| by Amber Poole |
FORBIDDEN TO USE THE NAME
Poet, Husband, Father, Activist, Philosopher, Friend
Ghassan Kanafani
“I heard you in the other room asking your mother: ‘Mama, am I a Palestinian?’ When she answered ‘Yes’, a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then ---- silence.” Ghassan Kanafani (Introduction, Men in the Sun)
Interview (1970) with Australian television journalist, Richard Carleton
Kanafani: ...they are forbidden to use the name even ‘Palestinian’.
Carleton: ...they’re better that way than dead, though.
Kanafani: Maybe to you, but to us it’s not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself.”
Carleton: Why won’t your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis.
Kanafani: You don’t mean exactly ‘peace talks’. You mean capitulation. Surrendering.
Carleton: Why not just talk?
Kanafani: Talk to whom?
Carleton: Talk to the Israeli leaders.
Kanafani: That kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean? No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist and a national liberation movement.
Carleton: Talk to stop fighting. To stop the death and the misery the destruction and the pain.
Kanafani: The misery, the destruction, the pain and the death of whom?
Carleton: Of Palestinians. Of Israelis. Of Arabs.
Kanafani: Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name ‘Palestinian.’
Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again; hills, plains, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do not believe that man grows. No. He is born suddenly---a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road. GF
Ghassan Kanafani, spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was assassinated by Mossad on July 8, 1972, six weeks after the Lod (now David Ben Gurion) Airport Massacre.
Kanafani was a writer living in Lebanon. His 17-year-old niece Lamees, was in the car that exploded them both to their untimely deaths.
Time Magazine wrote on July 24, 1972: Death of a Guerilla.
Guerilla what? He never picked up a gun. Guerilla poet? Guerilla father, husband, friend?
More than fifty years later, the same questions are being asked, the same disinformation being spread by an apartheid state, the same confusion in the voices of western journalists asking the questions, and the same agenda in place to exterminate all Palestinians.
The weekend Princess Grace died; I was in Verona. That same weekend, the weekend of September 16-18, 1982, the Sabra Shatila Massacre in Beirut was in motion. Reports varied that between 800 to 2,000 to 3,500 Palestinians were slaughtered by Lebanese Christian Militia while the Israeli Army stood by and watched. Under the command of Arial Sharon, deep pits were dug and the bodies buried there; the reason an accurate count was not possible.
All the world was looking at our American beauty, Grace Kelly, Hollywood legend, star of the silver screen, a Princess lying in state at the Grimaldi Palace. Nobody was interested in a bunch of dessert dwellers in sandals living in substandard conditions in a place so distant from the assumed civilized life that not even the slightest comparison to anything familiar could be made. The gap was too great to close. Who were the Palestinians?
The late Robert Fisk posed the question that weekend that still impacts today: ‘When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre?...When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel’s enemies?...If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.”
In order to understand an Occupation, one must first understand the history of the Occupier. One must understand intimately their shared relationship.
The late professor, Edward Said, Columbia University, himself displaced, living as a Palestinian in exile with no right to return to his homeland, told us that he and his wife were probably the only two Arabs sitting in the theater that day watching the most notable documentary on the WWII Holocaust, Shoah. He concurred the tragedy, as any human with a beating heart would do but his unanswered question, and to this very day the unanswered question, is why should the Palestinians take the blame and suffer the consequences for what was done to the Jews by the Nazis? Why should the Palestinians be tortured, scorned, murdered, shamed and humiliated by the Israelis for a crime they did not commit?
I am not writing today in the spirit of politics. I am writing as a witness to humanity. We have too long rationalized the killing of innocent people, in particular, infants and children.
I want to repeat this so that it is very clear.
Infants and children are being murdered. By the thousands.
Thousands of children are being slaughtered. We kill our livestock and criminals more humanely. We don’t cut their legs off with no anesthetic. We don’t burn them, only almost to death, but not quite, so that they suffer from these injuries with no relief.
Let’s be honest. If we were to put aside our fears, put aside our prejudices, put aside our politics, would it be possible to actually just see a murdered child and weep? Is that yet possible for humanity? Or have we so demonized the Palestinian people that we are now the living lie...the lie that says ALL Palestinians are terrorists? Has something rooted itself, something that cannot be reversed in the collective psyche of the State of Israel (for that matter, in the collective psyche of the West) convincing itself that someone has to pay the price for the atrocities committed between 1939 and 1945?
And that if the Palestinians would just go away, disappear, be cleansed, forever, then we, the people of the State of Israel and the West could rest in peace. But first, we must kill every Palestinian on the planet. We must put an end to Islam. We must eradicate all those who do not look like us, pray like us, celebrate like us.
Be careful what distracts you. Be careful how far you go in your actions to damn your neighbor: THE OTHER. Be careful what lies you consume.
The women came down from among the belongings and went to a farmer who was squatting in front of a basket of oranges. They picked up the oranges, and we heard them lamenting. At that moment I realized that oranges are something precious, and that they are dear to our hearts. The women bought the fruits and went back to the car. Your father stretched out his arm, took an orange, stared at it silently, then burst into tears, just like a miserable, little child. GF
We are refugees. Dispossessed.
In a world where one is established as The Other, it’s not long before the finger turns on the accuser, a new power base established and the deadly game begins again. What a tragic waste of imagination. What a blow to our potential intelligence when one is trapped in the delusion of revenge. No matter how many Palestinians the Israelis kill, in the end, they will have to circle back around and look within themselves for what it is they can’t carry, what it is they project onto another, and figure out a way to create a safe container for their suffering.
God Help Humanity spare its rotting heart.