The Rifle and the Bard

How Palestine Became Revolution

Every nation has its founding myths; few have been so thoroughly imprisoned and crushed by them. The Palestinian national imagination was not born, as its admirers suppose, from the organic memory of the “Nakba,” a dispossessed people finding its voice. But it was constructed in the late 1960s by a handful of Third World poets and militants who fused revolutionary Marxism with romantic nationalism and produced something unprecedented: a people whose very identity was indistinguishable from the act of armed struggle. That this identity was forged in the white heat of genuine suffering does not make it less artificial; if anything, it makes the artifice more tragic, because the suffering was real and the framework imposed upon it was not. What follows is an attempt to trace how this happened — how Palestine ceased to be a place and became a Revolution, and how a Revolution, by its very nature, could never become a place.

When Nasser's armies were destroyed in six days in June 1967, the entire edifice of pan-Arab socialism collapsed with them. Egypt, which had served as the vanguard of Arab modernity since the nineteenth century, was suddenly exposed as a hollow state, its revolutionary promise reduced to rubble and charred metal in the Sinai. Into this vacuum stepped the Palestinian armed struggle, which offered the Arab world something Nasser could no longer provide: a living revolution, embodied not in a failing state but in a stateless people whose very dispossession seemed to guarantee their purity. Palestine became the site where the revolutionary promise could be renewed precisely because it had no territory to govern, no bureaucracy to corrupt it, no reality to test it against. The guerrilla replaced the officer; the fedayeen replaced the army; the refugee camp replaced Cairo. And with this transfer came everything that had defined the Arab revolutionary imagination, its Marxist vocabulary, its Hegelian confidence, its theology of historical destiny, now compressed into the figure of the Palestinian fighter.

In becoming the new Nasser, the Palestinian movement not only inherited his mantle but also his triumphalism, along with the vanguard position Arab Marxism had once conferred on Egypt. This was the natural triumphalism of Revolution itself: wherever Revolution appears, it claims inevitability. Once Palestine was declared to be the Revolution, its triumph was presumed assured, and the Palestinian intellectual automatically became an intellectual of Revolution. Within this structure of thought, the world runs on a stark linear axis of Revolution and reaction; Revolution alone carries the truth-value of history, and its victory is destiny. In a later act of self-criticism, Palestinian Marxist Faisal Darraj admitted the folly of this framework, observing in 1990 that Palestinians “believed that having a cause with a right makes it necessarily triumphant.” Such triumphalism produced utopian fantasies, unrealistic expectations, and, by the force of disappointment, inevitable despair.

Much of this new reality, Palestine as the new incarnation of the Revolution, was expressed candidly in the words of George Habash, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and, after Arafat, the most important figure in the movement. In a lengthy 1970 interview with Life magazine—conducted just after his group launched its unprecedented campaign of airplane hijackings—Habash was pressed on why Western civilians were being targeted. His answer was blunt: “The capitalist countries that conceived Israel and are now using it as a bulwark to protect their interests in Arabia. They include the U.S. and almost every country in Europe.” He insisted that the Palestinian struggle was only one theater of a far larger historical drama: “We have to look at this scientifically and recognize that our revolution is a phase of the worldwide revolution. We have to be honest and admit what we want is a war like the war in Vietnam. We want a Vietnam war not just in Palestine but throughout the Arab world.” Finally, Habash anchored the struggle in the Marxist-Leninist genealogy of the era: “By 1967 we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples. There is no escape from this logic… Israel is a product of colonialism, colonialism is the product of imperialism, and imperialism is the product of capitalism.”

Being a Revolution inside a Revolution, however, was less the inevitable conclusion of Arab revolutionary logic, as Habash liked to suggest, than it was an act of imitation of the New Left’s manual of struggle. The international Left of the late 1960s lived in a transnational revolutionary imagination, circulating symbols, tactics, and theories with remarkable speed. The Palestinian movement was no exception. Its very self-understanding as an armed struggle within the world struggle was lifted almost verbatim from the French Marxist Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). Debray—once a young philosophy lecturer in Paris, later a comrade of Che in Cuba—codified the new theory of guerrilla war. His book laid out in detail the tactics, methods, and instruments of insurrection, but its theoretical core was the separation of the vanguard from the party: “there is no Revolution without a vanguard… this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist-Leninist party.” The conclusion was: “The guerrilla force must be developed if the political vanguard is to be developed… the principal stress must be laid on the development of guerrilla warfare and not on the strengthening of existing parties or the creation of new parties. That is why insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity.”

Debray’s world was one in which politics were stripped to their barest form, reduced to pure force, and left brutalized. The Palestinian leaders and intellectuals absorbed this entire theoretical framework wholesale. In place of politics, there was violence; in place of institutions, the gun.

Just as Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth first reached Arab readers through the Lebanese literary journal al-Adab in Arabic translation, so too did Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, published by the journal in 1972. By that time, however, the Palestinians were already deeply immersed in their “Armed Struggle”—guerrilla warfare and People’s War against Israel, Jordan, and the Lebanese state. In the introduction, the translator confessed what was already obvious: “…every day the Arab man hears about People’s War, Armed Struggle, and guerrilla work… these slogans did not come to us before other nations had already adopted them, not just with words, but with mountains of sacrifices and blood, dangers, and lives lost in vain at first… a large number of us [Palestinian revolutionaries] went to review the history of other revolutions… it mostly led to disagreements over models—Cuba, China, Vietnam…”

If the translator’s words are taken seriously, then the Palestinian guerrillas were not guided by theory into practice but by imitation into theory. They adopted forms and methods of violence first, with concepts drifting behind them like loose garments. Only afterward did the books arrive to tell them what they had already been doing.

When Constantin Zurieq first gave meaning to the Nakba in 1948, what was most conspicuously absent were the Palestinians themselves. The Nakba was defined not as their catastrophe, but as the failure of an abstract “Arab Nation” to annihilate Israel. Palestinians did not yet possess an independent nationalism for the simple reason that they were presumed already absorbed into the imagined destiny of a unified Arab future. Only the exhaustion and collapse of Arab Nationalism—still lingering in traces among Palestinians—forced them into becoming Palestinians, inheriting the Nakba’s symbolic apparatus and fusing it with their own lived dispossession. Out of this transfer, a new national identity emerged, but one constructed on ground already staked out: it was defined as the negation of Israel. No alternate foundation was sought, no independent ideological meaning beyond the struggle against Zionism.

This remains the most haunting feature of Palestinian nationalism: an identity articulated within the same theology of alienation, its redemptive horizon mapped as Armed Struggle culminating in Return. Eden is retroactively posited as pre-Israel Palestine, conjured through an invented memory shaped by a biblical-romantic paradigm of orange groves, olive trees, and the noble peasant in a timeless landscape. As Eden is defined only by the Fall, and the Fall only by Eden, so Israel becomes the negation of Palestine, and Palestine the negation of the Fall. The result is a national self-conception locked in a metaphysical dichotomy, one of the most intractable problems of the modern world, and one constantly sustained by the transnational supply chains of the international Left.

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The transition to a Palestinian-led Arab New Left meant the entry of new figures, poets, and theoreticians, while the older Arabist guard was gradually consigned to irrelevance. Yet one man bridged both worlds: George Habash. His life condensed the arc of revolutionary futility. He fought first for Arabism under Nasser, then for Palestine as Revolution, then for Muslim Palestine, and finally for a democratic Palestine. Habash was less a thinker than a pure vessel of revolt; his only constant was the guerrilla struggle itself. He was a Philosopher-King of insurrection without philosophy, a man whose successive causes revealed the poverty of the revolutionary identity: rebellion without end, direction, or final substance.

George Habash (1926–2008)

Known as al-Ḥakīm—the medieval Arabic title that signified both philosopher and physician—George Habash (1926–2008) was born in Lydda, today’s Lod near Tel Aviv, to a Greek Orthodox family. In 1948, as he pursued medical studies at the American University of Beirut, his family was driven from their home, an exile that marked him for life. At AUB he came under the sway of Constantin Zureiq, the eloquent young professor whose Meaning of the Nakba had already defined the ideological logic of Arab defeat. Habash became one of Zureiq’s most ardent disciples, embracing Arab nationalism as a new faith. So intense was his devotion that he founded a clandestine group of his own, the Youth of Arab Vengeance—a small, fascist-styled cell animated less by doctrine than by ritual. Together with his comrade Hussein Tawfiq, Habash engaged in strange ceremonies of self-purification and self-flagellation, binding violence to sacred discipline.

By Habash’s own later admission, they possessed no real revolutionary theory at this stage, “no political thought but a clear goal, to assassinate those who betrayed Palestine… it was very narrow thinking, just by way of violence.” Yet the men who passed through these embryonic cells would go on to become the core leadership of the Palestinian national movement. In the 1950s, Habash gathered his followers into the Arab Nationalists’ Movement (ANM), which soon became one of the most important vehicles of Nasserism outside Egypt—a proxy formation that tied the Palestinian struggle directly to the fortunes of Arab nationalism.

The slogan of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement was simple: “Unity, Liberation, and Vengeance.” Ideological sophistication was never its strong suit, which is precisely why it gravitated toward Nasser rather than his Ba‘athist rivals, who spun far more elaborate theories. Marxism held little attraction; instead, the ANM studied what Habash later claimed were “the Qur’an, German and Italian unification [histories].” Given that he made this remark in the late 1990s, when Islam had become the indispensable idiom of politics, one can doubt whether the Qur’an figured at all in their studies of the 1950s.

Asked in retrospect about the socialist content of Nasser’s Arab nationalism, Habash offered a neat formula: “Nationalism is the framework, socialism is the content.” Eighty pages later in the same interview, when pressed about his support for Islamism in the final decades of his life, he repeated the exact same construction: Arabness is the framework, Islam the content. The man did not merely speak in slogans; he thought in them.

Before his later cooperation with Islamists in the 1980s and 1990s, Habash had already abandoned Arab nationalism in the aftermath of 1967–68, reinventing his organization as the PFLP, a Leninist–Marxist formation. He explained his “conversion” to Marxism not as a rejection of Nasser but as a belated discovery of the importance of “classes.” Yet even in describing these ideological zigzags, he insisted he had never lost his bearings: “historical materialism, the essence of Marxism… the Arab Nation… and the total liberation of Palestine.” When asked in the late 1990s what new words he might add to the old slogan, he replied: “democracy.” By then, of course, Marx was long buried and the global idiom had shifted to democratization. Habash was simply repeating the slogans of the age as he had always done.

There is nothing in Habash’s thought that justifies serious analysis. His real legacy was not philosophical but terroristic. As head of the PFLP he pioneered the Middle Eastern “industry” of terror spectacles, plane hijackings, building an international network that linked Palestinian militants to the wider family of national-liberation movements, with material support flowing from Moscow and Beijing. The PFLP also played a major role in the first phases of the Lebanese civil war, before greater and more nihilistic monsters entered the field. But violence was not its only contribution. If Habash supplied the organization and the gun, it was Ghassan Kanafani who gave the Palestinian Revolution its voice, its image, and its myth.

Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972), today canonized on American campuses as a postcolonial romantic hero, was the figure most responsible for endowing Palestinian identity with its founding literary imagination. The now ubiquitous symbols—the kufiya, the orange groves, the peasants, even the rifle—bear his imprint. Born in Acre to a Sunni family, Kanafani lived through the trauma of 1948 when his family fled to Damascus, where they survived on UN rations as impoverished refugees. Unlike many of his contemporaries who spoke from ideological distance, Kanafani carried the wound of personal dispossession. The romanticization of his memories was, in one sense, natural. Yet he elevated them into a totalizing aesthetic, transforming nostalgia into obsession and, ultimately, into a kind of psychopathic fixation.