‘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.
Guns and politics
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
For Palestinians, this principle was lived reality. Palestinian armed struggle against the British colonizer began in the first half of the 20th century. Between 1936 and 1939 Palestinians, led by the Islamic leader Izz al-Din al-Qassam, revolted against brutal British Mandate rule. The realization among Palestinians that they had lost their homeland to the Zionist project in 1948 sparked the birth of new armed groups in the early 1950s. Among them was the left-leaning Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). Young activists and freedom fighters began organizing resistance efforts in different Arab capitals. One of these young men was my late father Khalil Hamdi, a founder of the ANM in 1950s Jordan and the leader of its regional command in Amman. At a 1965 conference held in Ghor Aljiftlik (an area in the West Bank, which was under Jordanian rule at the time), ANM members voted for their leaders, including my father.4 These young men believed in Arab unity and that such unity would inevitably lead to the liberation of Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism. It was at this conference that ANM members in Jordan organized their resistance efforts – which included political, cultural and armed resistance.
By 1967, the ANM had transformed into a Marxist-Leninist organization led by George Habash: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). A few years earlier, the secular Palestinian resistance organization Fatah was established by Yasser Arafat. It was not until the 1980s that Islamist resistance movements began to emerge with the rise of groups such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even with their Islamic foundations, however, these movements remain deeply rooted in the broader national struggle for liberation.
Women’s role in the resistance
Palestinian women have long played a vital role in resisting Israeli occupation and apartheid. Their participation has perhaps been more pronounced in leftist groups, such as the ANM and later the PFLP. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary and freedom fighter, told me that from the 1950s to the early 1970s, women distributed illicit ANM leaflets in Palestinian refugee camps in Amman and Beirut and carried arms, while also caring for their families.
Khaled, who became the face of Palestinian resistance around the world after hijacking a plane in 1969, added that women’s involvement went back even further to political and social activism in 1917, and during the 1936 revolt. ‘Palestinian women bore arms,’ she said, adding that some died fighting for their homeland.5
The resilience of art and the land
Palestinian literature, art, music, dance and the land itself all speak one language – the language of resistance. What poets Samih Al Qassem, Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti expressed through resistance literature – what Kanafani called the work of the ‘combatant writer’ or al adib al muqatil – Naji al-Ali conveyed through his art.6 In one of his most iconic cartoons, al-Ali’s character Handala, a 10-year-old barefoot refugee child (the same age al-Ali was during the Nakba) with his back turned to the complicit world that displaced him, stares at a refugee whose open shirt bears the names of dozens of displacement camps. In the center of this man’s shirt, al-Ali wrote: ‘No Reconciliation, No Negotiations, No Recognition –1948 Refugees.’ The phrase ‘1948 refugees’ implies the necessary return of those who were expelled from their homeland in historic Palestine – the idea of a free Palestine from the river to the sea. For poets, such as Izzidin Al Manasra and Mourid Barghouti, this meant not only the right of return for the living to Palestine but also all those who died in exile. Al Manasra’s wish was ‘not to sleep in a grave in exile’, and Barghouti movingly observed ‘our dead are still in the cemeteries of others’.7
Ghassan Kanafani, Naji al-Ali and Refaat Alareer were all assassinated, not for carrying a gun, but for wielding a pen or an artist’s pencil
The tradition of the ‘combatant writer’ has been taken up by the next generation of Palestinian poets and writers, those like Refaat Alareer, a professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, a poet, and now a martyr. Refaat, whose voice was very influential on social media, was targeted by Israel’s army early on in its genocide, killing him along with six members of his family at his sister’s house on 6 December 2023. Like Gaza itself, Refaat was defiant to the end. In one of his last posts on X (formerly Twitter) just two days before he was assassinated, he wrote: ‘We could die this dawn. I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighbourhood and city.’ His 2011 poem ‘If I must die’, made famous after his death, shows the enduring resilience of the Palestinian writers’ words.
In 2022, Refaat told me that Israel’s continuous genocide of the Palestinian people ‘proves that it is not only armed Palestinian resistance that Israel is after; Israel is after the very existence of Palestinians’.5 It’s worth noting that Refaat Alareer, Ghassan Kanafani and Naji al-Ali were all assassinated, not for carrying a gun, but for wielding a pen or an artist’s pencil.
Rooted like the olive tree
Even in exile, Palestinians, like their native olive tree, remain deeply rooted in the land; they are ever present even in their absence. This is why Israel continues to uproot millions of olive trees, which for Palestinians represent their livelihood, food, medicine, existence and continuity. For Palestinians, the olive tree – a tree that has inhabited the land for thousands of years (unlike the European pine trees introduced by the Zionist project) – is just as essential as human life. In fact, there is a medicinal component to the resistant and resilient olive tree, whose leaves my late brother Hamdi Khalil Hamdi, a scientist specializing in biochemistry, studied. The olive tree’s leaves owe their resistance to a bitter compound called oleuropein, which Hamdi identified as a powerful ‘anti-tumour agent’.8 The leaf’s resilience mirrors the resilience of Palestinians: out of bitterness comes strength. This has been expressed through Palestinian art – as in al-Ali’s character Handala, who derives his name from the bitter plant al-handal – in science, through Hamdi’s discovery of a powerful medicine, and in the legendary sumud, or steadfastness, of the besieged Palestinians of Gaza.
What the colonizer does not understand, as Darwish wrote about Gaza and Palestine more broadly, is that ‘Gaza is devoted to rejection… hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection’.9
As Palestine has shown the world, despite the brutality of the Israeli colonial regime and its powerful global allies, the Palestinian cause lives on through the words of the combatant writer who resists and defies death – against all odds.
- Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi (eds.), Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, Pluto Press, London, 2024.
- ‘A Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck’, YouTube, 2016, a.nin.tl/writer
- Stanley L Cohen, ‘Palestinians have a legal right…’, Al-Jazeera, 20 July 2017, a.nin.tl/occupied
- Saqr Abu-Fakhr, The Palestinian National Movement: From the Armed Struggle to a Disarmed State, Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, Beirut, 2003.
- Tahrir Hamdi, Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity, Bloomsbury, London, 2023.
- Ghassan Kanafani, Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine. Dar al-Adab, Beirut, 2013 [1968].
- Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, Bloomsbury, London, 2005.
- HK Hamdi and Raquel Castellon, ‘Oleuropein, a non-toxic olive…’, Biochem Biophys Res Commun, September 2005, a.nin.tl/bitter
- Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Silence for Gaza’, [republished by] Mondoweiss, 1973, [republished] 2012, a.nin.tl/rejection
