Ghassan Kanafani and the freedom fighters: Confronting torture and genocide in Gaza
Khaled Barakat
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Republished from Al-Akhbar in Lebanon
Gaza was consistently visible in the thought, literature, and artistic works of the martyr Ghassan Kanafani. It remained, ubiquitous and immortal, in his words and phrases, like a bridge to eternity, never disappearing except to reappear.
There is hardly any form of writing and artistic and literary expression that the revolutionary writer did not employ in the service of the Palestinian resistance. Perhaps Kanafani was the first to draw revolutionary posters about the resistance fighters and the siege in the Gaza Strip, highlighting the Battle of Maghazi and calling for supporting Gaza’s steadfastness, and issuing his call to the revolutionary forces in the world to support the escalating resistance and its steadfast people in the rebellious Strip.
At the time, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which Kanafani participated in founding and became its official spokesman, was the most visible and effective party in confronting the Zionist enemy in the Strip between 1967 and 1973. Kanafani spoke more than once about the comprehensive siege imposed upon Gaza, and in a long interview with the English magazine, New Left Review, in 1971, he indicated that Gaza was not only besieged by land, sea, and air, but that they were also “psychologically besieged.” Kanafani explains the specific conditions of the Palestinian resistance in the Strip and their experience, that reads as if he were talking to you today. When a journalist asked him about drawing a comparison between the escalating resistance in Gaza and the difficulties of guerrilla struggle in the occupied West Bank, Kanafani reveals the exceptional situation in Gaza, pointing to the population density in the small Strip (360,000 refugees at the time) and the availability of weapons training opportunities for young people due to the presence of the Palestine Liberation Army forces and their proximity to Egypt. He also revealed the failed attempts of the occupation and the Jordanian regime to “bribe the masses of the West Bank” as well as the various forms of direct repression they faced. When we read Ghassan’s writings today, we discover an important fact: Gaza has been under siege for half a century, not two decades.
In 1966, while participating in the Writers’ Union conference held in the Gaza Strip, Kanafani wrote a personal letter while looking out “on the shore of the sad sea” saying: “I’m well-known here- I can even say that I’m “loved”, more than I ever imagined, and this is something that humiliates me, because I know that I won’t have enough time to live up to people’s expectations from me, and that, in all scenarios, I will fail to be like they expect me to be. All day and night I receive people, and in shops the shopkeepers almost give me whatever I want for free. Everywhere I go, I’m received with warmth that increases my feeling of coldness and the shortage of my trip to these people and to myself. I feel, more than any other time, that the value of my words is like a silly compensation for the absence of resistance weapons, and that it now bows in front of the glory of the real men who die every day for something I respect. All of that makes me feel a sense of longing similar to death, and the happiness of a dying person after a long journey of faith and torture, but also a striking sense of humiliation.”
Ghassan Kanafani has returned to speak for the revolution once more today, in the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood. With it has returned his short story, Letter from Gaza, translated into multiple languages. This immortal literary piece is perhaps the most widely circulated and read piece about what children suffer in the Strip, as resonant today as 70 years ago when it was first written.
The narrator says to his friend, “Ill children have something of saintliness, and how much more so if the child is ill as result of cruel, painful wounds.” The “letter” comes with all its details, characters and events to reach the little girl, Nadia, who threw herself on top of her siblings to protect them from the bombs, flames and fire thrown upon them. She lost her leg, it was amputated at the thigh, and she no longer needed the “gift” (red pants, brought for her by her uncle from Kuwait) as much as she needed something else: the decision of her uncle (the narrator) to stay and to struggle, rather than to leave for Sacramento and College of Engineering at the University of California to which he had been accepted. The scenes of the story are so current as to be painful, speaking about Shuja’iyya, the bombardment, and the streets of Gaza. It seems to the reader as if Kanafani had finished writing them this morning.
Once again, his epic novel, “All that’s Left to You,” also returns to our consciousness. Kanafani’s second novel condenses the meaning and feelings of loss and betrayal, and the people of Gaza’s experience of deception and siege. It is the story of a Palestinian family that was uprooted from Yafa, to find itself besieged in the Gaza Strip, without a mother or a father. The girl Maryam is preyed upon by the traitor Zakaria, who sold his conscience to the enemy and raped and impregnated Maryam. Maryam was besieged and abandoned, sad, violated, and a bride without a dowry, as all of her “rights were postponed.” As such, she had no choice but revolution, disobedience, and taking up arms.
If Ghassan Kanafani’s first novel, “Men in the Sun,” told of the death of Palestinians in the desert, fleeing death and siege in search of individual salvation, then the novel, “All That’s Left to You,” despite its harshness, heralded revolution and the search for collective salvation. It was clear that there were those born to knock on the walls of the tank in Gaza. It was natural for Maryam to rise up and stab Zakaria, who told her, “Your entire dowry is postponed.” Either her brother Hamed, the potential feda’i, the freedom fighter, the hope and the future, would live, or the traitor Zakaria would continue to threaten her and impose his conditions. In Ghassan Kanafani’s view and thought, it is and was impossible to make a reconciliation or agreement between the two paths.
The Zionist enemy also realized the importance of Ghassan Kanafani’s presence and legacy in Gaza, so it attempted, with the help of some agents, to stir up strife within the Strip in late August 2015, and spread a malicious and false rumor stating that “the Hamas government intends to change the name of the Ghassan Kanafani Elementary School in Rafah” in an attempt to create political and social division. However, the vigilance of the masses of Gaza and the resistance in the Strip prevented the enemy, its intelligence, and the agents of chaos and destruction from having the opportunity to undermine that unified front. As we write today, we note that the enemy finally destroyed large parts of the aforementioned school, and other schools bearing the name of Kanafani in its genocidal assault on Gaza in 2023-24.
Ghassan Kanafani said in the Beirut Symposium in March 1968: “Something great is being born from the rubble of defeat, just as a volcano is born from under the cold fragments of an abandoned mountain. If a wound opens in a dead body, it does not cause any shaking, but if it opens in a living body, it increases its ability to resist, activates the latent power deep within it, and multiplies its capacity to respond.”