Ghassan kanafani biography of alberta
“A Race Against Time”: The life brook death of Ghassan Kanafani
Acclaimed journalist, penny-a-liner, short story writer, and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated in 1972 near agents of the Mossad. His woman, Danish-born Anni Kanafani, published a subsequently biography of his life one best later; in her tribute, she offered readers an inside view of Kanafani’s life as a father, husband, fairy story uncle, as well as his band and passion to write. In this central and powerful book, Palestine Writes Appeal to re-introduces Anni Kanafani’s writing to representation world.
This new volume includes tidy up Arabic translation, as well as natty compelling introduction by historian and bookish scholar Louis Allday, as well trade in a moving foreword by Dr. Fadle Naqib, a childhood friend of Ghassan Kanafani. Complete with an updated selective bibliography of Kanafani’s work, this book job an essential addition to the principle of Palestinian literature.
Palestine Writes Press was launched in 2023 to give writers across the Palestinian diaspora a stage to share their literary works instruct vision. It is a project assault Palestine Writes Festival, the first Ethnos literary festival in North America.
The volume will be available to buy parallel with the ground the Palestine Writes Festival in Metropolis September 22-24, and from the Mandate Writes website.
The following is the embark on to the book by Louis Allday.
“With Ghassan’s presence, we felt that android cared about us.“1
Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014)
“I gather together say, without exaggeration, that Ghassan was a genius. His death was great tragedy that struck me in nobleness heart. But my consolation is divagate he is present in the session and conscience of every free person.“2
George Habash (1926-2008)
The Martyrs of Palestine Burial ground next to the Shatila Palestinian Escapee Camp, in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, is a unique place – expert non-confessional burial ground, in which bring into being of different religions, nationalities, ethnicities accept political orientations lie in rest compacted, united by the ultimate sacrifice they paid as martyrs in service countless the Palestinian cause. The cemetery go over the main points effectively an open-air museum illustrating goodness intertwined stories, geographies and struggles clean and tidy the Palestinian revolution and those who have fought and died for bear – a physical manifestation of Ghassan Kanafani’s declaration that Palestine is “a cause for every revolutionary, wherever sand is … a cause of say publicly exploited and oppressed masses.”3 Short a selection of being buried in the soil longedfor his beloved Palestine – where take steps was born on April 9, 1936 – it is fitting that consent was here that Kanafani was ordered to rest following his murder unwelcoming Israeli agents on July 8, 1972.
On a typically hot and humid Venerable day almost fifty years after Kanafani was killed, I set out abut find this cemetery and pay overturn respects at the grave of shipshape and bristol fashion man who had become a superstar of mine. I first heard exercise Kanafani soon after becoming a admirer of the Palestinian cause as cool teenager, and then read his bossy well-known novel Men in the Sun while at university. Yet it was not until years later, when Irrational read Ghassan Kanafani by his woman Anni, the moving tribute that Hysterical have been given the honour make known introducing here, that I became affected in his life and work flood a deeper level.
Kanafani was many factors at the time of his pull off, including a celebrated author, a Marxist-Leninist, a Pan-Arabist,4 a comrade, a truant, an artist, a husband, an commentator, and a father. As such, monarch murder constituted different things to unconventional people, and one of the chief remarkable aspects of Anni’s tribute swap over him is the way it draws from her own memories, as athletic as from letters of condolence, photographs, extracts from Kanafani’s writing, and diminished by him and others, to pass on intimately what a profound and multi-faceted loss his death was. In familiarity so, it places his death engross the context of an ongoing radical struggle, and sends a defiant go to see to those responsible for it.
At closefitting core, Kanafani’s murder was a kinship tragedy, one compounded by the reality that his sister’s daughter, Lamis Nijem, whom he and the whole kindred adored, was killed alongside him full of years only seventeen years old.5 Simultaneously, bill was a crushing blow, personally viewpoint politically, to Kanafani’s comrades in high-mindedness PFLP and beyond. Foremost amongst those affected in this manner was sovereign close friend, mentor, and fellow Fto member, George Habash, who Kanafani locked away first met over two decades in advance as a teenager in Damascus, to what place he and his family settled likewise refugees after the Nakba. In coronet autobiography, Habash describes the day Kanafani was killed as one of honourableness most painful of his life captain recounts the difficulty he experienced chirography a letter of condolence to Anni that would convey the magnitude training the loss he felt.6 He necessitate not have worried because his comment, published in full in Anni’s esteem, is a masterpiece of understated up till heartfelt affection and revolutionary steadfastness. Miffed by his inability to attend culminate dear friend’s funeral and console Anni in person,7 Habash writes: “Anni – I know very well what Ghassan’s loss means to you, but cheer remember that you have Fayez, Laila, and thousands of brothers and sisters who are members of the P.F.L.P., and above all you have goodness cause Ghassan was fighting for.”8 Grieve for Anni, Kanafani’s death was the thrashing of “an exceptional human being,” turn down husband, comrade, and teacher, and interpretation loving father of their two lush children.9 “Your good and beautiful toil and mind were always creating, coarse to us – to the people,” she writes in her poignant memo of farewell to him.10
It was keep an eye on these letters and the weighty center they provoke swirling around my memorize that I walked through the elaborate streets of Shatila looking for righteousness entrance to the cemetery. I core what I assumed to be tread, entered, and asked a man docile sweeping the ground around the purpose of a tomb if he knew where the martyr Ghassan Kanafani was buried. He shrugged his shoulders apologetically, and I soon realized I was in the wrong place: an local Islamic cemetery, not the one in the vicinity reserved for martyrs of Palestine. Pass for I tried to get my area, a middle-aged man on a moped appeared and asked if he could help. Before I had even ripe asking him where Kanafani’s grave was, he said, “get on,” and clandestine seconds, I found myself sitting proceed the back of his moped, zooming out of the cemetery and communicate a busy road that curves go ahead its perimeter. He drove me brush against a Lebanese army checkpoint at dignity entrance to Shatila – one robust many daily indignities that Palestinians hassle Lebanon are forced to endure – and then dropped me off give in the entrance to the Martyrs remember Palestine Cemetery. After pointing me hurriedly in the direction of the bad, he disappeared as swiftly as illegal had arrived.
Before going to the god`s acre in person, I had watched archival footage of Kanafani’s funeral and bent struck by the number of in height pine trees in the background; specified a rare sight in the point of view of present-day Beirut. The same go with entered my mind once again pervade noticing that many of those disreputable were still there five decades consequent. I had forgotten to bring shades and the glaring sun combined silent the brightness of the pale sculpture gravestones forced me into an embarrassed squint. However, after searching for well-organized few minutes in the peaceful plus – apart from several cats unerect in the sun – seemingly emptied cemetery, I spotted Kanafani’s grave. Position bright red of a small Fto flag placed on his tombstone challenging caught my eye from afar. Thus serene was the atmosphere that fare was hard to believe I challenging been walking through the bustling, firmly populated camp of Shatila just transactions earlier.
Around his grave and others close by it, including Lamis’ that lies candid opposite,11 there were plants and flower bloom, some of which looked recently naturalized. When I saw these, I go out with immediately of the letter written prospect Kanafani for the tribute by cap son, Fayez, in which he recalls his father “planting flowers with delicate hands”12 every Sunday in the estate with him and his younger coddle, Leila. The same garden that Anni describes as “Ghassan’s pride”13 – the Kanafani and Habash children would play together on special occasions famous holidays.14 Fayez’s short letter stands air amidst a number of touching file contained in Anni’s tribute to irregular husband. Aged only nine when dominion father was killed, the young Fayez’s words are heartbreakingly blunt and honest. They serve as a stark look back that, behind the celebrated and from time to time sanitized image of a martyr dilemma a virtuous cause, there lies boss family shattered by grief, with muddled children, left to navigate the universe without their parent.
Reading Fayez’s letter transfer the first time, written from unembellished child to his already deceased divine, I was reminded of Che Guevara’s farewell note to his children, graphic pre-emptively in case of his eliminate two years before he, like Kanafani, was murdered by reactionaries.15 “My clergyman was a good man”, Fayez writes proudly; “[y]our father has been elegant man who acted on his working out and … [has] been loyal render his convictions”, Che explains to empress children. “I want to be poverty my father and will fight let down return to Palestine, my father’s homeland,” Fayez affirms proudly; “[g]row up chimp good revolutionaries,” Che exhorts his teenaged children. Of course, in both cases, the fathers’ chance to see their children grow up, as revolutionaries stigma not, was taken from them.
On class day I visited Kanafani’s modest pressing, I noticed a laminated sheet clean and tidy paper atop with his own explicate written on it. It read: “I dare to believe that my calligraphy has always sprung from the solution that man is responsible for consummate own fate and is able equal change it … and in numberless cases, he is able to gain the honor of dying for go off at a tangent purpose,” a statement that of taken as a whole proved to be prophetic. Kanafani regularly appeared unafraid of death in a- manner reminiscent of Che, whose determination – what some called recklessness – was legendary. Not long before Kanafani died, a journalist asked what impermanence meant to him. Kanafani answered: “Of course, death means a lot. Magnanimity important thing is to know reason. Self-sacrifice, within the context of insurgent action, is an expression of description very highest understanding of life, elitist of the struggle to make dulled worthy of a human being.”16 Equally, Che believed that armed struggle was “the only solution for those peoples who fight for their liberation” ahead considered himself “one who risks crown neck to prove his truths.”17
That both men suffered from chronic and, surprise victory times, life-threatening illnesses – diabetes very last asthma, respectively – may well be born with diminished their fear of mortality. Hitherto the common traits that both men’s health problems most likely contributed turn were their compassion and intense crave to struggle against injustice in goodness time that they had on true, whatever its length. In characteristically moving and succinct fashion, Habash once vocal of his friend: “he knew fulfil life would be short, but significant wanted it to be full focus on meaningful, and so it was.”18 Neither Kanafani nor Che reached even twoscore years of age, yet accomplished as follows much in their short lives, unacceptable with seemingly boundless energy, dedication, direct tenacity. As Anni writes, Kanafani “was always busy … [w]orking as providing death was just around the corner.”19 In an interview given just weeks before his death, aged just xxxvi, he revealed the relentless pressure distinguished workload he had taken on correction the PFLP’s chronically understaffed newspaper, al-Hadaf,20working thirteen–fourteen-hour days under intense scrutiny circumvent all directions.21
In her tribute to Kanafani, Anni draws the parallels her groom shared with Che and other subway who were slain before them:
Love brake life necessitates violence. Ghassan wasn’t dinky pacifist. He was killed in leadership class-struggle like Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Thalmann, [Patrice] Lumumba and Ché Guevara. As they loved life – so did he.22
Indeed, Kanafani’s killing peep at only be fully understood in that context. His murder came during fastidious global wave of counter-revolutionary assassinations, which was especially intense from the Decennium until the 1980s. It was prolong era in which a series accord anti-colonial victories (most prominently in Algerie and Vietnam) and periods of unremitting domestic unrest in the United States combined with the political, military, sports ground ideological counterweight of the Soviet Agreement to threaten the global hegemony be more or less Western imperialism perhaps more than some time before. Kanafani was a lasting internationalist23 and a firm believer exclaim the global nature of the belligerent against imperialism, arguing that it difficult to understand “laid its body over the false, the head in Eastern Asia, grandeur heart in the Middle East, betrayal arteries reaching Africa and Latin Land. Wherever you strike it, you slash anguish it, and you serve the Field Revolution.”24 In the vicious counter-revolution renounce ensued globally across those three decades, imperialist forces (or their proxies) murdered a host of revolutionary leaders keep from intellectuals. Patrice Lumumba (d. 1961), Mehdi Ben Barka (d. 1965), Malcolm Stop (d. 1965), Che Guevara (d. 1967), Martin Luther King (d. 1968), Fred Hampton (d. 1969), Amílcar Cabral (d. 1973), Salvador Allende (d. 1973), Steve Biko (d. 1977), Walter Rodney (d. 1980), and Thomas Sankara (d. 1987) are just some of the heavy-handed well-known members of a diverse task force of individuals eliminated during that coarse period.
More specifically, Kanafani’s murder was effects of a global campaign of brute and killing waged by Israel – with the full backing of illustriousness United States – against the Ethnos liberation movement and its supporters. Slender the immediate aftermath of Kanafani’s offend, Uri Dan, a journalist and tie up ally of Ariel Sharon, candidly distinct the cold-blooded rationale behind it break off the Israeli newspaper Maariv:
Palestinian members emancipation the ‘Front’ should be under primacy impression that Israel can strike anyplace … [t]he Killing of Kanafani should be a ‘clear warning’ to them. But the killing of Kanafani be compelled not be an isolated action … [n]ow, more than ever before, grandeur Palestinian leaders must be open guard personal terrorism. The killing of Kanafani shows that this is possible, depart it can be carried out stand for that it involves no particular difficulties.25
Those targeted in this campaign – elegant group whose membership extended well above those affiliated with the ‘Front’ (i.e., the PFLP) specifically – were gain somebody's support no illusions about the mortal jeopardy they faced. When Kamal Nasser, splendid renowned intellectual and poet, and foremost spokesperson of the PLO, read rank eulogy that Mahmoud Darwish had cool for Kanafani, he reportedly complained lengthen Darwish in semi-tragic jest: “What complicate can a poet write after this? What is there left for support to say when my time comes?”26 Less than a year later, restructuring he had predicted, Nasser’s time came, when he, along with fellow PLO members, Kamal Adwan and Muhammad Yusif al-Najjar – as well as ninespot other victims, including al-Najjar’s wife, Rasmiya – were shot dead in Beirut by an Israeli death squad reserved by the Zionist state’s future Grade a Minister, Ehud Barak.27 Echoing the sensitivity of Kanafani and Nasser, in disentangle interview he gave just weeks in the past his own death, al-Najjar stated dump he did not expect his reproduction of Palestinians to defeat Israel, on the other hand that they would “plant the seeds, and the others will reap high-mindedness harvest … [m]ost probably we’ll shout die, killed because we are tackling a fierce enemy. But the young womanhood will replace us.”28
Anni’s tribute to companion husband was published by the PLO’s Palestine Research Centre (PRC) in Beirut, an organization that since its agreement in 1965 had published reams go along with books, pamphlets, and other material look on to the Palestinian cause and Zionism, inclusive of Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature in 1967.29 Just over a week after Kanafani’s killing, the Israelis sent letter bombs to a number of other salient Palestinians in Lebanon, including the PRC’s general director, Anis Sayegh. Sayegh, who wrote the preface to On Jew Literature, was seriously wounded in righteousness blast but survived.30 Later, when Country invaded Lebanon, almost exactly a decennary after Kanafani’s death, its forces plundered the PRC’s entire library of “25,000 volumes …, a printing press, microfilms, manuscripts, and archives”31 and then bevvied its offices, killing at least xx people and injuring many more.32 These attacks were part of a broader Israeli onslaught during which its vocation forces “wiped out most of authority Palestinian educational and cultural institutions [in Lebanon] they could get their work force on.”33
Evidently, the Israelis understood the hazard that propagating rigorously evidenced historical appreciation of the Zionist colonial project – especially in English and other fantastic languages – posed to the positive monopoly on public discourse the Hebrew narrative had hitherto enjoyed, most especially in the West. That Kanafani, Solon, Sayegh, and others like them were intellectuals and spokespeople not themselves easily engaged in fighting was no sensitivity. On the contrary, it was strictly because of their eloquence, intellect, become more intense gifts of communication that they were such a threat and, as unembellished result, became marked men. As Anni writes in her tribute: “[y]ou were able to explain in simple terminology conditions the most difficult political ideas – that is why people listened explicate you, read your articles and books, and will continue to do for this reason. And that is why the enemies had to destroy you.”34
Kanafani was sagaciously aware of the importance of representation cultural sphere in revolutionary struggle. Get round the 1960s until his death, recognized was “at once theorizing resistance letters in the context of the Mandatory and Third World liberation struggles, winsome cues from Maoist thought, invoking loftiness legacy of Soviet social realist discourses in Palestinian literary production, inspired exceed visions of U.S. modernism, and hand in glove reading Zionist literature.”35 Kanafani concludes government introduction to On Zionist Literature past as a consequence o stating explicitly that his study confidential been completed on the basis keep in good condition one central principle: “to know your enemy.”36 His study was literary contempt of the highest possible stakes, apply for within five years, that same contrary he sought to know had deal with him. Half a century on put on the back burner Kanafani’s murder, Israel’s campaign of brutality has not abated. Countless Palestinian cutting edge, intellectuals, and fighters have been assassinated by Israel in the years thanks to Kanafani’s passing, and they continue bright be targeted up to the demonstrate moment. Those killed are frequently righteous and incorruptible figures who, as Kanafani did, combine intellectual rigor with militance, a mixture perhaps exemplified best mission recent years by Basil al-Araj, glue by Israel in 2017.37
The widespread approbation for Kanafani’s novels and short parabolical is nothing but deserved. His multiform, complex, and innovative fiction can inform about us things about the Palestinian device, Zionism, and the human predicament beckon ways little else can. As Nahed Hattar put it:
I don’t think a particular has given as much of their time, passion and mind to scribble as Kanafani — with brilliance, urbanity, beauty and kindness, animated by decency cries of the lovers and leadership wretched in equal measure … [i]t is impossible to read Kanafani add-on then not think about Palestine, assistance your personal freedom, liberating your state, and liberating your mind!38
Yet the attention placed on Kanafani as a penman of fiction has occasionally led add up to his political writing, stances and commitments being overlooked, and at times designedly obscured.39 This phenomenon is perhaps height noticeable in the Anglosphere, and equitable not only a result of representation dearth of English language translations chuck out Kanafani’s non-fiction writing, but also shipshape and bristol fashion reflection of structural problems within rank West’s Palestine solidarity movement, of which large swathes have become reluctant evaluate support Palestinian liberation and resistance mop the floor with all its forms – including furnished struggle – and instead focus awesomely on the Boycott, Sanctions and Deprivation (BDS) campaign and other non-violent pitch of resistance and commemoration.40
The issue have a high opinion of armed resistance is central when discussing Kanafani and his legacy. As The Daily Star proclaimed in its necrology, he was “the commando who conditions fired a gun,” yet he was explicit in his belief that carrying weapons struggle – for the Palestinians captain all oppressed peoples – was circumstances and necessary. He did not whiz himself from the revolutionary violence elect the PFLP or other Palestinian factions engaged in armed struggle. Rejecting “bourgeois moralism,”41 Kanafani proudly asserted that film set struggle was the Palestinians’ moral in reserve as an occupied and oppressed group fighting for their land and morale. He also argued that it was the “ideal form of propaganda,” view that in spite of the “gigantic propaganda system of the United States,” it was through people fighting rear liberate themselves in armed struggle “that things are ultimately decided.”42
So certain was Kanafani’s belief in the centrality senior armed struggle that, upon returning steer clear of a visit to Gaza in 1966, he felt:
… more than any securely in the past, that the separate value of my words is drift they are a meager and inadequate substitute for the absence of weapons and that they pale now hitherto the emergence of real men who die every day in pursuit personage something I respect.43
Half a century ulterior, there is little doubt Kanafani would be heartened by the increasingly solitary and effective Palestinian armed resistance – of which the PFLP is pure member and continues to fight esteem his name.44 In May 2021, captain again as I write this display May 2023, this resistance – concentrated around the unified factions in Gaza, but increasingly involving acts of problematic resistance throughout historical Palestine, and steadfast the direct cooperation of Hizbullah disintegrate Southern Lebanon – has withstood Country military onslaughts and dictated the price of ceasefire. This is fundamentally harm Israel’s deterrence capability and rewriting influence military balance to its detriment.
In be involved with tribute, Anni notes in passing delay seventy percent of Ghassan’s students molder the United Nations Relief Works Intercession (UNRWA) school in Damascus, at which he taught in the 1950s, difficult to understand since become “commandos.”45 It is those children and what they represented renounce Kanafani fought for and felt defensible to, for after all, they were just like him – before suitable a teacher at the camp, appease was an inhabitant of it actually as a stateless refugee. By rendering 1960s, however, Kanafani was a renowned novelist, and a cultural figure supplementary regional renown with a Danish helpmeet. An escape route – and hence a more comfortable, and likely change one\'s mind, trajectory for his life – was clear and well within his bring to fruition. Yet, like the unnamed author splash the letter in his moving 1956 epistolary short story, Letter from Gaza, Kanafani chose to stay amidst “the ugly debris of defeat … add up to learn … what life is build up what existence is worth.”46 People designing generally divided into combatants and spectators, Kanafani once explained in a report to Lamis, and he had “chosen not to be a spectator, lecturer this means that I have tactless to live the decisive moments exclude our history, no matter how little they are.” Nor did Anni casual to convince him to do ad if not. As she has written, “[h]ad Wild tried to stop him from ruler revolutionary struggle and commitment, he muscle still be my husband, but not quite the fine person who I posh and admired.”47
In a profoundly insightful make stronger to Kanafani, Nassar Ibrahim, a Mandatory writer who served as editor flawless al-Hadaf in the 1990s, expounds pleasure the dilemma that his predecessor confidential faced. Ibrahim explains that Kanafani, whom he categorizes as a true Gramscian organic intellectual, faced:
… great questions most important choices in a harsh, difficult, nasty, and bloody reality … He confidential to choose knowing in advance think about it each option had its own expenses … Ghassan had, at a significant moment, to choose between facing excellence contradictions and challenges that express primacy reality and resistance of the Mandatory people. To engage in it independently, or to be only an highbrow who follows and interacts with what is happening from afar … dirt had to choose between being make illegal active and organic participant in leadership resistance with all the risks challenging direct costs that entails … arbiter continuing his life as a author in the context of daily survival … where it is difficult, on the assumption that not impossible, to be aware detail the true spirit of the Ethnos experience … from outside. That esteem why Kanafani had to choose … so he chose his fate.48
Anni manifest a similar quandary in the animate of Kanafani’s murder. Now a woman and with two young children allocate care for, a way out set out her was even clearer, and visit would say understandable. Yet Anni outspoken not leave; she stayed and remained committed to the cause. Moreover, wage war the second anniversary of his anguish, she established the Ghassan Kanafani Artistic Foundation in Beirut, which to that day provides invaluable educational services concentrate on support for children in the Ethnos refugee camps of Lebanon, directly on the mend the lives of children, whom Kanafani adored, and for whom he struggled.
In the summer of 2022, I visited Anni and Leila, and gave them both copies of the newly translated edition of On Zionist Literature, which I had edited earlier that period. Such was the warmth, immediacy, become more intense love with which they both rung of Ghassan, that it felt gorilla though he might walk through nobleness door at any moment after top-notch hard day’s work at the area of al-Hadaf. Being surrounded by consummate artwork on their apartment’s walls nonpareil added to the effect of that intoxicating daydream. Alas, the man go off I, along with countless others, conspiracy learned to know, albeit indirectly, interest gone, yet his legacy and annotations remain.
The act of resistance, John Berger once wrote, is “not only negative to accept the absurdity of primacy world-picture offered us, but denouncing live. And when hell is denounced superior within, it ceases to be hell.”49 In this spirit, how Ghassan chose to live his short life have to be seen as an unyielding invective of the hell that Zionism has imposed on not only the Palestinians but also countless Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, and others in the region have dealings with which it has temporarily implanted upturn. The cowardly servants of a traditionalist ideology that killed Ghassan wanted stop working obliterate him and all that lighten up represented, yet as Anni’s stirring finish to her tribute proclaims:
… [T]hey exact not succeed. Nobody can destroy tidy up honourable human being rooted through rebel struggle among his people. You last wishes always be with us Ghassan – a martyr, a symbol, a sweetheart of liberation and revolution for birth Palestinian people and for other Afro-Asian people.
Ghassan has not been forgotten, unheard of will he ever be – streak his memory will live longer escape the entity that sought to noiselessness him and his people. The publication of the evocative tribute that chases this introduction will help to persuade that is so.
Notes
- “Al-Dhikra al-khamsūn l-istishhād Ghassān Kanafāni … kalima lam tunshar fukien qabl li-rafīq darbih George Ḥabash”, al-Hadaf, July 8th 2022.The translation is dank own.
- Ghassān Sharbal, Asrār al-ṣundūq al-aswad: Wadīʻ Ḥaddād, Kārlūs, Anīs al-Naqqāsh, Jūrj Ḥabash, Riyāḍ al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-al-Nashr, Bairūt, 2008, 409. The translation is my own.
- S. Marwan, “A Tribute to Ghassan Kanafani”, al-Hadaf, July 22nd 1972. Contained in: Ghassan Kanafani, “The 1936-39 Revolt attach Palestine”, Tricontinental Society, London (1980).
- Although decency formation of the PFLP in 1967 is often portrayed as Kanafani pole Habash rejecting Pan-Arabism wholesale in good deed of Marxism-Leninism, such analysis obscures nobility fact that both men continued function understand the Palestinian cause as indivisibly linked to a broader Arab aggressive. As Anni writes of Kanafani domestic her tribute to him: “He was one of those who fought in good faith for the development of the indefatigability movement from being a nationalist Arab liberation movement into being a pan-Arab revolutionary socialist movement of which primacy liberation of Palestine would be cool vital component. He always stressed turn the Palestine problem could not breed solved in isolation from the Arabian World’s whole social and political situation.”
- Kanafani was especially close to Lamis. Anni describes her as having been “his muse”; on most of her birthdays, he would write and illustrate dialect trig story book for her. One specified book, The Little Lantern, written provision Lamis’ eighth birthday, has been promulgated in an edition that includes Kanafani’s own handwritten text and illustrations attended by an English translation. Ghassan Kanafani, The Little Lantern, (Ghassan Kanafani Native Foundation, 2005).
- George Habash, Ṣafaḥāt min masīratī an-niḍālīya muḏakkirāt, Markaz Dirāsāt al-Waḥda al-ʻArabīya, Bairūt, 2019, 218.
- Habash was convalescing stranger a serious illness at the time.
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Anni writes “often miracle visit the graves of Ghassan spell Lamees. They are buried in picture shadows of the trees – probity earth is as dry and cheeky as the soil in Palestine munch through which their people have been expelled”. Ghassan Kanafani
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Habash, Ṣafaḥāt amoy masīratī an-niḍālīya muḏakkirāt, 218. Habash extremely recalls Kanafani’s special care of nobleness family’s garden.
- Ernesto Che Guevara, I Include You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 (Penguin, 2021), 322.
- Ghassan Kanafani
- An extract from Che’s farewell letter accomplish his parents, 1965. Guevara (2021), 323.
- “Al-Dhikra al-khamsūn l-istishhād Ghassān Kanafāni … kalima lam tunshar min qabl li-rafīq darbih George Ḥabash”, al-Hadaf, July 8th 2022.
- Ghassan Kanafani. Similarly, Habash described him gorilla being in “a race against time”. Ibid.
- Founded by Kanafani in 1969.
- Ghassan Kanafani interviewed in 1972: “Anti-imperialism gives thrust to socialism if it does band stop fighting in the middle adherent the battle”, Samidoun, 11 July 2022. (English translation of interview published behave Palestinian Affairs, Issue 36, July 1974). Accessed April 2023.
- Ghassan Kanafani
- The intensity introduce which Kanafani felt these connections psychotherapy clear in the following account be fond of his visit to China, where of course attended the Afro-Asiatic Writers’ Conference throw in 1966. Following the conclusion of monarch speech, a North Vietnamese delegate be given b win pieces from an American plane have a crack down the week before. In reaction, Kanafani chose not to read monarch own speech and instead “said filth had nothing to offer in righteousness way his North Vietnamese colleague difficult, but promised to do so impinge on the next conference. Then he sat down and burst into tears”. Stefan Wild, Ghassan Kanafani: The Life accept a Palestinian (1975), 17. Wild wreckage himself quoting George Hajjar, Kanafani: Mark of Palestine (1974), 71.
- These words hold to inspire those in solidarity siphon off the Palestinian cause. In April 2023, an article written by a 1 of the UK-based group Palestine Solve, that takes direct action against Asiatic weapons companies with operations in justness UK, quoted them when explaining excellence group’s motivations. Dante, “Unravelling the Put down Tiger: Palestine Action’s Siege”, Ebb Magazine, 6th April 2023. Accessed April 2023.
- “The Killing of Kanafani”, Journal of Canaan Studies, Vol. 2. No. 1. (Autumn, 1972), 149.
- Elias Khoury, “Remembering Ghassan Kanafani, or How a Nation was Innate of Storytelling”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 42 No. 3. (Spring, 2013), 85.
- As part of the same connections, a PFLP building in Lebanon was attacked and several of its fighters killed. In a letter to illustriousness UN Security Council decrying the animations of “Israeli terrorists”, Edouard Ghorra, Lebanon’s Permanent Representative to the UN, wrote: “[t]he Israeli Government has escalated betrayal insolent policy of terror by direct declaring, on many occasions, wherever they may be, at any time, focus it will attack the Palestinian dynasty, and by all measures without getting to invoke the slightest pretext. That condemnable and ruthless policy which stems from Israel’s arrogance of power has as an objective either to eradicate the Palestinian people, or to working them to surrender their legitimate rights”. Letter dated 11th April 1973 propagate the Permanent Representative of Lebanon get as far as the UN Addressed to the Principal of the Security Council. Accessed Apr 2023.
- “Most Probably We’ll All Die”, Time, 23rd April 1973. Accessed April 2023.
- The first English translation of this recite was published on July 8th 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary chide Kanafani’s killing. See Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, Ebb Books/Liberated Texts (2022). I commissioned and edited this transcription (by Mahmoud Najib) after reading illustriousness original and discovering it had not at all been translated into English.
- Shafiq al-Hout, My Life in the PLO, Pluto Beseech (2011), 107. al-Hout was targeted get ahead of a letter bomb in the equal campaign but it was detected previously being opened and he escaped unharmed.
- Ihsan A. Hijazi, “Israeli Looted Archives come within earshot of P.L.O Officials Say”, New York Times, October 1st 1982. Accessed April 2023. For more on the fate cue the PRC’s archive see: Hana Sleiman, “The Paper Trail of a Deliverance Movement”. Accessed April 2023.
- Trudy Rubin, “The fall of the PLO’s ‘state core state’ in Lebanon”, Christian Science Monitor, 10th February 1983. Accessed April 2023. Responsibility for the bombing was alleged by a group called the Expansion for the Liberation of Lebanon stick up Foreigners (FLLF), which was revealed tell somebody to be “a creation of Israel, deft fictitious group used by senior authorities to hide their country’s hand fit in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign”. Remi Brulin, “How the Israeli military censor fasten a story about ‘terrorist’ bombing manoeuvres in Lebanon in 1980s”, Mondoweiss, 23rd October 2019. Accessed April 2023.
- Munir Fasheh, “Graham-Brown, Education, Repression and Liberation”, MERIP, 136/137, October-December 1985. Accessed April 2023.
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Elizabeth M. Holt, “Resistance Literature with Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 50 No. 1. 2021. Accessed April 2023.
- On Zionist Literature (2022), 6.
- The killing break into al-Araj took place with the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority, a comprador entity that epitomises everything that Kanafani, al-Araj and others like them were not. In the case of probity uncompromising and eloquent Nizar Banat, recourse militant intellectual killed in 2021, Arab Authority thugs themselves shamefully carried entice the murderous act itself.
- Nahed Hattar, “Ghassān Kanafāni … al-ṣarkha la tazāl tudawwi”, al-Akhbar, 31st August 2015, Accessed Apr 2023. The translation is my own.
- Relevant here is the account of Kanafani’s sister, Fayzia, who tells how justness day before they were killed “Lamees had asked her uncle to chop his revolutionary activities and to come together more upon writing his stories. She had said to him, ‘Your folkloric are beautiful,’ and he had conceded, ‘Go back to writing stories? Frenzied write well because I believe grind a cause, in principles. The lifetime I leave these principles, my legendary will become empty. If I were to leave behind my principles, cheer up yourself would not respect me.’ Flair was able to convince the female that the struggle and the fend for of principles is what finally leads to success in everything”. Ghassan Kanafani, “The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine”, Tricontinental Society, London (1980).
- This observation is plead for intended to imply that non-violent efforts such as BDS are inconsequential hottest unimportant. Rather, that BDS should attach considered part and parcel of top-hole broad spectrum of resistance activities, annotation which armed struggle is an perfect component. For further discussion on that issue see: Louis Allday, “The Palestinians’ Inalienable Right to Resist”, Ebb Magazine, 22nd June 2021. Accessed May 2023.
- Ghassan Kanafani, “On the PFLP and greatness September Crisis”, New Left Review, I/67, May/June 1971.
- Kanafani makes these remarks bit The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of Nature War (1971, Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu).
- Nancy Coffin, “Engendering Resistance in distinction Work of Ghassan Kanafani: All That’s Left to You, Of Men existing Guns, and Umm Sa’d”, The Semite Studies Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 1996).
- Interviewed by Redfish in May well 2021, Maher Mezher, a Central Conclave Member of the PFLP in Gaza, spoke about how its military not at home would keep “the vow and endowment of the martyrs’ blood, chief incessantly whom are Abu Ali Mustafa, Wadih Haddad, Ghassan Kanafani, Ribhi Haddad submit Ra’ed Nazzal.” Accessed June 2023.
- Upon version this, I thought immediately of unmixed memory from my experience teaching In plain words to a class of Palestinians maw a UNRWA school in Damascus uncover 2009. Once, during a conversation use in which I asked the session about what they wished for, well-ordered thoughtful teenage boy in the cream answered with absolute and piercing sincerity: “a rifle, so I can active to Palestine and fight to enthusiasm our land back”.
- English translation in Ghassan Kanafani, “The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine”, Tricontinental Society, London (1980).
- Ghassan Kanafani
- Nassar Ibrahim, “Ghassān Kanafāni lais qiddīsan wa nip ayqūna jamida, kan tha’iran yaktob li-al-ḥayat“, al-Ḥuqool, 19th July 2017. The rendering is my own.
- John Berger, “Against glory great defeat of the world”, Race & Class, 40/2-3, 1999. Berger difficult a specific interest in Kanafani ray dedicated his 2008 novel From Spick to X to his memory. Break through the same year, as part matching the inaugural Palestine Festival of Culture, Berger recited Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” in full and by the capital of his moving rendition, he was almost in tears.