Ghassan Kanafani (Photo: Flickr)
This May marks the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) in Palestine in 1948 when over 700,000 Palestinians were forced off their land, in some cases at gunpoint, in other cases through massacres or threats of massacres like the massacre at Deir Yassin. Hundreds of villages were completely destroyed or depopulated. Today, the suffering in Palestine continues: from the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, to the demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, to the continued siege of the people of Gaza – deprived of food, water, electricity, and medicine- to the mass detention of tens of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners.
Each year we approach this date and millions worldwide are overcome with a strong emotional reaction, a feat showing how deeply rooted their connection to the Palestinian issue is. This is true even for third and fourth generation Palestinians who are unable to fulfill their right to return; a powerful emotional connection passed on from generation to generation.
Ghassan Kanafani’s words are perfect to capture this connection. Few Palestinian writers will ever evoke as strong a response as a mere mention of Ghassan Kanafani’s name does. A teacher, journalist, and writer, Kanafani’s wide reach of influence continues even today, especially in the terms of his literature. His works will forever have a seamless connection to the hope for freedom in Israel/Palestine, a goal that even Kanafani knew would become the responsibility of future Israeli and Palestinian generations.
“I was just asking. I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs… Tens of thousands like Khalid won’t be stopped by the tears of men searching in the depths of their defeat for scraps of armor and broken flowers. Men like Khalid are looking toward the future, so they can put right our mistakes and the mistakes of the whole world.” (From Return to Haifa)
If there’s one thing Kanafani attempted to do through his works, it was to show the Jews and Palestinians that they were more similar than they knew. Let us hope these similarities are realized and leveraged to achieve a lasting peace in the near future.
Kanafani was assassinated in Beirut in 1972.
Thanks for a nice post, @@WomanUnveiled, but lest there be any doubt, I’d suggest changing the last sentence from passive to active voice: Israel assassinated Kanafani in Beirut in 1972.
For details, see
http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2005/10/3357.shtml
“Return to Haifa” is about a Palestinian couple who after 1967 are able to go back to what used to be their home in Haifa. They discover that the baby boy who they lost in the stampede to escape the Zionist forces during the Nakba has been adopted and raised as a Jew by the family now living in the house and is now serving in the IDF. I don’t know whether things like that happened in real life, but it is effective as a literary device. The message (as I understood it) is that who ends up in what role can be a matter of chance: identities are not predetermined.
“Men in the Sun” is one of the great works of modern literature, following on from one of the epoch making Arabic works “The Black Sun” whose authors name escapes me right now, an Egyptian but the name is gone.
Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun” captures the current state of the Arab masses in our world of tortuous Byzantine bureaucratic oppression and forgetful self immolation better than anything i can think of.
Islam specifically sunnism now apparently sanctions cannibalism, thats faintly reminiscent of the willful western media misunderstanding of an idiomatic phrase used by one of Wasfi Tal’s assassins, Abba Eban made much of it, but now we have
Abu Sakkar and one only hopes that the man he was filmed eating was slaughtered in the correct manner, and is thus Halal.
Kanafani i think subscribed to Habash’s analysis that Palestine could not be free without a thorough going transformation of the Arab world, i think that goes for all of us everywhere now, well now we are free to eat each other, and people say no progress is being made, “The Arabs foremost in Hubris, foremost in Hypocrisy” cant argue with that, its scripture after all.
For such a deeply emotional topic, it’s amazing how pedestrian this article is – the Nakba write-up reads cold like a yahoo listing. And the writer is also completely and utterly wrong in her analysis about Ghassan Kanafani.
I should know. My parents were very good friends with Ghassan and his wife. I went to school with Kanafani’s kids. We rode the same school bus everyday. They lived four blocks from us. We were regular guests at each others’ houses and we sometimes had Sunday lunch family-outings together (I still have some grainy black and white pics). This was back in the late sixties/early seventies when my parents moved from USA to Lebanon for a few years because of my dad’s work. But back to my point regarding the article…
One gets the sense after reading it that Ghassan Kanafani was pro 2 state solution. That he accepted european zionism’s illegitimate claims on Palestine. Now why is the writer creating this fake sympathy, this false linkage? Is she simply under-researched or is she a hasbara agent?
Let’s be clear first, this here below is the essence of what Kanafani believed in:
1- No zionism in Historic Palestine/Israel is a european invader.
2- Liberation of the WHOLE of Historic Palestine through the armed struggle, partially guided by the Palestinian cultural intelligentsia.
“If there’s one thing Kanafani attempted to do through his works, it was to show the Jews and Palestinians that they were more similar than they knew”.
What a clueless statement. Kanafani didn’t need to “attempt” anything. What he thought and wrote was focused and clear. He was anti israel regardless of it’s jewishness – israelis could be Buddhist or atheist and he’d still be against them as invaders of Palestine. He was a literary and secular warrior. He spoke of Palestinians versus zionists/israelis, not of Palestinians versus “Jews”. His audience was the oppressed Palestinian and other repressed Arabs of all religious persuasions – to “attempt” to show his audience commonality with “Jews”, as the article claims, is just utterly ridiculous. It’s undeniable that Gassan clearly understood his audience needed empowering, not pacifying. He was a populist after all. So why is the writer here presenting Kanafani as a wandering pacifist looking for commonality? What’s the writer’s agenda here?
And why (like Henry Norr above remarked), why would the writer state in her last line that Kanafani was simply “assassinated”, without mentioning too who assassinated him and why? Why is she hiding israel’s bloody hands? WTF?!! Why did she exclude the most important piece of information? Her last line only needed two little extra words to present us with the whole truth: “assassinated” ‘BY ISRAEL’, she coulda EASILY added that! How ungenerous of the writer!
And I take particular offense to this omission, having actually heard the car-bomb that killed Kanafani outside his residential building. Yes I remember that boom very clearly till this day. Any journalist worth their investigative salt would have also added that Kanafani’s niece was also killed in the car-bomb. Kanafani’s brother and niece had spent the night at his house and in the morning all three went to get into Ghassan’s car when the brother, last minute, realized that he’d forgotten his toothbrush and headed back into the building to fetch it – as the car exploded at his back.
I mean, at this stage of dissecting this sham piece of writing, I’m wondering why the heck MW editors would publish such an amateur piece of liberal zionist propaganda disguised as Arab feminist writings. Why publish this thin piece of I-don’t-know-what to commemorate a grave and sombre occasion?
I’m sorry guys to tell you that I don’t believe a single word ‘womenunvailed’ has to say about the mideast. And I also don’t believe a word about her purported identity. Woman “unvailed” should not be covering up their face with a black handkerchief in their public foto – symbolically or literally.
This article is even worse than the last one she wrote. Probably the worst article Mondoweiss ever published.
Mondo folks, this here is a small taste of what the REAL Kanafani thought about the Nakba, taken from his book, ‘Returning To Haifa’:
“You should not have left Haifa. If that wasn’t possible, then no matter what it took, you should not have left an infant in its crib. And if that was also impossible, then you should have never stopped trying to return. You say that too was impossible? Twenty years have passed, sir! Twenty years! What did you do during that time to reclaim your son? If I were you I would’ve borne arms for that. Is there any stronger motive? You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of backwardness and paralysis! Don’t tell me you spent twenty years crying! Tears won’t bring back the missing or the lost. Tears won’t work miracles! All the tears in the world won’t carry a small boat holding two parents searching for their lost child. So you spent twenty years crying. That’s what you tell me now? Is this your dull, worn-out weapon?”
Now if the above passage isn’t a call to righteous armed resistance, I don’t know what is. Kanafani has written hundreds of such passages. Please do explore his books – they are highly recommended gems.
What true-blooded Arab woman, who allegedly fully supports the Palestinian plight, would turn a sanguine resistor like Ghassan Kanafani into a kombaya crooner! Who do you think benefits from diluting Kanafani’s ardent message? One thing we know for sure: once a revolutionary’s message has been successfully diluted, they cease to be revolutionaries and their books and ideas soon lose appeal and lapse into dust.
Lady (if you are a lady), what’s with the ‘@’ symbol before your “name”? What’s that about? Do please entertain us with a marvelous clever-clever anecdote ’bout how important it is for you to stay on top of the alphabetical ladder, the PR ladder, the ehm propaganda ladder. And why are you being afforded the luxury of calling yourself a “WomanUnveiled” anonymously but with veiled portrait – how does that work in your ‘chosen’ world? By jeebs you’re like a copycat of the writer of the ‘Syrian Lesbian’ hoax!
Sorry to do this but I’m raising the alarm on this contributor. I must – it’s my duty. Not just for her highly suspicious modus operandum, her motivation to be here on MW, but also because she is such an atrocious writer too! She’s disseminating covert propaganda AND lowering the high literary standard of this site.
Do something about this, investigate it – or else encourage her to come forward and answer some questions by this here commentator – others too if they’re so inclined.