On Zionist Literature

Liberated Texts series

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium… this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers – but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.

Head of Covert Action, CIA, 1961.

This series, a collaboration between Liberated Texts and Ebb Books, is dedicated to re-publishing, or publishing in English for the first time, works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release.

We do so in the belief that despite the dramatic shift in the educational and media landscape that has taken place in the six decades since the statement quoted above was made, books remain powerful tools with the ability to fundamentally transform people’s view of the world and spur them into action to change it for the better.

Series Editor, Louis Allday

First published in Arabic, 1967

© Copyright by Anni Kanafani

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

First published in English, 2022

Translation © Mahmoud Najib

Ebb Books, Unit 241, 266 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 7DL

ISBN: 9781739985233

ISBN: 9781739985240 (e-book)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library.

Typeset in Garamond

liberatedtexts.com

ebb-books.com

Front cover artwork by David Bomberg, Jerusalem, Looking to Mount Scopus (1925)

Contents

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972)

Translator’s Foreword

Introduction to the English Translation

Preface to the First Edition, 1967

Preface to the Current Edition, 2022

Introduction

1. Zionism Fights on the Linguistic Front

2. The Birth of Zionist Literature

3. Race and Religion in Zionist Literature Beget Political Zionism

4. The Birth and Development of the Character of the Wandering Jew

5. Zionist Literature Marches in Lockstep with Politics

6. Jewish Infallibility and the Unworthiness of Other Peoples

7. Zionist Rationalizations for the Usurpation of Palestine

8. From the Nobel Prize to the 1967 Aggression

References

Index

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), taken by K. Høver, Denmark

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972)

Ghassan Kanafani is regarded as one of the most well-known Arab writers and journalists of the past century. His literary writings, in novels and short stories, are deeply rooted in Arab and Palestinian culture, and have inspired generations during his lifetime and after his martyrdom – both in word and deed.

He was born in Acre in northern Palestine on April 9th 1936, and lived in Yaffa until May 1948, when the war that established Israel compelled him to flee his homeland with his family to Lebanon and then Syria, after which he lived and worked in Damascus, Kuwait and finally, from 1960, Beirut. Kanafani was martyred on July 8th 1972, in Beirut along with his niece Lamees in a car bomb planted by Israeli agents.

Kanafani published eighteen books until his untimely death, along with hundreds of articles on culture, politics and the struggle of the Palestinian people. All of his works have been republished in numerous editions in Arabic after his assassination. His novels, short stories, plays and articles have been collected and published, the literary works of which have been translated into 20 languages. Some of Ghassan’s work has been incorporated into school and university curricula; some of his plays have been made into theatrical productions and radio programs in Arabic and other languages; and two of his novels have been adapted into cinematic features. His work, written during the period between 1956-1972, continues to enjoy increasing levels of interest to this day.

Translator’s Foreword

This was a rather unorthodox piece to translate because the Arabic text is unlike the literary work for which the author is better known in the Anglosphere. It seems important to underline the fact that this work was clearly an extension of the author’s primary concern of political struggle; and that producing it could not have been a leisurely affair. This was a study motivated not by professional ambition or scholarly pretension, but an urgent desire to understand how the author’s enemies had been able to so thoroughly dominate the narrative and justify their cause. As such, the text is rough at times and required a significant amount of editing to clarify the argument, avoid ambiguities, determine the appropriate length of a given paragraph and so on.

This process of refining the text while remaining faithful to it required a deep level of engagement, which was facilitated by Louis Allday’s crucial and generous assistance. The experience of reading the Arabic text for the first time approximates that of reading a classical work of drama, where the dramatis personae remain nondescript until one becomes well-acquainted with the entire volume. In a similar sense, On Zionist Literature contains a number of passages, references, quotations and paraphrases that will not be clear at first glance. It would be unreasonable to expect the English reader to engage with the text so intimately to fully comprehend it because its objective was not intended to be literary, per se.

To that end, I have employed a number of methods to render the English text in an accessible manner without undermining its integrity. One is elementary for any translator: to read the text several times and translate it as faithfully as possible. Then, Louis and I reviewed as many of the referenced sources as possible. After having followed the author’s footsteps in researching the book and drafting it, I finally felt confident enough to make the following interjections:

1.I have added transitional words and expressions that either improve the flow of a given paragraph – because it may, for instance, contain a sequence of declarative statements that do not directly gesture toward one another – or as signposts for the causal structure of the argument.

2.I have reconsidered the author’s paragraph breaks to guide the reader’s attention to the logic of the argument when the original text seemed to lack such structure.

3.I have inserted endnotes that may clarify a given point, correct an error on the author’s part or provide relevant background information on a given historical figure or event.

4.To enrich the texture of the translation, Louis and I have replaced the quotations that appear in the Arabic text – much of which the author had translated from English-language source materials – with the original passages. The idea is to avoid translating the author’s translation wherever possible, which may risk losing some of the nuances of the cited text. Such a practice also puts the reader in direct contact with the materials with which the author was conversing, which in turn may elicit a reaction from the reader in parallel to the author’s. In a similar vein, I have indicated the instances in which the original quotations and the author’s translation of them do not appear to be identical. The differences are rarely more than subtle.

5.I have shared some of the discoveries that Louis and I have made over the course of our research. It is hoped that they will facilitate the reader’s comprehension of the message of the book.

I will close by pointing out that our research has not been comprehensive because we were not able to locate all of the author’s sources. The process of replacing his Arabic translation with the original source material is uneven, as a result. Last but not least, I thank Hamad al-Rayes for proofreading the translated text, Wafa Hafid for her valuable insights into the original, and Louis for commissioning and facilitating this work.

- Mahmoud Najib

Introduction to the English Translation

Ghassan Kanafani doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. He is well-known to Palestinians, and to those interested in Palestine, but not as a singular figure. He was a Marxist revolutionary, a party spokesperson, a novelist, a political theorist, a schoolteacher, an artist, a newspaper editor, and a committed internationalist. These disparities of perception befit Kanafani’s heterogeneous life, and he was accomplished in each of these roles. Kanafani is less known for another vocation at which he also excelled: literary criticism.

Throughout his short life Kanafani reviewed and analyzed creative writing in multiple genres, having been a student of literature at the University of Damascus where he met his mentor George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist organization that was of significant size and influence in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to On Zionist Literature, Kanafani authored two books critiquing Palestinian literature. Unlike his novels and short stories, these works have not been translated into English.

As On Zionist Literature illustrates, Kanafani was a searing and incisive critic, at once generous in his understanding of emotion and form and unsparing in his assessment of politics and myth. We cannot adequately comprehend his literary criticism without also delving into the political sensibility he brought to the enterprise; it helps, as well, to examine the strictures of the enterprise itself. Literary criticism is not supposed to be political. This may sound absurd on its face – the sort of thing no serious reader of literature has ever considered possible – but the stricture isn’t an axiom so much as a kind of ideological coding. In particular, it functions to reinforce intellectual and economic orthodoxy. By consigning political criticism to a lesser category of cultural labor, standard-bearers of academe and the arts inhibit revolutionary thought within institutional settings. Anything that threatens centers of power earns the label of political, perforce a negative evaluation, and the disrepute that comes along with it. Power therefore comes to embody the apolitical. This sort of environment is unwelcoming of critics such as Kanafani.

Running afoul of bourgeois customs was no issue to Kanafani however, who wanted his critical approach to inform Palestine’s struggle for national liberation. His approach is less an arbitrary choice than a result of his thesis that Zionist literature is itself deeply political (in the crude sense of the term). Kanafani identifies a colossal scheme among Zionist leaders to conscript a wide range of artistic work into service of their colonial project. He marshals a long list of examples to make his case: Yael Dayan’s Envy the Frightened, Ahad Ha’am’s essays on Zionism and Judaism, Leon Uris’s Exodus, and a variety of other creative and historical material.

Nor is his critique limited to the texts themselves. Kanafani examines the publishing industry and associated cultural institutions as sites of imperial politics. The Nobel Prize committee comes in for an especially harsh evaluation: Why did the Nobel Prize committee reward a reactionary and chauvinistic author [Shmuel Yosef Agnon] in 1966, whose writings lack all of the requisite literary standards for such an award? For Kanafani, the Western literary scene is not an open forum based on meritocracy, but a tightly controlled marketplace meant to satisfy the predilections of a voracious ruling class. Many would-be authors with revolutionary devotions have tried to navigate the industry and reached a similar conclusion.

Kanafani makes it clear that Zionism isn’t coterminous with either Judaism or Jewish people. He identifies ruptures in the movement’s self-definition and its popular definition owing to its provenance in Western imperialism. He unambiguously implicates Jews in Palestinian suffering and considers it an abrogation of intellectual honesty to exculpate Jews qua Jews of Palestinian dispossession, but shows that mainstream notions of Jewish peoplehood are refracted through systematic normalization of Zionism, which brands itself as a natural occurrence. While Zionism does not in fact emerge from scriptural tradition or cultural practice, it insists on its own supremacy as the primary model and final arbiter of Jewish peoplehood. This effort was not the sole domain of Jewish people. The imperial powers and philosemitic luminaries played an important role. Kanafani does not treat Zionism as a natural response to European antisemitism, instead exploring intracommunal dynamics around class and religious devotion. His summary of Jewish integration into modern Europe is perhaps the most controvertible part of the book, but his key point warrants serious consideration as it inverts the common narrative of Zionism as an existential necessity. For Kanafani, Zionism was ultimately a choice borne of internalized racism and a supremacist inclination to seek power in the service of imperial domination and accumulation at the expense of rank-and-file Jews. He argues,

While opportunities for social integration and assimilation were increasing, we can nevertheless note a rising chauvinistic current among socio-economically privileged Jewish circles. The constant stream of Zionist literature that began to appear by the middle of the century finally broke into the mainstream by the century’s end, leading up to the consolidation of political Zionism at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.

Well-read in Jewish literature beyond what he conceptualizes as the Zionist variety (a category that in any case includes Christian authors), Kanafani evinces an impressive understanding of liturgical traditions, secular narratives, and linguistic developments. Scholars of Judaism will no doubt find great provocation in Kanafani’s sweeping historical summaries, but his sharp acumen, from the perspective of the colonized party, is the book’s most compelling quality. We would do well to focus on his argument that Zionism is neither a cultural inclination or a political necessity. It is a material phenomenon rooted in chauvinistic ideas of culture and politics that tried to squash revolutionary and communist Jewish politics in Europe. Kanafani’s historical overview illustrates the movement’s deep-seated contradictions.

To understand Zionist literature, then, the critic must analyze the painstaking and often contradictory process of forging a notion of singular nationhood from disparate (and in some cases ill-fitting) communities. This is so