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Beirut, City of Solidarity. The Intellectuals and the Palestinian Cause, 1952–1975

Beyrouth, ville solidaire. Les intellectuels et la cause palestinienne, 1952-1975
Beirut, ciudad solidaria. Los intelectuales y la causa palestina, 1952-1975
Beirut, Stadt der Solidarität. Die Intellektuellen und die palästinensische Sache, 1952-1975
Sune Haugbolle
Traduction(s) :
Beyrouth, ville solidaire. Les intellectuels et la cause palestinienne, 1952-1975 [fr]

Résumés

Cet article analyse le rôle des intellectuels palestiniens à Beyrouth et leurs alliances et amitiés avec des militants solidaires européens, africains, asiatiques et américains pendant les années qui ont mené à la guerre civile. La ville de Beyrouth est souvent louée pour son âge d’or des années 1960, lorsqu’elle attirait les dissidents et libres penseurs de toute la région. Malgré la guerre, ce syncrétisme a perduré et s’est transformé durant la décennie suivante. Alors que la militarisation poussait de nombreux intellectuels à l’exil, cela a également attiré de nouveaux membres de l’intelligentsia polyglotte beyrouthine. La plus grande partie de l’histoire intellectuelle de Beyrouth s’intéresse à l’influence palestinienne, mais ne l’analyse que rarement dans un contexte transnational prenant en compte la présence de milliers de militants solidaires de la cause, dont des artistes et intellectuels venus à Beyrouth apporter coopération et soutien à la révolution palestinienne. Cet article se concentre sur le rôle joué par les mouvements de solidarité avec la Palestine dans les années de « l’âge d’or », de 1952 à 1975, et plus particulièrement pendant les années qui ont précédé la guerre civile. Cette solidarité se manifestait selon trois registres : le soutien des intellectuels libanais, l’arrivée de militants solidaires étrangers et le discours des Palestiniens. En s’appuyant sur les archives des organisations palestiniennes et des mouvements qui leur sont solidaires, l’article offre une vue d’ensemble des tendances intellectuelles de ces trois registres. Il interroge également l’influence de présence sur la vie intellectuelle de la ville et sur le cours pris par le mouvement de libération de la Palestine, dans la guerre civile et en général. D’un point de vue théorique, l’article s’appuie sur le rôle des intellectuels dans le « transfert culturel ».

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Figure 1

Figure 1

Falastin was the first Danish Palestine solidarity magazine published by the Danish Palestine Committees between 1970 and 1974.

Sources: Falastin, n° 2, 1971.

1Beirut is often celebrated for its golden period in the 1960s when cultural life blossomed and freethinkers from across the region found a home in its famed syncretism and pluralism (Kassir 2010; Khalaf 2002). This was also the period when Palestinians became more visible and central in Lebanon’s history. While most part of literature on the intellectual history of Beirut pay attention to the Palestinian influence, they rarely analyse it in a transnational context that considers the presence of thousands of solidarity activists, including artists and intellectuals, who came to Beirut to work with and support the Palestinian revolution. They are important because they add a dimension to Beirut’s “polyglot” mix of intellectual influences. This article focuses on the role that solidarity movements with Palestine played in the years from the ‘golden age’ 1952-1975 and particularly in the run-up to the civil war. It also queries what solidarity means and how it developed over time. I argue that solidarity manifested itself in three registers. In support from Lebanese intellectuals, in the arrival of foreign solidarity activists, and in the discourse of Palestinians themselves. By reading into archives of Palestinian organizations and solidarity movements, with a special focus on the writer Ghassan Kanafani and his family, the article provides an overview of the intellectual tendencies in these three registers. It also asks which role their presence played for intellectual life in the city, and for the course that the Palestine liberation movement took in the civil war, and in general.

2Theoretically, the article draws on the role of intellectuals in “cultural transfer.” I adopt the notion of cultural transfer from Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (1987), who in their work on German-French relations consider the various dimensions of how ideas circulate from one national context to another. They focus on the mediators of culture but also on the economic support for cultural transfer and the strategies involved on both the recipient and the “exporting” side—as crucial aspects of cultural transfer (Joyeux-Prunel 2003: 154). Cultural transfer also involves acts of translation—in the broad sense of adaptation of ideas, idioms, and concepts to a local cultural, linguistic, and political context—that invariably take place when ideas move from one part of the world to another. What interests me in this article is how the intellectual engagement that took place with Palestinians—seen from the vantage point of Lebanese, Palestinians, and foreigners in the city—produced scripts and logics for revolutionary action. Which processes of cultural transfer helped shape the thinking of politicized intellectuals around the Palestine liberation movement? And how did this script develop over the years, from the culturally close-knit world of Palestinians and Lebanese in the 1950s to the increasingly internationalized context of global revolution in the late 1960s and beyond? To answer these questions, I provide a historical overview starting with the arrival of Palestinians after the expulsion in May 1948 and trace the place of Palestinians in the city to 1975. I draw on books and articles by Palestinian and Lebanese intellectuals with a special emphasis on one of the most prominent Palestinian writers Ghassan Kanafani, but also on interviews with and material produced by solidarity activists who made an imprint on the city from 1967 onwards. The article does not purport to represent all aspects of Palestinian life and writings in Beirut. Rather, the aim is to analyse central tendencies in the solidarity milieu at the time and their impact on the city and on the Palestine liberation movement.

1. Palestinian Contributions to Intellectual Life 1948–1967

  • 1 Editor’s note: a term meaning “disaster” in Arabic, referring to the forced exodus of thousands of (...)

3Around 130,000 Palestinians arrived in Lebanon after the Nakba1 in 1948. While most rural Palestinians settled into camps in and around the coastal cities of the south, some of the more well-to-do urban refugees from Akko (Acre) and Jerusalem found a new life in Beirut, joining others who had already arrived during the 1936–1939 revolt. Among them, there were artists, writers, and scholars, who through their varied work channelled their commitment to the liberation of their homeland (Sayigh 1979). Many of them combined artistic work with political commitment and were members of various Lebanese, Palestinian, and pan-Arab movements that thrived in the open and liberal atmosphere of Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s. Lebanese cultural life at the time was generally divided between an engaged, largely left-leaning tendency that sought to address social and political issues in their cultural production, and a more existentialist, modernist, and experimental strain (Boullata 2003). Added to that, some intellectuals and artists represented conservative positions, either with Christian or Muslim religious overtones. While leftists clustered around the journal al-Ādāb (Literature), the existentialist and less politicized trend found its main expression in the journal Shi‘r (Poetry). Conservatives, including Lebanese nationalists, wrote in various French and Arabic-language publications. Palestinian artists, writers and academics were mainly to be found in the first two domains—that of cosmopolitan sophistication and experimentation, and that of social realism and political art—but most of them naturally leaned towards engaged art (fann al-iltizām) because of their political and existential predicament as refugees from an occupied neighbouring country.

  • 2 Editor’s note: Fatah (an inverted acronym of the organization’s full Arabic name meaning “Palestine (...)

4From the late 1950s onwards, the incentive of iltizām increasingly began to involve actual political mobilization (Klemm 2000). Periodicals like Fatah2’s Filastinunā and the Arab Nationalists’ Movement (ANM) al-Hurriya that were published in Beirut doubled as cultural magazines and political cauldrons, where arguments were exchanged, and positions were formed and challenged. One of al-Hurriya’s editors was the writer Ghassan Kanafani. Born in Acre in 1936, he had fled Palestine with his family in 1948, first to Lebanon and later to Damascus, where he was raised. In 1955 he moved to Kuwait, where he became involved with the ANM. In 1960, his friends and comrade George Habash invited him to move to Beirut, where Kanafani became part of a lively political and cultural scene (Wild 1975: 9–18). Despite the stigmatization and poverty that Palestinians in the refugee camps faced—a recurring topic in Kanafani’s short stories and novels—he also recognized the potential resonance of the Palestinian cause in Lebanon and the possibilities of organizing their defence in Beirut. As Kanafani, a newcomer, learned in 1960, Palestinians were present in many professional walks of life in the country and intermarried across sectarian lines. Before 1920, Lebanon and Palestine had overlapping territorial boundaries in the Ottoman Empire and cultural sinews running naturally across the artificial national borders. Many families were naturally connected before and after the Nakba, just as they were between Lebanon and Syria. Unlike many other Arab groups in Lebanon, Palestinians resembled Lebanese in dress and language and could—despite subtle differences—not easily be told apart. Therefore, the more well-to-do part of the Palestinian community in Lebanon, had open boundaries with Lebanese social life while sharing a common experience of expulsion and resistance with the inhabitants of the camps. Kanafani played a crucial role as a cultural translator of the conditions that Palestinians lived around the world. He introduced Lebanon and the broader Arab public to Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) and Samih al-Qāsim (1939–2014) residing in Palestine. Between 1966 and 1968, he published two works on what he called “resistance literature” (Kanafani 2015a, 1968), where he describes the context of the production of this literature and evokes the state of “cultural siege” of these writers living under Israeli occupation (Kanafani 2015b). Breaking this siege and making Beirut a space to do so now became a declared goal, taking the literature of iltizām into the realm of revolutionary mobilization.

  • 3 Editor’s note: The date 1957 marks the intellectual beginnings of Fatah, which was officially forma (...)

5The thousands of Lebanese who had Palestinian family and friends were naturally inclined to take pity on their plight. Many of them read Kanafani’s work with interest and defended Palestine in the Lebanese press. The most committed and vocal about the Palestinian cause were, however, naturally Palestinians. After a decade of relative confusion and inertia following the 1948 Nakba and exodus from Palestine, young Palestinians were starting to organize in student groups like General Union of Palestinian Students (founded in 1959), the ANM (founded in 1948 at the American University of Beirut) and Fatah (founded in Cairo in 19573). Others sought influence in region-wide movements like the Communist parties, the Nasserist parties, and the Ba’ath parties of the region, hoping that Arab nationalism would create the impetus needed to take back Palestine and transform the Arab world in a socialist direction. Many Palestinians were forced by circumstances to stay in Lebanon. Those who had the means and the opportunity to travel connected with other centres of the Palestinian diaspora, notably Damascus, Amman, and Cairo (Sayigh 1997: 56–84). Like Kanafani, they brought with them tangled dreams of unification, liberation and social justice when they returned to Beirut. For most of the now 300,000 Palestinian refugees in the country, daily life was still marred by poverty and marginalization, confined to refugee camps on the margins of Lebanese cities and restricted from the formal economy. Artists and writers saw it as their job to communicate this miserable experience and to formulate a strategy for how to change it. The Palestinian cause thus grew to encompass not just critique of the West, imperialism, and Israel, but also of Arab regimes and the Lebanese state. This entanglement of progressive social agendas and revolutionary geopolitical agendas formed a basis for a political and cultural movement with Palestine at its centre.

6From the mid-1960s, this movement began to reshape Palestinian life but also the wider meaning of Palestine in Lebanon. First, Lebanese students and youths gradually cultivated awareness of the Palestinian problem as a cause, similar to how the Algerian struggle for liberation became a cause in the late 1950s. By the mid-1960s, Beiruti students would regularly lead protests in support of Palestinian rights to live a better life and to liberate their country. This developed over time into an actual student movement that centred radical demands (Barakat 1977). Second, armed groups known as fedayeen began to attack Israeli territory from Jordan. The emergence of popular militias challenged the old Palestinian leadership, which in 1964 helped found the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) with the Arab League and under the control of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The internal struggle in the PLO culminated after Nasser’s defeat in the June 1967 war and led to the fedayeen, headed by Fatah’s young leader Yasser Arafat, taking over control of the PLO in 1969. Third, and related to the institutionalization of Palestine liberation struggle, the PLO set up cultural centres and formed networks of support in Lebanon. These networks grew out of existing cultural and political circles. Thus, cultural figures like Kanafani and political activists like Nayef Hawatmeh and George Habash now fronted new political movements—the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Coming from Arab nationalist, socialist and Ba’athist starting points, many of these young Palestinians in the late 1960s embraced Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology. They also took inspiration from popular liberation struggles in former colonies around the world and built a new vocabulary and ideological direction that mixed, often uneasily, with Palestinian nationalism (Guirguis 2020).

7These new tendencies in Palestinian and Lebanese society left a mark on Beirut’s intellectual life. In the fervent climate of the late 1960s, the question of Palestine became increasingly central, as witnessed in Lebanese newspapers reporting on Palestine, as well as in the growing number of media such as al-Anwār and al-Muharrir (both of which Kanafani contributed to) expressing direct support. To some Lebanese, that was a great concern as they saw their national independence threatened by the rapid mobilization, while some also worried about the Lebanese youth’s infatuation with Nasserism and Marxism. Fatah started to organize militarily in Lebanon already in 1965. In 1968, it carried out its first attacks on Israel from Lebanese soil. After September 1970, when PLO bases in Jordan came under attack from the Jordanian army and then moved to Lebanon, the stakes were raised immensely. The fervour of political mobilization was now induced by military mobilization and independently controlled territory held by the Palestinian militias. Fatah rode a wave of popularity in the Arab world after its relatively successful defence of the village of Karameh in Jordan in March 1968. Even leaders of the Lebanese Christian Party Kata’ib, which was to engage Fatah directly in the civil war in 1975, paid tribute to the fedayeen at this stage. It was not until 1971 that Christian groups, starting with al-Kata’ib, began to view the resistance primarily as a threat. A poll conducted by the newspaper al-Nahār in 1969 showed that 85% of Lebanese backed the Palestinian’s right to attack Israel from Lebanon (Hudson 1997: 152–153). However, while the 1969 Cairo Agreement sanctioned this right, a few years of expanding Palestinian control in the 1970s led a growing section of the Lebanese political establishment as well as the population to feel threatened by them, and they began to counter-mobilize. This fundamental tension eventually exploded in hostilities between Christian Lebanese and Palestinian militias supported by Lebanese leftist groups in April 1975. Although the Palestinian presence was far from the only factor in the long Lebanese conflict until 1990, it was the central reason for the outbreak of war. Therefore, the question of Palestine now became highly divisive in Lebanese intellectual life (El-Khazen 2000).

2. The Palestinian Cause among Lebanese Intellectuals

8The central question that came to divide Lebanese was not so much over sympathy for Palestine’s plight as over the prerogatives of solidarity. To what extent should Lebanese stand with Palestinians in their struggle? And to what extent should the state allow Lebanon to be the primary platform for what its supporters now articulated as the “Palestinian revolution?” After all, a revolution would have regional and global ramifications, drawing in the Cold War powers, and not least Israel—as became clear when the Israeli air force bombed Beirut airport in December 1968 in retaliation for a PFLP attack on an Israeli airliner. For internationalists like the PFLP, the Palestinian revolution was part of a wider revolution in the region and the world, pitting Western imperialism and capitalist hegemony against popular socialist struggle for independence and social justice. Ghassan Kanafani articulated this internationalism in his political writings as an alliance of liberation movements. After the collapse in the June 1967 war of Nasserism, which Kanafani had been very devoted to, his writing was increasingly inspired by Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese revolutionaries. In articles in al-Hurriya, al-Anwar, al-Muharrir and in the PFLP’s own journal al-Hadaf, edited by Kanafani himself from its first issue in July 1969, Kanafani embraced the idea of Palestine as part of a global East, formally colonized countries where the “stage of national liberation” had to be embraced ahead of any overarching Marxist internationalism (Kanafani 2015b; Wild 1975: 20–23). Parts of the Lebanese Left supported this interpretation of “stagism” that used Marxist terminology to frame the “primary contradiction” between workers and bourgeoisie in the region, while also allowing space, also for emotional expressions and symbolism of Palestinian nationalism (Haugbolle 2017). Even inside Fatah—the main nationalist current in the Palestinian camp—there were Maoist elements who emphasized international popular struggle.

9Yassir Arafat himself—by no means a Marxist—at the time used internationalist phrases like the PFLP’s discourse, and he had high hopes that the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union would deliver weapons for his liberation fight. At the same time, Arafat sought to balance these alliances with support from the region from countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia that did not subscribe to a wholesale non-Western front against the West. He believed that Palestine could only be regained through broad international recognition. This necessitated an array of diplomatic partners and initiatives and could not be confined to a push for Sino-Soviet aid (Chamberlin 2011). Besides, tensions between Moscow and Beijing became ever more pronounced throughout the 1970s. While some Palestinian militants, like the Maoist tendency inside Fatah but also the PFLP, leaned towards Chinese support, Arafat felt more secure in Soviet backing, possibly to remain relevant to the United States. This political line alienated the left in Palestinian politics. After Arafat’s delivered his famous olive branch speech in the UN in November 1974, the PFLP headed what was known as the “rejection front” (Sayigh 1997: 122–128).

  • 4 Editor’s note: the National Movement was a coalition of various Lebanese parties of a left-wing or (...)

10Lebanese intellectuals and activists had to find their feet in these internal Palestinian debates, and often used them to accentuate their own ideological and strategic disagreements. The sociologist Fawwaz Traboulsi was a member of the far left and strongly pro-Palestinian party Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (founded in 1970) and helped to engineer the alliance between the National Movement4 and the PLO in the civil war. In his memoirs, he formulates the Left’s embrace of the Palestinian militias as “the Palestinian stick.” In effect, he writes, the Left used the stick that was Palestinian resistance to beat the Lebanese establishment, in the hope of succeeding with their own revolution against feudalism and sectarianism (Traboulsi 1997: 145–162). The “stick” should not just be understood crudely as the PLO’s armed forces, but also as the backing of its sizeable economy in Lebanon which by the mid-1970s provided tens of thousands of jobs and competed with the economy of the Lebanese state (Hudson 1997: 154). Traboulsi’s admission of an instrumentalist approach to solidarity should also not be confused with cold calculation. On the contrary, Lebanese leftist support for Palestine was often extremely “hot” and committed, romantic even, and ready to sacrifice lives in the process. Thousands of Lebanese students became members of parties and militias in the decade between 1965 and 1975. Some of them later, like Traboulsi, became leading intellectuals and produced novels, films, and other cultural production that documents but also processes and critically discuss their iltizām. This cultural production began with the first war novels in the late 1970s and continues today. In this way, what Kamal Boullata (2003: 35) has called the “sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden presence of Palestine in Lebanon” may have been politically sidelines after the end of the civil war in 1990, but it continues to occupy a central space in cultural life, as witnessed by the number of films, books, and exhibitions in Beirut that deal with Palestinian history and culture.

3. Solidarity Activists in Beirut 1965–1975

11After 1990, Beirut as the “Hanoi of the Middle East”—a place to organize the revolution—gradually became a faint memory. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was a very real part of life in Lebanon that culminated in the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in August 1982. The “Golden Age” of Palestinian Beirut began in the mid-1960s and centred on West Beirut. In 1965, the Palestinian intellectual Fayez Sayegh founded the PLO’s Palestine Research Center (PRC) close to the bustling Hamra District. Next to it, the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) worked in close coordination with the PLO and Fatah’s leadership. The two centres were run by cosmopolitan, mobile and highly educated Palestinians like Sayegh, many of whom had studied and taught at leading American and British universities before returning to Beirut. This group of friends and colleagues also counted academics at the American University of Beirut (AUB) like Walid Khalidi and Hisham Sharabi, who influenced their peers and played a role for the adoption of the Palestinian cause by Lebanese students. The Palestine Research Center provided information about the Palestinian struggle. In a short period of time from 1965 to 1975, it published hundreds of pamphlets and books in Arabic, English, and other languages that placed Palestine in an international context as one of many anti-colonial struggles. These publications were also distributed abroad as part of the PLO’s effort to gain acceptance and create linkages. The first PRC monograph, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine from 1965, written by Sayegh himself, thus put forward the concepts of racism and settler colonialism to understand the operation of the Zionist state, described as “a challenge to all anti-colonial peoples of Asia and Africa” (Sayegh 1965). The following year, Sayegh’s pamphlet Do You Know? Twenty Basic Questions About the Palestine Problem was distributed as a basic guide for understanding the colonial predicament and strategies of resistance to it (Sayegh 1966).

12Due to his good connections in academia and diplomacy, Sayegh could communicate the history and struggle of the Palestinian people in accessible language. In my research on solidarity movements in Scandinavia (Haugbolle & Olsen Pelle 2023), I have repeatedly found these volumes in the libraries and archives of solidarity activists who went to Beirut during the 1970s. They were also referenced in solidarity journals published by various Palestine groups of European countries, such as the journal Fritt Palestina (Free Palestine) published by the Palestine Committee in Norway. This shows the international circulation of these texts and the internationalist and often Marxist framework of interpreting Palestine that they transferred to Europe and beyond.

  • 5 Online interview with Jørgen Nielsen, 11 February 2022.

13Like the PRC, the Institute for Palestine Studies became a hub for foreign researchers, students and activists who participated in the PLO’s effort to collect and analyse information from the region, including Israel. Western pro-Palestinian students and researchers were drawn into these circles. One of them was Jørgen S. Nielsen, a Danish researcher who later became professor in Islamic Studies at Birmingham University and a leading authority on Islam in Europe. As a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, he arrived in Beirut in 1970 and was to spend eight years on and off in the city. The pro-Palestinian milieu at SOAS had already prepared Nielsen’s political disposition. SOAS was where the first solidarity groups in the UK emerged in the late 1960s, inter alia, through support from Fawwaz Traboulsi. His teachers at AUB, Constantin Zurayk and Kamal Salibi, and the student rebellion that was already underway when he arrived, further lobbed him into Palestinian circuits already in his first year. These contacts, and the need for additional income, soon landed him a job at the Institute for Palestine Studies. His work consisted in scanning the international and Israeli press and Middle East studies publication for relevant news and perspectives that could feed into PLO decision making and the scholarly milieu that was emerging, with IPS as a key driver, as “Palestinian studies.” From 1972 to 1976, Nielsen edited International Documents for Palestine, still a valuable source for historians of Palestine. He and his team of Palestinian, Lebanese, and foreign researchers compiled open-source documents but also received information from the Lebanese Armed Forces, with whom they exchanged new publications. This methodical effort, Nielsen assesses today, facilitated awareness and strategic depth in the PLO. His solidarity work grew more political after 1974, when both IPS and the Palestine Research Center became “magnets” for pro-Palestinians from all over the world. He remembers these spaces in their prime as “ecumenical,” with people from all backgrounds and sympathies in terms of the Palestinian political spectrum. Whereas IPS mostly attracted PFLP and DFLP supporters, Fatah had more of a hold over the PRC. Both, however, related to the PLO and the Palestinian leadership in an open and supportive manner. He does not remember receiving any direct orders from the leadership, and he describes the atmosphere as “non-dogmatic.”5

  • 6 Interview with Rosemary Sayigh, 28 March 2023.

14Perhaps working for Palestine in Beirut felt “non-dogmatic” because of the general atmosphere in the city, with its many different nationalities and political perspectives. If the cultural transfer can be described as a process of learning that passed from Palestinians in Lebanon to foreigners around the world, Beirut was the filter for that process. It happened gradually through friendships, romances, and deep engagement with Palestinian society and its Lebanese ramifications. In these circles, several European leftists dated, and eventually married, Palestinians. According to Nielsen’s estimate, 10–20% of the staff at the two centres were foreigners and some were intermarried with the Palestinian intelligentsia, like the researchers Yusif and Rosemary Sayigh. Rosemary Sayigh moved to Beirut in 1953 and was thus deeply immersed in Palestinian-Lebanese society when solidarity began to become a global phenomenon in the 1960s. As early as 1963, her and Walid Khalidi—one of the founders of the IPS—invited foreign journalists and political figures on tours in the Palestinian camps. After the June 1967 war, she wanted to counter the negative media coverage of the Palestinian freedom fighters in a more systematic way, and therefore founded the Fifth of June Society, named after the day of the June War that they saw as a turning point for Palestinian action. She recalls the realization among her small group that “the world’s attention had now been turned to Beirut,” as a steady stream of journalists, diplomats, spies, and solidarity activists began to arrive.6 The society encompassed a network of trusted people who would introduce outsiders to the “right” people, first of all Fatah spokesman Muhammad Tijani, and later also Ghassan Kanafani, who quickly became a recognized go-to person for foreign journalists because of his good command of English and his ability to communicate clearly and powerfully. Together with Ghassan Kanafani’s Danish wife Anni, Sayigh would take British, Scandinavian and other Western journalists to the PFLP office. She also wrote letters to the British press and designed a “press kit” to the distributed amongst journalist and activist networks. In her own rendition, the Fifth of June Society provided a more personal entry into the world of solidarity than the Institute of Palestine Studies and Palestine Research Centre, which focused more on dealing with Arab journalists.

  • 7 Interview with Anni Kanafani, Beirut, 16 April 2023.

15Sayigh herself was never a member of a Palestinian party, and considered herself, and others like her, to exist in a more loosely defined role of “friend of the PLO.” This positionality allowed for greater freedom in communicating and welcoming international visitors, especially before the Lebanese state signed the 1969 Cairo Agreement legitimizing Palestinian revolutionary activity in Lebanon. The Society became an important source of information about the Palestinian movement in Britain, through its press kits, its connections with individual journalists, and its association with the MCF (Movement for Colonial Freedom). Anni Kanafani operated a similar network called Arab Women’s Committee that focused on external information work but also internal coordination of the Palestinian community in Lebanon to make sure that it was informed about political developments. This was important, Kanafani explains today, because foreigners were becoming such a common sight both in Beirut and in the Palestinian camps. People therefore had to know how to meet them and how to communicate the Palestinian experience and the Palestinian cause. Herself from a Communist background in Denmark, she had met Ghassan in Beirut in 1961 and married him in 1962. She now lived immersed in the city’s resistance community where she effectively functioned as a gatekeeper.7

16The personal connections provided by the relatively significant number of solidarity activists who lived in Beirut, as opposed to the more short-term visitors, were important factors in creating trust. They became agents and intermediaries of internationalization. Their job, whether in Beirut or in their home countries, was crucial for the transfer of knowledge and interpretative framework to an international public, who needed to receive—so they reasoned—the correct version of the Palestinian experience and political reasoning. The opposition to this “correct” version was a distorted, Zionist framework that articulated Palestinians as Arabs, refugees, poorly educated, or innately bent on confrontation, destruction, and terror. Awareness of this powerful narrative, and the necessity of deconstructing it, became focal points for Palestinian intellectuals and not least Ghassan Kanafani. In 1967, he published a long essay on Zionist literature, which was later translated and reprinted in several European solidarity magazines (Kanafani 2022). Through readings of novels and articles in Europe, the United States and Israel, Kanafani analyses how the myths used to justify the Zionist-imperialist domination of Palestine first emerged and were later propagated in popular literary works in order to generate support for Israel. This understanding of Palestine, many solidarity activists felt, dominated in their home countries and had to be deconstructed if the Palestinian people were to have any chance of building international support. People like Anni Kanafani and Rosemary Sayigh who had deep connections and many years of experience had a wide circle of friends in solidarity movements, became very familiarized with the ongoing internal political struggles and strategic debates among Palestinian intellectuals and groups, not least by virtue of being married to two key figures. The trickle of Western and other solidarity activist began in the mid-1960s but increased immensely after PLO moved its leadership to Lebanon in 1970. This was also the year when most European Palestine solidarity movements, often called “committees,” were founded. The activists were young members of leftist parties or simply committed to the Palestinian cause as part of a general tendency to support causes in non-Western countries. Some were writers seeking a counterpoint to dominant Western discourse, like the French author Jean Genet, who stayed for two years with the Palestinian organizations in Jordan and later visited Beirut in 1982 (Genet 1986). Some just visited Beirut for a week or two; others kept coming back; and others yet stayed on and became fully embedded in the liberation struggle, siding with Kanafani, Sayegh, and others.

4. Circulation and Interlocutors: Ghassan Kanafani In and Out of Beirut

17My interviews with solidarity activists who lived in or visited Beirut in the 1960s and 1970s reveal that while institutions like the PRC and the IPS were crucial spaces for cultural transfer and the cultivation of solidarity, personal friendships and networks were even more important. In fact, it was often necessary to establish a level of friendship and trust before being introduced to the centres. Sometimes, first-time arrivals would need to carry a letter of introduction with them from friends in their home country who already knew Palestinians. But it was also important for the Palestinians to have a more formal press office, like the PLO’s information bureau that could receive and brief journalists. Another well-known venue of contact between international solidarity and the Palestinian lifeworld in Beirut in the 1970s was the PFLP’s office where its spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani doubled as editor of the weekly PFLP publication al-Hadaf and liaison for foreign contacts. Despite being in Arabic, al-Hadaf made a big impact on the formulation of solidarity abroad. The journal served social and political functions, attracting a broad readership of Palestinian intellectuals as well as leftists, journalists, and diplomats from around the world. al-Hadaf’s Beirut office attracted material and human support from solidarity activists, who in turn channelled the energies of youth rebellion and the surging New Left in Europe and the US to give the Palestinians liberation struggle a platform in contexts where pro-Israeli narratives otherwise dominated (Haugbolle & Olsen 2023).

  • 8 Interview with Anni Kanafani, Beirut, 26 March 2023.
  • 9 Interview with Nabil Kanafani, Copenhagen, 16 January 2022.

18Kanafani’s role for the internationalization of the Palestinian cause can hardly be overestimated. Like few others, he moved between the Palestinian, the Lebanese and the international networks of writers, politicians and artists who were engaged with the cause. He primarily belonged in the world of letters and preferred to write and edit, but his writing was part and parcel of the Palestinian struggle. As a Palestinian intellectual, he communicated the historical experience of ordinary people in novels such as Rijāl fī al-Shams (Men in the Sun, 1967 [1962]) that portrays Palestinian refugees who die in truck on their way to Kuwait, and Umm Saad (1969) that articulates the life and work of a Palestinian woman from the refugee camps. While Kanafani’s literary work is widely celebrated, his role as a facilitator of Palestine solidarity has not been explored in detail. He travelled first to Denmark in 1964, mainly to meet his wife Anni’s Danish family, but also to connect with writers and intellectuals. In Copenhagen, he met a group of journalists at the Communist newspaper Land og Folk (Land and People), explaining to them the liberation struggle of Palestine. This was a time when Palestinians were largely unknown as anything other than Arabs, in Scandinavia and in Denmark as a whole. The “cause” had not yet taken shape, as he and Anni felt clearly in their conversations even with her Communist family members, who needed a lot of basic information to even begin to situate the struggle of Palestine in an international context. During this visit, he also befriended the modernist poet Ivan Malinovski, who was the first to introduce Palestinian poetry to Denmark.8 In 1966, Ghassan’s distant cousin Nabil Kanafani arrived in Sweden and later moved to Copenhagen. At the School of Architecture, he became friends with the first small core of pro-Palestine activists in Denmark, and in 1970 he helped establish the first Palestine Committee in Denmark. Nabil Kanafani would be in regular contact with Ghassan in Beirut via mail and visited him several times.9 The contact with his Denmark-based cousin gave Ghassan Kanafani a platform to communicate the work of the PFLP. The platform also extended to Norway, where Anni had worked before moving to Beirut, and to Sweden, where a small group of Maoist intellectuals became friends with the Kanafanis as they visited the city. Although he only visited Scandinavia on two occasions—in 1964 and in 1970—Ghassan Kanafani in this way helped to bridge Palestine solidarity in Beirut with the wider world. His own writings and the publications of the PFLP were read widely in these circles, and translated into Scandinavian and other European languages. This relation opened Beirut up to a wider current of Palestine activists, as described above, who by the early 1970s had become part of the city’s polyglot intellectual makeup.

Conclusion

19If Kanafani’s cultural transfer extended north in important ways, it also reached south and east. At a time when Arab nationalism clouded many Lebanese’s view of Israel as an amorphous enemy, he was one of the first intellectuals in Beirut to pay attention to Palestinian literature as well as Israeli Zionist literature. His collection “Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine” (1948-1966) introduced poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qāsim who would in time become widely read in Lebanon and beyond. He also took note of intellectual developments in Israel and wrote a study of Zionist literature, just as his novel Return to Haifaa (Kanafani 1999 [1969]) engaged the painfully entangled relation between colonizer and colonized. As I have shown in this article, he was a cornerstone for the development of the Palestinian cause in Beirut and its integration into Lebanese intellectual life in the 1960s. I have also argued that the receptiveness towards Palestine depended on familiarity and connections. Together, the agency of cultural mediators and the receptiveness of the cultural milieu facilitated the internationalization of Palestine, which spread to multiple locations after 1967 (Sayigh 2024). That this happened in Beirut was not a coincidence. Open and accessible to the world, the city provided a better platform for the internationalization of Palestine solidarity than Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. Paradoxically, it was also here, in the city that gave the liberation movements space and power to grow, that it met its defeat in 1982. Beirut will forever be associated with this tragic defeat that destroyed much of the city with it. Unresolved and open-ended, memories of Palestinian Beirut linger on and continue to inform the identity of the city.

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Annexe

ANM: Arab Nationalists Movement

IPS: Institute for Palestine Studies

OCAL: Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon

DFLP: Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

MCF: Movement for Colonial Freedom

PFLP: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization

PRC: Palestine Research Center

SOAS: School of Oriental and African Studies

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Notes

1 Editor’s note: a term meaning “disaster” in Arabic, referring to the forced exodus of thousands of Palestinians during the war triggered by the adoption of the United Nations partition plan for Palestine (November 1947) and during which the State of Israel was proclaimed (May 1948).

2 Editor’s note: Fatah (an inverted acronym of the organization’s full Arabic name meaning “Palestine Liberation Movement”) is the largest resistance organization within the PLO.

3 Editor’s note: The date 1957 marks the intellectual beginnings of Fatah, which was officially formalized in 1959 in Kuwait.

4 Editor’s note: the National Movement was a coalition of various Lebanese parties of a left-wing or Arab nationalist or Syrian nationalist sensibility, which played a predominant role in the early years of the Lebanese civil war.

5 Online interview with Jørgen Nielsen, 11 February 2022.

6 Interview with Rosemary Sayigh, 28 March 2023.

7 Interview with Anni Kanafani, Beirut, 16 April 2023.

8 Interview with Anni Kanafani, Beirut, 26 March 2023.

9 Interview with Nabil Kanafani, Copenhagen, 16 January 2022.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1
Légende Falastin was the first Danish Palestine solidarity magazine published by the Danish Palestine Committees between 1970 and 1974.
Crédits Sources: Falastin, n° 2, 1971.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bssg/docannexe/image/5061/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 955k
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Sune Haugbolle, « Beirut, City of Solidarity. The Intellectuals and the Palestinian Cause, 1952–1975 »Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods [En ligne], 15 | 2024, mis en ligne le 13 mars 2025, consulté le 21 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bssg/5061 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13kxx

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Auteur

Sune Haugbolle

Professor in Global Studies, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University (Denmark). ORCID: 0000-0003-0094-1989, suneha[at]ruc.dk

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