Ghassan Kanafani’s “Guerrilla Rhetoric,” Then and Now

Jay Murphy reviews “Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings,” a collection of newly translated essays by the influential Palestinian philosopher, author, and activist.

By Jay MurphyJune 28, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Politics

GHASSAN KANAFANI was an indefatigable force for the Palestinian struggle—novelist, short story writer, journalist and newspaper editor, and militant with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He drafted the PFLP’s 1969 platform, in which it moved from pan-Arab nationalism to revolutionary Marxism. Kanafani began writing stories when he was a staffer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. After receiving his teaching certificate in 1952, he used his stories to help children in refugee camps in Damascus, Syria, understand their predicament. He was the first to adopt the term “resistance literature” (or adab al-muqawama) for the efflorescence of writing in this “heroic” phase of Palestinian resistance (in which he singled out poets Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim).

As Edward Said remarked in an interview I conducted with him on the eve of the first intifada in November 1987, Palestinian literature has had many plateaus but only a few peaks. Kanafani was responsible for several of these peaks—his intercutting, semi-cinematic narrative lines and flashbacks, in works such as Men in the Sun (1962; adapted as the film The Dupes in 1972), All That’s Left to You (1966), Umm Sa‘d (1969), and Returning to Haifa (1969), remain an example of the wedding of modernist experimentation with sociopolitical insight. Kanafani insisted that it was literature, along with the practical communion with refugee children, that led him to his political views, instead of the reverse. All of the author’s furious, multitasking activity was cut short by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut, on July 8, 1972, which also killed his 17-year-old niece. This was not before Kanafani foresaw, in his PFLP report for that year, a “new stage” of struggle that “requires a popular people’s war that stretches for tens of years.”

Kanafani remains known as perhaps the preeminent Palestinian novelist, but a recent anthology edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi (with translations editor Ourooba Shetewi), Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024), shows he was so much more. Like the Martinican poet-playwright Aimé Césaire and the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton—not to mention Vladimir Mayakovsky, the preeminent poet of the Russian Revolution—Kanafani was as much a political force and social critic as he was a literary artist. The translations gathered in this book make the case that he belongs in such company. In addition to his literary works and journalism, Kanafani was a social activist, political strategist, and cultural analyst, articulating the philosophy of armed struggle in the PFLP while always insisting that “the cultural form of resistance is no less valuable than armed resistance itself.” Given his immensely effective parallel efforts, translator Hazem Jamjoum suggests that Kanafani may have been “the most dangerous intellectual” Palestine possessed.

Kanafani was acknowledged during his lifetime as one of the great Palestinian writers. On a visit to Gaza, he was surprised to discover that he was so well known, his visage adorning the walls of many refugee camps (as it does to this day). Tens of thousands came out for his funeral in Beirut. It is thus curious that his political writings are relatively unknown. The new volume, however, aims to rectify this neglect. As the editors point out in their introduction, his literary production was “dwarfed” by the hundreds of political articles, statements, and analyses he issued. By the age of 19, he had already joined the editorial board of the Arab Nationalist Movement’s Al-Ra’i (“The Viewpoint”), and by 1963, he was editor in chief of both the daily Al-Muharrir (“The Liberator”) and its bimonthly supplement Filastin (“Palestine”) in Beirut. His work for these publications entailed contributing a daily news story, an editorial, and a column, in addition to a short story or novel excerpt for the cultural section.

For Al-Muharrir, Kanafani also wrote up his international travels, including trips to India and to China in 1965 and 1966 and to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in 1966. Later, he would edit Al-Anwar (“The Lights”) and become (from July 1969 until his assassination) editor in chief of the PFLP’s Al-Hadaf (“The Target”). In a June 1971 interview, Kanafani remarked on the difficulty of writing among the constant death toll in the Palestinian struggle:

It is as if he [the novelist] is suspended and his generation, his comrades, are passing him by—advancing faster than he is. Therefore, there are times when a novelist can’t write.

On the other hand, there are times that the novelist can’t stop writing. The novelist lives, therefore, with this kind of contradiction, a kind of suffering.

All this activity was carried on as Kanafani also served on the central committee of the PFLP, guiding policy as its primary writer and spokesperson. According to his wife Anni, Kanafani “was always busy, working as if death was just around the corner.” His life, after all, spanned the immense crises and debacles of the Palestinian cause. His family left Acre (known in Arabic as Akka) on April 9, 1948, the day of the Deir Yassin massacre, and his prime organizing and writing took place in the midst of the 1967 Six-Day War (during which Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem), the “Black September” events of 1970 (in which Jordan turned on and attacked the Palestinian cause), and the intense waves of violence and counterviolence of the 1970s of which Kanafani was himself a victim. His career is inseparable from what Frantz Fanon called the “fighting phase” of decolonializing culture.

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon theorizes three stages of “national culture” or consciousness—the first, a period of slavish imitation of foreign (usually European) models; the second, a rediscovery and valorization of Indigenous traditions; the third, a creation of newly self-aware art that emerges from, yet is not dependent on, Native models. It is the last that Fanon termed “the fighting phase,” in which the artist, writer, or revolutionary becomes “the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.” As Fanonian as much of Kanafani’s work may be, Selected Political Writings also displays key differences between the two figures. While the conflict in the Middle East for many remains an “intercommunal” one of Arabs versus Jews, for Kanafani, it was not even a “Palestinian-Israeli” struggle of competing nationalisms. Adhering to a strictly Marxist viewpoint, in which Lenin’s definition of imperialism was a consistent guide, Kanafani saw the system of Western colonialism as the primary enemy that produced the dispossession of the Palestinians, even if its machinations could not be clearly differentiated from the network of international Zionism, reactionary Arab regimes, and the collaboration of parts of the Palestinian bourgeoisie.

Kanafani is at his most prescient in his early criticism of the inadequacy of a separate Palestinian polity adjoining to Israel, a position later reflected in the PFLP’s rejection of the Oslo Accords. Kanafani’s rejection of a “bourgeois” nationalism prefigures the later thinking of the theorist-activist Bassel al-Araj, “the educated martyr” who was assassinated by Israel on March 6, 2017, and whose graffitied image, like Kanafani’s, is found across the West Bank and Gaza. Al-Araj called for the collapse of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) installed by the Oslo agreements, argued for the viability of guerrilla warfare, and advocated a continuing revolution that would not coalesce into a state—positions that might have formed the continuing threads of Kanafani’s thought, if he had lived past the age of 36.

Kanafani’s early writings show his gradual acceptance of Marxism-Leninism as applicable to the Arab world, his embrace of this body of theory delayed by the often disappointing behavior of Arab communist parties as well as of the Soviet Union itself (which, in 1948, took only three days to recognize the state of Israel). Kanafani’s mature writings brim with Marxist influences—Lenin and Mao, Georg Lukács and Võ Nguyên Giáp, Che Guevara and Hồ Chí Minh. Fused with the notion of armed revolution as the “highest form” of struggle is the persistent concern displayed here with organization. Well aware of the relative weakness of the Palestinian struggle in the face of powerful enemies, Kanafani saw Vietnam as the most successful example of nationalist liberation due to its solid organizational structure, while he judged the Palestinian cause as the least effective.

Kanafani and the PFLP were dedicated to developing trained cadres, with the goal of creating a unified revolutionary movement, even while realizing that the proposed role of the party “brings mountains of complications if applied to the reality of Arab struggle.” In discussing the role of the party, he repeated Mao’s saying that it was the boat that connected the shore of theory to the shore of practice. Combating “diseases of the backward society,” the organization must “present a living model and microcosm of the future of the struggle.” Whatever the forms of organization, they must “transform the democratic spirit into daily practice at all levels.”

For a long time, the PFLP remained the second largest faction of the PLO, which it would join and leave at various points. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, the PFLP, in the words of historian Rashid Khalidi, “rapidly became the most dynamic” of the PLO’s forces, largely due to the support it enjoyed in the refugee camps, its charismatic leadership and clear ideology, and a series of spectacular plane hijackings, which reinforced the impression in much of the world that the resistance consisted of lawless terrorist attacks. In a dramatic illustration of what Kanafani called “looseness of organizational structure,” a splinter group from the PFLP, having been ordered to halt further “external operations,” joined with the Japanese Red Army to attack Lod Airport on May 30, 1972, resulting in the deaths of 28 people—one of the most notorious attacks of an extremely violent decade.

Although not an official PFLP operation, the group felt compelled to defend it, and one of the most famous images of Kanafani’s career saw him fielding questions in the PFLP office in Beirut, seated before portraits of Guevara, Hồ, and other Marxist heroes. Though he was often wrongly cited as a planner of the Lod attack, which perhaps contributed to his targeting for assassination, Kanafani—along with other political activists who were also important cultural figures—was actually marked out earlier for elimination by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and her lieutenants. Tactics like the plane hijackings helped fuel criticisms of the PFLP that it owed more to anarchism than to Marxism.

Despite all the careful contextualization, in their introductions to the excerpts in this volume, the 21 commentators and three editors barely address the difficulties involved in applying Kanafani’s theories to the geopolitical situation prevailing today. Indeed, as scholar-activist Rabab Abdulhadi argues in her introduction to Kanafani’s key 1968 essay “Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language,’” the still-ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip “makes writing or engaging in any intellectual activities outside this context completely meaningless.” Though the PFLP periodically reconsidered its opposition to the two-state solution—it was a signatory to the May 2006 “Prisoners’ Document,” for example, which called for national unity and accepted negotiations with Israel—it later affirmed that only a single democratic, secular state was just and desirable. The PFLP joined with Hamas, the Islamic Jihad Organization, renegade factions of Fatah, and other groups in the October 7, 2023, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attacks, a response to the 17-year siege of the Gaza Strip, to the escalating attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, and to the stepped-up demolitions of houses and settlements in the West Bank. Armed struggle thus remains a fulcrum for the group.

It is in this context that Kanafani is being read, and reread, with translations of The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (very much a quintessential achievement of what Lenin called the “concrete analysis of a concrete situation”) appearing in 2023 and On Zionist Literature in 2022, which examines the novels of George Eliot, Arthur Koestler, Leon Uris, James A. Michener, and others to show how Zionist ideology paved the way for its success in historic Palestine. Also in 2022, Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein published a biography of Kanafani in Hebrew, arguing that forms of Palestinian resistance were quite reasonable responses to Zionist violence and colonialism. Part of his argument regarding Kanafani, in a country where Kanafani is widely regarded as simply a “terrorist,” is that there is nothing “innately anti-Semitic” about his project for a single, secular democratic state, constructed on democracy for all, with guaranteed rights for minorities.

Though extermination is often enough the end point of any number of colonial situations, the sheer level of sociopathy exhibited in the current Israeli assault on Gaza (with even a number of former Israeli prime ministers and military officials speaking of “war crimes”) led Palestinian American journalist Ramzy Baroud to suggest that “Zionism has descended into a barbaric modus operandi that defies conventional academic theories of colonialism or settler colonialism. It cannot be deciphered through typical political analyses of Israel’s internal machinations or shifting global dynamics.” In this context, Kanafani’s work becomes exemplary of Anthony Wilden’s “guerrilla rhetoric,” which holds that, as a guerrilla fighter, “you must know what your enemy knows, why and how he knows it, and how to contest him on any ground.” In the growing threat of what has been called the “Gazafication of the global order,” Kanafani’s legacy is likely to continue to be challenged and regenerated.