Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) is one of the most important figures in Palestinian literature. He was also a scholar, a historian, a journalist, and a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist faction of the Palestinian liberation movement that advocated armed resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project. He was 12 years old when his family was forced to flee from Jaffa to Beirut in 1948 during the Naqba. Israel’s Mossad assassinated him and his niece with a car bomb in Beirut.
I recently finished reading Kanafani’s The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, a masterful historical materialist1 analysis of the three-year-long Palestinian general strike against Zionist settler-colonialists and their British colonial patrons.
Hisham Matar, an American-born British-Libyan writer, described Letter from Gaza, a short story that Kanafani wrote in 1955:
Letter From Gaza is written in the voice of a Palestinian who has returned to his destroyed neighbourhood. All he has left in Gaza after the assault are his mother, sister-in-law and her four children: “… but,” he tells his friend, the addressee, who is eagerly waiting in Sacramento, “I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils.” He has been accepted at the University of California, for a degree in Civil Engineering. He buys a “pound of apples” for his wounded niece in hospital. The girl is inconsolable. Her wounds seem to reflect the new geography of occupation. The short stay entirely alters his plans and he decides to remain instead in Gaza, “among the ugly debris.”
The mechanism by which the epistle leads its author (and the reader) to this conclusion reveals, with the inevitability of a natural process, the intimate reality of a man whose breath had been quartered by defeat. The prose has an air of being told in spite of its teller. Like all good letters it is not intended for anyone other than its recipient. Writing a short story that turns the reader into a transgressor, a spy, is, of course, a literary trick and an indication of Kanafani’s exceptional talent.
In the story, the letter writer refers to UNWRA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, created by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 in December 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees from the Naqba. Toward the end of the letter, the writer says, “I imagined that the main street that I walked along on the way back home was only the beginning of a long, long road leading to Safad.” The town, Safad (Safed), is in northern Israel in the Upper Galilee. I think the writer is saying that the road he was on would take him (and his family) back to the home from which they were driven out. The story also mentions Shajiya (Shuja’iyya), a neighborhood of Gaza City in northern Gaza, which was in the news recently. I did not find a reference to the writer’s mention of Sabha.
Letter from Gaza demonstrates, yet again, that Gaza didn’t begin on October 7.
I am trying something new: At the top of this newsletter is an audio recording of me reading Letter from Gaza. You can follow this link if you prefer to read the story on your own.
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.” Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
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