The appearance of English-language translations of The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine and On Zionist Literature some fifty years after publication of the original Arabic texts is tragically timely.Footnote ¹ The catastrophe in Gaza, occupied West Bank, and now Lebanon is continuing, and Kanafani’s insights into Palestinian society and politics, Zionist ideology, and European and North American involvement are still all too relevant.

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine starts from a Marxist analysis of Palestinian society in the early twentieth century, focusing on workers, peasants, and intellectuals. It brings out the contradictions in the situation of the urban notables and large landowners, naturally inclined to ally with the colonial power but outbid by the Zionists, who were relentlessly pursuing an Arab-free Palestine at the end of the mandate. The British laissez-faire approach to agriculture, in which the majority of the Palestinian population was engaged, together with pro-Zionist sympathies on the part of many British officials, resulted in the increasing tendency of government policies to favor Zionists, leading to the impoverishment of the peasantry. The Communist Party failed to recruit many Arab members, nor did it engage actively with Palestinian concerns.

Having set the stage, Kanafani traces the course of the revolution, contrasting the heroism and self-sacrifice of the peasants with the efforts of the notable and landowning class, “semi-feudal and semireligious” as he characterizes it, to control the movement for its own advantage. The British took measures to crush the movement – arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, destruction of homes – which are familiar to anyone following current news about Occupied Palestine. The rulers of surrounding Arab states (Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Egypt) played along with the British for their own ends. In this unequal struggle the Palestinian revolutionaries, who had no effective national leadership, could not win.

As Maher Cherif points out, The Revolution of 1936-1939 was a pioneering study. Historians both Arab and foreign have examined this subject since the 1980s from different ideological points of view and methodologies, but Kanafani’s account and interpretation of the events from a Palestinian-Marxist standpoint remain pertinent. He saw the defeat of 1939 as foreshadowing 1948; one can also usefully apply his interpretation to the history of Palestine from 1967 on.

Kanafani was a creative writer as well as political analyst, and he moves away from general social categories (“the landowners,” “the beduin”) in his section on intellectuals to quote traditional proverbs as well as popular and elite poetry of protest (27-35). The poets’ individual voices offer a contrast in tone to the rest of the book and show how here, as elsewhere, literary creation existed for Kanafani on a continuum with political commentary and activism.

The translation reads well, but it could have benefitted from a final critical look with respect to usage.

On Zionist Literature has attracted little attention until now, and its appearance in an English translation is all the more welcome. Scholars have concentrated on Kanafani’s creative literary work, his political writing, and his career as a revolutionary, whereas this essay illustrates a more academic side to his activities.

In the introduction Kanafani explains his aim is to show Zionist literature as a forerunner and then ally of political Zionism, with the two working hand-in-hand. The first chapter looks at the revival of the Hebrew language in Europe, a necessary step in the creation of a literary Zionist movement, and its conflictual relationship with Yiddish and surrounding languages such as German or Polish. A choice for Hebrew implied a refusal to assimilate. This is followed by a survey of Jewish writing before the eighteenth century, including in Arabic and Latin, which notes times when Jews enjoyed greater freedom for instance in Germany.Footnote ² Such periods offered Jews the opportunity to integrate into the surrounding society but elicited the reaction of those hostile to assimilation and convinced of Jewish superiority and difference.

The Jewish characters portrayed in medieval- and early-modern European literatures were of two kinds, the Shylock figure and the Wandering Jew. This changed in the nineteenth century, as the third chapter traces. Kanafani chooses illustrations mainly from English literature, where positive characters like Maria Edgworth’s Harrington in the novel of that name (1817) emerge, contrasted with figures such as Disraeli’s racist and supremacist Alroy in The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), a wondrous Orientalist farrago. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) includes a Jewish character’s powerful expression of racist and nationalist thinking; the novel influenced many Jewish readers to become Zionists. Chapter four returns to the Wandering Jew, tracing the figure’s evolution from religious and prophetic in Jewish culture to political and chauvinist as portrayed by Zionists. In the next chapter Zionist writers are shown manipulating history in order to justify Zionism’s claim to Palestine on the basis of Jewish superiority, a prime example of such texts being Leon Uris’s Exodus. Chapter six discusses further instances of Jewish supermen heroically establishing their right to Palestine; the Palestinians are portrayed correspondingly as barbaric and worthless. Works examined in chapter seven by writers such as Benjamin Tammuz and Yael Dayan, who lived in Palestine before 1948, do not caricature Palestinian characters in this way, but they are incapable of engaging with what the Nakba meant for them.Footnote ³ The final chapter sees the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to S. Y. Agnon in 1966 as an uncritical acceptance of what Agnon stood for – the same attitude which would applaud the outcome of the June war.

On Zionist Literature is an impressive intellectual achievement. Kanafani’s account of the emergence and development of a Zionist literature parallel to and in dialogue with the Zionist political movement is original and convincing. It is also the product of much reflection and research, some of it involving obscure nineteenth century texts.Footnote ⁴ Kanafani has identified crucial issues in Jewish and Zionist history, such as the development of Hebrew as a modern language, the tensions between assimilation and ethnic nationalism, and the attitudes of the surrounding European societies to their Jewish communities. In the nearly sixty years since On Zionist Literature appeared these questions have been the subject of much study, and now some of Kanafani’s statements need qualifying. But his general conclusions still stand.

One curious omission concerns Agnon’s Nobel Prize. Kanafani does not mention it, but Agnon had a fellow laureate, the poet Nelly Sachs.Footnote ⁵ Sachs was born and lived in Berlin until 1940, when she escaped to Sweden, to live the rest of her life there. The Nobel Prize was awarded to them together for their individual achievements and “to honor two writers who, although they write in different languages, are united in a spiritual kinship and complement each other in a superb effort to present the cultural heritage of the Jewish people through the written word.”Footnote ⁶ Although the Swedish Academy recognized the Zionist element in Agnon’s writing and saw no reason to criticize it, by linking Agnon with Sachs it expanded the definition of Jewish literature linguistically, with German and Swedish appearing side by side with Yiddish and Hebrew, and thematically, with exile and the human tragedy of the extermination of Jews beside the chauvinism of the Zionists.

Translating Fī al-adab al-ṣahyūnī presented special challenges because in AṢ Kanafani quotes extensively from mostly English-language original material. The translator into English sets out how he has proceeded in a Foreword (ZL iii-v). Of the five measures he took to make the book more accessible to readers, four are uncontroversial: they include explanatory notes and some reflections by the translator and publisher on the text. But faced with Kanafani’s extensive quotations from English, he has chosen to give the original passages in the text, rather than translating back the Arabic, in order, as he says, to avoid the risk of “los[ing] some of the nuances of the cited text” (ZL v). But the texts as Kanafani has understood them are surely more important for the book’s argument than the English originals. A translation of Kanafani’s rendering, where necessary noting where he has departed from the original, would have been more useful.

Thus, Tammuz’s original and its English translation end The Tale of an Olive Tree with three reasons for cutting the trees down: they are too tall for ladders to reach the high branches; they are not in a straight row easily negotiated by ploughs; and the agronomist has judged them unprofitable (ZL 105-6). AṢ (647-8) has only the first two reasons, and concludes curiously: “I [i.e. the narrator] have mentioned these two reasons so that it won’t be said there is a third one.” In ZL (55), the Wandering Jew of Pär Lagerkwist’s The Death of Ahasuerus reproaches God before he dies: “Why do you force me to think of you continually? To think of how you came along the street dragging your cross.” AṢ (564) gives his place of death as a monastery and his final words as: “How did you want me to recognize you were a prophet carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha, while each day I see the criminals carrying their crosses on the same road?” Kanafani generally uses the term al-masīḥ to render the Messiah/Christ, but in one translated passage he chooses the Islamic al-mahdī al-muntaẓar (the rightly guided one expected at the end of time) (AṢ 562). For ZL (54) this is simply the Messiah again.

Two more observations may be made about the translation. First, it occasionally abridges Kanafani’s text. A particularly interesting example is when Kanafani is discussing the religious component in Agnon’s writing. According to ZL (114) “[i]t is rare for God, a Jewish prophet or a dead person to be mentioned in any of his stories without being followed by the appropriate religious expression.” Kanafani gives the appropriate expressions, which will resonate with his original readers: “In his stories it is rare for the word ‘God’ to occur without being followed by ‘exalted be he’ or ‘blessed be he,’ or the name of a Jewish prophet not to be accompanied by ‘May God be pleased with him,’ or a dead person’s name not to have ‘May God have mercy on him and make him dwell in Paradise’ after it.” (AṢ 663-64). Intentionally or not, Kanafani here brings out convergences between Judaism and Islam. Second, a few of the translator’s choices are misleading, such as “exhilarating” for mudhhila (startling) (ZL 34; AS 526) or “torso” for zunnār (girdle) (ZL 48; AṢ 550).

To have made On Zionist Literature available to the English-reading public is extremely important. It traces the development of Zionist literary discourse in parallel with the Zionist political movement from the nineteenth century up to the 1960s. It also shows how the racist and dehumanizing language used by Israeli government officials and army officers toward Palestinians since October 2023 is part of a “literary” tradition enshrined in Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958), James Michener’s The Source (1965), and even earlier in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night (1945).

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine and On Zionist Literature are valuable additions to the English-language library on the Palestine-Israel conflict. And they contribute greatly to integrating the Palestinian experience into the wider history of liberation movements and racist-colonial discourse.