Read around the issue of Palestine and you soon come across the legendary figure of Kanafani. Critic, novelist, politician and revolutionary, who achieved all of this by the age of 36, when he was assassinated by Mossad. Not many literary critics are targeted by foreign secret services: the power of the word proven in the act of killing. On Zionist Literature explores how the very notion of the Zionist state was seeded through literature. Its critique encompasses authors from George Eliot to Arthur Koestler to Leon Uris. It’s one of those breathtakingly brilliant treatises that recognises the soft power of the written word as a seedbed for the cultivation of ideas. In this case the idea that Israel had a right to occupy Palestinian land and displace the Palestinian population. There are elements of the better known Edward Said’s intellectual project at play here, but Kanafani’s argument is all his own. How do ideas succeed in taking over the world? Insidiously, by stealth, Kanafani argues, showing how writers who believe in the concept of Zionism have manipulated historical data to support the brute force colonialism they seek to propagate.
No comments:
Post a Comment