like a mermaid in captivity

[...] The Martyrs of Palestine Cemetery next to the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, is a unique place – a non-confessional burial ground, in which people of different religions, nationalities, ethnicities and political orientations lie in rest together, united by the ultimate sacrifice they paid as martyrs in service of the Palestinian cause. The cemetery is effectively an open-air museum illustrating the intertwined stories, geographies and struggles of the Palestinian revolution and those who have fought and died for it – a physical manifestation of Ghassan Kanafani’s declaration that Palestine is “a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is … a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses.” Short of being buried in the soil of his beloved Palestine – where he was born on April 9, 1936 – it is fitting that it was here that Kanafani was laid to rest following his murder by Israeli agents on July 8, 1972. [...]

Kanafani was many things at the time of his death, including a celebrated author, a Marxist-Leninist, a Pan-Arabist, a comrade, a refugee, an artist, a husband, an uncle, and a father. As such, his murder constituted different things to different people, and one of the most remarkable aspects of Anni’s tribute to him is the way it draws from her own memories, as well as from letters of condolence, photographs, extracts from Kanafani’s writing, and artwork by him and others, to convey intimately what a profound and multi-faceted loss his death was. In doing so, it places his death in the context of an ongoing revolutionary struggle, and sends a defiant message to those responsible for it.

At its core, Kanafani’s murder was a family tragedy, one compounded by the fact that his sister’s daughter, Lamis Nijem, whom he and the whole family adored, was killed alongside him aged only seventeen years old. Simultaneously, it was a crushing blow, personally and politically, to Kanafani’s comrades in the PFLP and beyond. Foremost amongst those affected in this manner was his close friend, mentor, and fellow PFLP member, George Habash, who Kanafani had first met over two decades earlier as a teenager in Damascus, where he and his family settled as refugees after the Nakba. In his autobiography, Habash describes the day Kanafani was killed as one of the most painful of his life and recounts the difficulty he experienced writing a letter of condolence to Anni that would convey the magnitude of the loss he felt. He need not have worried because his letter, published in full in Anni’s tribute, is a masterpiece of understated yet heartfelt affection and revolutionary steadfastness. Pained by his inability to attend his dear friend’s funeral and console Anni in person, Habash writes: “Anni – I know very well what Ghassan’s loss means to you, but please 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 the cause Ghassan was fighting for.” For Anni, Kanafani’s death was the loss of “an exceptional human being,” her husband, comrade, and teacher, and the loving father of their two young children. “Your good and beautiful hands and mind were always creating, giving to us – to the people,” she writes in her poignant letter of farewell to him.

[...] The issue of armed resistance is central when discussing Kanafani and his legacy. As The Daily Star proclaimed in its obituary, he was “the commando who never fired a gun,” yet he was explicit in his belief that armed struggle – for the Palestinians and all oppressed peoples – was legitimate and necessary. He did not distance himself from the revolutionary violence of the PFLP or other Palestinian factions engaged in armed struggle. Rejecting “bourgeois moralism,” Kanafani proudly asserted that armed struggle was the Palestinians’ moral right as an occupied and oppressed people fighting for their land and dignity. He also argued that it was the “ideal form of propaganda,” and that in spite of the “gigantic propaganda system of the United States,” it was through people fighting to liberate themselves in armed struggle “that things are ultimately decided.”

So certain was Kanafani’s belief in the centrality of armed struggle that, upon returning from a visit to Gaza in 1966, he felt:

… more than any time in the past, that the sole value of my words is that they are a meager and insufficient substitute for the absence of weapons and that they pale now before the emergence of real men who die every day in pursuit of something I respect. 

Half a century later, there is little doubt Kanafani would be heartened by the increasingly unified and effective Palestinian armed resistance – of which the PFLP is a member and continues to fight in his name. In May 2021, and again as I write this in May 2023, this resistance – centered around the unified factions in Gaza, but increasingly involving acts of coordinated resistance throughout historical Palestine, and with the direct cooperation of Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon – has withstood Israeli military onslaughts and dictated the terms of ceasefire. This is fundamentally undermining Israel’s deterrence capability and rewriting the military balance to its detriment. [...]