By M.A. AL-GHARIB
Ghassan Kanafani’s “The Revolution of 1936 – 1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis,” is a concise and densely argued book, translated with clarity and beauty by Hazem Jamjoun and contextualized with a helpful introduction and afterword by, respectively, Layan Sima Fuleihan and Maher Al-Charif. Originally published in 1972, the Peoples Forum-affiliated 1804 Books reissued it in the annus horribilis of 2023, just as Israel began the genocide of Gaza.
Kanafani’s book is a must-read to deepen our knowledge about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and to arm our solidarity movements with the knowledge to combat Zionist hasbara.
Kanafani began writing “The Revolution in Palestine”in 1969. This was a turning point in Arab history, the aftermath of the great defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. As his subject, Kanafani took up another major defeat, that of the Palestinian revolution of 1936-1939, both to recuperate the heroism of the early struggle against Zionist colonization and to assess its lessons for contemporary political work.
Kanafani was born in Acre in Mandatory Palestine in 1936 into a middle-class professional milieu. After the Zionists expelled his family during the Nakba, they fled to Syria, where they experienced proletarianization and its attendant precarity. His father, a lawyer in Palestine, was so devastated by the Nakba that he was unable to work again. Kanafani, educated early on in French, began seriously studying Arabic literature at Damascus University. There, he also joined the Arab National Movement (ANM), a network of reformists and revolutionaries, many of whom were disillusioned with the soft-Zionist politics of the Palestine Communist Party. Expelled from Syria because of his membership of ANM, he decamped to Kuwait, which would become the setting for one his most important novels, the devastating and brilliant “Men in the Sun.” By 1960, he had moved again, this time to Beirut. It was there that he composed “The Revolution of 1936-1939.”
Kanafani’s thesis in brief
Kanafani sees the Revolution of 1936-1939 as perhaps the decisive moment that sealed the Zionist-imperialist victory over the forces of Palestinian national liberation. The reasons were fourfold: the weakness of the Palestinian working class and bourgeoisie, the hegemony of the feudal-clerical stratum over the Palestinian movement, the failure of the landless peasants—the vanguard of the revolution—to achieve class independence, and the British-Zionist alliance with its huge advantages in resources and violence. With respect to the last item, Kanafani is brutally honest. The main reason that the British sided with the Zionists was because the latter were more competent and effective imperialist collaborators than the often equally amenable Palestinian feudal elite.
Kanafani wrote his book after his political conversion to Marxism-Leninism, albeit a version of it that was critical of the Stalinist USSR and allied parties, such as the Palestine CP. In spite of its name, the PCP was dominated by Jewish members and had failed to “Arabize” or to build a base among the peasantry. Kanafani’s conversion to Marxism enriched his secular Arab nationalism by increasing the materialist rigor of his method. Specifically, it allowed him to appreciate the political evolution of the landless peasantry in the 1930s as central to the story of the revolution.
The landless peasants: Origins and politicization
The emergence of this class was a phenomenon produced by Zionist settlement. As Kanafani acknowledges, it was Hitler’s persecution of European Jews that led to the explosion of Jewish migration to Palestine between 1933 and 1936. Between 1926 and 1932, 7201 Jews were migrating to Palestine annually. This number increased to nearly 43,000 per year between 1933 and 1936 (p. 5).
Moreover, by 1930-1931, Jewish organizations’ landownership had risen to around one-third of arable land, causing widespread impoverishment among both the peasantry and the bedouin. In this process, the Zionists expelled around 20,000 peasant families from their land, such that, by 1941, around 80 percent of Arab peasants were either landless or owned land insufficient for subsistence. With expanding Zionist settlement and the forced transition toward Jewish-controlled industrialization, Arab smallholding peasants bore the brunt of “extortionist” taxation designed to offset tax exemptions for Jewish settlers and to encourage Jewish industry. An example of the latter can be seen in the British tariff regime: high tariffs on imported retail goods, low tariffs on raw materials, unfinished goods, coal etc. (pp. 15-19).
By the time that the British assassinated Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, the landless peasantry was at a boiling point. Al-Qassam was unusual for his class: a leader who advocated Arab unity and Palestinian liberation and who was a talented organizer, a disciplined fighter, and uncompromising in the struggle against Zionism-imperialism.
For all its self-sacrifice and heroism, about which Kanafani is clear, this class-in-formation’s inability to become a class for itself, independent of the reactionary Palestinian leadership, was a main reason for the revolution’s failure. This made it increasingly difficult to defend the movement against Palestinian liberation’s two other implacable foes, the collaborationist Arab regimes and the Zionist – imperialist alliance (p. 1).
Zionism and fascism
The Jews flowing into Palestine by the mid-1930s counted among their ranks a much higher number of capitalists, professionals, and intellectuals than could be counted among the Palestinian side. The land grabs of the settlers were in the service of transforming Palestine from an “Arab-agrarian” to a “Jewish-industrial” economy and were facilitated “through capital concentrated in Jewish hands [which] simultaneously aimed to provide this transition with a Jewish proletariat.” Deploying the slogan “exclusively Jewish labor” and led by the reactionary Zionist labor federation, the Histadrut, this process drove “Jewish settler society in the direction of fascism” (p. 6).
Kanafani here is both launching a clear-eyed critique of what would later become known as liberal Zionism and entering into the Marxist debate on fascism. A rejection of liberal Zionism is now so accepted by the Palestine solidarity movement that is easy to forget how hegemonic it was, at least in the West, until the Gaza genocide revealed the true logic of Zionism to a mass audience. At the time he was writing the book, the understanding that Zionism was a form of racism and colonialism tending toward genocide of indigenous peoples was only widespread among people in the Global South, particularly Muslim-majority countries.
Regarding whether Zionism inevitably leads to fascism, or whether it is fascist from the start, is a more complicated question. Engaging Kanafani on this would require a separate article, on which this reviewer is currently working. For now, it suffices to say that Kanafani’s discussion of fascism here remains undeveloped, though it resonates with understandings of fascism generally more aligned with, for lack of better terms, “postcolonial” and “Black radical” currents of the left than it does with those within the Trotskyist tradition.
There have too few instances of these two currents engaging in debate. With the far right and neofascists running rampant across the political terrain of a declining Western imperialism, such a debate can highlight both overlaps and differences in theory and strategy. It is much needed today, and Kanafani’s work on Zionism would undoubtedly play an important role.
Marxism and culture
Kanafani’s analysis of the relationship between art and the revolution is one of the more engaging parts of the book. During the revolution, a generation of artists and intellectuals came of age who, though mostly born into the feudal-clerical or professional middle classes, rejected their class and instead solidarized with the armed peasant masses.
Poetry, in particular, was the genre that best played what Kanafani calls the dialectical role of a truly revolutionary art form. Experimenting with both fusha (classical Arabic) and vernacular forms, a “wave of patriotic poets” (p. 29) such as Ibrahim Tuqan, Abu Salma, and Abd al-Rahman Mahmoud expressed the militancy of the revolutionary zeitgeist and politically intervened to raise consciousness.
Kanafani’s discussion of Palestinian patriotic poetry is one the most compelling parts of the book—a sophisticated, materialist and dialectical analysis of the role of organic intellectuals in a revolutionary process—by an organic intellectual himself. Echoing Trotsky’s discussion of the ways that active participation in the Russian Revolution propelled the vanguard of the Russian empire’s working class beyond religious consciousness into a higher, socialist consciousness, Kanafani highlights the role of revolutionary Palestinian poems in combatting “the abject fatalism under the banner of religious loyalty” that defined the cultural world of the pre-revolutionary peasantry (p. 26).
The importance of 1936-1939 in understanding the Nakba
For Kanafani, the armed peasantry, representing the vast majority of the Palestinian population of the 1930s, was the class with both the objective capacity and the developing subjective consciousness to seriously disrupt if not defeat Zionist colonization. Its failure to do so set the stage for the eventual Zionist victory of 1948, the Nakba.
By 1939, the movement was exhausted. The British consolidated their alliance with the Zionists by, among other things, implementing a vicious regime of repression against the Palestinian toiling classes, from year-long prison sentences for the most minor transgressions against the colonizers to campaigns of physical violence enacted both by the British military and the Zionist gangs under their aegis to a policy of “widescale home demolition” (p. 50). The feudal-clerical leadership and the Arab collaborationist regimes—most notoriously exemplified by Abdullah of Transjordan, Nuri Al Said of Iraq, and Ibn Saud—actively betrayed the Palestinian masses by, among other things, imprisoning and deporting Palestinian revolutionaries back to the British authorities, where they faced execution.
The crushing of the revolution allowed the Zionist movement to pursue its main aim, alongside that of allying “with the British to the greatest extent possible.” This was to establish “the foundations of a military society and providing it with its martial and economic instruments” (p. 67). Freed from competition with Arab agriculture, the Jewish bourgeoisie was also freed to develop its economic capacity. The defeat of the revolution, for example, allowed the Zionists to build roads and ports to integrate their economy into emerging postwar capitalist order, a process helped along by monopolies granted by the British, such as for provisioning British troops in Mandatory Palestine.
Equally if not more importantly, the British actively supported, through personnel and training, the expansion of Zionist military capacity. For example, the imperial patrons employed Jewish auxiliaries as part of their police force as well as Jewish troops to defend the Mediterranean pipeline that transported crude oil from Kirkuk in Iraq to the port of Haifa. They also deployed those troops to violently repress the revolution (pp. 69-71). “Such an escalation in the role and activity of Zionist military units would not have been possible,” writes Kanafani, “had it not been jointly planned and orchestrated between the British and the Zionists” (p. 70).
“He went to battle with his pen”
“The Revolution of 1936-1939” is essential reading for activists in the socialist and Palestine solidarity movements. It is an irreplaceable classic of Palestinian and anticolonial movement history. That being said, it leaves major questions unanswered, questions that Kanafani, martyred at the age of 36 by a Mossad assassin’s bullet, surely would have further developed had he lived longer. The aforementioned question of fascism is one. The term appears several times throughout the short book and the reader is meant to understand that Zionism, which reflects and organizes a society of total military mobilization, an economy of land theft, and the genocide of the indigenous people of Palestine, is either a phase of fascism or a form of it. However, which of these apply, and how it applies, is not clarified.
A second question relates to Kanafani’s criticism of the Palestine Communist Party of the 1920s and 1930s for ignoring the colonial question and for normalizing Zionism. This is a prescient critique, to which he contrasts his own position, in which he attempts to harmonize Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and socialism.
As Kanafani put it in a 1972 interview: Anti-imperialism gives the impetus to socialism if it does not stop fighting in the middle of the battle and if it does not come to an agreement with imperialism […] The Arab nationalists realized this fact in the late 1950s. They realized that they could not win the war against imperialism unless they relied on certain [social] classes: those classes who fight against imperialism not only for their dignity, but for their livelihood. And it was this [road] that would lead directly to socialism. [p. x].
This position has parallels with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, specifically, that the struggles for democratic rights and economic reforms are not simply “stages” on the way to socialism, but rather, dialectically interrelated with the struggle for socialism. The struggle for socialism, in short, must put the question of working-class power on the table if it is not to fatally undermine itself. Reform and revolution, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, are not different paths to socialism—they are paths to different destinations. Kanafani seems very much in agreement.
Yet while for Trotsky, as for Lenin and Luxemburg, it was the proletariat that must be the class leading the process of permanent revolution, for Kanafani, as for Mao and Ho Chi Minh, it is the armed peasantry that must exert hegemony in the revolution. Again, we are left to wonder, had he been able to live to see the profound changes undergone by the Arab region in the decades since his death—not least the proletarianization of the majority of the Arab working classes and their leadership role in some if not all the Arab revolts of the 2010s—whether and how Kanafani would have rethought his 1972 analysis.
As we conclude this article, Israel is engaged in a deliberate starvation campaign against the people of Gaza and a seemingly unending wave of terror and pogroms in the West Bank. The Israelis have also murdered four more journalists in Gaza: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammad Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, and Mohammad Noufal. This brings the total since Oct. 7, 2023 to 270, making this genocidal campaign the deadliest for journalists in recorded history. Unfettered by a U.S. empire mired in a cycle of rapid, grotesque decline, the Israelis hurtle onward in this, one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history. The U.S.-Zionist axis is not only annihilating Palestine, it is saying to the rest of the world’s working classes: “This is what happens to you if you get in our way.”
More and more, we see the necessity today of Kanafani, a revolutionary socialist intellectual “who went to battle with his pen.”
“Kanafani guides us to resist the isolation of the Palestinian cause as simply an issue for the Palestinians alone, or for the Arab states alone,” writes Layan Fuleihan in the introduction to “The Revolution of 1936-1939.” “When Zionism is understood as an imperialist project in its origin and its agenda, it becomes an enemy of all of humanity, and the Palestinian cause a banner for all of humanity” (p. xii). More and more of the world’s working masses, the only force that can stop this horror, are now seeing the truth that Kanafani shares in this book and in his life’s work.
