The Revolutionary Tradition of Kanafani's On Zionist Literature
In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on… If you murmur … ‘[Frantz Fanon] has it in for us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for [he] has nothing in for you at all; his work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, but never to you.
Jean Paul Sartre[1]
The first and most fundamental point to make about On Zionist Literature is how it orders its subject matter. Ghassan Kanafani’s political commentary was rooted in a broader political tradition of rebellion in the colonised world, which sought liberation through struggle for sovereignty and self-reliance. The authors of this tradition did not enjoy the requisite luxuries to engage in the Western academy’s speculative and non-committal meta-conversations about the conversation. This is the conversation. In this sense, readers of this volume are allowed the privilege, which I have been immensely fortunate to have enjoyed as its translator, of glimpsing into ideas more profound and a struggle more palpable than what is commonly accessible in the English language.
The book’s revolutionary tradition, which demotes the ubiquitous West from the position of the subject of history down to its object, has a simple and straightforward message that shook the world from Havana to Saigon: the peoples of the world are its new protagonists. It is in this spirit that On Zionist Literature is not an appeal to the West’s collective conscience. Like Fanon’s “scandal”, this text discusses the West’s conscience without addressing it; it is concerned with it only insofar as it facilitates that seemingly absurd and sociopathic violence.
The implied truth here is that only the subjects of Zionist aggression are willing to pay the price of ending it. In this vein, it is spectacular to observe how Ghassan takes the time to define his variables, in the parlance of Western social science — e.g., what he means by “Zionist literature” and so on — but never once explains what he means by his most serious charge against the crimes of that literature: that it either ignores or obscures “the heart of the matter.” He does not directly tell us what it is because the children of the Nakba — his audience and singular purpose — already know.
Ghassan was clearly baffled at how outright fabrications and slander against the Arabs were so readily accepted in the West during the aftermath of Israel’s aggression of 1967, and was especially struck by the sheer resemblance of the hegemonic narrative of the day to what he found in Zionist literature of deep historical roots. He hypothesised that this must have been an ingrained phenomenon, and his tools were similar to those of Marxists in every corner of the colonised periphery: historical materialism. He thus reads the development of Jewish archetypes in European literature, primarily, against the backdrop of the material conditions of Jewish communities to great effect. It is here that we find the author in sympathy with the likes of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, to a lesser degree, for their groundbreaking portrayal of “‘virtuous’ Jewish characters” that broke the antisemitic “Shylockian mold.”[1] Before long, however, the romantic movement’s protest against the inhumanity of antisemitism, as exemplified in the works of the likes of Edgeworth and Scott, was steered in a chauvinistic direction. In this sense, Ghassan’s argument is that the First Zionist Congress in 1897 was the crowning ceremony for a movement whose birth was long conceived in literature.
Particularly striking is Ghassan’s claim that the literary phenomenon in question was the product of a deliberate “colossal scheme,” which On Zionist Literature was intended to expose. Was Ghassan a “conspiracy theorist”? Arguably — not that he would have given a damn about liberal stigmata. He had good reasons to believe that his formidable enemies had the motivation, foresight and wherewithal to plan their heinous crime. Except Ghassan could not go far enough, in this particular regard, because he did not enjoy our benefit of hindsight.
While researching the book’s sources,[2] quite a few of the literary figures cited by Ghassan were found to be one degree removed from the material and ideological establishment of the Zionist entity as we know it. Yael Dayan he must have known about — her work is reviewed relatively favorably here — as the daughter of Moshe Dayan. Her brother Assi was an actor who starred in He Walked Through the Fields, a 1967 film released just months before the war and was endorsed as a pillar in the Zionist entity’s narrative by its highest echelons. Elsewhere, we find that one of the cited literary critics (Jon Kimche) to be the brother of a renowned Mossad “super-agent.” We find that Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, which Ghassan analyses at length as a contemporary manifestation of the Zionist literary archetype, was immediately translated into 50 languages, adapted into film by Otto Preminger (featuring Paul Newman as its star and the hitherto-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo as screenwriter) and was promoted in the United States with unprecedented enthusiasm.[3] We likewise find Ted Berkman’s novel Cast a Giant Shadow as a 1966 Hollywood blockbuster involving Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne. One could go on.
These discoveries, which were stumbled upon during the translation process, seem to support Ghassan’s idea of there being “a colossal scheme” to promote the Zionist agenda so consistently and effectively since George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda up to the present moment. Yet, there’s more: consider this damning question Ghassan poses in his introduction: “what did [Benjamin Disraeli’s] The Wonderous Tale of David Alroy accomplish to later become Nazism’s covert mentor?” Lumping one of the first Jewish heads of government in modern Western history with Nazi Germany is a bridge too far, surely? No; that Adolph Hitler drew inspiration from the proto-Zionist and unabashedly racist Disraeli has since been mainstreamed.[4] The point here is not to make the argument on the author’s behalf. It is, rather, to pose the idea that the truth does indeed stand naked in the colonised world, and to invite the reader to glimpse it through this towering revolutionary’s sincere effort to represent it.
References
[1] This passage is lifted from Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grover Press, 1963), pp. 7-10. It has been cited here for its insight into the intellectual tradition to which Fanon belonged and its cultural impact in the West. It has since been removed from the book because Frantz’s widow Josie believed that the French intellectual was among those who have been deceived by Zionist propaganda (hence the raison d’être of Ghassan’s On Zionist Literature). She commented on the matter in an interview:
It was through my initiative that Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth was removed. Let us say that from a western point of view, it is a good preface. Sartre understood the subject matter in The Wretched of the Earth. But in June 1967, when Israel declared war on the Arab countries, there was a great pro-Zionist movement in favor of Israel among western (French) intellectuals. Sartre took part in this movement. He signed petitions favoring Israel. I felt that his pro-Zionist attitudes were incompatible with Fanon’s work. Whatever Sartre’s contribution may have been in the past, the fact that he did not understand the Palestinian problem reversed his past political positions.
See: “Frantz Fanon’s Widow Speaks,” frantzfanonspeaks, April 26, 2011
[2] Much like his revolutionary counterparts in other parts of the colonised world, Ghassan’s humanism was both an assertion of the dignity of the oppressed as well as a moral denunciation of the vulgar voices that speak in its name.
[3] Much of the book’s sources had to be researched as I endeavored to avoid retranslating the book’s cited quotes, much of which Ghassan had originally translated from English-language sources.
[4] German Jewish film director and critic Gideon Bachmann, who lived in Palestine from 1927 to 1947, reviewed Exodus in a manner that recalls Ghassan’s critique:
Exodus is dishonest as far as the facts are concerned… [its] success… is a frightening phenomenon of our time. More frightening than propaganda because it takes in precisely those who know it to be false. Exodus was the best promotion campaign Israel ever had… Tourist travel to Israel soared when the book remained eighty weeks on the bestseller lists.
See: Gideon Bachmann, “Exodus,” Filonm Quarterly, Vol. 14 No. 3 (Spring, 1961, 56-59. More recently, Exodus has featured in the HBO series on the dark arts of Madison Avenue, Mad Men, as a marketing scheme.
[5] “Hitler, and some of his supporters, also had a curious admiration for Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only British prime minister of Jewish descent, whose phrase "race is all" was much quoted in Germany…” See: Ian Buruma, “Class Acts,” The New Republic, September 24, 2001