W. Rafeedie's Trinity of Fundamentals
Gotta knock on the tank a little harder...
Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals, translated by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji. New York: 1804 Books, 2024 [1991]. 331 pp.
This letter is composed in the midst of a very dire situation in the student movement and civil society. A Columbia University activist was abducted by ICE from campus, transported to a detention camp in Louisiana, without any charges. State Sec Rubio made a taunting post online, indicating the conscious effort by the unitary executive to expand its field of action: to strip away visas, green cards, and birthright citizenship from anyone who speaks out against the crimes of Israel and American imperialism.
The university administration colluded with ICE to carry out this authoritarian assault. Consider also the letter from the DOE’s Civil Rights office sent to 60 universities (including your host’s alma mater) threatening action against Palestine advocacy.
Your host recalls 2016 as a time when all of polite liberal society ran amok like headless chickens. This turned out not to be in fear of “fascism,” but of a premature break from political norms to right the ship of the US ruling class. As sketched out in a prior letter on the unitary executive theory, big monopoly capital needs centralized and consistent control over state power. The US capitalist class has itself been polarized on a common management policy for the decline of their state from the #1 great power position. Now we see a reactionary fraction — big tech plus semi-fascist militarism — taking the reins to secure unity by force.
All the while, the Israeli far right commits its pogroms in the West Bank, while undermining the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire with provocations, and most recently cutting off aid and utilities into Gaza.
The current state of the just Palestinian war of national resistance is gloomy at least for the short term, most directly because of the events in Syria. With Assad and the Ba’ath out of power, the masses of Syrians have been relieved of a great burden, after a decade-plus of civil war. Nevertheless, replacing one reactionary capitalist bloc with another in Syria has destabilized the outside tactical allies for the Palestinian militants in the occupied territories. More fundamentally, a relative blow has been dealt to Iran’s credibility, being ultimately unable to affect the pace of Israel’s genocidal campaign.
With all these considerations and more in mind, I’m sharing some notes on an interesting semi-fictional novel about a revolutionary living the clandestine life for the Palestinian cause. It covers the tail end of the PLO’s armed struggle, from the 80s to the Gulf War period. Among other things it’s a novel about self-discipline, the sacrifice of individual wants for the strength of the collective, for the greater good.
In the US, the last sixteen months have felt similar to Vietnam, with public figures taking career blows, a massive disparity between public sentiment and institutional narratives, and young activists witnessing militant rebuffs to a colonial army, watching the video of Yahya Sinwar’s last stand, as well as Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation protest. Among the rest of the literature the youth will pick up, looking to get a concrete sense of what participating in a revolutionary war, against a militarily superior foe, relying mainly on democratic people themselves, the translation of Rafeedie’s book will be among them.
Just as a book product, Trinity of Fundamentals is fascinating: a novel liberated from a Zionist prison (the MS apparently parceled out through pill capsules), now recently translated to English as a project by the Palestinian Youth Movement.
The 30 pages of front matter begin with George Habash, an eyewitness of the nakba as a youth, a refugee, medical student in Beirut, and founder of the Arab Nationalist Movement. The ANM’s program of action called for an independent Palestinian armed struggle. The Palestine branch of the ANM would become the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) by the end of the 50s.
It’s never mentioned by name, but the party that’s central in Trinity of Fundamentals, the one our young hero Kan’an joins and serves while hiding out in the central West Bank, is the PFLP.
The novel opens at the moment of Kan’an Subha’s arrest, and we go back and forth over a decade or so of underground life in safehouses in the suburbs of Ramallah. Kan’an is an energetic and imaginative young man, even so at the moment of arrest.
They were pounding on the door like celebrants of some primitive, pagan ritual, like members of a cannibalistic tribe engaged in a debauched, mad dance to the accompaniment of mindless screams and shrieks that tear apart the stillness of the jungle.
From there we cut back to the beginning of Kan’an’s political career, in his school days in the early 70s. Universities were fertile ground for recruiting political militants. Even to this day, organizations in the region have strong student and youth wings driving energetic student governments — a very different situation from American colleges.
At that time the university served as a hub for nationalist actions in the Occupied Territories. Everything was politicized — union activity, social relations, even the gathering of a few students to study together! The students clustered around organizations that were engaged in heated struggle for the hearts and minds of the youth in an atmosphere of democratic and intellectual competition among varying agendas and opinions. The university’s policy of wide support for the students proved transformative, shifting the entire setting from that of an educational establishment for the children of the bourgeoisie to a learning institution that attracted hundreds of residents of refugee camps and the rural areas each year — the children of the popular classes. This shift sped up the process of politicization even more.
The political organizations belonging to the resistance movement quickly capitalized on this trend, sending tens of freed political prisoners to form secret organizational cells which then spread like wildfire among the students. Clusters of unions began to appear, fronts for the political organizations that later changed into democratic student organizations. Birzeit University was not only a hotbed of resistance and political organization, it was also an example of a modern and enlightened society that was not closed in on itself. The university was open to new ideas and the free exchange of opinions, a society in which the full spectrum of ideologies — the nationalist-bourgeoisie, the leftists, the religious, the communists, even the Trotskyites — had someone to carry their banner, even if the ideology itself had no followers. And the anarchists, who were enamored with life along chaotic European lines of thought, flocked together like a clique which elicited nothing other than annoyance.
Coming around the edges of these lines is not just student politics but also the genuine credence Kan’an has in secular nationalism, in the capacity for democratic and progressive reforms to bring new life to Arab society — it’s a world of difference from the discourse today, or since 1979!
On the one hand, Trinity is the kind of text that might be hard for many novel-readers to get into: it’s cut up into blocks that blend fiction with confessional writing, with sections that are almost purely expository about politics. On the other hand it’s the kind of novel that pure non-fiction readers would probably like to pick up, just ‘cause its subject matter is so interesting.
The cut-up narrative makes it hard to hold it in mind concretely (plus your host didn’t take notes) but it’s a nice book to hop into randomly. And there’s a lot of typographical variety. Printed text is in bold, and other lines are formatted in narrow columns of italics:
"Kan'an, do you know what awaits you behind this door that you just closed? Chronicle this rainy December night, for your history begins as of now. On December 21, 1982, a door opened and closed again. When it reopens, a most critical development will have occurred in your life. An opening and a closing of a life that is not a life, a world that is not a world. Make a record of what came before December 21 and what came after December 21. This date will be for you what the birth of Christ was to humanity, a turning point from which people date events. Humanity has its calendar, you have yours."
Sometimes on the left margin of the page and other times on the right, these moments are like the self speaking against the inner self, or the passions and perceptions of Kan’an’s many psychic states, and a relatively serene, rationalized voice, tempered by experience and party lore.
Kan’an hides out in safehouses in the West Bank while larger events unfold. “Relationships” are reduced to friendly neighbors, nosey landlords, certain comrades, and his mother, and mother and son seem very close. There’s a funny bit of effrontery against the landlord Sakinah:
The confrontations of 1985 had left a deep impression on him, strengthening his belonging, and enhancing his conviction about the need to protect himself behind the walls of his safe house. He would return, having established and enacted for himself the basis for his religious trinity. The time for laying low was over. It was now time to resume his activities. He decided to leave a souvenir for the damned Sakinah before his departure. After returning her possessions to the two rooms and locking them back up, he took ashes from one cigarette, mixed them with water, smeared the black mixture on his finger and wrote on the inside of the eastern door: “Death to the damned Sakinah —K.” He opened the door and took with him what he had brought three months earlier: his papers, his packs of cigarettes, his red prayer beads, and his suitcase. Apart from that, he was departing carrying his memories.
Near the end, during the Gulf War the people of the West Bank, anticipate a missile attack on Israel — a scene very similar to the more recent strikes by Iran and the Houthis in Yemen.
One evening the sky was bountiful with the rare combination of heavy rain and thick fog. He climbed to the roof as fast as he could with no time to put on his wool sweater, and stood there gazing at the east while trying to shelter from the rain near the door to the roof. He wasn’t even wearing socks to protect his feet form the cold surface. The beloved missile did not appear on schedule — Where had it gone? It should have been visible. Was the siren a mistake? Did the missile lose its way? Two minutes later he heard an explosion and stepped out into the rain, searching in all directions. He saw a quick flash to the south. The Hussein missile had gone in the direction of Jerusalem this time and he missed it! He used all of the swear words he could remember at the time and went back inside feeling defeated. He slipped into bed after changing out of his wet clothes but continued to shiver from the cold.
Among the details of clandestine life, political discipline, and energetic political organizing, Trinity of Fundamentals is also a testament to the kind of militant optimism that we in the metropole may not be so acquainted with.
More letters on works of Palestinian national literature: