Imagining the Unimaginable: A New Palestinian Nationalism

Can there be a Palestine Vision 2048?

"Armed resistance is not superficial, but it is the fruit of a tree with roots deep in the land. And if liberation comes from the barrel of the gun, the gun comes only from the will to liberation. It is nothing but the logical, natural conclusion to the meaning of resistance: resistance by rejection and by steadfast holding to our roots and to our stand… cultural resistance is as crucial as armed resistance to understand the basis of the rifles of our armed struggle." — Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, Ghassan Kanfani. 

The above quote is the opening line for Ghassan Kanfani's 1968 study in militant Palestinian literature, of which Kanfani himself became an icon. Kanfani, a celebrated icon of Palestinian militant leftist machismo and the perfect unity between literature and violence, theory and practice, was both a highly regarded literary talent and a highly regarded terrorist. He was part of the leadership of the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which pioneered the industry of Arab international terrorism and established its enduring models and foundations. For him and his generation of Palestinian writers and poets, life was defined by bullets, whether made of lead or ink, seeking to give birth to the Palestinian man, a leftist symbol of universal humanism through the killing of the Zionist, the symbol of universal oppression. In lines inspired by Frantz Fanon, the Palestinian cultural establishment made the self-realization of a Palestinian identical to the killing of an Israeli. It is the bullet that transforms victimhood into humanization.