The Assassinated Word: Kanafani at 54
On the morning of July 8, 1972, a car bomb exploded outside of a house in Beirut. 36-year-old novelist, editor, and poet, Ghassan Kanafani, was killed, along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees Najim. He had served as a spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Mossad—which built the bomb, wired it to the ignition, and waited—justified the murder as a retaliatory response to the PFLP’s Lod airport operation that May. Kanafani never fired a gun in his life, but his dedication to militant anti-imperialist struggle rendered him a culpable target.
Understand what that means: A state with a nuclear arsenal, an air force, and the backing of the world’s most powerful military did not send its soldiers after Kanafani, but opted instead to use a car bomb to silence a prominent writer and militant intellectual. Ghassan Kanafani wielded his pen as his weapon of choice, and that pen had become, in the calculus of the Israeli settler state, a genuine strategic threat.
Kanafani was the editor of the PFLP weekly, al-Hadaf (“The Target”), and was the author of the seminal Palestinian novel Men in the Sun and the short story collection Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, books that gave the world the term resistance literature. “A Poem For Ghassan Kanafani” holds the lesson of Kanafani’s legacy in a single image—the pen in one hand, the gun in the other. Not the pen or the gun. The pen as the gun. It is not merely a metaphor Kanafani’s admirers invented for him, or the operating assumption of the men who killed him, but the political posture he, a survivor of the Nakba, assumed in his lifelong dedication to ousting the occupation and returning home to Palestine.
54 years later, militant writers know that the repressive assumption has not changed, nor have the empire’s murderous methods. The same logic that bombed a novelist’s car in 1972 is now embedded in today’s content moderation policies, platform architecture, large language model training data, and the deliberate severing of a fibre-optic cable. The state no longer needs to assassinate every writer one at a time because it has found more efficient ways to repress on a mass scale. This continuity—the violent throughline running from Beirut in 1972 to Gaza in 2026—reveals the high stakes of what it means to write and read under genocidal repression when writing itself is deemed an act of war by the oppressor.
Why Empire Fears the Militant Pen
The day before she was killed, Najim asked her uncle to ease off on political work. “Write your stories,” she told him. “They’re beautiful. Leave the rest to someone else.”
He answered her plainly, and his sister recorded the exchange: “I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty.”
Kanafani’s response encompassed exactly why the pen warrants the bomb. He spoke of a “commitment” that is not merely decoration hung on good prose, but commitment as the condition of good prose—the thing that keeps the narrative alive. Remove it, and the writing does not become neutral; it becomes hollow. Militant commitment is the opposite of the rule most writers are trained to abide by, which dictates that political conviction is a contaminant, a bias to be managed, a reason a piece might be dismissed as unserious. Kanafani said the reverse: Abandon the conviction, and what’s left is no longer objective. It’s dead.
This is also, not incidentally, why he was worth killing. A writer who believes the commitment is decorative can be ignored, marginalized, and properly disciplined. A writer who has made their commitment structural—who has built it into the actual grammar of the narrative—cannot be neutralized by argument because there is no detachable ornament to strip away. Instead, one must take the whole thing, which is what the Zionists did.
Kanafani’s commitment extended beyond his writing and informed the way he read. He was the first Arab writer to seriously study Zionist literature. He didn’t dismiss it or caricature it. He read it with total precision, and was clear that to defeat an adversary, one must first understand exactly how that adversary imagines the world and be fluent in their grammar and rendering of said world. That is reading as reconnaissance. It has nothing to do with reading to be seen reading, the credentialing performance that the modern university and mass culture reward.
Militant reading is a form of combat discipline, which Kanafani used in his political commitment to rigorously engaging literary criticism as he did with his historical analysis in The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine, a genuine, footnoted, and sourced history that produced on the argument that a people who mean to be free must know their own history—because the history sitting in the archive belongs to the colonizers. He did not spare his own side in that account, nor did he avoid it in a commitment to “objectivity.” He read the Palestinian leadership of the 1930s with the same precision he brought to his enemies, and indicted them for calling off a popular revolt at the instruction of foreign kings and local bourgeois elements, trading their own people’s uprising away as a bargaining chip. Out of that reading came the line that should be carved over every institutional door that claims to serve a cause: “If the defenders fail, you change the defenders. You do not change the cause.”
The Forgery Precedent
Kanafani’s death is told as the story of a bomb, but it is worth remembering that the state’s first instinct when it cannot kill the writer is the violence of repressive forgery.
Ali Shariati—Iranian sociologist and lay theologian whose lectures fed the intellectual current of the 1979 revolution and whose reading of Islam as a doctrine of liberation for the mustazafin, or the dispossessed, put him in direct confrontation with the Shah’s regime—was not killed by a car bomb. He was killed slowly, by exile and surveillance, and died in London in 1977 under circumstances his supporters have never accepted as natural. But before his death, SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, tried something else first. They took one of his unfinished manuscripts and altered it, inserting language that made it appear Shariati had renounced his revolutionary positions. The SAVAK circulated the doctored text to sow confusion among his followers. When imperial adversaries fail to silence radical voices, they counterfeit them, allowing the revolutionary’s own name to do the work of betraying their cause.
Repressing Public Memory
Kanafani was not the only writer whose body the state judged too dangerous to live. 15 years after Beirut, in 1987, the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali was shot in the face on a London street and died four weeks later. His weapon was a pen too. Al-Ali created the recurring figure named Handala, a barefoot refugee child who turns his back to the reader and never ages past 10, a permanent indictment of the Zionist tradition of extinguishing Palestinian youth. Nobody has ever been convicted of al-Ali’s killing. A cartoonist does not command armies. He commands a symbol simple enough for a child to redraw on a wall, which is precisely why a symbol like that survives being killed and why the state keeps trying anyway.
The fear of the written word animating this specific struggle was diagnosed from the master’s side of the colonial relationship, by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre warned his readers, the French public and the international Marxist Left, that they should be afraid to open it—not because the book contained a weapon, but because reading it erodes Europe’s comfortable self-image, a shield that made the colonial project bearable to its beneficiaries. Zines were used against Prairieland defendants like Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was recently sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of antifascist literature post-protest, which prosecutors deemed as “material support for terrorism.” A state does not fear a pamphlet or a zine because the literature can shoot. It fears them because literature can be understood and applied to advancing struggle. Assassination, forgery, and censorship are three different responses to the same panic.
Assassination, Forgery, Censorship and Contemporary Counterinsurgency
Today, forgery is a method no longer limited to the state intelligence agencies with access to confiscated unfinished manuscripts. In the age of the internet and today’s surveillance apparatus, forgery simply requires a laptop and a language model trained on a writer’s collected works. Anyone with access to generative AI technology can now generate a passage mimicking Kanafani’s cadences, arguing for patience, for calm, for the wisdom of waiting—the opposite position his life’s work takes—in the time it takes to make coffee. This is not a hypothetical anxiety about the future of artificial intelligence. It is the direct technological descendant of what SAVAK did to Shariati’s manuscript, and it is now available without the original manuscript, without the forger’s skill, without even a specific text to alter. The machine can produce fluency indistinguishable from the original. What it cannot produce, however, is fidelity—the belief that made the original words true and the commitments the writer’s life staked behind them. Fluency without fidelity is precisely what the counterfeiters are now capable of flooding every channel with at once, and the only known defence against it is the same one that has always existed: revolutionary destruction of counter-insurgent technologies.
Meanwhile, the newer, quieter descendant of assassination doesn’t need a forgery at all; it just requires an algorithm. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch published a documented account of what it called “the systemic censorship of Palestinian content across Instagram and Facebook:” content removals, account suspensions, restrictions on who could be followed or tagged, and what researchers termed shadow-banning—the quiet reduction of a post’s visibility, with no notice given to the person whose voice it mutes. In June 2026, the Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh released a five-year-long study of the same platforms, built from more than 3,000 documented cases and gave the practice a harder name than “moderation.” They called it platformicide, the deliberate, structural erasure of a people’s presence from the platforms where the present is now recorded and understood, intensifying, by their own account, precisely when Palestinians needed to be seen and heard the most. Nearly 70 percent of the users in that study were never even told which rule they had supposedly broken. Assassination used to require identifying an individual target. Platformicide suppresses a population in lieu of singling out a person to kill.
Gaza’s telecommunications blackouts—the deliberate severing of internet and phone networks at moments of intensified bombardment—are not incidental technical failures, but a strategic choice to kill the signal when it is needed most. It is the car bomb logic applied at the population scale. If Kanafani’s words were dangerous because reading them unobscured colonial violence, then the blackout is the occupying power’s tactic that proves it has learned the surest way to prevent that unveiling requires the assurance that resistance literature won’t be read at all. The people who continue reporting under those conditions are paying the highest price. Their names matter, especially as the logic of platformicide and blackouts is to erase a population before individual incidents can be counted. In August 2025, an Israeli airstrike hit a media tent outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, killing Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif along with four of his colleagues—not a single assassination but a cluster of them, erasing a tent full of people committed to witnessing and reporting genocidal atrocities.
Al-Sharif had spent the preceding months reporting on his people’s conditions on camera and without the protection of a pseudonym, determined to tell the truth while the world was being told to look away from the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians. At the time of this writing, the Committee to Protect Journalists—in the middle of its own contentious internal review of exactly who qualifies for the count, which was undertaken after disputes over combatant status among the dead—still describes the genocide in Gaza as the deadliest documented conflict for journalists. By most recent figures, that toll stands above 200 killed since October 2023. Whatever the final, most defensible number turns out to be, the qualitative fact underlying the numbers is not in serious dispute: No conflict in the history of press freedom monitoring has killed reporters at this rate. This is not incidental collateral damage in a war being fought over territory. It is a continuation, at mass scale, of the exact calculation that killed Kanafani—the person carrying the pen—and now, the person carrying the phone or the camera, must be killed for making genocidal violence legible.
The Actual Target
Steve Biko, writing in South Africa under the world’s original apartheid regime, identified the real object of the settler colony’s repressive extermination with a single sentence: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Biko was clear that the greatest victory available to a colonial power is not controlling what a colonized people can say, but shaping what they have come to believe about themselves—instilling the occupier’s account of events so thoroughly that it no longer needs to be enforced from outside because it has been accepted from within. This is platformicide’s sinister ambition. It is not merely that a Palestinian post gets fewer views, but that an entire generation, Palestinian and otherwise, accepts a single, uncontestable narrative from feeds engineered to make the colonized, who are being ethnically cleansed, less visible than the occupier.
Biko’s answer to this, in his own writing life, was not to seek the approval of the very audience whose comfort depended on the old story. He originally wrote his column, I Write What I Like, under the pseudonym Frank Talk. It was addressed to his people, in language for the masses, built to foster Black Consciousness. Biko wrote to decolonize the native’s self-perception rather than to win permission from a liberal readership who preferred a sanitized version of events. The I Write What I Like collection completely rejects the idea that the oppressed should have to write what the oppressor finds palatable. Every algorithmic demotion of Palestinian testimony today is aimed at the same target Biko named 50 years ago. The target of its repression is not the post, but the mind of its potential viewer.
What Is Asked of Us
If Kanafani were reading contemporary times rather than his own, I do not think he would ask how any of this makes us feel. He read the 1930s without despair, and I suspect he would read 2026 the same way—as a structure to be understood, resisted, and abolished. He might ask a harder, plainer question: What did you read, and what are you going to do about what you read?
Kanafani wrote, near the end of his life, that everything in this world can be robbed and stolen except one thing: the love a human being holds toward a solid commitment to a cause. Zionists took his home. Zionists took his country. Zionists took his niece’s life on a Beirut street on an ordinary Saturday morning. 54 years later, under blackouts, algorithmic repression, and AI counterfeiting, the task of the anti-imperialist writer remains. Read closely. Read the times while they are still bleeding. Write as if it might, again, cost you everything—because it has already cost those whose names populate the kill list.
source: Black Agenda Report
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=36144
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