We are a month and a half into an unprecedented escalation in Palestine. The state of Israel’s collective retaliation on the Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip has exceeded all limits, yet receives the full-throated and unconditioned political and military support of the so-called liberal democracies in the western world.
To speak of a “rules-based international order” is laughable, and only because the mass slaughter of people through airstrikes and drones with machine guns mounted on them is a practice that already laughs in the face of a “law” that upholds a distinction between combatant and civilian that the reality of heavy industrial colonial warfare has already annihilated.
How does it happen that people who support Ukraine’s partisan war against Russia’s invasion can turn right around and support the Zionist colonial occupation of Palestine, whose price for a coveted ethno-state has cost generations of Palestinian blood?
Compare that question above with the one Ghassan Kanafani—one of the most famed writers of the Palestinian resistance movement—put forward in 1967, in his short book of criticism On Zionist Literature: “Why did the Nobel Prize committee award a reactionary and chauvinistic author in 1966, whose writings lack all the requisite literary standards?”
There is a certain connection between the Nobel Prize and its rationale for recognizing Israeli literature and the acceptance of Israel’s annexations in the 1967 war. The binding agent lies in “many years of deception, indoctrination and promotion of racist thought and literature.”
This is what Kanafani sets out to trace and document in this historically inflected monograph.
We learn how Zionist culture emerged prior to the Zionist political movement in the late nineteenth century. This ultranationalist project, stepped in European colonial ideology, needed a national language, and used Hebrew, a liturgical language, as the means to bind Judaism to Zionism, and to justify the settlement of Palestine.
In this context, Kanafani as a critic influenced equally by bourgeois academics like Stuart Hall as well as partisan methods of critique, pays attention to the evolution of typical images: mystics become strongmen; the Wandering Jew goes from folklore to an extreme corner of political novels.
Kanafani includes a handy schema, so formulaic are the novels he’s examining, including those by George Eliot and Arthur Koestler. These are just some fragments:
1. The hero comes from Europe, in most cases, as a result of apocalyptical persecution. He is fleeing the memories of one or two recent massacres at the hands of Hitler, the effects of which remain in his mind and body. He loses his family and friends along the way, and searches for a quiet place to recover, where dormant national aspirations emerge from the depths of his unconscious to rehabilitate his pride.
2. The hero falls in love with a non-Jewish person. But this person could never be an Arab for reasons that will soon be apparent. Through this relationship, the author provide a full explanation of the Zionist perspective and aspirations, and moderates a dialogue through which the story always puts the narrative of "Jewish torment" at the forefront — thereby entirely obscuring the heart of the matter...
3. The Arabs, being the direct adversary, are represented as individuals without a cause — often as mercenaries who either serve a foreign or, at best, feudal power....
Even though Jewish immigration to Palestine began long before the rise of fascism in Europe, the “extremist” wing of Jewish letters spoke out against social integration and improving democracy in the countries were Jews lived in order to improve their living conditions. Rather, the long history of persecution is raised as an argument that Jews cannot assimilate and therefore need their own territory — a point of unity between Jewish nationalism and anti-Semitism.
The ideological project of Zionist literature is to distort the historical narrative so that religion and race seem to eclipse geographic, linguistic, historical, and economic facts that are actually at stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And then there’s Zionism after its state formation, which brings its own layers of disfigurement and obscuration.
“The space in which the Zionist author can operate is miniscule and superficial, tightly confined to the idea of 'the acceptable and justified war.’” Stopping short of "unwanted memories," a false history is constructed of Zionism after the establishment of its state. 1948 is not a "stone wall" but a link in a sequence. The Zionist authors of the immediate generation of the Nakba have the hardest time maintaining this smokescreen.
The most striking aspect of Kanafani's analysis is the yardstick of aesthetic evaluation that he's putting forward. Why should Zionist literature fail with such particular misery. The answer, in a word, is "falsification," which is not simple fabrication, but something that's reaching toward the Marxist sense of historical development. "The Zionist novel does not merely exaggerate the facts, it invents them." The production of Zionist novels fulfills a political need before a cultural one: they provide the needed rationale for an existing process of displacement, to legitimate a concealed racist position, to implant the notion in taxpayers in western countries that the Arabs in Palestine don't deserve a country.
Zionism is at bottom an ideology “founded on the sanctioning and justification of aggression based on so-called racial and ethnic superiority.” And it has succeeded in obscuring its own colonialist origins due to the spurious indigeneity narrative.
But if Kanafani's book conveys anything, it's that Zionism's greatest enemy is not in Gaza, or in southern Lebanon. As with all forms of fascism, Zionism's worst enemy will be its own history.
More readings in Israel/Palestine coming soon.