Ghassan Kanafani is regarded as one of the most well-known Arab writers and journalists of the past century. Born in Palestine in 1936, Kanafani and his family were forced to flee his homeland during the Nakba - after which he lived and worked in Damascus, Kuwait and finally, from 1960, Beirut. Kanafani was martyred on July 8th, 1972, along with his niece Lamees, in a car bomb planted by Israeli agents. His writings have inspired entire generations of Palestinians and those in solidarity with their cause.
"Searing, precise, and gloriously revealing, Kanafani lays bare the
deceptive practices that give voice to the Zionist literary
tradition's boorish and arrogant refrain. As Zionism haplessly
shapeshifts into a pseudo-indigenous liberation movement, nearly
five decades after its debut, On Zionist Literature is more
necessary and timely than ever. This translation is a welcome
event."Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer from Jerusalem, occupied
Palestine. RIFQA (2021), his debut collection of poetry, was
published by Haymarket Books
"In this searing critique, Kanafani laid bare the ways in which
language, fiction and film were employed in the service of Zionism
to manipulate popular western imagination - paving the way for
political Zionism, a chauvinist and supremacist ideology that aimed
to colonize Palestine and usurp the natural rights and claims of
indigenous Palestinians. Kanafani provides an audit of key literary
pivots that mark the invention and evolution of a Zionist narrative
that managed, through deceit, to not only embed itself in an
ancient historic context to which is has no actual connection, but
to also alienate the peoples who forged that very same history.
Although written in 1967, this work is crucially relevant to
contemporary examination of Zionist mythos underpinning Israel's
ongoing incremental genocide and theft of Palestine. Finally
translated into English, this work is a monumental contribution to
anglophile Palestine studies and to critical postcolonial and
neo-colonial theory."Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American
political activist and the author of Mornings in Jenin (2006), The
Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), and her latest novel Against the
Loveless World (2019) won the Palestine Book Award
"This superbly translated book is a splendid example of the
Palestinian political commitment to know one's enemy. If Ghassan
Kanafani was one of the earliest Palestinian novelists to humanize
the Israeli Jewish enemy as he did with several characters in his
1969 novella Returning to Haifa, in this 1967 study of Zionist
literature, he was also one of the first literary critics in the
Arab World to examine and analyze Zionist literature, whose output
he studies since the early 19th century as an ideological formation
and preparation of the ground for the settler-colonial project that
the Zionist movement pioneered in Palestine at the end of the
century. Brilliantly argued and comprehensive in its coverage, the
book remains most relevant to understanding Zionist and western
representations of Palestine and the Palestinians historically and
at present. Its searing insights are as accurate and revealing
today as they were when it was published in 1967. This is a
Palestinian classic!"Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab
politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York.
His books include Colonial Effects (2001), The Persistence of the
Palestinian Question (2006), and Islam in Liberalism (2015)
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