القط الأسود

[...] 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. [...]

Björketorp runestone, Blekinge, Sweden c. 500–700CE.

transcription: ᚺᚼᛁᛞᛉᚱᚢᚾᛟᚱᛟᚾᚢᚠᚼᛚᚼᚺᚼᚴᚺᚼᛁᛞᛖᚱᚼᚷᛁᚾᚼᚱᚢᚾᚼᛉᚼᚱᚼᚷᛖᚢ ᚺᚼᛖᚱᚼᛗᚼᛚᚼᚢᛊᛉᚢᛏᛁᚼᛉᚹᛖᛚᚼᛞᚼᚢᛞᛖᛊᚼᛉᚦᚼᛏᛒᚼᚱᚢᛏᛉ

an iraqi woman in traditional attire - afaq arabiya magazine, 1981

A recent study underlines the dangers of these worsening highs. It estimates that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally in India. A five-day heatwave is linked to nearly 30,000 extra deaths, according to the paper published in the Frontiers in Environmental Health journal last month. These heatwaves are becoming more frequent, longer and more intense as climate change – driven by the burning of fossil fuels – pushes global temperatures higher. The past 11 years, from 2015 to 2025, were the hottest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). [...]

Over a century before we reached the brink of ecological catastrophe, Rabindranath Tagore had a glimpse of where we might be headed. Tagore, an Indian author and cultural reformer who lived during the period of British colonialism, was among the last of a generation able to examine the industrialized world from the outside. He issued one of the earliest and most eloquent warnings about the precarity of a world sustained, like ours today, on the twin pillars of industrial consumption and industrial warfare. On a sea voyage to Japan in 1916, Tagore witnessed an unfathomable event that seems almost mundane to us today: an oil spill. To him, it was a jarring image of an earth destroyed by humanity’s unbridled pursuit of power, now supercharged by the tools of modern science.

[…]

It may not come as a surprise that the largest industrial military in the history of the world is also the single biggest polluter on the planet. A recent study from Brown University’s Costs of War project surfaced this startling fact: The U.S. Department of Defense has a larger annual carbon footprint than most countries on earth. With a sprawling network of bases and logistics networks, the U.S. military is the single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world aside from whole nation-states themselves. “Indeed, the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” the report notes. If the Pentagon were a country, it would be the world’s 55th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. And its main purpose — warfare — is easily its most carbon-intensive activity. Since the present era of American conflicts began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military is estimated to have emitted a staggering 1.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. For comparison, the entire annual carbon emissions of the United Kingdom is roughly 360 million tons.

That massive additional burden on the planet might be justifiable were it all being done in the name of vital national security interests, but the biggest components of the U.S. military’s carbon dioxide footprint have been in wars and occupations that were almost entirely unnecessary. To put it crudely: The U.S. poisoned the planet for vanity projects.

[…]

the United States decided to embark on an endless war and occupation. The costs have been tremendous: The Taliban was revived from near-death, at least 110,000 people have been killed, and the environmental toll has been massive.

In addition to emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide during the war, the U.S. military footprint contributed more directly to the immediate destruction of the Afghan environment. Deforestation has accelerated amid the chaos of the war and, through trash burning and other means, the U.S. armed forces released toxic pollutants into the air that are blamed for sickening Afghan civilians and causing chronic illnesses among U.S. veterans.

The environmental havoc wreaked by the war in Iraq has been even worse. Not only did the war lead to a spike in carbon dioxide emissions through U.S. military activity, it resulted in the widespread poisoning of the Iraqi environment through the use of toxic munitions and the same so-called burn pits on military bases that were used in Afghanistan. The environment has become so toxic in some places that it has led to elevated rates of cancer, as well as crippling birth defects — terrible individual punishments inflicted on innocent future generations. A British doctor who co-authored two studies on the environmental impact of U.S. military operations in Fallujah said that the city’s population suffers “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.

Much of this impact can be blamed on the use of depleted uranium munitions by U.S. forces. Despite vowing to cease their use, a study by the independent monitoring group Airwars and Foreign Policy Magazine found that the military continued to use the toxic munitions during its most recent bombing campaign in Syria.