• Mu’in Bseiso
• Abdul-Wahab Kayyali
• Edward Said

“They will turn their fins into feet again.”

—Theodor Herzl²

Zionist literature helped build the Zionist political movement and later trudged alongside it, reflecting the classed valences of Jewish people’s economic reality in Europe, Asia, and America, while whispering of the Arab, arms twisted around the magician in entreaty:

There never was a house here. There was a desert and a stinking swamp and pox-ridden fellahin … Your population was on the decrease for centuries because half your babies were dying from filth in their cradles, and since the Jews came it doubled. They haven’t robbed you of an inch of your land, but they have robbed you of your malaria and your trachoma and your septic childbeds and your poverty.³

This quote, from Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night (1946), is presented plainly in the text of Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature.⁴ Like many of the citations in Kanafani’s study, the words are delivered without ornament and are left to speak for themselves. Taken as their sum, they depict a corpus of Zionist works from the 1800s to the 1960s toward which Kanafani—translated into English by Mahmoud Najib—directs his literary criticism: “the first study by an Arab in Arabic on Zionist literature and its methods,” so claimed in the original 1967 preface.⁵ Kanafani is among the most significant Palestinian novelists and revolutionaries, his many works comprise a scattered picture replete with Palestinian life: from exile to return, from the suspended time of the camps to the erotic madness of the land relation, from the Western war machine to Arab reactionary states. On Zionist Literature spans eight chapters, each focusing on different periods and authors, developing an evolutionary theory of Zionist representations of the Jewish subject: from the “(Davidian) religious figure” to “the Shylockian character,” “the doubter,” “the complainer,” “the conqueror,” and finally, “the political David,” a “figure of absolute power, virtue and infallibility, before whom, the entire world appears like the ghost of Goliath.”⁶ Kanafani ultimately argues that Zionist literature—as written by Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists alike—is a literature of bourgeois hegemony masked as a literature of redemption for the wandering and disenfranchised. He identifies five features that define it: a European hero fleeing apocalyptic persecution; a courtship by Zionists of a non-Jewish love interest; a mercenary and backward Arab enemy; a justificatory historical connection to the desired lands; and a posture of separateness.⁷

In his 1977 essay, “Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins,” Abdul-Wahab Kayyali writes of three interconnected problems facing Europe in the nineteenth century that help to explain the rise of political, and by extension, literary Zionism: the inability of European liberalism to assimilate and accept European Jews, themselves destabilized by the transitions in the economic system and industrialization’s employment crises; the spread of European chauvinist nationalism through which colonial duty was underwritten; and the expansion of European imperialism and its economic exploitation of Arab lands.⁸ In Kanafani’s view, Zionist literature navigated these tumbling dynamics, both articulating and emerging from the movement to establish and profit off a settler-colonial project in Palestine. In so doing, it had at least two distinct but mutually reinforcing audiences, an appeal to Western imperial powers for their patronage and to a broader Jewish proletariat whose interests it co-opted and whose consent it manufactured. This required a complex dance of signification and elaboration that arrived at a winning formula: an affective identification with historical embellishments and religious texts coupled with unsubtle entreaties to imperialist realpolitik—mediated practically through Arab life.

In this formulation, Zionist literature is a form of despair. At its core it requires an internalization of anti-Semitic claims about Jewish people, fed by the conception of galuth—the exilic misery of the Jewish diaspora preordained by scripture—and insists upon the inevitability of catastrophe and victimization, which it argues may only be redeemed through muscular ethnonational self-determination.⁹ Near the beginning of his study, Kanafani summarizes this sociopolitical antagonism, as subtended by Zionist literature in the early nineteenth century:

The oppressed Jewish communities were confronted with two mutually exclusive possibilities: to either endure the pain of the struggle for equality and social integration, or to cling to claims of superiority and the myth of exceptionalism—with the latter being a mere inversion of the same racist ideology that persecuted the Jews.¹⁰

Kanafani then uses this framework to study the early history of Zionist texts. He describes the preliminary literary attempts at answering the “Jewish question” as having tended toward arguments for anti-racist integration, situating works like Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817) and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) in this “integrationist” camp as two English novels written by non-Jews to break from dominant representative frames and portray Jews virtuously.¹¹ Kanafani then traces the reactions to these works by Zionists, in particular the English novelist and later British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli—born Jewish, baptized in the Church of England as a teenager—whose The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) depicted a Jewish exilarch in twelfth-century Iraq attempting to restore the Hebrew people to greatness and being met with fatal persecution. Disraeli built on the view that Jews were destined to inveterate inequality unless a “racial dream” was insisted upon.¹² His Zionist romantic hero in Alroy is pulled between two poles—the assimilation of a Jew-turned-Muslim named Honain, and the messianic exhortations toward political power of a kabbalist named Jabaster—ultimately typecasting the latter by espousing a belief in an “unmixed” Hebrew “race”¹³ poised to “assume the moral and intellectual leadership of the universe.”¹⁴ These ideas of Jewish exceptionalism—manifesting specifically as racial superiority—could then be used to justify a “right to nationalism” in Kanafani’s analysis,¹⁵ with Palestine as the fons et origo for renewed Jewish life.¹⁶ In this case, Alroy christens the matter by proclaiming that “empires and dynasties flourish and pass away […] but Israel still remains […] a word, a deed, a single day, a single man, and we might be a nation.”¹⁷

Doubtless, the repudiation of the possibilities of integration required a set of narrative strategies, and far from simple pride in one’s people,¹⁸ the postures of superiority were premised on deep contempt for others. Accordingly, the summary of Zionist literature’s depictions of “the rest” are among the study’s most breathless: “the Poles are cowards, the Germans are barbarians, the Turks are corrupt, the Greeks are servile […] the English are complicit, the Americans are opportunistic.”¹⁹ This continues, as it must, to the Arabs, where Kanafani quotes several Zionist writers: of Arab children, “there seemed to be no laughter or songs or games […] it was a static existence”;²⁰ of Arab fighters, “thugs slither[ing] along the ground with knives between their teeth”;²¹ of Arab civilization, “[t]hey haven’t (produced) anything worth showing off, except cabarets and filthy postcards, from Tangier to Teheran [sic].”²² (For what it’s worth, Alroy is beheaded in Baghdad by the “King of Karasmé” at the end of Disraeli’s novel.)

Part of this insistence on separateness was borne of an anxiety about the possibilities of a fracturing in the fragile connections between the strands of Jewish life across Europe and Asia—of greater equality in “times of reprieve”²³ generating new Jewish “duties” toward their states that could weaken support for the idea of a spiritual Jewish home.²⁴ Kanafani argues that those who most ardently advanced the literature of the anti-integrationist camp were the beneficiaries of historic gains in social and economic status experienced by the Jewish bourgeoisie before the turn of the century.²⁵ Kanafani cites notable examples of political power attained around the period of the amendment to the British parliament’s requirement of a Christian oath of abjuration, the former of whose assent in 1858 allowed Jews to serve in the British lower house:²⁶ Lionel Nathan de Rothschild as the first British-Jewish parliamentarian; David Salomons as the first Jewish mayor of London; Disraeli as a two-time British prime minister.²⁷ But these are individual representatives of political systems, and if there is a critique to be made here it is that Kanafani does not provide a deeper historical analysis of the reaction of the Jewish bourgeoisie to conditions of reprieve or its relation as a class to other major turning points in Jewish history, among them the 1881 Russian pogroms and 1894 Dreyfus Affair. Instead, he focuses on the downstream, but no less important question of how the literature of this period came to collude with Western imperial and Zionist interests.²⁸

Per Kanafani, Zionists would employ these aforementioned resources to “besiege and obliterate the proponents of integration […] establishing in its place a negative Judaism at the heart of which lies a psychological complex which would be exploited to the furthest possible extent.”²⁹ The result was the incremental development of a chauvinist ideology which sought to combat alternative tendencies within Jewish polities, among them “Haskalah” assimilationism, Labor Bundism, secular Communism, Yiddishism and its principled diasporism (doikayt in Yiddish) that were more inclined to believe in the cause of strengthening Jewish communities where they lived. Zionist literature would find its early scapegoats in these “integrationist” Jews, later the weak and waifish diaspora Jew, the homosexual, the neurotic recalcitrant; hating them, but also seeing in them the unevolved form, not yet benefitting from the heroic liberation that would be afforded during the Sabbath of history. This, in turn, would complement a colonial project of astounding scale, reformatting the Jewish relationship to their idea of “homeland” after oppression, until, as Kanafani puts it, arriving in Palestine could mark “the end of ‘the Jew’ and the beginning of ‘the Hebrew.’”³⁰

Literary Zionism and Political Zionism

The Anglo-Saxons (1958) was a novel written by Lester Gorn (1917–2016), an American who fought for the Zionists during the Palestinian Nakba of 1947–49 under the nom de guerre Ben Zion Hagai, relaying his experiences through an American cypher named Joe, who also enlisted with the Zionists. Kanafani cites part of the novel in which a native informant describes how Arabs occasionally “touch the screen” when watching films as they are being shown.³¹ This is meant to depict Arab backwardness, but it also presents a question: why did they hate us for touching that screen? Which myths did we puncture, which rules? In part, it is about decorum and in part it is not: perhaps Arabs are accustomed to the fleshier voyeurism—smoking a cigarette out the window while men work on a stalled car; observing the ducking and the weaving motorcycle from within a beat-up Mercedes. What bothers the Zionists in this formulation is the unwillingness to adopt their onanistic illusions; Arabs watching, unconvinced.

This begs the question of Zionist literature’s formal and narrative postures toward Arab life. Were the Orientalizing logics of Zionist literature good old-fashioned products of imperialism, a post-hoc justification for the colonization of Palestine? Or were they part of an existing Jewish psychic position, which itself generated a “will-to-power”³² in an attempt to bring reality into coherence with an assumption of what ought to be? Edward Said attempted to weave between these approaches by proposing, respectively, “manifest” and “latent” Orientalism in his eponymous work;³³ the latter was criticized by, among others,³⁴ Sadik Jalal al-Azm, who suggested that the idea of an unregenerated expression of the fundamental unknowability and inferiority of the Occident was itself a type of essentialization.³⁵ If anything, Kanafani’s perspective in On Zionist Literature does not track neatly onto either camp. Very early on he describes literary Zionism as preceding and giving rise to its political counterpart—the establishment of political Zionism as a moment of consolidation for the movement’s history, rather than its inception³⁶—but also that it would be later enlisted by political Zionism’s positivist approaches to the colonization of Palestine. This position is not a case of the tail-superstructure wagging the dog-base, though: Kanafani views Zionist literature as no less imbricated in the class positions of its writers or the material history of its production, only that it helped to articulate strategic priorities and ideologies that would be consolidated, realized, and rearticulated by the political movement in a reinforcing feedback loop.

In order to argue this, Kanafani’s study next transitions to an analysis of the strategic utilities of Zionist literature, examining how it grew alongside settler colonialism in Palestine. As Zionist literature arrived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, its authors began to concern themselves more explicitly with the “national question.” This was perhaps inevitable. The project of undermining the prospects of integration necessarily required as its complement an alternative place-relation for the achievement of self-determination, an answer to the question “wherefore, then?” Concurrently, the imperial compact in Palestine was coalescing: as early as the 1840s, the British Foreign Ministry had been lobbying the Ottoman sultanate to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine;³⁷ this was followed not long after by the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, the 1899 Jewish Colonial Trust, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and alongside them a growing number of Jewish settlers in Palestine. The result was a Zionist movement more directly confronted by the resistance of the Palestinians and Arabs within the lands on which it had designs; this led to strategic readjustments in Zionist literature’s formal and narrative approaches, which began “to march in lockstep with the Zionist political program.”³⁸

One can see concretion of these outlooks in Zionist texts from the second half of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is cited by Kanafani as among the first in the English language to feature a fully realized Zionist hero, positing a wellspring of Jewish wisdom from which a new Jewish polity could be formed, while its protagonist Mordecai advocated “funding, media and propaganda, organization (through the Zionist Congress), purchasing land, campaigns of hatred”³⁹ in order to successfully achieve a state, “grand, simple, just, like the old.”⁴⁰ The novel was republished in several languages and blanketed Jewish households; it inspired, among others, Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, who echoed its refrains three decades later in his novel, Altneuland (Old-New-Land [1902]), which depicted the establishment of a Zionist settler-colonial project as a means of “national-political restoration,”⁴¹ in effect an implementation of the “action plan to conquer Palestine” articulated by Mordecai.⁴² (Herzl’s visit to Palestine on which the novel is based did not last more than half a week.)⁴³ For its part, Daniel Deronda rendered clear the demands to Jewish people:

Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skillful in all arts, […] who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood […] “unite in a labor hard but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness.”⁴⁴

As such, Zionist literature depicted the ideal Jewish man as a political man, who “translates […] defensive plea[s] for greater tolerance into […] positive plea[s] for greater national or racial or territorial recognition.”⁴⁵ One can see how this operated in practice: at the time of writing Altneuland and the earlier pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State [1896]), Herzl was also at work petitioning Ottoman, British, Russian, and German leaders to support a nascent “state-building” project in Palestine⁴⁶ and drafting agendas for the early Zionist congresses, whose participants declared Zionism not to be “a party,” but “Jewry itself.”⁴⁷ And Der Judenstaat devoted an entire section to “The Jewish Company,” which it envisioned organizing Jewish settlement efforts in Palestine, articulating several of the methods and narratives that would become cornerstones of the memoranda and letters of the Zionist political movement.⁴⁸

This thesis is provocative but also incomplete, insofar as it posits a semi-independent nucleus of political power from which the ideological apparatuses stem without a full accompanying analysis of the economic base or of this literature’s reception by Jews. What helps to bridge these tensions is Kanafani’s analysis of land-relation: that the Jewish proletariat could become the beneficiaries of a prosperous and ostensibly dignified life in exchange for their labor to build the settler colony. This required a calcification of the land in the Zionist imaginary; a sublime, auratic thing that would gladly play host to a variety of modern institutions to be dutifully led by the “New Hebrew” man.

Kanafani spends considerable time in the study examining these representations of land in Palestine, insisting on a literature of geographic specificity in contrast to the romantic or deceitful representations of Zionist literature. Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958)—which had sold more than 5 million copies by 1965⁴⁹—depicted Zionism “rescuing” the land from its inhabitants, Palestine’s date palm trees only arriving after a Mossad agent smuggled in saplings from Iraq.⁵⁰ By comparison, in Benjamin Tammuz’s short story “A Tale of an Olive Tree”—which Kanafani compliments as an improvement on the standard Zionist literary tropes—a Jewish settler takes over a plot of land in the Galilee that belongs to an Arab named Mahmud al-Tawil, deliberating what to do with its olive tree, given he knows little about the production of olive oil, until eventually deciding to cut it down.⁵¹ The tree, per Kanafani, represents an “unwanted memory,”⁵² like all Indigenous things. Here, then, we have the trappings of narrative: what is beautiful, we brought; what is unproductive, we broke.⁵³

Kanafani’s broader analysis of the land relation under settlement cannot be understood through On Zionist Literature alone. One must also review Kanafani’s other major studies of Palestinian adab (literature), Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966 (1966) and Palestinian Resistance Literature under the Occupation 1948–1968 (1968), which when combined with On Zionist Literature, comprise his rounded theory on the cultural production of the colonizer and the colonized in Palestine. The first of the aforementioned studies analyzed Palestinian literature and poetry after the Palestinian Nakba began; in theorizing “resistance literature,” Kanafani viewed the diaspora’s exilic poetic condition as overdetermined—a drive to modernism and free verse in an attempt to contain the emotions of the Nakba—and found great salience in fellahi oral traditions, which he saw as comprising a type of popular intelligence.⁵⁴ Therein, the Palestinian peasants dispossessed from their homes and isolated from their lands fought against the depredations of settler colonialism and sought “re-attachment” through a land-based pedagogy.⁵⁵ Zionism, then, enacted the inverse; the movement’s preoccupation with “place” instead of land made sense, disconnected as it was from topography, flora, and fauna, and in the process of forging entirely new national identities through the practice of colonization.

This can provide a toolkit for understanding Zionism today. The Zionist entity is diverse, a collection of Eastern Europeans and Sephardim; realtors, mercenaries, Long Island fanatics, and cops. What “unites” them, in the contingent sense, is extraction, the profiteering off of Palestinian land and labor. This in turn both produces and is strengthened by a cultural project of vicious dehumanization. Zionist literature plays this role; it demands that the Arabs be hapless and permissive, the land backwards and underdeveloped. As the Zionist entity’s settlement project has grown, so too have its contradictions, which have been followed by hurried attempts to fashion additional mythoi, to affix the so-called wanderers to a “super-culture” like that of the European model, while also stealing from the culture of the Arabs that surround them, deforming and recasting it in service to the great civilizing causes of the Western powers: “a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom.”⁵⁶ This tasked Zionist literature with navigating the antagonisms inherent to being both a “modernizing” project and a return to a nostalgic past. The way through, then, was somehow inherent to Judaism, the most prudent, just, technologically advanced, and strong of the races.

Zionism and Imperialism Confront Arab Anti-Colonial Literature

One can understand the ideological and theoretical framings of On Zionist Literature through an analysis of the conditions of its drafting and lived commitments of its author. Born in ‘Akka (Acre) in 1936, Kanafani’s family was forced from Palestine during the Nakba, and was exiled to Lebanon and Syria. He studied at the University of Damascus until he was expelled for his political activities, moved to Kuwait, and eventually settled in Beirut in 1960 to write for the magazine al-Hurriya (Freedom) at the urging of his comrade and mentor, Dr. George Habash, then with the Arab Nationalist Movement and later with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It is in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1960s Beirut that Kanafani found a setting of creative fecundity—an “explosion of his genius”⁵⁷—joining other Palestinians-in-exile to work against the forces of Zionism, Western imperialism, and Arab reaction. Kanafani authored several novels, wrote for the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association’s journal Lotus (at the time, Afro-Asian Writings) and edited al-Hadaf (The Target), the PFLP’s magazine. In Beirut, he operationalized his visions of “resistance literature,” publishing Arab poets and writers like Samih al-Qasim, alongside Afro-Asian literature in the pages of al-Hadaf, and analyzing notable works such as Sadik Jalal al-Azm’s Self-Criticism After the Defeat (London: Saqi Books, 2011)—which Kanafani critiqued—and Nizar Qabbani’s poem after the 1967 Naksa, “Footnotes in the Book of the Setback.”⁵⁸ Kanafani was also one of the drafters of the PFLP’s 1969 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, which showed a clear focus on the class dimensions of the Palestinian struggle and their connection to a broader Arab nationalist and anti-colonial internationalism. He did this all while serving as a political spokesman for the party, which pursued campaigns of armed resistance, kidnappings, and plane hijackings against Zionist forces and their allies.

Beirut during this time was one setting out of many in the Arab world undergoing large-scale efforts in anti-colonial cultural articulation and committed resistance against Zionism. Kanafani was commissioned to write On Zionist Literature by the PLO’s Palestine Research Center, though “the idea was his,”⁵⁹ in part previewed by his March 1965 lecture “Race and Zionist Literature,” delivered in Beirut.⁶⁰ (He had friends and comrades source some of the discussed books from Europe.) Central to his thesis was the work of Arthur Koestler, whose words open this essay. Koestler was notable for his critiques of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (London: Macmillan, 1940) and his book Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917–1949 (London: Macmillan, 1949), which giddily depicted the fall of Haifa during the Nakba.⁶¹ Koestler was deeply involved in the operations of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which funded literary magazines to counteract the influence of communism, including Quest in Bombay, Black Orpheus in Ibadan, and Transition in Kampala. Koestler drafted the CCF’s 1950 manifesto, though his virulent racism and egoism were seen as liabilities for even the intelligence community.⁶² In Beirut, an anti-communist West was involved in supporting the Arabic cultural wire service, ‘Adwa’a, the US State Department’s Franklin Books Program, and the literary journal Hiwar—which Kanafani refused to write for.

In 1966, the CIA’s relationship to the CCF was revealed, and in the wake of the perceived imperialist betrayal, Arab intellectuals were maimed left and right, including some of Kanafani’s Palestinian contemporaries in Beirut: Cecil Hourani, Tawfiq Sayigh—the editor of Hiwar—and Anis Sayigh, the latter two of whose brother Fayez headed the Palestine Research Center. It was during this time that Kanafani completed On Zionist Literature and the work bears the clear imprints of the period’s discussions between the duped and the vindicated. According to scholar Elizabeth Holt, Koestler had loomed large in the psyches of both camps: Anis Sayigh would author the 1967 introduction to the original Arabic edition of On Zionist Literature as a sort of mea culpa; while Kanafani would dedicate portions of his Men in the Sun (in Arabic, 1963) to retracing Koestler’s words in Thieves in the Night—“I lie on my belly and bite into the live throbbing flesh of the earth, suckling the milk of Galilee”—and reclaiming them for the Palestinian cause—“Abu Qais rested on the damp ground, and the earth began to throb under him with tired heartbeats, which trembled through the grains of sand and penetrated the cells of his body.”⁶³ (One “throbbing” an extractive relation; the other cowed by the land.)

What came next is largely known. In the 1970s and 1980s, Western powers and Zionists waged a campaign of destruction against the infrastructures of the Palestinian revolution. This included parts of the Palestinian film archives, the Palestinian Research Center, and the Palestinian children’s book publisher Dar al-Fata al-Arabi. These attacks extended to Arab artists and writers as well; among those martyred by the Zionist entity were Wael Zuaiter (1972), Kamal Nasser (1973), Mohamed Boudia (1973), Ali Fodeh (1982), and Kanafani himself, whose life was ended by a Mossad car bombing in Beirut on July 8, 1972, an event which also took the life of his niece, Lamees Najm.⁶⁴ Six months before his death in 1984, the Palestinian dramatist Mu’in Bseiso would describe these martyrdoms as “a special experience for Palestinian literature, whether in the Territories or outside Palestine.”⁶⁵ This was not a statement born of disenchantment, much the opposite. Revolutionary artists were targeted because they posed a threat to imperial domination; Kanafani was martyred precisely because he was a committed Arab nationalist working within a popular movement advocating armed resistance. In the same remarks, Bseiso would summarize the fruits of the cultural labors during this conjuncture:

Now for the first time there is poetry connected to the Palestinian fight. There are militant newspapers against the Israeli tanks; for the first time there are poetic and literary meetings in the trenches.⁶⁶

Literary Criticism and the Palestinian Revolution

It should come as no surprise that literary criticism had a role to play during this stage of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Kanafani’s intellectual project saw criticism as a revolutionary tool, both for knowing the enemy and for knowing the self. It was a direct extension of militant resistance, whereby a cultural reconstitution would be in service of reclaiming the land; “my words […] are a meager and insufficient substitute for the absence of arms,” he wrote in a 1966 letter to Ghada al-Samman.⁶⁷ On Zionist Literature, then, is fundamentally an anti-normalization text: the cause was to be settled through political confrontation and the study served the role of intelligence gathering and circulation.

Kanafani is not the only Arab to endeavor criticism of imperialist cultural production; others that come to mind from that period are the aforementioned Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, Edward Said, and Mu’in Bseiso, the latter of whose Forms of the Contemporary Israeli Novel was published in 1970. And while Kanafani’s anger and humor certainly ring out the most clearly and cathartically,⁶⁸ Said is the exception among these figures for having written primarily from within the imperial city and Western academy.

Doubtless, this meant Said’s writing was mediated by a wholly different network of relationships and structures. Said addressed this in his 1979 essay “Reflections on Recent American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” wherein he argued that American literary criticism had undergone processes of deliberate technical specialization, which valorized methodological refinement and style, but without any investment in the study of authority and power in literary production.⁶⁹ This “‘left’ literary criticism” confronted the injustices of the midcentury “without so much […] as a polite murmur” about Western imperialism; its unwillingness to challenge “prevailing values, institutions, and definitions,” prefiguring what Said called a coming era of “depressing quietism.”⁷⁰ This diagnosis of the metropole was accompanied with its own theorizations of the role of literary criticism—which bears both similarities and differences to Kanafani’s. For one, their audiences and projects were different. Said was also without a political home, while Kanafani saw the social practice of the masses as the most significant source of revolutionary theory, with the party taking on the role of structuring, disseminating, and returning it to the people.

The translation of Kanafani’s criticism into English, then, can challenge the dominant American frames and the venality of American letters.⁷¹ The deliberate coordination between his criticism and political objectives confronts the racist and justificatory aesthetic strategies that exist everywhere imperialism exists. Western literature is one of the psychological bases of Western power, a type of “witchery,” per Jean-Paul Sartre, himself no stranger to its seductions;⁷² it produces the “acquiescent critic” and the “appeasing arts,” both Sylvia Wynter’s terms.⁷³ And if the Western academy is engaged in a process of “extraction” of literature from former or current colonies—which Barbara Harlow argues is “discovered,” imported as “raw material,” and transformed into “consumable commodities”⁷⁴—then Kanafani’s criticism represents a durable theoretical contribution that is difficult to disentangle from its author’s commitment to revolutionary violence. The reasons why relate to the abovementioned conditions of his studies’ drafting and circulation, but also the clarity of his positions on the role of literature, which he described as a “weapon,” calling on Palestinians to take up arms too.

For Kanafani, “the only literature that can bravely shoulder the necessary confrontation—in form and content—is the literature of the Arab youth who suffer under the military Zionist occupation.”⁷⁵ This is part of the dialectic theory of the “popular cradle”—that Palestinian resistance culture finds its ramparts among the people of Gaza, of Jenin and Tulkarem and Nablus, and of al-Lydd, Umm al-Fahm, and al-Nasra (Nazareth) within the historic lands. Kanafani’s demand was for a Palestinian fiction to rival “theirs,” one that could at once capture the spirit of Palestinian resistance and communicate it at mass scale—he then attempted to write it. Kanafani saw his political positions as stemming from those novels: “insofar as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I was a novelist, not the opposite.”⁷⁶

Novelist, revolutionary, educator—all are true, if perhaps not sufficiently exhaustive. Would Kanafani have described himself as a critic? He certainly wrote criticism and was engaged in not just a critique of the texts at hand, but also of the cultural institutions that produced, promoted, and legitimized those texts, which constituted an integral part of the imperial order. But also, and just as importantly, Kanafani was at work questioning Arab understandings of themselves. Like the Zionist texts, Arabic writing had its political responsibilities, a literature of iltizam (commitment), encapsulated in one example by the life’s work of the late Samah Idriss, the Lebanese writer who served at the helm of the second iteration of the Beirut-based magazine al-Adab (Literature) and the publisher Dar al-Adab, which under Idriss’s father, Suhail Idriss, published Kanafani’s Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966 (in Arabic, 1966). In some senses, Kanafani honored that tradition of iltizam, but in others he thumbed his nose and repurposed it. He held his political convictions in the highest esteem, but was also engaged in experiment, possibility, satire, and transgression through writing that often questioned the status quo. In “For a New Ghassan,” his 2017 obituary-of-sorts for Kanafani, Samah Idriss wrote that this was, in part, what brought Arabs back to Kanafani “year after year.”⁷⁷ Kanafani helped reconstitute Arab resistance fighters in the wake of one of their most catastrophic defeats, the 1967 “setback”; he demanded an end to self-flagellation under the guise of self-criticism that made “a victim of pure, objective truth”⁷⁸ and a recommitment toward a class politics that could be used to attack the common enemy on all fronts. In effect, Kanafani exposed “our shortcomings.”⁷⁹

Conclusion

Ghassan Kanafani is buried in the cemetery for the martyrs of Palestine in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut; Lamees Najm is buried two graves down. In Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s memorial for Kanafani on the fortieth anniversary of his martyrdom, Khoury writes of two occurrences wherein “the commemoration of death takes precedence over that of life”: the death of a martyr and the death of a writer.⁸⁰ In the former, the martyr rejoins their cause’s moral arc and “is born anew to become part of the collective history of [their] people”; in the latter, the written word is liberated from its writer, becoming a collective text, to be completed by its readers.⁸¹ The essay, published in JPS, ends with the note that “[i]t is a rare occurrence when martyr and writer are one and the same.”⁸² In the case of Kanafani, the contradictions—inherent to the “completion” of the martyr’s story, the “incompletion” of the writer’s story—shall remain unaddressed until Palestine is liberated.

But I disagree with Khoury’s teleology. I believe that it is the sum total of Kanafani’s experiences—his life—which “takes precedence” in the circulatory process into which his texts entered. If anything, this process is contingent: it stands independent of the enforced fixities of martyrdom and is clarified along the terrain of struggle. Now, as then, Kanafani’s works are thrown into an amphitheater of revolutionary fervor: there, forces both hostile and receptive read, scrutinize, litigate, and drag them out into the street. Like literary criticism itself, these undertakings are a type of re-articulation; they occur in parallel with the lives of the writer or martyr, who dip in and out of focus as required of them by the conjuncture.

So too, the reader. My grandfather lived in Kuwait for decades and used to follow Kanafani in the Movement of Arab Nationalists’ publications. When I spoke to him about this essay in Beirut last summer, he was animated in his memories of the man. He said he remembered hearing Kanafani’s words on the living room battery radio, my father a young boy listening in too, as they were broadcast by Lebanese stations—in our case, the one run by the Mourabitoun Independent Nasserite Movement, which was active in the neighborhood. Kanafani had made him proud during that period of deep burning. Later that week, our family visited a friend in Burj al-Barajneh, a Palestinian refugee camp that occupies dozens of city blocks in Beirut’s south. There too they continue to study Kanafani’s work. In dark corridors and sweaty rooms, I saw his words framed alongside the names of comrades, some—Wadie Haddad, Abu Maher al-Yamani, George Habash—long gone; others new.

The English translation of On Zionist Literature will only furnish more students. Its publication on July 8, 2022, was intended to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Kanafani’s martyrdom. Fittingly, the fifty-first commemoration this year was marked by July’s heroic victory of Jenin refugee camp in the battle against Zionist forces led by its youth and militant brigades. As one PFLP comrade of Kanafani’s claimed this summer, Jenin’s resistance “recalled” Kanafani’s texts and “confirmed them anew.”⁸³ This perhaps implies the stickiness of literary practice, which—whether life or text—is simply a social elaboration of ongoing history.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaleem Hawa

Kaleem Hawa is a Palestinian writer. He has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Artforum, among others. He most recently published an essay on Palestinian histories of “Tel Aviv” in The White Review.

Notes

1 Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, trans. Mahmoud Najib (London: Ebb Books, 2022).

2 Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 10.

3 Arthur Koestler, Thieves in the Night (London: Macmillan, 1946), 176, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 90.

4 The aforementioned quote is misattributed in the original 1967 Arabic version of On Zionist Literature as being from Robert Nathan, A Star in the Wind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); it is corrected in the 2022 translation.

5 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, xvii.

6 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 26.

7 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 68–70.

8 Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, “Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins,” JPS 6, no. 3 (1977): 98–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/2535582.

9 This will appear subversive only to those unfamiliar with Zionist texts. In the 1895 diary entry that serves as this essay’s epigraph, Theodor Herzl wrote, “[A]nti-Semitism, which is a strong and unconscious force among the masses, will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of the group by the masses, and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks” (Herzl, The Complete Diaries, 10).

10 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 22.

11 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 29.

12 Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (Phoenix House, 1954), 175.

13 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 34.

14 Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 178, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 34.

15 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 60.

16 While Palestine is mentioned only twice in Benjamin Disraeli, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (London: Saunders and Otley, 1833), Disraeli’s later novel, Tancred: Or, the New Crusade (London: Henry Colburn Publisher, 1847)—uncited in Kanafani’s study—sees its protagonist take on the colonial burden more fully while living in the “Holy Land.”

17 Disraeli, The Wondrous Tale, 61.

18 For further reading, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism [in German] (London: Hogarth Press, 1939).

19 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 81.

20 Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 361, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 84.

21 Uris, Exodus, 291, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 85.

22 Koestler, Thieves in the Night, 219, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 83.

23 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 15.

24 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 24.

25 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 30.

26 Rosemary Ashton, “Disraeli, de Rothschild, and the Struggle to Admit Jews to Parliament,” Yale University Press, July 5, 2017, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2017/07/05/disraeli-de-rothschild-and-the-struggle-to-admit-jews-to-parliament/.

27 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 30–31.

28 The limited historical scope and set of texts subject to analysis in Kanafani’s early chapters should not distract from the broader claims being made. Kanafani suggests early on that his aim is not indexical and that such a task would exceed the limits of a single-volume study, instead he has selected the “most prominent works of literary Zionism,” or those “most emblematic of its essence” (Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 2). These early texts are considered Zionist literature by Kanafani insofar as their objective was the articulation of an ideology of convergent pessimism and obligation with ambitions for a colonial state-building project.

29 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 22 (emphasis in the original).

30 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 118. In particular, Kanafani is responding here to the work of the Israeli novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

31 On page 90 of On Zionist Literature, Kanafani cites “Lester Gorn, The Anglo-Saxons (1958), pg. 243,” as the source for this quotation, but it was not possible to locate the original from reviewing both editions of the Gorn novel. The closest plot point to Kanafani’s summary occurs earlier in the novel (on page 40) and reads: “Pacing along the sidewalk, he saw some pedestrians standing transfixed before a television set on display in an alcove. The T.V. set was making noises to go with the images on its screen. Joe looked away.”

32 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 222.

33 Said, Orientalism, 201–26.

34 Mahdi Amel, “Marx in Edward Said’s Orientalism: Is Reason for the West and the Heart for the East?” [in Arabic], al-Karmel, no.6 (1982): 35–67.

35 Sadik Jalal al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin (1981): 5–26, https://libcom.org/article/orientalism-and-orientalism-reverse-sadik-jalal-al-azm.

36 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 1–2.

37 Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. William Polk and Richard Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 41–68.

38 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 59.

39 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 128.

40 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876; repr., London: Panther, 1970), 486, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 41.

41 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 43.

42 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 59.

43 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 134.

44 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 486, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 41.

45 Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali, 164.

46 Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl’s Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine,” JPS 22, no. 2 (1993): 31–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537267.

47 Rory Miller, Divided Against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition to the Creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945–1948 (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.

48 Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land,” 31.

49 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 121.

50 Uris, Exodus, 39, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 90.

51 Benjamin Tammuz, “A Tale of an Olive Tree,” trans. Lisa Katz, Haaretz, 1953.

52 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 106.

53 In his short story, Tammuz writes, “One day a car arrived from the company of a building contractor who developed abandoned land, and inside were an agronomist and his seven consultants. They carefully examined the olive grove’s ‘rentability,’ they said what they said, and a week later, workers came to prepare the land. The first thing they did was to uproot seven ancient olive trees, first, because they had not been planted in rows and so disturbed plowing, and second, because they were too tall and during picking they required ladders so high that they could not be found in the warehouse of the building-contractor-for-developing-abandoned-land, and third, because this is what the agronomist demanded, having found them unrentable” (“The Tale of an Olive Tree”).

54 Ghassan Kanafani, Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966 [in Arabic] (1966, repr. Limassol, Cyprus: Rimal Publications, 2012), 22.

55 Eman Ghanayem, “‘Popular Intelligence’: Indigenous Literary Resistance and the Diasporic Question of Home,” (lecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, March 31, 2021).

56 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 486, as cited in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 42.

57 “The Third Exile: The Explosion of Genius and the Detonation of the Genius” [in Arabic], al-Hadaf, no. 12 (August 2023): 60.

58 Z. Gabay, “Nizār Qabbānī, the Poet and His Poetry,” Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (May 1973): 210, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4282472.

59 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, xvii.

60 Elizabeth M. Holt, “Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut,” JPS 50, no. 1 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2020.1855933.

61 Holt, “Resistance Literature,” 4.

62 Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 142.

63 Holt, “Resistance Literature,” 6.

64 Elias Khoury, “Remembering Ghassan Kanafani, or How a Nation Was Born of Story Telling,” JPS 42, no. 3 (2013): 86, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2013.42.3.85.

65 Barbara Harlow, “Egyptian Intellectuals and the Debate on the ‘Normalization of Cultural Relations,’” Cultural Critique, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 50, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354333.

66 Harlow, “Egyptian Intellectuals,” 50.

67 “Letter from Kanafani to Ghada al-Samman, January 29, 1966,” in Rasa’il Ghassan Kanafani ila Ghada al-Samman [Ghassan Kanafani’s Letters to Ghada al-Samman] (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a li al-Tiba’a wa al-Nashr, 1999), 39–40; as cited in Nancy Coffin, “Engendering Resistance in the Work of Ghassan Kanafani: All That’s Left to You, Of Men and Guns, and Umm Sa’d,” The Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 109, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27933702.

68 When Israeli novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, Kanafani wrote: “a fraudulent and illegitimate literary endorsement to humanize what is fundamentally inhuman” and “a literary Balfour Declaration” (Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 113).

69 Edward Said, “Reflections on Recent American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” boundary 2 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 20–21, https://doi.org/10.2307/303135.

70 Said, “Reflections on Recent American,” 25, 20, 29.

71 To my mind, it is particularly fitting—and an extension of the ideology informing Kanafani’s work—that Ebb Publishing selected Steven Salaita to author the preface to On Zionist Literature, owing to his own formal commitment to a criticism that refuses to grovel to the bourgeois liberalism that warmly embraced the defamation campaigns against him. There and among the Zionist media class, Kanafani’s legacy remains under attack; the attempts to criminalize discussion of his works is, in effect, an attempt to martyr him once more. The designation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—Kanafani’s political home—as a global terrorist organization and the constellation of Zionist outfits prepared to tar people of conscience with the association has produced many victims.

72 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 19. Note: the term “witchery” was edited out of Sartre’s preface in the 2004 English reissue of The Wretched of the Earth. The original French reads, “possession,” as in to be possessed; contextualized alongside “madness,” “psychosis,” and “dissociation.”

73 Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays, 1967–1984 (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2022), 99.

74 Barbara Harlow, “Introduction to Kanafani’s ‘Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language,’” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 10 (1990), 133, https://doi.org/10.2307/521721.

75 Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 108.

76 George Hajjar, Kanafani: Symbol of Palestine (Karoun, Lebanon: G. Hajjar, 1974), 7; as cited in Nancy Coffin, “Engendering Resistance in the Work of Ghassan Kanafani: All That’s Left to You, Of Men and Guns, and Umm Sa’d,” The Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 98, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27933702.

77 Samah Idriss, “For a New Ghassan” [in Arabic], al-Adab, 2017, https://al-adab.com/article/%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A3%D8%AC%D9%84-%D8%BA%D8%B3%D9%91%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8D-%D8%AC%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%AF-%D9%80%D9%80-%D9%85%D9%84%D9%81%D9%91.

78 Ghassan Kanafani, “Criticism of the Criticism of Dr. Sadik Jalal al-Azm” [in Arabic], al-Sayad, October 24, 1968.

79 Idriss, “For a New Ghassan.”

80 Khoury, “Remembering Ghassan Kanafani,” 89.

81 Khoury, “Remembering Ghassan Kanafani,” 89.

82 Khoury, “Remembering Ghassan Kanafani,” 90.

83 Wissam Rafidi, “Umm Sa’d Wins in Jenin Camp!” [in Arabic], al-Akhbar, July 8, 2023, https://www.al-akhbar.com/Albilad/365443/%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B0%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%BA%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%83%D9%86%D9%81%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%85-%D8%B3%D8%B9%D8%AF-%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%85%D8%AE%D9%8A-%D9%85-%D8%AC%D9%86.