Between the sword and the neck

‘Resistance is the essence,’ wrote Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian writer, intellectual and activist who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on 8 July 1972 in Beirut at the age of 36.¹ For Kanafani, armed and cultural resistance were equally important in the struggle for Palestinian liberation – a message that resonated clearly in both his fictional and political writings. He did not believe in engaging in dialogue with Israel, which had colonized historic Palestine and dispossessed its Indigenous population. To do so, Kanafani believed, would be an act of defeat and surrender. In a 1970 interview with ABC journalist Richard Carleton in Beirut, Kanafani stated that negotiating with one’s colonizer was like ‘a conversation between the sword and the neck’.² Out of this conviction came his idea of the ‘combatant writer’: the intellectual whose role it is to create a literature of resistance to galvanize support for anti-colonial struggle, of which armed struggle is an essential element. The idea of the ‘combatant writer’ also helps us to see how Palestinians have always resisted in complex, intertwined ways: through political organization and armed struggle, poetry, art, science and the resilient olive trees that dot the Palestinian landscape.

Anti-colonial thinkers such as Kanafani, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Amilcar Cabral and even the Ivy League scholar Edward Said of Columbia University all supported armed resistance within the context of anti-colonial struggle. For Kanafani, the imbalance of power between the occupier and the occupied meant there couldn’t be Palestinian liberation without armed resistance. International law likewise recognizes the right of people living under foreign occupation to resist by ‘all available means, including armed struggle’.³