Resistance Literature Against Zionist Brutalities

The Infra-Politics of Palestine

[you have to read this on the substack site, since this essay is too long for the email]

While Israel and the United States conducted their illegal war on Iran, and while Israel illegally attacked Lebanon and continued to grind on with its genocide of the Palestinians, I read Ghassan Kanafani’s great book On Zionist Literature (Fi al-adab al-sahyuni, 1967). It is little read these days, but thankfully in print in Arabic by Rimal Books and in English through the Liberated Texts series of Ebb books. The book is paired with Kanafani’s Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine, 1948-1966 (Adab al-muqawama fi Filastin al-muhtalla, 1966 - also in print from Rimal in Arabic). Together, these books made the case that Israel had not only carried out a territorial Nakba (catastrophe) against the Palestinians from at least 1948, but that they had also embarked assiduously on a programme of a cultural and political nakba – the erasure of the Palestinians as a people in Israeli texts (now written increasingly in Hebrew), and the eradication of Palestinian cultural life within Palestine (with the enforced exile of most of the Palestinian intellectuals). These books are a precursor to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which, while much more famous, is far less directly politically astute than Kanafani’s volumes.

Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature

For Kanafani, Zionist literature set the terms for the construction of the state of Israel and for Israel’s attempt to eradicate Palestinian life. It is this Zionist imaginary, crafted over generations prior to 1948, that creates the cultural conditions within the Israeli population for a casual kind of annihilation of the Palestinians, despite their own parents and grandparents having survived the worst kind of annihilation policy – the Holocaust by the Nazis. Zionist literature, Kanafani wrote, is contested by a new kind of literature written within the ‘walls of the Zionist occupation’ by a world of ‘Arab youth sentenced to military rule’ – often within prisons that had begun to spring up and would multiply after 1967. These young Palestinians, amongst whom Kanafani counted himself, had developed the consciousness of their nation and had begun to wield the ‘weapon of literature’ against their occupiers. As they wrote – stories and poems – and as they painted and sculpted, they created a Palestinian imaginary that went from small magazine to poster and shaped this ‘weapon of literature’ into international icons. Recognising this, the Israelis had begun to try and disarm the Palestinian writers and artists, imprison them, destroy their work, bomb their studios and libraries, steal their archives; in other words, the Israelis wanted to steal their imagination of their own future and suffocated by the Zionist ‘blitz’ (as the late Walid Khalidi put it in 1959).

Palestinian fighters in Beirut, with a cat

Eradication went from the erasure of the history of Palestinians on their land (by the altering of names of villages) to the destruction of their art.

No wonder that the Israelis felt the necessity to assassinate Ghassan Kanafani in 1972 at the tender age of thirty-six.

None of this has changed. If there had been no mass protests in the United States and Europe for Palestine, I doubt that we would see the flurry of books being published about Palestine by publishers who normally stay well away from the subject (unless they publish Zionist authors). But even here there is the patina of Zionism regnant. Many of these books are by liberal Israelis (‘heartsick’ at the ‘tragedy’) or by Palestinians in the diaspora who are not directly linked to the various factions (all these factions have been falsely labelled as ‘terrorists’ by the Israelis). The key texts are anything by David Grossman (his latest being The Thinking Heart, 2025) and Eli Sharabi, a former captive (Hostage, 2025) - both New York Times bestsellers.

Many of these books are very useful and good books, no doubt, but they are also safe, and in many ways not able to break out of the framework that suggests that the emancipation for the Palestinians must come from elsewhere than themselves since those in the Occupied Territory are victims or survivors but not political subjects able to act, and those in the camps in the surrounding countries are equally prone. Concessions are made for these books to see the light of day: Hamas must be condemned or shunned, violence must be set aside, Israel must be acknowledged to have the right to exist, Palestine must be allotted its requisite Bantustan status, and there must be no valorisation of the history of resistance by the Palestinians themselves. If Kanafani appears as a quotation, it is through a set of words that have lost their meaning and would not be recognisable out of their context even to him.

History, in these books, must come from elsewhere or otherwise there is demoralisation (‘why can’t we stop the genocide?’); History does not come from within the Palestinian society that is, in fact, in ferment and struggle but whose ferment and struggle continues to be suffocated physically and culturally by the Israeli occupation.

Books on Palestinian Politics by Palestinians

In the early days of the genocide, it was difficult for Haider Eid (a professor at al-Aqsa University in Gaza) to find a publisher for his book, Decolonising the Palestinian Mind. Why? I am not sure exactly why because nobody said so, but here are two options: first, he was based in Gaza and worked at an institution that the Israelis had successful said was Hamas-run (as they said of every institution and every person in Gaza), and second, Haider Eid had written a very radical book that was not about Palestinian suffering but about the necessity for a Palestinian politics. Books about suffering seem easier to find an audience than books about the hard-headed politics of the Palestinian people. Parts of the book came to me through the journalist Victoria Brittain and parts via WhatsApp voice notes. It is often how books of this kind, from the frontlines of today’s harshness, are written and assembled. We published the book in 2023 at LeftWord Books in India and then at Inkani Books in South Africa (where Haider Eid is now based and from where he has become an important voice against the genocide and the occupation more broadly).

With Haider Eid and his book

Between 1993 and 1995, Wisam Rafeedie, in al-Naqab Ansar 3 prison, wrote a novel about a young revolutionary – Kan’an Subhi (age 22) – who is (like Rafeedie) a revolutionary and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The novel highlighted three fundamentals – love, revolution, and life. In bits of paper smuggled in dough and in pill capsules, the novel travelled throughout the prison, where it was an absolute success, and then it went from prison to prison – becoming a staple for the debate and discussion of political life amongst Palestinian prisoners. One prisoner copied it, and got it out of the prison system, from where it went to Damascus and was published in 1998 as al-Aqanim al-Thalatha. The book circulated widely in Arabic but did not have an international audience – because it was not another book on Palestinian suffering alone, but on Palestinian politics. In 2024, a version of the manuscript translated into English by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji was edited by fourteen members of the Palestinian Youth Movement and then eventually published in English by 1804 Books (New York) and later by LeftWord Books (New Delhi). Rafeedie’s book is a manual for politics and should be required reading by every political organisation. The Palestinians are political subjects in the book, in the fight for their own emancipation.

The arrest card for Wisam Rafeedie

During the genocide in Gaza, Wasim Said was studying physics. But the ferocity of the bombing forced this young man (he was 22) to begin to write. So, he wrote. From October 2023 to January 2025, Wasim wrote about his family’s turmoil in Beit Hanoun and then about what was happening around him in Gaza – including the politics of the genocide. This was sincere prose, unaffected by metaphors and adjectives – just a record of the stories that had been taking place around him. His manuscript left the country, and was soon in the hands of Louis Allday – who works with Ebb Books and published the English edition of On Zionist Literature and recently an English translation of Sabri Jiryis’ The Foundations of Zionism (translated by his daughter Fida Jiryis), a companion volume to Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature. Louis sent the manuscript to the writer Mousa Alsadah, with a note, ‘You must read this – and we have a duty to help publish it’. Mousa got in touch with Wasim, who told him by WhatsApp voice notes that he wanted to resist – as Mousa wrote in his foreword – ‘the collective erasure of families, of entire lineages being slaughtered. He refused to let them vanish into oblivion. Someone had to give them meaning, to preserve their memory’. Mousa took the manuscript to 1804 Books and it appeared in English as Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide (and will soon come from LeftWord Books in India).

Wasim Said on the Gaza beach

That idea of refusing to let the Palestinians ‘vanish into oblivion’ and that someone had to give their lives ‘meaning’ echoes the work of Kanafani – memory and meaning as the arc of resistance. But more than anything the issue here is whether Palestinians can be subjects of their own political history or must be simply erased or mourned.

Voices of the Prisoners

The International Peoples Assembly (IPA) began a campaign recently for Political Rights for Palestinians. On the surface, the phrase seems strange: don’t Palestinians have political rights by the fact of their humanity, since that is already established by the United Nations Charter. But of course as a consequence of the Israeli occupation, Palestinian rights have been largely vacated – Palestinian organisations that do not fully submit to Israeli authority are defined by the Israelis and their Western allies as terrorists, any political action to expand Palestinian rights and to build these organisations is seen by the Israelis and their allies as terrorist activity, and Palestinians in prison are brutalised and whatever limited rights that prisoners have are denied to them. All these points have been long-established by human rights groups, often in the West. Israel, however, has decided to define Palestinian and pro-Palestinian human rights groups as well as mass organisations of Palestinians as ‘terror organisations’. The list is interesting:

· Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

· al-Haq: Law in the Service of Mankind.

· Bisan Centre for Research and Development.

· Defence for Children International-Palestine.

· Union of Agricultural Work Committees.

· Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

In this list, we have two prisoner rights organisations, one research institution (with which I continue to collaborate), one NGO, and two mass organisations. What links them? They believe fundamentally that Palestinians have political rights and are political beings. Increasingly, any Palestinian that speaks is going to be seen by Israel and by their allies as a terrorist.

It is shocking to go back and read the 1978 report by the Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners in Israel, because so much that’s in there is repeated in the policy paper on Systematic Violence by Issa Qaraqe for the Institute for Palestine Studies (August 2024) and then by the report on torture and genocide by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese (published in 2026). Almost fifty years later, the reports of terror by the Israeli state seem identical. So be it. It is known. But it must be told repeatedly to every generation in every possible venue. Albanese’s report is very important because it puts the material into the United Nations system and builds a case on behalf of the prisoners.

The world of Palestinian letters with the occupied territories has taken a beating, with presses in Gaza bombed and many of them in the West Bank and East Jerusalem dismantled by the Israelis on the accusation that they are used for terrorist activity. But nonetheless, many Palestinian political figures have written novels and short stories, including political books, to explain their sense of the world. This is such a common genre that it has its own name, al-abad al-sujoun (Prison Literature) or al-adab al-asra (Captive Literature) but is also known as al-abad al-wahshi (Brutality Literature). Former prisoners have often turned to fiction, as we see with Wisam Rafeedie, and with Walid al-Hudeli in Sata’er al-Atma (Lady of the Windows). Al-Hudeli spent fifteen years in the Israeli prison system, so he knew how to depict his character Amer’s ninety days of torture and interrogation. The point, al-Hudeli shows us, is to break the political will of the Palestinian prisoner, but it does not happen. And so, there is Walid Daqqa’s imaginative children’s book – The Oil’s Secret Tale – which bristles with that Palestinian will to survive and will to emancipate, the dreams of a prisoner going far outside the bars of the cell. Then there are several PhDs written by prisoners that will never see the light of the day, many of them unfinished, most of them written under enormous duress.

Walid Daqqa and Sana Salameh on their wedding day in Shikma Prison

Most of the published novels and stories we have are by men, but women participate equally in the Israeli incarceration system both as prisoners and as family members of prisoners who are drawn into the torture and interrogation as instruments to terrorise Palestinian society (a useful book was published by Pluto Press in 2014 by Nahla Abdo called Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System).

Palestinian fedayeen in Jordan before 1970

It is not just that Palestine’s presses have gone silent as much as that the presses for Palestine in the Arabic speaking world have also gone quiet. These used to be in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus – but so many of them in Beirut might not recover from this bout of the Israeli bombardment, while the presses in both Cairo and Damascus have faced pressure from their respective governments to shy away from radical Palestinian books that are radical only because they take Palestinian humanity seriously. The former al-Qaeda bosses in Syria who are now in charge have dismantled the Palestinian solidarity networks, with almost silence meeting this act of Zionism from those who spent years condemning the Assad family on human rights grounds. Egypt’s Sisi had cracked down on freedom of expression right from the day he took power, with permission from his Western backers to duplicate Mubarak since the alternative – any form of democracy – was going to be too dangerous for Israel. Both Sisi and al-Sharaa are as good gendarmes for Israel as Jordan’s King and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

Malak Mattar, No Words, 2024

In a few weeks, LeftWord Books will publish Wesam Afifa’s remarkable piece of non-fiction, Survivors of the Darkness (with a cover by the luminous Malak Mattar). This book, written by a veteran reporter from Gaza and translated into English by Husam Almadhoun, is about a young cameraman, Osama, and his time in the Israeli archipelago of prisons during the genocide. Osama spent most of his time in Sde Teiman, a combination of the US prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib with a touch of the Nazi concentration camps. The experience is brutal. Wesam listens to Osama and then recounts the story in a way that makes it go by fluidly, as if we are there with Osama, or sitting by a fire in Gaza, listening to Osama talk to Wesam and then Husam telling us what is being said. ‘This book is memory resisting erasure’, Wesam writes. When Osama is released after months of granular torture, he is back in Gaza. People come to see him. They come covered in dust. He wonders about them, these professionals that he knew from Gaza’s middle class now looking like people who work in a quarry. Then Osama reflects on this experience:

Each one told me his own Gaza story. It felt like they were telling me that they were in Hell too, just like me in that prison. There is a hell here, and a hell there, and each is trapped in his own corner of fire.

But each person seems to be fighting that trap. They do not want to exist in this partial reality. They seek something more. In Wisam Rafeedie’s book, Kan’an’s friend Muna has doubts about the need to struggle. Kan’an tells her, ‘arm yourself with determination and that will make the impossible possible’. That’s the feeling from all these books, resistance literature that stands against Zionist literature.

Infra-Politics of Palestine

One day in Jenin, I was struck in a conversation to learn about the idea that what happens to the prisoners is somehow ‘underneath our reality’, as if it were something that is so essential to the Palestinian experience today that it bears little mention. It is such an everyday occurrence for Palestinian families in the Occupied Territory that they do not talk about it to each other with alarm – it has become their reality. This is the infra-politics of Palestine, the taken-for-granted politics. And because it is the infra-politics it has not been so necessary to talk about it or to write about it. Every family has been hit directly by the arrests and detentions, and as each family maintains the paperwork to visit their relative or to get them out of prison, there is a mundaneness about this activity. It is as if this is normal life.

PFLP fighters in Gaza

And it is normal life under the conditions of Occupation, just as it is normal in Gaza now to be bombed and is normal in the West Bank to get harassed by racist Israeli settlers and by the vicious Israel armed forces. Despite the video evidence of the bombing and the racism, that old foe – Zionist literature, now considerably updated – still plays its role. Perhaps no-one reads Leon Uris’ Exodus any longer, but the story of the valiant Jews who tame the desert and tame the savages in the desert remains; and, since Kanafani published On Zionist Literature, an entire panoply of institutions has been built around the world to condemn any anti-Israeli actions as anti-Sematic, itself a form of Zionist literature. Despite the months of sustained attacks on Palestinian life in the Occupied Territory and the war in Lebanon, there remains very little direct criticism of Israel from the governments of the West – and there remains support within those societies within the West despite the evidence of brutality. The engine of Zionist literature prevails – a fantasy literature of a beleaguered but essentially European people who hide in their kraal from the savages, an apartheid fantasy that appeals to the North Atlantic population that has not washed itself of its own colonial fantasies. Kanafani was right about how the pen was indeed part of the fundamental struggle for emancipation.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we published a dossier in November 2025 called Despite Everything: Cultural Resistance for a Free Palestine (dossier no. 94). For the dossier, Tings Chak (director of our Culture Department) interviewed the brave Palestinian filmmaker Mohammed Bakri (who died not long after the dossier was published). We ended our dossier with some lines that Bakri told Tings in the interview.

Culture is life. Culture is roots, and history. Culture is humanity. If we lose culture, we lose our identity. We lose our life. There is no meaning without culture. There is no meaning to life without love. Culture is love. I will not permit them to take my love away from myself. My culture. This is my heart. This is my people. These are my memories. This is my childhood, when I walked without electricity and without water. The songs that I heard. The food that I ate. The air that I smelled. The mountain that I climbed. The sea that I swam in. This is my culture, my existence. Nobody will take that from me. So, I will continue making films. Despite everything.

Despite everything, which is despite the infra-politics really. But it does not end the struggle – which is shaped by the consciousness of resistance and emancipation and by the reality of the Zionist horizon that must be broken.