The Sword and the Neck: Ghassan Kanafani and the Question of Violence

 This was an assignment for my political theory class. It had a word limit of 750, though I went over the limit by a bit. We had to pick a political poster and use a philosopher from the course in our analysis.

Political Theory 240

                        November 3, 2024

The Sword and the Neck: Ghassan Kanafani and the Question of Violence

The genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians has shown us one thing, that is, this “conflict” didn’t start on October 7th, as the power narratives suggest, it started even before the creation of the Zionist settler state. The power narratives frame this genocide as a war against the armed militant wing of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas. Their reaction to the violence of the Israeli state has been seen as an attempt to commit genocide against the Jewish population, however, Zionism is not Judaism, though it attempts to disguise its true nature under it, it is an ugly recreation of what they claim to fight against, Nazism. In fact, through the Haavara Agreement, German Zionists reached an indirect arrangement with the Nazis, allowing them to transfer capital to Palestine. That transference of capital allowed the Zionists to solidify their economic power, and with the aid of the West, they took over Palestine through violent means. The Nakba–“catastrophe” in Arabic–was a massacre in which 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homeland and Ghassan Kanafani was just a child when it occurred. Kanafani was a Marxist Palestinian journalist and activist killed for his presumed behind-the-scenes role in a massacre at Israel’s main airport (Dittmar, 71). The Nakba and the brutality of the Zionist state gave Kanafani the ammunition towards radicalization. Kanafani epitomized and vocalized the fusion of Marxism-Leninism with Arab national liberationism (Brehony, 190). I chose Kanafani because of his commitment to Palestinian liberation in a Marxist way, and one could also include Frantz Fanon in the way that he thought about violence; his thoughts on the issue were that a “dialectical process must be pushed towards its climax by armed struggle, requiring action with utmost force to tip the current balance of power in favor of the Arab and Palestinian national and progressive forces.” (Brehony, 195). Which is to say that, the Zionist colonization cannot be resolved through nonviolence, as Frantz Fanon said on nonviolence, that it’s “an attempt to settle the colonial problem around the negotiating table before the irreparable is done before any bloodshed or regrettable act is committed.” (Fanon, 23). We have seen what that has brought us, nothing, the oppressors will continue to tighten the chain of oppression while condemning the oppressed for their reaction to that lack of air in their esophagus. As Malcolm X said: "...Whenever you teach a man to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent, what you're doing is disarming the victim of white brutality; you're robbing him of his right to defend himself. The only time it's intelligent to be nonviolent is when you're dealing with someone else who's nonviolent." (reelblack, 1:45). The Zionist state is anything but nonviolent. Kanafani spoke truth to power, his literary work combined the reality that the Palestinians faced, with revolutionary sentiment. It is precisely for this reason that Kanafani and his comrades were targeted for assassination by the Zionist regime (Barakat, 240). They see the other in the Palestinians using zoological terms when describing them (Fanon, 7). Kanafani connects to our course by asking what justice means, for the oppressed, it’s expressed through a violent revolution. It’s the way that they can react to the injustice of the oppressor; their actions choke the oppressed and submit them to a painful reality in which they yearn for freedom. Kanafani showed that through literature and advocacy of a greater cause, the Marxist-Leninist route, one can display the way towards freedom, that decolonization is always a violent event (Fanon, 1). Additionally, Kanafani showed us what violence meant, that its form is fluid, that the oppressor's form is legitimized, and that the oppressed, in their reaction to that violence is attacked with power narratives. The racial polity creates a cognitive dissonance to the realities of that violence, and we close our eyes to it until it affects our vassal state--Israel. We must recognize that violence from the oppressed is a form of achieving freedom from the chains of oppression, that it's needed to achieve a more equitable society, and to realize this, we must confront the power narratives that distort our realities toward freedom; a freedom that has been afforded to the dominant race--the creation of the US and the French Revolution. The poster shows us that, the humanity of the otherized can be shown, that it can be displayed for the world to see, and that in that process towards humanization, we inquire about a vocation for it through our love of humanity, something that the oppressor tries its hardest to hamper the process towards it with divide and conquer narratives. We must not allow the racial capitalist polity to alienate us, as “the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided.” (Freire, 142). We must take the example of Kanafani, let literary art be how we showcase the brutality of the other, and use critical praxis as a way of achieving a reality free from the chains of oppression. Kanafani was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ballpoint pen, and his arena, newspaper pages (Englert 2022).

                            

                                                            References

Barakat, Khaled. 2024. “GHASSAN KANAFANI AND THE URGENT QUESTIONS OF OUR DAY.” Arab Studies Quarterly 46 (3-4): 237-. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.46.3&4.0237.

Brehony, Louis. 2024. “Ghassan Kanafani and the Leninist Warriors of Palestine.” Arab Studies Quarterly 46 (3-4): 189–213. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.46.3-4.0189.

Dittmar, Linda. 2024. “Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘Men in the Sun.’” Radical Teacher 129 (129): 70-. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2024.1256.

Englert, Sai. 2022. “Ghassan Kanafani: The life of a Palestinian writer.” Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/ghassan-kanafani-palestine-life-writer.

Fanon, Frantz. 2021. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. N.p.: Grove Press.

Freire, Paulo. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra B. Ramos. N.p.: Bloomsbury Academic.

reelblack. 2019. “Malcolm X - The Ballot or the Bullet (1966).” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KmGrY3TOfw.

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