This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Kotsai Siguake on 6 September at the London launch of the book Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings co-edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi. The book can be ordered below.
Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad on 8 July 1972 in a car bombing in Beirut. He was only 36 years old. He is one in a long line of revolutionaries murdered because they were implacable enemies of imperialism: Fred Hampton at 21, George Jackson at 29, Thomas Sankara at 37, James Connolly at 47, and the list goes on. And yet, despite being dead for 53 years, Ghassan Kanafani remains an icon.
With the resurgence of the Palestine solidarity movement demanded by Operation Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023 and the barbaric response of the Zionist state, we have seen in the imperialist countries, an increase in repression against anyone in solidarity with Palestine while the genocide in Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank continues. In these political conditions, this book is essential. It is vital that we recover Ghassan Kanafani’s ideas to help us find a way forward in our confrontation with imperialism.
Recovering revolutionary ideas
In State and Revolution Lenin explained that when revolutionaries are alive, they are persecuted and hounded by the oppressing classes. After their deaths, those same oppressing classes, as well as their opportunist lackeys, try to convert them into harmless icons, distort their ideas and purge them of their revolutionary content. This is true for Kanafani. While he was alive, he was a refugee and his organisation was vilified as a terror group. Now that he’s dead, he is quoted by all sorts of people and organisations, but very few of them actually grasp the revolutionary essence of his writings. You get those who try to downplay the fact that he was a Palestinian nationalist who was completely unwilling to compromise with Zionism and imperialism. On the other hand, you get those who present him as a narrow nationalist, ignoring the fact that he saw the Palestinian struggle as part of a broader class struggle against imperialism. Even worse, we even have some academics such as Hazem Jamjoum presenting Kanafani as an anarchist! This is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the key political reality – that Kanafani was a Marxist-Leninist committed to the liberation of Palestine and the working class and to deny the importance of communist analysis and practice within the wider context of the Palestinian liberation movement.
Kanafani and Lenin: national liberation and the working class
In the book we see Kanafani follows the communist tradition, established by Marx and Lenin, on the question of national liberation. While present in the first part of the book that looks at Arab nationalism and socialism, it is most emphasised in the chapters within part three of the book: “The target”: building the Marxist-Leninist Front. For Kanafani, national liberation and socialism are inseparably bound in a dialectical relationship, you cannot separate one from the other.
Kanafani analysed the different classes interests involved in the Palestinian struggle, he correctly identified the reactionary nature of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, now represented by the comprador Palestinian Authority since the Oslo Accords, and the potentially revolutionary yet vacillating role of the Palestinian petit bourgeoisie. While Kanafani advocated for a unified national front to confront Zionism, only the Palestinian peasantry and working class could play a consistently revolutionary role in the national struggle and lead the Palestinian masses to victory. Furthermore, he identified the main enemies of the Palestinian people: the Zionist entity, the Palestinian bourgeoisie, the reactionary Arab regimes, and world imperialism. All would have to be defeated. Kanafani was a firm internationalist. The liberation of Palestine cannot be separated from the liberation of the Middle East and all other oppressed peoples.
What we see here is the communist position on national liberation struggles that Lenin laid out almost five decades earlier. It is the only internationalist position. The nationally oppressed working class and peasantry fights against the oppressor bourgeoisie jointly with the nationally oppressed petit bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie inevitably enters into an agreement with imperialism to secure its own position and share the spoils of imperialist exploitation. The class conscious working class and peasantry follow their own independent class policy, which is why building a ‘Marxist-Leninist Front’ was crucial for Kanafani. Narrow nationalism leads to a capitulation on the class question which leads to a capitulation on the national question. On the other hand, abandoning the national question in favour of a reactionary, abstract internationalism leads to capitulation on the class question. Anyone who quotes Kanafani to flaunt their solidarity with Palestine but opposes the communist tradition is distorting Kanafani’s ideas.
By understanding Kanafani’s class analysis, we can see the destructive role opportunists in Britain play. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana make moralistic calls for ‘peaceful solutions’ and essentially water down the Palestinian cause from a struggle for national liberation to a humanitarian issue. Imperialist governments call for a two state ‘solution’ because they want to impose a pro-imperialist solution onto Palestine and liquidate the Palestinian struggle. Both the ‘humanitarian’ opportunists and the imperialist states want to deny the Palestinian working class agency and stop it from fulfilling its historical mission – the liberation of Palestine and the destruction of imperialism in the Middle East. In Britain, we must oppose this relentlessly. Kanafani looked at the question of national liberation as a communist in an oppressed nation; we look at the question of national liberation as communists in an imperialist nation. From this, we unconditionally support all the sections of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination while understanding that it is the Palestinian working class that is ultimately capable of leading the struggle to victory.
Kanafani and the armed struggle
Kanafani was unapologetic in his defence of the armed struggle. We are living in a time where supporting the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation through armed struggle is being criminalised as terrorism and all sorts of opportunists who flaunt their ‘solidarity with Palestine’ outright condemn the armed struggle (Jeremy Corbyn himself was proud to say that he had repeatedly condemned Operation Al Aqsa Flood in Parliament). This book shows us why defence of the armed struggle is essential. It comes out very clearly in the chapters: On the PFLP and the September Crisis and “A conversation between the sword and the neck”. Both were interviews where Kanafani was addressing criticism of the armed struggle and he was dealing with the same arguments back then that we hear today.
The September Crisis chapter has people arguing that the plane hijacking operations by the PFLP provoked the Jordanian state to attack the resistance, a common argument parroted by liberal media when discussing Israel’s genocide in Gaza today, and arguments that the operations failed to mobilise the masses, a common argument given by ‘left’ opportunists today who condemn the armed struggle. Kanafani patiently explained the political situation of the time and why the PFLP, after analysing this political situation, chose to take that course of action. The situation then was strikingly similar to today; the Palestinian resistance was isolated and the surrounding Arab regimes were entering into deals with imperialism and Israel in an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian resistance. The resistance operations forced the Palestinian cause back onto the world stage and disrupted these reactionary schemes. It’s clear that people who blame the Palestinians and their resistance for their own oppression are very ignorant of the concrete situation.
In the chapter “A conversation between the sword and neck”, Kanafani is again defending the armed resistance against an interviewer who makes moralistic appeals to peace by asking him why the PFLP don’t engage in peace talks with the Israelis to make the fighting stop. Essentially, as Kanafani points out, he was asking why the Palestinians don’t capitulate. This is not a conflict between two equal sides, this is an oppressed people who are fighting for liberation and fighting for their homeland. For the people of Palestine they have no choice but to fight.
In our solidarity with Palestine, we must support their right to struggle for liberation through any means necessary and that includes armed struggle. This also means fighting attempts to criminalise the armed struggle. To do this we must have not only the correct theoretical framework but also a concrete understanding of the political situation in Palestine. The opportunists who flaunt solidarity with Palestine while rejecting armed struggle come up with all sorts of theoretical justifications for their stance: for example the notion of a progressive Israeli working class, something that Kanafani himself rejects, or the idea that there can be peaceful resolution without the use of arms. These notions amount to capitulation to imperialism. By recovering the ideas of Kanafani we can see why such ideas are nonsense and expose those who push them.
As communists, we do not form a consensus with the bourgeoisie in condemning the resistance nor do we lecture Palestinians on how they resist. This is particularly important because the armed struggle is being criminalised and it is essential that we fight back against it. ‘Progressive’ politicians and organisations such as the PSC and Jeremy Corbyn either pretend the armed resistance doesn’t exist or have condemned the resistance and Operation Al Aqsa Flood outright which makes the state’s job of repressing anyone who shows solidarity with the resistance easier. The SOAS 2 are facing the possibility of up to 14 years in prison for defending Kanafani’s tradition.
Organisation, the masses and liberation
Kanafani was deeply inspired by the revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam, China and Russia. He frequently references the works of other Marxists – Lenin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung. From their experiences he argued the need to build a revolutionary organisation that could act as the vanguard for the Palestinian working class to lead the struggle. However, he did not blindly apply abstract formulas from Marxist texts to the Palestinian situation but he concretely analysed the practical tasks involved in building such an organisation and the challenges the Palestinians faced in building it.
At the same time, this was not simply a mechanical question. Kanafani stressed that organisation was about relationships and therefore dialectical. Only through examining the question in this way could the organisation be dynamic, flexible and responsive. He highlighted: the relationship between theory and practice; relationships between members of the organisation; relationships between members of the organisation and its leadership and cadre; relationships between the organisation and the masses.
These are important questions and they have been asked by every communist attempting to make revolution. The last point is particularly important. You have the masses, and then you have the organisation thrown up by the masses to lead it in struggle. But the masses are not idle, they participate in the struggle. Taking inspiration from Che Guevara, in the chapter Resistance is essence, Kanafani argued that the Palestinian struggle was not simply about Palestinians being granted a state but about transforming the Palestinians themselves. It was about creating new social relationships between Palestinians through struggle. In short, building consciousness in order to create a new human being.
Humanity is at a critical crossroads and it is the Palestinian resistance that has put us there. Everyone, everywhere, has a part to play in the fight against imperialism and the question of organisation is crucial to this. As Kanafani himself said:
“Imperialism has layed its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.”
It is up to us to organise and learn from the people of Palestine who have put themselves in the vanguard in the struggle to destroy imperialism. This book will equip us with the tools to do that.
Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024)
Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi (eds), Pluto Press 2024, 308pp
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