Palestinians in Lebanon and the “Political Ghassan Kanafani”: An Interview with Marwan Abd el-‘Al, PFLP
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: During a month commemorating the fifty-first anniversary of the Zionist assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut, Louis Brehony met leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Marwan Abd el-'Al in the city's Mar Elias refugee camp in June 2023.An artist, novelist, and cultural activist alongside his role in the PFLP political council, Abd el-'Al had freshly returned from taking part in events in Syria, where he had lectured on Kanafani's legacy, building on an analysis of al-Kanafaniyya ('Kanafaniism') he had developed in recent years.This Beirut interview took place in two thematically distinct parts, with the first -the historic and contemporary situation faced by Palestinians in Lebanon -the subject of an interview published by the Britain-based Revolutionary Communist Group. 1 Here, we present the first and second parts combined.The first part comprises the first four questions.The second part of this interview, comprising the latter questions, centered on the enduring presence of Kanafani in Palestinian resistance culture. Can you describe the inception of the PFLP and the context of the organization's early years in Lebanon?The PFLP was born as a successor to the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which had come into being among young intellectuals at the American University of Beirut in the early 1950s.The ANM took on the strong influence of pan-Arabist ideas but, because of the direct experiences of the Nakba defeat in 1948, it saw the necessity of building a response to the presence of the Israeli state and to fight US interests in the region.But after 1967 there were new questions: the ANM had been a response to 1948; the PFLP was the response to 1967.The nationalist trend had been the introduction to raising the questions of how to free the Arab nation, for which the Arabist movement paid a high price.We were now dealing with a period of transformation, organizationally and politically, from nationalism to Marxism-Leninism.Of course, this is no easy question, and the Front was subject to splits and new trends.But what emerged during this Marwan Abd el-'Al is a member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Source: Arab Studies Quarterly
Author: Marwan Abd el-‘Al
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402936180