The Coffin Business
Cameron Hurst interviews Hazem Jamjoum about Ghassan Kanafani and the historic fight for Palestinian liberation
I’ve temporarily moved to London to study Northern Renaissance art history (and file reports as The Paris End’s foreign correspondent). This means that, although I have been constantly watching videos from Gaza, reading news reports from Jerusalem, and scanning open letters from New York, I have felt somewhat distant from the political discussions and activities happening on the ground back home in Naarm/Melbourne.
I wanted to find out more about Palestinian activism happening in the city that I’m living in. So, on Sunday November 5, I went to an event called “Arts Action Palestine” in an art space in north east London. The event was billed as a day of fundraising for a Palestinian medical aid organisation and a UK-based Palestinian political organisation. It featured panel discussions, workshops, films, food, soundscapes, and a library, and was put together by a group of arts organisations, many of which are connected to West Asian, South Asian, and North African diaspora communities.
Most people in attendance at the event were young—in their 20s and early 30s. It was busy, with a constant queue of people waiting patiently outside the door. The largest room in the space was periodically filled by people sitting on the floor listening to panel discussions led by Palestinian speakers. People seemed keen to learn. Maybe I was projecting, but some seemed a little overwhelmed and ashamed about being uninformed. I felt like this. To be honest, growing up in a white Anglo family in suburban Perth, I’d mainly learned about the State of Israel via torrented episodes of Broad City. This changed somewhat in the following years, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert on Middle Eastern geopolitics.
One of the speakers at the London event was Hazem Jamjoum. Jamjoum is a writer and translator from a Palestinian family who works as an audio archivist in London. His translation of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani's 1972 text The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis was published in July of this year by 1804 Books, and his translation of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's novel No One Knows their Blood Type is due to be published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2024.
Jamjoum presented a talk where he argued for understanding the past and present of Palestine via the history of apartheid South Africa and using the theoretical framework of settler colonialism. He was a charismatic speaker—the audience, sprawled on bean bags and rugs, clapped vigorously when he finished.
Jamjoum’s translation of Kanafani’s text was for sale at a stall at the event. I bought a copy and read it over the course of an afternoon in a library the following week. To summarise very briefly: it is an account of a Palestinian-led uprising in British-controlled Palestine in the late 1930s. Kanafani frames it as a “revolution”; elsewhere it has been written about as the “Arab Revolt.” One major factor in the uprising was tensions caused by the large influx of Jewish migrants fleeing rising anti-semitism in Europe. In early 1936, a general strike by Palestinians was initiated by followers of Shaikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a militant religious leader who was killed in a conflict with the British in 1935. Civilians refused to pay taxes and began wearing the keffiyeh en masse. The general strike was reaffirmed by the “Arab Higher Committee,” a group of Palestinian leaders who formalised demands directed towards the British: a halt to Jewish immigration into Palestine; the prevention of land transfers to Jews; and national independence. These demands were not met. 1937, 1938, and 1939 were filled with guerilla warfare and violent conflicts between British soldiers, Palestinian peasants, Palestinian “feudal-religious” leaders (to use Kanafani’s term), Zionist militants, Jewish migrants, and various other groups. By the outbreak of World War II, the British had mostly suppressed the revolution, but not the profound schisms that underpinned its incitement. These would continue to shape the region for decades to come.
I hadn’t read Kanafani before this. I didn’t know what to expect. Compared to more recent histories I’ve been reading, I was struck by his militant, materialist approach to understanding the period. Kanafani writes that the British Army gave Zionist “Settlement Police” special and distinctive Australian bush hats to “further distinguish them”; this reminded me of the disturbing connections between the distant ends of the British Empire. I was also affected by a section where Kanafani cites popular sayings as evidence of how, for Palestinians in the early twentieth century, “abject poverty, crushing oppression, and centuries of class and national repression” had produced “defeatism, fatalism, and political quietism.” Some of these sayings are: “the prince’s dog is a prince,” “don’t stretch your toes beyond your blanket,” and “move into the coffin business and people will stop dying.”
How are people engaging with this text and Kanafani’s politics today? With this question in mind, I organised to meet Jamjoum for an interview (the first of a free, three-part interview series with people involved in the Palestinian liberation movement published by The Paris End). In our conversation, we covered a time period going back over a hundred years in a region where history is intensely contested. The following history is one that Jamjoum has arrived at through extensive research, lived experience, and from being embedded within a “body on the line” leftist political tradition. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cameron Hurst: How did you end up translating Ghassan Kanafani’s text on the 1936–1939 Revolution?
Hazem Jamjoum: One of the chief editors involved in 1804 Books, who published the translation, spoke to Kanafani’s widow, Anni Kanafani. Anni gave her blessing for a translation. I had written a book review of Basel al-Araj’s I Have Found My Answers on the website Liberated Texts. People at 1804 Books had read it and I think that gave them a sense that I would be a good person to translate Kanafani.
Who was Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972)?
Kanafani came up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He's a teenager when he meets George Habash, who is one of the founders of the Arab Nationalist Movement. That movement then becomes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Habash is so impressed with Kanafani that he makes this young teenager the editor of the Arab Nationalist Movement’s newspaper, which is called al-Ra’i (the “Opinion”). Then when the organisation becomes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and their organ becomes called al-Hadaf (the “Objective” or the “Goal”), Kanafani is the natural choice for editor-in-chief.
So Kanafani is one of the leading Marxist intellectuals and the editor of a major political faction’s publication. He’s also an important political leader. He’s deeply embedded within a very particular political formation, which is considered the most important part of the Palestinian left. They have a very fraught relationship with Moscow. This wasn’t the kind of party that was just taking orders from the Comintern. It tried to maintain a high degree of autonomy and independence. In some of his other writings, you see Kanafani being very critical of Moscow without being too overtly critical. Let’s not forget that Stalin was the first to recognise Israel, in 1948. Before the Americans. Before the British. Before anybody else. The Soviet Union was no friend to liberation movements in the Arab world, just as it was not an ally of Spanish revolutionaries in the 1930s.
Now, Kanafani is mostly remembered as a writer of short stories and novellas, especially for his book Men in the Sun (1963). But he has analytical writings, like this text about the revolution, which are extremely important. I actually think one of his greatest contributions was as an editor. He gave many of the leading Palestinian intellectuals and artists their start by having them published, including Naji al-Ali, the person who came up with [the political cartoon] “handala.” If you look up “handala,” you'll probably recognise that figure of the boy. You only see the back of his head—he is in rags and is stuck at 10 years old, which is the age Naji al-Ali was when he and his family were expelled in ‘48.
How is Kanafani relevant today?
He is incredibly relevant, both in the approach that he took as a committed fighter and organiser and in his analysis. In terms of his approach, he is a Marxist internationalist. And so, for him, this is not a national or a religious struggle. It's very much about all power struggles being a struggle for human dignity.
It’s actually quite stark how he begins his analysis [of the 1936-1939 revolution] by looking to the Palestinian Communist Party as the place that should have been the leadership against both the British imperial occupation of Palestine and Zionist settler colonisation. He goes into the Communist Party’s debates and decisions, and realises that it’s predominantly made up of Jewish colonists. Then he begins his analysis by saying that the Communist Party weren’t able to effectively act on their own decision to do what they called “Arabize” the Communist Party. [In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Palestine Communist Party tried to diversify and broaden its membership. This stated goal did not happen.] Because of this, the working class, Indigenous people, and Jewish migrants/settlers were left a bit rudderless.
The fact that that’s his starting point, I think, is really telling. He’s not differentiating people by their origin—he basically gives priority to the identities that people choose for themselves, their political identities, and their political solidarities. I think that’s something that needs to guide all of our actions. This isn’t about blood or parentage or origin. This is very much about looking at humans as humans, and what we can do collectively to create a better world—and that will require people to be militant and put their bodies on the line. I think that was a big part of why the Zionists considered Kanafani so dangerous. They ultimately assassinated him in Beirut in 1972, using a car bomb that also killed his 17-year-old niece.
How do you see your position in the current Palestinian liberation movement—as leftist educator; as an inheritor of Kanafani’s tradition?
I am a product of that tradition on a global level, not just the Palestinian level. I see Jewish and non-Jewish European partisans who fought the Nazis, and the black, brown, and white comrades who fought white supremacism in the United States and elsewhere, as the lineage from which I descend. That is my chosen identity. There is no stirring of feeling when I see things like the Palestinian flag or any kind of national symbol. In that sense, I often say that the day Palestine is free is the day I cease to be a Palestinian.
After reading Kanafani’s text, I’ve been interested in learning more about the period before 1936–1939. How do you understand the historical context of Palestine leading up to the revolution?
Palestine is historically inseparable from the region around it. It was always tightly connected to Egypt and what we would now think of as Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as the Mediterranean Basin, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. People referred to this area [Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan] as Bilad al-Sham (the land of Sham, one of the names of Damascus). Since the sixteenth century, it had been under Ottoman rule. As with most peoples in the “age of empire,” people were likely to identify with the city or the village or the region they lived in, combined with some kind of confessional identity. But then there was also a recognition, regionally and globally, of this land of Palestine as a distinctive place. This was especially true because of its religious significance to three of the monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Then, at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire [in the early twentieth century], the Ottoman Sultan goes ballistic. There is this feeling that the Empire is disintegrating. The British Empire basically wants to hold the Ottoman Empire intact so that rival European empires won’t do a rapid land grab. But by the time we get close to World War I, the British are ready to take whatever they can for themselves. As soon as the war starts, the British initiate diplomatic arrangements for carving up the empire in the war’s wake.
The British state also allies itself with the European Zionist movement. We have a crucial event on November 2, 1917, when the notorious anti-semite Lord Arthur Balfour sends a letter to British Zionist movement leader Baron Rothschild saying that Britain looks favourably upon the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This then becomes a text that’s effectively copied into the British League of Nations Mandate over Palestine. After World War I, Britain militarily occupied Palestine and appointed its highest ranking Zionist, Herbert Samuel, as High Commissioner.
Palestine historically is a place where migrants, refugees, worshippers, and pilgrims have come and lived together. We’re a very motley, mixed population as a result. Many of us can trace family to different waves of refugees and migrants, in addition to communities that have been on the land for millenia. In the 1920s, the British begin to execute land expropriations. They started evicting Palestinian farmers, who would then see European Jewish settlers being implanted on their land. At this point, you get the beginning of a Palestinian resistance and a national liberation movement that has two enemies. The primary one is the British military occupation. The secondary one is the European settler colonisation that comes under the umbrella of Zionism, which is not a regular migration or refugee movement. It’s a movement that Palestinians begin to understand very clearly as “they’re not coming to be our neighbours. They’re coming to take the country.” Of course, as Kanafani shows clearly, there is a third enemy—the sell-out elites within our own society.
One of the important parts of this story is that this actually places Palestinian Jews in a very awkward position. Palestinian Jews are Arabic speakers. They are indistinguishable from me or any other Palestinian, except for when they take their holiday and what kind of building they go to for worship if they’re religious. It’s almost completely forgotten that some Palestinian Jews turned anti-Zionist once they realised that Zionism was this harmful settler colonial movement. Some of the people who are most vociferous in analysing Zionism and speaking out against it are doing so in Jewish-owned Palestinian presses—these are Palestinian intellectuals from Jewish families who have newspapers or are journalists. They’re the ones ringing the alarm bells and trying to actually appeal to European Jewish settlers to rethink Zionism. To say: “Just come as regular people. You’re not the first nor will you be the last to seek some kind of dignity here. We have centuries and millennia worth of coexistence with our non-Jewish neighbours. There’s no need for this whole Zionism business.” I’m not trying to paint any kind of picture of perfection and say that everybody was singing Kumbaya together. But there was not the presence of the European phenomena based around the [nineteenth century] rising tide of exclusivist nationalist ideology and white supremacism. That is an import that comes in with Zionism. As with Palestinian society, Arab society has always been diverse, including with a sizable Jewish population. Many Jewish Arabs were estranged from their neighbours and from their communities. It has made that part of our history difficult to talk about when it really should be something that we're able to celebrate along with other parts of our pluralistic history, warts and all.
There are many uprisings and protest moments that happen in the ‘20s and early ‘30s. But the thing that really changes everything is the rise of the Nazis to power in Europe. Throughout the 1920s, the Zionist movement had only been able to move something like 60 to 80,000 Jews from Europe and North America. But when the Nazis win the election in Germany, it becomes patently that much more unsafe to be Jewish in Germany and also in much of Europe. People start running for their lives. And at the same time that Jewish refugees from Europe are trying to find safety and security, you have the countries that they’re trying to go to, like the United States, Canada, and Britain, closing off their borders specifically to Jewish refugees.
If you’re a Jewish refugee trying to seek safety for yourself and your family in the 1930s after the rise of the Nazis, Palestine becomes one of the only places you can go. So you have this dramatic increase of Jewish immigration, mostly refugees, into Palestine. This really creates panic and alarm for Palestinians. Because even though these refugees aren’t coming as ideological Zionists, they’re being co-opted by the Zionist leadership as the Jewish demographic on which an exclusive Jewish state will be built in the future. This is the exclusive Jewish state that political Zionism had been talking about since the 1880s and ‘90s.
These circumstances lead to the calling of a workers’ general strike in 1936. It’s mostly an urban phenomenon. It is one of the longest general strikes in the global history of the twentieth century. It’s six months long. The imperial powers, led by Britain, begin to exert a lot of pressure: not just on the bourgeoisie and landowning elite in Palestine, but also on puppet regimes in other Arab states. In Trans-Jordan, in Iraq, in Egypt, and so on. They also begin to exert a great deal of pressure on the Palestinian elite to call off any kind of resistance.
They eventually succeed, but as soon as the general strike is called off, the resistance moves into the countryside and turns into an organised and sustained armed insurrection. This then grows to the size where one can very legitimately call it a revolutionary moment. From 1936 to 1939, Palestinian guerrillas are joined by volunteer partisans from neighbouring countries and further afield. Their fight is primarily against the British military occupation, which is the governing power and the main military and policing power crushing people’s skulls and brutalising the population. But also, by extension, the guerillas are fighting Zionist colonial settlement.
In Kanafani’s text, he attempts a thorough class analysis of the revolution. He tries to show how between the workers, the peasants, the landowners, the intellectuals, and the cultural sphere, the battle is waged on various fronts. These battles are internal to Palestinian society, as well as between Palestinian society and broader Arab society. Then there are the struggles against the British occupier and the Zionist coloniser.
He shows that this is a distinctive context. Usually, an imperial power seeks a local indigenous partner amongst the local indigenous elites. The British called this “indirect rule,” the French called this “association.” It’s imperialism on the cheap. This is what happened in almost every other Arab country and most of the Global South after decolonisation or in the process of decolonisation. In the case of Palestine, what Kanafani argues is that the British didn’t need the Palestinian elite. The Palestinian elite even try to offer themselves as that pliant native authority. But there was no actual interest from the British to take them up on this offer, because the British had a way more effective, already allied force in the form of the Zionist leadership. This basically creates the contradiction that the region has been reckoning with ever since; it is the contradiction mass-murdering us now.
The British suppressed the revolution. What do you see as the key aftereffects of this turn of events?
The British go into overdrive as they recognise that they’re going to be embroiled in a war in Europe with the Nazis. Everything kind of gets put on hold. They issue a White Paper in which they promised to limit Jewish migration into Palestine, but this is consistently violated. The British do not really open up their own borders to Jewish refugees from Europe. This is especially true after the liberation of the concentration camps. If you go back to the newspapers from 1945 and 1946, across Europe, anti-semitism is still alive and well. Even though the Nazis have technically been defeated, in one sense Europeans are saying, “Oh, my God, we have millions of Jews, where are we going to put them?” And not only do these refugees dare to be Jewish, they’re also poor and impoverished, because the Nazis took all their belongings. It’s like the two worst evils: you’re both Jewish and destitute. And so “send them to Palestine” becomes formulated as a kind of European restitution for the Holocaust. The way to assuage European guilt is to support this other form of racist settler colonial violence.
We’re very much living with this today, right? Nowhere is this clearer than in Germany, where even the mention of Palestine is practically illegal. Germany has committed to a kind of “never again,” but is interpreting “never again” as “we will never again commit a genocide against Jewish people. If someone else is committing genocide somewhere else, that seems to be okay. We’ll even send weapons.”
In effect, in this period, what the British did was take out Palestinian society’s ability to organise itself. They took out the key leaders and key movements, banned the possession of arms, and banned political organisations. This kind of stuff would get you executed, imprisoned, or exiled. So when we hit the mid-1940s, Palestinian society is reeling. In contrast, the Zionist movement has been emboldened. In terms of the demographics, thousands of Jewish refugees are now being funnelled into Palestine. The British have also armed and trained Zionist fighters as an additional police organisation, which they call the “Settlement Police.”
The British Empire also trains Jewish fighters in Europe to fight the Nazis, which was, of course, very important. But then after the war, many of these units’ personnel move to Palestine. They enlist as Zionist fighters. This is not only in the Jewish Agency’s formal fighting militia, the Haganah, which would become the Israeli Defense Forces. The more zealously ideological settlers also join paramilitary organisations like the Irgun and the Stern Gang. These groups became notorious for things like the Deir Yassin massacre and other massacres that were committed in 1948. And they committed the King David Hotel bombing. [The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was a headquarters for the British Mandate government. Zionist militants from the Irgun bombed the hotel on 22 July, 1946.] A lot of those guys were actually considered terrorists by the British state in the period between ‘46 and ‘48.
When we get to 1947, you basically get the British saying, “We’re overstretched. We’re going to pull out of places like India, we’re going to pull out of places like Palestine. We’re just going to hand the problem over to the United Nations.” The UN doesn’t know what to do. They are basically adopting the approach of partition wherever it sees problems between defined groups. In every case where they enacted partition there were catastrophes—nowhere more so than in India, but similarly in Palestine. In the UN General Assembly Resolution 181, in November of 1947, the calls for partition. The Zionist movement takes this as a kind of international legitimacy for the creation of a Jewish state. This is despite the fact that, in the case of Palestine, the Partition resolution does not actually say that the Jewish state is going to be exclusively Jewish or that the Palestinian state is going to be exclusively non-Jewish. It leaves inhabitants with the right to choose which state to live in, including the right to remain where they are.
But then you have the systematic, forced expulsion of the largest number of Palestinians that Zionist forces are able to carry out. At least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled between November 1947 and the Armistice Agreements in the spring of 1949. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba, or the “catastrophe.” It's really just the beginning of the nightmare. It's a period of accelerated forced displacement, but then it never stops. It's really important to highlight that it never, ever stops, whether it's land theft or expulsion of people from their homes and lands.
That reminds me of something that people often quote in an Australian context—the historian Patrick Wolfe’s idea that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event.
Patrick Wolfe would partly have been thinking of Palestine when he wrote that. The structure of settler colonialism is not just the legal structure. The way it’s enacted is about maximising land under exclusive Zionist control, with a minimum number of Palestinians on that land. Flipped, this means the largest number of remaining Palestinians squeezed into the smallest morsels of territory. The model is the ghetto or the open air prison or the concentration camp—or in the case of Gaza right now, the extermination camp. This is so that the rest of the territory can be cleared for what Zionists call, in their own terminology, “exclusively Jewish settlement.”
It’s important to remember that the word “Jewish,” when we talk about Israel, is not a religious category. It's very much a legal category. You are registered as a Jewish national or an Arab national or Bedouin national or a Druze national. Or an absentee. If you're a refugee and you have property that the state has taken, it calls it “absentee property.” If you were displaced in ‘48 but didn't cross the border—what we’d now call an internally displaced person—you were legally categorised as a “present absentee.” The Orwellian nature of Israeli law is ever-present.
At the talk you gave, you mentioned that you had conducted oral history interviews with older generations of Palestinian people. People you interviewed would have been living through this period. What were some of the recurring themes and stories that came up in your interviews?
When I was doing these interviews, it was already in the 2000s, so there weren’t many people remaining who were in community leadership positions in 1948. It was mostly people who remembered these events as children or teenagers. And so, for example, they remember Jewish merchants who would come to the village and sell things. They remember Jewish neighbours. My experience, without fail, was that this generation would talk about Jewish people in the language of betrayal. Like: “We were friends, we were neighbours, we would buy from each other. We would babysit each other's children. And then you turned around and did this to us?!” There was a kind of trauma that they very clearly had never gotten over. When my grandmother finally told me about her experience, she spoke about her family being expelled at gunpoint from Jaffa. Bullets were flying behind the red pickup truck that they escaped in.
What was her story? Where did she end up?
She ended up in Jordan with her family. Her father was sort of a merchant—buy-and-sell, whole goods kind of stuff. He had a lot of pride. He refused to register with UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency] as a refugee. He moved the family out of the camp as soon as he could and basically worked from dawn ‘til dusk every day to make sure that his kids had enough to eat and had a roof over their head. That’s the story of a lot of refugees in Jordan. My grandmother developed a kind of feminism that takes the form of holding it down. You know, it's not necessarily political organising, and it's not attending meetings and going to demos. Just: holding it down. Making sure people are fed and clothed. Making sure people get an education. That is one of the most important things. My grandmother was a teacher and then became a headmistress of a school.
Actually, my entire family are teachers—from both sides. That's been very central in how they've seen themselves as part of the struggle. On my father's side, for example, in the First Intifada, his sisters, who were mostly teachers, opened up classrooms in their homes or the community churches or mosques. The Israeli military had closed down all the schools because the school kids would go out and demonstrate. And so people would hold classes in their homes and in community spaces.
It's that kind of political action that actually doesn't leave much of a trace and doesn't appear as heroism. You can’t take a picture of it. It's not like somebody holding up a flag while throwing a stone in front of a tank. It's not glorious. It's about just making sure people survive and are healthy. Right now, you can see this by looking at parents in Gaza who are just trying to make sure their kids are not traumatised somehow—by covering their ears and hugging them and giving them an explanation for what's happening so that they're not constantly terrified. Making sure there's food and water when there's no food or water. It's just about maintaining a certain level of humanity in the face of monstrosity.
[At this point, the conversation turned to key events in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the 1967 War, internal conflicts in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat’s rise to prominence, the Camp David Accords, Israel’s increasingly close relationship with the United States, the First Intifada, and the Oslo Accords. Much of this discussion was outside the scope of this published interview—the following section is a highly condensed version of the narrative Jamjoum offered of events leading up to the twenty-first century.]
In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the Israelis began to think about how to create a native authority. How are they going to get Palestinians to come and play that role Bantustan administrators played [in apartheid South Africa]?
What the PLO did in the ‘70s—and not the entire PLO, just the right wing of the PLO, represented by Arafat’s Fatah party and its cronies—was to basically abandon the liberation struggle and turn it into a diplomatic struggle. They were like, “Okay, let's see what the US wants. What would they accept? Then we will say that we're willing to play ball on those terms, so long as the US then twists the Israeli arm into backing off. Then they can give us a state so we can become another Arab dictatorship.” Of course, the US never ends up doing anything to pressure Israel in any meaningful way.
The PLO transforms into a Bantustan authority governing Palestinians in the ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza on behalf of Israel. That remains the case. If you go and find videos of the protests in the last month in the West Bank, the chants are predominantly against the Palestinian Authority (PA). If you were to draw an organisational chart of the Israeli military, the PA is part of that organisational diagram—it's part of what the Israeli military calls its “Civil Administration.” It’s an Authority with very little authority besides policing and prisons. It has no real sovereignty. It’s seen as an extension of the occupying force: as Israel’s first line of defence.
The PA’s only legitimacy comes from the fact that international aid is funnelled through the organisation as a job-creation program. Part of the Oslo Agreements ends up being the devastation of Palestinian agriculture, manufacture, and production—anything that's about Palestinian economic sovereignty is not mentioned in the agreements themselves. Since 1994, the Israelis have sort of accelerated this devastation while increasing dependence on international aid for people's survival. Aid—and remittances. The other key thing is remittances. Palestinians are 70% displaced people and the majority of those are outside of historic Palestine. We live outside and we send money to our families. That's the other major dependency. It's all money from outside because our productive sectors are forced to remain stunted while the Israelis systematically destroy anything that looks like it could be a foundation for the economic sovereignty which would enable steadfastness.
In the ‘90s, the main contender against the Fatah party is the Islamic resistance movement that has popped up in the First Intifada: Hamas. The Israelis have facilitated the growth of this party as something that's going to be a counterbalance to Fatah—to ensure that Arafat doesn't get any ideas, basically. But Hamas is made up of people who are not there to be collaborators. They end up launching a full-scale attempt to oppose the peace agreements. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, this famously takes the form of suicide bombings, many of which targeted civilians. Hamas was also a social movement, building orphanages and schools and community centres, because they were trying to create a popular base. Now, within a family, you'll have some siblings who are Hamas and some siblings who are Fatah and some siblings who are leftists and some siblings who are apolitical. This becomes a contradiction that the Israelis are very interested in playing up.
There is a very important moment after the death of Yasser Arafat—probably the assassination of Yasser Arafat [the circumstances of Arafat’s death are disputed]. If you go back to the newspapers in 2005-2006, the international community at this point was all about how Palestinians needed to conduct a proper, democratic, free and fair election. The idea here was to basically create some legitimacy behind the sellout leadership that succeeded Arafat. There was a clear assumption that Fatah would win that election and then that would be the mandate to sign off what remained of Palestinian rights. That failed miserably. Fatah members, Christians, people who never would have voted: all came out and voted for the Islamists Hamas. This was a protest vote. No Christian is going to want to live under an Islamic state or a state that's avowing Islam as part of its political ideology in any way. I, as a secular, would never want that either. Though even if I had been able to vote in that election, I would not have ever voted for Hamas—as a refugee outside, I don’t even have that choice. But it was like: “Not the corrupt sellouts. Who's the most likely to beat the corrupt sellouts? Hamas.” And so Hamas won an overwhelming majority.
The US and other global powers are put in this position of “oh, I mean, we said yes, free and fair, democratic elections…but, erm, not like this. Not if your democratic choice is going to mess with our plan for you.” [The international community and Israel] immediately turn off the faucets of all the international money and aid that was coming in. This development also enabled Fatah to forcibly take back power. In doing this, they provoked Hamas. Hamas held on to its power in Gaza, also by force, whereas Fatah came back and took power in the West Bank and Ramallah. And then, with Israeli help, they enacted a full-on crackdown on any Hamas institution in the West Bank, from the orphanages to the schools to the armed presence and to any kind of political presence. And so, since 2007, we've had a situation where the Palestinian Authority is governed by Fatah, the kind of apartheid government in the West Bank, and the open air prison of the Gaza Strip gets Hamas as their prison warden.
As soon as Hamas takes power in Gaza, Israel imposes a blockade. This is a full, medieval-style siege using the latest in grotesque modern technology. The Israelis built a sophisticated network of walls and barbed wire fences and remote control machine guns. There are completely bulldozed no go zones at the border areas for several kilometres everywhere around Gaza. People started stealing and destroying hundreds of acres of mostly agricultural land. The Israeli Navy controls all access to the Mediterranean sea. The key Israeli ally in the region, the regime in Cairo, comes in and closes off the fourth, Egyptian side. [Cairo] are in complete coordination with the Israelis on who is let out and who is let in, and what is let out and what is let in. Every two to three years, Israel goes in and does what some generals call “mowing the lawn”—a large-scale bombing and destruction campaign. It’s widely documented that in addition to continually punishing the people of Gaza, these campaigns showcase and market new Israeli weaponry.
So that brings us close to the present. What’s your perspective on what’s happening now?
I think that since 2014, the Hamas militant wing’s orientation was that “we need to go back to being a liberation movement. We can't just play this governing authority, prison warden role.” Hamas began a long-term strategic process of building their military capacity. They would use unexploded Israeli ordnance and the rubble from the buildings that were bombed and turn those things into missiles. For people who remember the first rockets fired out of Gaza—they were basically Molotov cocktails mounted onto projectiles. Now Hamas is able to fire rockets that cause significantly more damage at significantly longer range. Now there is a homegrown, homemade arms industry under the ground in Gaza designed to sustain a military campaign for several months or more. This was initiated on October 7. I think it's effectively the first time that the resistance chooses the time and place. They were far more effective than they thought they were going to be. I imagine they thought they were going to get 30, 40, or 50 Israeli captives in order to trade those for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, while also laying claim to internal legitimacy as the leadership of the liberation struggle. The fact is that the major component of Israeli casualties on October 7 appear to have been soldiers and police, at least in the reports I’ve seen in Israeli publications like the Jerusalem Times. [Official sources report a high civilian death toll.] Reports of their humane treatment of Israeli captives also suggests that they were making a play for international legitimacy as a body that can act in accordance with the laws of war. [Human Rights Watch have stated that the “Palestinian armed group’s apparent deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate attacks, and taking of civilians as hostages amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law.”] We still don’t have all the details, but there is plenty of evidence that this is at least what Hamas intended in its conduct of the operation on October 7.
One of the biggest flashpoints in the discourse at the moment is how to understand Hamas’ actions on October 7. On a visceral level, I personally find their actions extremely disturbing, even though I can try and rationalise the structurally oppressive and extraordinarily violent historical context they appear in. In public, I see this immense pressure, especially on Palestinians, to condemn these attacks. How have you been thinking about this?
One thing to always keep in mind is that Palestinians have fought a largely unarmed resistance since the Nakba. And whether it's the Great March of Return or the campaign for boycotts or school strikes or tax strikes, they've been treated with the full brunt of Israeli brutality. I find it extremely disingenuous when people want to judge a movement for taking armed action when their enemy uses the full might of the most advanced military technology in the world to obliterate entire neighbourhoods. I'm not even just talking about the past month. I’m talking about every Israeli assault on Gaza or the West Bank or on its own Palestinian citizens or on southern Lebanon or Syria. They have used mass murderous strategies and tactics. This has been epitomised since October 7. The mask is completely off with this one, but we've been seeing and saying this for decades.
The other thing that I think plays into this is the kind of whitewashing of many crucial liberation movements of the past. The Black struggle for freedom against racism in the United States was a very militant struggle. Martin Luther King was an extremely militant leader and organiser. Yet he's talked about as if he was just throwing flowers at the police. Nelson Mandela is treated as the paragon of nonviolent resistance. No—Nelson Mandela was put in jail for 30 years because he was the head of the armed wing of the African National Congress. He was organising military training camps for people to use armed violence in pursuit of freedom. Gandhi is talked about as this kind of nonviolent figure, but Gandhi was riding the wave of an extremely militant national liberation movement that was burning down British police stations. Like Assata Shakur said: “Nobody is going to hand you your freedom on a silver platter.” You have to take it. Every liberation movement and freedom movement throughout history has recognised this. This is not to glorify this or to celebrate it. It's to recognise that every freedom movement that's managed to actually win its freedom has raised the costs for those who have withheld that freedom and oppressed them.
I'm not a Hamas supporter. If there was an election today, or ever, I would never vote for Hamas because I don't agree with their political ideology. But I'm not going to sit in London and condemn people in an extermination camp when they break free from that camp.
Hamas have home-made weapons, but they also have more advanced weapons acquired through relationships with other regional powers like Iran. How do you understand that dynamic?
So much of this has been in secret—I can’t really pretend to know. All of this is done in ways that are inaccessible to us as a general public, especially in places where Hamas is not allowed to speak for itself.
What do you think about the international community’s response?
The most devastating part of this entire story is that we have an international community that's closed ranks behind Israel. Europe, Australia, North America—mostly places with imperialist settler colonial histories and presents of their own—have given Israel complete permission. The US official line is: “No red lines. Israel can do whatever it wants.” The Israelis have taken that no-holds-barred directive and used it. One high-ranking official and intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari have been talking about the use of nuclear weapons! More than twice the explosive power dropped on Hiroshima with a nuclear bomb has been dropped on Gaza in less than a month. More Palestinian children have been killed in the last month than since 1967, between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank combined [according to Defense for Children International-Palestine]. They've killed over 10,000 people [Gazan medical authorities now say over 11,000]. And only a tiny fraction of those that they've killed were the targets they were looking for, and even those are unconfirmed. Just the scale of mass murder and destruction, broadcast live, for everybody to see, between the Gaza Strip and West Bank combined…and no official entity has really lifted a finger. A few countries like Colombia, South Africa, and Bolivia have withdrawn their ambassadors. Bahrain said that they closed the Israeli embassy but it's clearly a temporary move while things feel completely unacceptable. We've yet to see a state with actual clout take any kind of action. Just to call for a ceasefire. This is not even talking about the things people really need, which is an end to the blockade, return of refugees, freedom, self determination, and equal rights. That's not even on the table. That's not even on the horizon. But just that minimal human demand of “stop bombing civilians” has somehow turned into a controversial—some would say terroristic and even anti-semitic—position.
There has not been significant censure by powerful nation states, but there are massive protest movements worldwide opposing the bombing of civilians and calling for a ceasefire, among other things. Looking back to the protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s—those were some of the largest protests in modern history. Some critics of that movement have argued that more everyday people mobilised than ever, but those mobilisations had more of a symbolic, rather than a realpolitik, impact. How do you see the role of the current protests?
I think protests are something where you go and you register your position. Where you can still hold your head up high in front of your grandkids when it comes time to talk about these events. It puts the lie to the government’s pretence that it's acting on popular will. It suggests to officials in electoral democracies that they should worry about holding on to their electorates, come election time. And people who voted for the Iraq War in places like the UK Parliament and the US Congress, for example—that is still a stain of shame on their record. It wasn't nothing. It's not that protest is ineffective. But I think it's not enough. I think what we're seeing now is a lot more being done. All over the world, we're seeing actions, for example, very specifically targeting the arms trade. We're still having these massive mobilisations, but I think people recognise that those are just one small part. They create powerful visuals but it's that much more mundane work that is far more impactful.
I also think that this needs to be looked at in context as part of the anti-fascist history of a city like London. In the last two years here, we saw with the environmentalist movement that there was an expansion of police power and an expansion of state power. There was a crackdown on protests, on freedom of expression, and on freedom of thought. There was a bill that would expand these kinds of policing powers, and there was a campaign to “kill the bill.” The bill was not killed; it passed. Now there are these expanded police powers. I think anybody who has any kind of political wherewithal would recognise that, regardless of what this is about, state actions to expand policing powers and the ability to crack down legally on thought and assembly and protest and the right to organise and the right to mobilise—this is how fascism happens. This is how we allow the fascists to win. This is the fascists winning. I think that this is not just about something that's happening over there in Palestine. This is very much a struggle for democracy here. And as we’re seeing that democracy turns out to have a “use it or lose it” dynamic at its core.
In London and in Melbourne, there has been a documented rise in anti-semitism. How can the Palestinian liberation movement combat anti-semitism?
There was actually a white nationalist, borderline Nazi demo in front of the White House recently. These white supremacists got up and said things like, “the genocide of the Palestinians is the same as the genocide of the whites in the United States.” So yes, anti-semites are definitely feeling more space to manoeuvre at the moment.
We have to be the number one anti-anti-semites. We have to be as morally and politically coherent and clear and explicit as possible: the anti-semites are just as much an enemy as the Zionists. They have no place in our movement. They need to be told, and forced to leave when spotted. Not because they tarnish our image or because of some strategic plan. They just have no place in this movement, morally and ethically.
When we saw, for example, the closure of Grand Central Station and the closure of Liverpool Street Station—those actions were organised by Jewish comrades. Jewish activists have been at the forefront of saying “not in our name,” because Israel acts in their name. The Jewish tradition is one where this kind of murder is completely unacceptable on religious grounds. Jewish history is one of people fighting fascism. That is an allied tradition. It is the tradition that I come from and that the Palestinian left comes from.
When we read Ghassan Kanafani’s book, written in the early ‘70s, it was clear as day to him that he belonged to the same tradition as the Jewish Bund in Europe. That was definitely much more his intellectual and political lineage than the right-wing of the quote-unquote “Palestinian liberation movement.” You can see that in the text. This is a strong and very much alive tradition in the Palestinian movement, but it’s not something that gets any airtime because it doesn't fit with the whole “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism” line that the media, the police, Zionist lobbies, and the State of Israel want to push.
What do you think everyday citizens in places like London and Melbourne should be doing about the conflict?
I think people need to look around them and say “no business with apartheid or you don't get my business.” If you're part of a union, you can look at things like pension funds. You can look at things where you work. For example, Hewlett Packard computers are standard issue across large sectors of the corporate and public sector, but Hewlett Packard has contracts with the Israeli military to provide them with tech. These are all things that we can directly change. There are also body on the line type actions to stop arms shipments and block arms factories, which a lot of people are doing and it's having an effect. This is throwing wrenches into the levers of the global arms industry, which has Israel as one of its key nodes. Show up to the protests, educate others, use social media to post information and share information. Help with media literacy and sift out lies. Educate yourself and others. Hold political representatives to account. Defend what’s left of your democracy before it’s gone.
Ultimately, this is a fight against fascism. Winning against the fascists in Australia, in Britain, in the US, in Canada is the biggest service anyone can do for Palestine. Because it's these same fascists in India, Brazil, the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia etc. that are the number one allies of the Zionist enterprise. Our fight here is part of the fight there. Beginning to see those fights as connected—as one—and creating a common cause is the power we have. We don’t have arms companies or state power. We have the power of the many. And we have power because the truth is on our side.