‘A Bond of the Same Nature’: Cartographies of Affiliation in the Global South
Palestine and ‘the Common Struggle’ of Third World Solidarity
'In the name of the Arab Palestinian people', a delegation of Palestinian representatives delivered their speech to the international audience meeting in Gaza from December 9-11, 1961:
We welcome you and thank you for convening the Executive Committee of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Conference in this part of our stolen homeland, Palestine. This generous action portrays the meaning of feelings of both African and Asian peoples, their understanding of the extent of oppression which we suffer from, their determination to stand by us for the consolidation of our just struggle in the different spheres.1
From all corners of Africa and Asia – belonging to a transcontinental bloc of formerly and currently colonised nations which, during the cold war era, became known as the Third World – over thirty delegations and observers assembled at this crossroads between both continents to attend the Executive Committee of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO).2 The meeting facilitated a unique conjunction of interlocutors from diverse formations of localised struggle and national politics. And in the eyes of the Palestinian host delegation, like Che Guevara’s 1959 visit to Gaza, the Executive Committee’s decision to assemble in Gaza alone embodied a gesture of unequivocal support by African and Asian peoples to advance their own just struggle against the continual violations of Zionism’s settler-colonial violence inflicted on native life in Palestine.
The 1961 Gaza meeting marks a decisive moment in the symbolic identification between Palestine’s spatial centrality as a bridge between Africa and Asia, and its historical and moral centrality to the formation of an emergent Afro-Asian consciousness. Among the conference participants present in Gaza were figures like Osendé Afana, the militant Marxist economist of Cameroon, as well as Mehdi Ben Barka, the socialist activist and anti-monarchist exile from Morocco – both of whom, just a few years later, would be assassinated and disappeared by the repressive forces of imperialism against which they had struggled. In Gaza, young communist activists like Wera Ambitho – secretary of the anti-colonial Kenya Office in Cairo – found proximity to distinguished critical theorists like Yoshitaro Hirano – founder of the Marxist tradition in Japan – as well as experienced organisers like the long-time Communist Party of India leader and World Peace Council activist, Romesh Chandra. Bureaucratic statesmen of the arts and letters, like Han Sorya – the celebrated author, Korean Writers’ Union head, and DPRK Minister of Education and Culture – and the Russian playwright and Soviet Writers Union secretary, Anatoly Sofronov, in Gaza found analogue resonances among such figures as Zia al-Din Tabataba'i, former Prime Minister of Iran, and cosmopolitan diplomats from China, like Liao Chengzhi and Burhan Shahidi.
For the Palestinian host delegation, the particular histories which belonged to these respective visiting delegations reflected a diverse set of triumphs, lessons, and tactics of resistance, the sum of which formed a Third World epistemology of anti-colonialism – a set of theories and practices for resistance against imperialism upon which to model their own struggles. And to this diverse, multi-national audience, the Palestinian delegation’s speech affirmed the imbricated relationship of their own anti-imperialist struggle to those before them, both literally and historically:
Your victories are a prelude to ours and to all peoples fighting for their freedom and dignity. The Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement is not an emotional one, but a historical movement, evolving with the days, drawing its experiences from the common struggle, and drawing its plans from the hopes to which our people aspire for a free and dignified life.
Friends, you have heard much about the Palestinian cause from friends and enemies, but today you will witness our reality, to which Anglo-American and French, Zionist conspiracies has led us. No doubt knowledge of the pains and hopes of peoples is [the best way for the establishment of a just peace to hover over humanity.3
The sympathetic identification with Palestine – ascribed to the ‘meaning of feelings of both African and Asian peoples’ – is nevertheless ‘not an emotional one’, but determined instead by an acknowledgment of the historical affinities between their pasts and futures. Palestinians thus carved their own position within a broader assemblage of Third World consciousness, ‘drawing its experiences from the common struggle, and drawing its plans from the hopes to which our people aspire for a free and dignified life’.
Affirmations of Palestinian self-identification with the pasts and futures of African, Asian, and Latin American struggles reveal a recurrent affiliative mode of national representation – whereby Palestinians signify their own historical experience in figurative modes of comparative legibility – recognising their own among disparate global struggles against settler-colonialism and imperialism. ‘We take this opportunity,’ the 1961 Palestinian delegation in Gaza continued in its address, ‘to hail the martyrs of freedom who fell on the battlefield of duty, as the martyrs, [Patrice] Lumumba, and [Félix-Roland] Moumié as well as all freemen who are fighting behind the prison bars as [Ahmed] Ben Bella and his comrades. They are torchlights lighting the road of freedom and honour’.4 In the betrayal of Lumumba’s independence by UN liaisons with the imperial designs of American and Belgian forces, and the repression of Algerian resistance by French imperialism, Palestinians recognised their own commonalities in the dominative systems of colonial rule against which they struggled.
But more than provincially-bound struggles signifying comparative analogues to Palestinian resistance against Zionist settler-colonialism - as an ethno-supremacist state sustained by the United States’ support - the Palestinian delegation’s address insisted that the existence of Israel also presented a direct threat to the national sovereignty of African and Asian nations, since:
Colonialism helped as well to let Israel infiltrate ... the markets of Africa and Asia, with the purpose of using it as a tool and screen for colonialist capital monopolies in the markets of the two continents.
You are no doubt aware of the similar manoeuvres that have been employed in Palestine, and through which colonialism endeavours to dominate Algeria, Angola, the Congo and South Africa, by mobilising minorities in these countries to play with the destiny of the peoples. All colonialist attempts to repress these peoples and obstruct their unity and liberation, have no other aim than to set new strong posts, bridges and other agents, in different parts of Africa to be complementary parts to the first imperialist base established in Arab Palestine.5
While colonial regimes continued to persist across Africa even after the formal age of empire had come to a close, the establishment of a settler-colonial state in Palestine during the age of decolonisation signalled the veritable reformulation of Western imperialism by any other name. Palestinians thus appealed to those sovereign states recently ‘releas[ed] from the fetters of colonialism’ to ‘fulfil their responsibility towards the cause of freedom and justice’.
Such a responsibility grounded Third World solidarity in the values of a humanist discourse which transcended the racialised limits of a humanism wielded by Western liberalism to rationalise its colonial enterprise in the previous century:
The upsurge of Afro-Asian peoples is both old and new, new because these peoples are newly liberated from colonialist domination, and old because [anti-colonial resistance is] a defence of human values ever since the dawn of history. We all hope for just Peace, and the Afro-Asian peoples have a great responsibility towards humanity which nearly is going to land itself in the plot of destruction, after development of destructive weapons and its well-designed tactics to do away with the freedom of man. May our movement prevent storms that may hit humanity from the dangers of colonialism against the liberation of peoples fighting for their liberty, and against the liberation of the peoples of colonised countries from their colonial rulers.6
In declaring the formation of ‘our movement,’ the anti-colonial struggle for Palestinian liberation became infused with a markedly global character, and the question of Palestine was reified as a definitive cause for an emergent Third World consciousness.
The generous action of convening in Gaza to witness their reality reflects an active effort by the visiting Executive Committee to further their ‘understanding of the extent of oppression from which [Palestinians] suffer,’ so as to better serve as determined advocates for their struggle in the realm of different cultural and political spheres. To bear witness in Gaza is thus inexorably to develop a direct knowledge of Palestinians’ pains and hopes – and an intimate awareness with the material conditions against which to pursue the ‘establishment of a just peace.’
Established in 1957 at the first Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference in Cairo (December 26, 1957-January 1, 1958), AAPSO explicitly affirmed its organisational contours around the spirit of Third World solidarity inaugurated by the Bandung Conference of April 1955. The twenty-nine African and Asian states represented at Bandung established their commonalities as recently decolonised nation-states within an international order shaped by the bi-polarised logic of the cold war. The question of Palestine received considerable attention at Bandung where it was championed with great urgency by representatives from Egypt, Syria, and China – despite attempts by Indian and Burmese delegates to sideline the issue from discussions. Indeed, prior to the conference, at the suggestion Israel would be invited to participate in its proceedings, Arab representatives threatened to boycott the meeting. The limits of Bandung were thus made legible by the conference’s occlusion of self-representation for African and Asian nations still struggling directly under repressive forms of imperial domination. And future formations for cooperative exchange between African and Asian nations7 (such as that represented by AAPSO) were motivated by political and cultural initiatives that centred their solidarity around mutual support for ongoing struggles against colonialism – which found Palestine imbricated with such places as Algeria, Congo, Korea, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Vietnam, among others.
Organised with Soviet support through the initiative of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, the first Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1957 made greater strides than its progenitor at Bandung to underscore the persistence of colonial exploitation and dispossession across Africa and Asia in the so-called age of decolonisation. In addition to adopting the Bandung Conference’s ten principles for peaceful co-existence – which entrusted the post-WWII order of international law based on the Charter of the United Nations – AAPSO’s inaugural 1957 conference in Cairo also adopted political resolutions in the spirit of Bandung which went further than that paradigmatic 1955 event to underline the importance of support for current struggles against colonialism as the basis for cultivating Third World solidarity.
Some of these resolutions adopted at the 1957 Conference condemned, respectively: the apartheid system of racial discrimination in South Africa; the French republic’s ‘colonial war [aimed] at the extermination of the Algerian people’; and the state of Israel, originally established in clear defiance of the Rights of Man,’ as a ‘base of imperialism which threatens the progress and security of all the Middle East, and […] its aggressive policy which is a threat to world peace’. This latter resolution, based on a report submitted by the Palestine Delegation, radically redressed Bandung’s muted position on the topic, which deferred to ‘the implementation of the United Nations decisions on Palestine’ to achieve a ‘peaceful settlement of the Palestine question’.
Whereas Bandung’s deference to the UN tacitly recognised the legitimacy of Israel’s acceptance in an international world order, the 1957 resolution on Palestine adopted by AAPSO implicitly challenged such premises. The report upon which the resolution was based chronicled the history of Zionism’s arrival in Palestine as a handmaiden of British colonialism, and – following the establishment of Israel – its inheritance by the US to sustain an effective garrison state through which to leverage American imperial interests in the region. Future resolutions adopted at subsequent AAPSO conferences continued to develop more nuanced analyses of the threat posed by Israel – not only to Palestinians living under its repressive military occupation, or as refugees banished without return to their homes, but – as a tool of American imperialism, to the independence of African and Asian nations, in general terms.
And it was at the 1961 meeting in Gaza that AAPSO began to firmly problematise the legitimacy of Israel’s existence according to the accepted basis of international law. The Executive Committee adopted a resolution proclaiming ‘that Palestine is an Arab territory and that the propping up of Israel in this Arab territory on the dead bodies of its people is an illegal action that violates the principles of international law, human rights and the United Nations Charter’. Thus, the resolution continued:
Israel is an aggressive entity propped up by imperialism to be used in striking and menacing national liberation movements in the Middle East area, infiltrating to the other parts of Asia and Africa and that Israel is a tool in the hand of neo-colonialism, as proved by events and therefore the Committee draws the attention of all Afro-Asian peoples to the reality of this colonialist tool and its danger to World Peace.
The Committee supports Arab rights in Palestine and their rightful cause to liberate their homeland and return to it and asks all Afro-Asian peoples to do the same.8
While the 1961 Executive Committee meeting in Gaza confirmed ‘all the resolutions adopted concerning Palestine in all the past Afro-Asian Conferences convened in Cairo, Conakry, Casablanca and Bandung,’ it also signalled a markedly emphatic recognition of Israel’s functional logic as a vassal state strategically located at the crossroads of Africa and Asia to serve the advancement of US imperial interests between both continents.
Such declarations and resolutions adopted by AAPSO and other organisations highlight the diplomatic processes by which Palestine became enshrined as a central cause in the cultivation of a Third World consciousness. Palestinian steadfastness against colonial erasures and imperial domination increasingly emblematised the humanist struggle for liberation which buttressed Third World solidarity. What’s more, the inclusion of Palestinian self-representation among the proceedings of events convened by such bodies as AAPSO, OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America), the Conference of Independent African States, the All-African People’s Conference, and the Pan African Cultural Festival throughout the 1960s likewise nourished the political and cultural development of a Palestinian national consciousness – increasingly articulated in reflexive terms of identification with the symbols and histories of comparative struggles against colonialism from across the Third World.
To trace, among these transcontinental encounters and exchanges, Palestine’s gradual entrenchment as a vanguard of Third World struggles also reveals how the lineages of Bandung endured and matured. The growing participation of Palestinian representatives among such meetings thus betrays the global formations of Palestinian self-determination after 1948.
In their description of the ‘[new] upsurge of Afro-Asian peoples’, unified by a shared commitment to ‘a defence of human values’ the Palestinian delegation echoes the closing of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, first published that same year, which enjoined that, ‘for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’. In declaring the shared responsibility towards humanity which underlines the movement, the anti-colonial struggle for Palestinian liberation became inscribed with a markedly global character, and the question of Palestine reified as an exemplary cause in the broader assemblage of Third World solidarity.
New Humanisms and the Universalism of Third World Poetics
At a July 1966 Emergency Meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Beijing, the intensity of Palestinians’ sympathetic affiliations with anti-imperial struggles in the global South became palpable in the figure of Palestinian writer and revolutionary, Ghassan Kanafani. As one biographer notes:
A North Vietnamese writer, after reading his speech, distributed to the other members of the congress shrapnel souvenirs from the remains of an American plane which had been shot down a week before; Kanafani was immensely touched by this episode. When his turn to speak came he did not read his prepared speech. Instead he said he had nothing to offer in the way his North Vietnamese colleague had, but promised to do so at the next conference. Then he sat down and burst into tears.9
Convened in response to splittist threats from growing Sino-Soviet tensions in the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau, the Emergency Meeting was organised by the Chinese government to reaffirm its commitment to solidarity with struggles of the Third World. Among the many resolutions passed in support of anti-colonial struggles across Africa and Asia, the ‘Resolution on Palestine’ adopted by the 1966 Emergency Meeting emphatically pronounced its commitment to Palestinian self-determination by calling for ‘an economic and cultural boycott of Israel and that Israel be ousted from international organisations’, and ‘be completely liquidated’.
The following year, at the Soviet-sponsored Third Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Beirut, Kanafani once again served as a Palestinian delegate where he delivered a lecture on ‘Resistance Literature in Palestine’ – published the following year in Afro-Asian Writings, a quarterly publication of the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers. From the particular experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel who, as a minority in their homeland, lived under a repressive military occupation from 1948-1967, Kanafani derives a theory of resistance literature that serves as a universal model for a Third World humanism – a popular culture and poetics formed in dialectic opposition to the ontologies of colonialism’s epistemological dominations and erasures. Estranged from the surrounding Arab world, and subject to Israel’s repressive cultural siege against native education and self-representation – the Palestinian writer under colonial rule exemplified, for Kanafani, the paradigm of a critical consciousness shaped by an oppositional relationship to colonial forms of knowledge production and an attendant epistemic violence of negation and denial. ‘After the fall of Palestine in 1948’, Kanafani explained:
popular literature remained the outlet through which the oppressed people expressed their anguish. It seems that when weddings in Galilee turned into demonstrations through the words of popular bards and poets, the Zionist occupation forces opened fire on the demonstrators. The Zionist authorities were later forced to submit a large number of ‘popular reciters’ to the military governor and to impose strict control on their movements. Nevertheless, words proved to be more effective than fire and capable of breaking the siege. In May 1958, Arab demonstrators clashed with the enemy police, and several people were killed in the fight. Shoulder to shoulder, the demonstrators rushed into the police lines, broke their ranks, and pushed them down the road. With this incident a new song was born and spread out in Galilee.10
In recognising the occasional force of resistance literature, Kanafani underlines the social history of written cultures, giving prominence to the verbal chants, songs, and orations which first materialise from the scenes of popular struggle. By the 1960s, as Maha Nassar’s work has shown, Palestinian poets in Israel represented their experience with local conditions of colonialism in terms of global struggles from the Congo to Vietnam. Mahmoud Darwish, Kanafani points out, ‘wrote a collection of poems entitled Birds Without Wings about the African Liberation struggle, in which his intent cannot be mistaken by the reader’.11
The 1967 Resolution on Palestine adopted at the Third Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Beirut – where Kanafani had lived in exile since 1960 – positions the figure of the Palestinian writer under Zionist military rule as the paradigm for a transnational figure of the ‘Afro-Asian writer’.12
The first five points of the 1967 resolution – adopted just months before the June War which hastened Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights – delineate Israel’s role as a ‘bridge-head of a neo-colonialism.’ And the following points extend a recognition of the role that language and culture hold as weapons of resistance with which to directly challenge the epistemic violence of colonialism. Appealing to ‘all progressive writers in the world to stand in the face of the wide cultural conspiracy launched by the Zionist movement through writers who have betrayed the honour of the written word in order to serve interests that are contradictory to the rudiments of truth and History’, the Resolution proffers an injunction, no doubt invoked by Kanafani, ‘to take action, as strongly as possible, in order to stem that misleading cultural aggression through a quest for truth and an appeal to consolidate it’.
Two years after he and his young niece Lamis were assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad,13 Kanafani was announced as a posthumous recipient of the 1974 Lotus Prize for Afro-Asian Literature. That same year, an essay by the Egyptian literary scholar Ezzedine Ismail was published in Lotus magazine14 and built on Kanafani’s previous theorisations on the figure of the ‘Afro-Asian writer’. In ‘Afro-Asian Literature: Its Nature and the Role It plays Against Imperialist Aggression, Racial Discrimination, and Zionism’, Ismail points to the political role of the Afro-Asian writer as a figure embedded in the particular circumstances of specific national exigencies but who simultaneously inhabits a transnational purview of liberation informed by commitment to universal principles. Inexorably circumscribed by local conditions of repression enabled through broader, global systems of economic and military domination:
The Afro-Asian writer is by no means a spectator, either with regard to his own people or the peoples of the two continents. He is bound to his people with the ties which bind the citizen to his nationality and, at the same time, he is bound to all the peoples of the two continents with a bond of the same nature. ‘Afro-Asianism’ has become, for him, a wider and more comprehensive nationality.15
‘With a bond of the same nature’, the Afro-Asian writer inherits its filial attachments to formations of national consciousness while simultaneously apprehending a set of universal principles derived from a global history of anti-colonialism. For the Afro-Asian writer, sites of native familiarity thus become inscribed with relational, affiliative significations to other geographies upon which similar systems of imperial domination and colonial violence have been visited. As a site in which Zionist settler-colonialism and American imperialism have been consolidated, to Ismail, Palestine represents a core paradigm of identification for all valences of Third World struggle:
Contemporary Arabic literature all over the Arab world, and not in Palestine alone, has taken the cause of Palestine and the Palestinian people to its heart and made it its main preoccupation, not only because Palestine is part of the Arab world, but also because Zionism represents the imperialist ideology that is destructive to peoples and to humanity and has expansionist plans not only for the Middle East, but for Asia and Africa. It is the duty of the writers of Asia and Africa to realise this fact and to shoulder their responsibility against that new colonialist octopus. Zionism in the Middle East is not different in any way from racial discrimination in South Africa, colonialism in the Portuguese colonies or the military commercial complex that is exploiting and victimising the Asiatic countries.16
Ismail’s emphasis on the domain of writing and literature as a front in the warfare of resistance against imperialist ideology also extends the lessons of Kanafani’s 1968 critical study on Palestinian cultural production Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine: 1948-1967. There, Kanafani includes selections of Palestinian literature characteristic of resistance literature, among which appear several poems by the Palestinian poet, Samih al-Qassim. Alongside poems dedicated to the Vietcong and to Fidel Castro, al-Qassim’s poem ‘To Paul Robeson’ demonstrates how Palestinian articulations of resistance looked to struggles from across the Third World – and indeed, within the interior of the American metropole – as a symbolic landscape of racialized stratification:
From the ends of the world
Your singing flows in my house
And flutters in my heart.
An exiled brown bird
From the farthest ends of the world
Your singing flows in my house.
Oh, the deepest voice
Your singing flows in my house
Oh, the farthest sign on the path
Oh, the scandalous injustice of man against man
From the farthest ends of the world:
‘For God’s sake, take my mother home
So that she does not witness my death.’
And wander into my eyes
Ghosts of the Ku Klux Klan
Having fun with your crucifixion in the field
Having fun with my crucifixion in the field
I woke up to the sound of a drum
Faith returns to my heart!17
Flowing from the ‘farthest ends of the world’ into the domestic spaces of interiority, al-Qassim’s poetic speaker identifies Robeson as a consummate figure of resistance to the injustices of racial discrimination replicated between the United States and Israel and the common struggle against elimination is equally ascribed to a desire for a future of freedom and liberation. The cartographic imagination of the Third World has been supplanted by that identified with the global South, but what remains constant in Palestine’s current global moment is a heritage of solidarity.
As the 1969 address of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to the Pan African Culture Festival in Algiers declared:
We therefore look to all the revolutionaries in Africa to stand with us, with the cause of freedom in Palestine as they stand with the cause of freedom in Africa. As the cause of freedom is one and indivisible.
We] believe that the cause of freedom is one and the cause of Revolution is one all over the world. As we feel responsibility towards all revolutionaries, we decided to extend our absolute unlimited and unreserved support to all those who carry arms fighting for the cause of liberty everywhere, especially in Africa which suffers in its struggle for human existence on the homeland.
We] intend to take a leading role in the revolutionary movement … as a militant pioneer in Palestine would intercede with all militant pioneers in Africa who intend to fight for liberty anywhere in the world that suffers from oppression, privation, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism.
This is not political propaganda. It is a pledge [to which Palestine] clings with full understanding, to its responsibility towards the map of world Revolution.18
References
1 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’ in Afro-Asian Bulletin, No. 1 (Supplement) Vol. IV Jan./Feb. 1962, 45.
2 Participating Delegates included Algeria, Cameroon, Congo, China, Guinea, India, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Kenya, Japan, North Korea, Lebanon, Morocco, Mongolia, Southern Rhodesia, South West Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Republic, U.S.S.R, Vietnam, and Yemen, as well as Observer participants representing Palestine, Basutoland, Nigeria, North Rhodesia, Oman, Ruanda-Urundi, Zanzibar, the World Peace Council, and Afro-Asian Lawyers.
3 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’, 45.
4 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’, 46.
5 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’, 46.
6 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’, 46.
7 And, beginning with the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, between African, Asian, and Latin American nations.
8 ‘Supplement on the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Executive Committee Gaza from 9th to 11th December 1961’, 25.
9 See Stefan Wild’s Ghassan Kanafani: The Life of a Palestinian, (1975), 17. My thanks to Esmat Elhalaby who shared this anecdote with me many years ago.
10 Ghassan Kanafani, ‘Resistance Literature in Palestine’ in Afro-Asian Writings (nos. 2-3, Summer 1968), 66.
11 Ghassan Kanafani, ‘Resistance Literature in Palestine’, 71.
12 From the Third Afro-Asian Writers' Conference, March 25-30, 1967:
Resolution on Palestine
1) Considers the Zionist movement as colonialist by nature, expansionist in its aims, racist in its structure, fascist in the means it is using;
2) Considers Israel as an imperialist base and a docile tool used for aggressive purposes against Arab states in order to delay their progress towards unity and socialism, and as a bridge-head which neo-colonialism relies on in order to maintain its influence over African and Asian states;
3) Views the aggressive Israeli presence in Palestine as artificial, usurping and demographically imperialist, resorting to violent means and consequently considers the liquidation of this presence as a liberatory and urgent task;
4) Considers that a revolutionary solution to the problems of the Arab Nation, i.e., the liquidation of the reactionary and colonialist regimes, economic emancipation and progress, is primarily bound to the liquidation of Israel as a base intended to maintain backwardness in that region;
5) Views the Israeli presence as a fascist and racist system, in terms of a setback to civilization directed against human progress;
6) Appeals to Afro-Asian Writers, and to all progressive writers in the world, to stand in the face of the wide cultural conspiracy launched by the Zionist movement through writers who have betrayed the honour of the written word in order to serve interests that are contradictory to the rudiments of truth and History, and to take action, as strongly as possible, in order to stem that misleading cultural aggression through a quest for truth and an appeal to consolidate it.
7) Denounces the heavy cultural siege laid by Israel on one quarter of a million Arabs living in occupied territory under a hateful racial oppression in their own land.
8) Hails Palestinian Arab Writers living in occupied Palestine under terrorist rule, for their valiant stand in defence of the rights of the Palestinian people to liberate their country, and denounces the continuous oppression to which they are subjected at the hands of the occupational forces.
9) Hails progressive writers from Asia, Africa and the rest of the world who have, through their consciousness and courage, stood up to Zionist falsehoods and exposed them; and those who have, through their honourable and responsible pens, considerably reinforced the cause of the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination.
10) Considers the support given by the writers of Africa and Asia to the people of Palestine in their struggle for the liberation of their territory as an integral part of the support given to liberation in the world.
11) Supports the Palestine Liberation Organisation which leads the struggle of the Palestinian Arab people to liberate Palestine and to regain their usurped homeland by any means.
13 Louis Allday, ‘A Race Against Time: The life and death of Ghassan Kanafani’, Mondoweiss, September 11 2023.
14 Beginning in the late 1960s, the flagship literary and cultural publication of the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau.
15 Ezzedine Ismail, ‘Afro-Asian Literature: Its Nature and the Role it Plays Against Imperialist Aggression, Racial Discrimination, and Zionism’ Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 20 (1974), 41. Thank you to Sara Hussein for sharing this text with me, in addition to other AAPSO-related publications on the histories of Afro-Arab solidarity.
16 Ezzedine Ismail, ‘Afro-Asian Literature: Its Nature and the Role it Plays Against Imperialist Aggression, Racial Discrimination, and Zionism’, 58.
17 Samih al-Qassim ‘To Paul Robeson’ in Ghassan Kanafani, Adab al-muqāwamah fī Filasṭīn al-muḥtallah, 1948-1966 (Manshūrāt al-Rimāl, 2015), 165-6 (my translation).
18 ‘Al-Fateh’s communique at the 1969 Festival of Pan-African Culture’, Black Agenda Report, November 29 2023.