The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine

from Barbara Harlow's After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing:

In “The 1936-39 Revolution in Palestine: Background, Details and Analysis” (Thawra 1936-39 fi Filastin: Khalfiat wa tafasil wa tahlil), Kanafani proceeds according to an apparently straightforward, at once disciplined and disciplinary, narrative development to present the “background, details and analysis” of the events and determinations of those three decisive years. The essay begins with a historical setting for the uprising; this opening is followed by a discussion of what Kanafani contends, more controversially, were its principal agents: workers, peasants and, within certain limitations, the intellectuals; and the reading concludes with a report on the “revolution” (thawra) itself. According to Kanafani, the Palestinian struggle had, at the time, as it would continue to do, to contend with three mutually conflicting but interconnected issues and/or obstacles: 1. the reactionary local leadership;2. the Arab regimes surrounding Palestine; and 3. the Zionist-imperialist alliance (p.45).

While the local Palestinian leadership, or indeed any other of these negative actors, may not be given an entitled site of its own in the text, Kanafani's iconoclastic critique of the roles played in the emergence and the perpetuation of the revolt by the workers, peasants and intellectuals focuses on the calculated and self-interested obstruction of the revolt (and thus the historical necessity of its ultimate collapse in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War), by the traditional leadership, including landlords, the clergy and the middle bourgeoisie — as well as on the weakness of will and the compromised organization of the left generally and the Communist Party in particular.

And while numerous causes have been cited by very different parties (see Johnson, 1982, and Swedenburg, 1995, for example) to explain the genesis and outbreak of the now historic 1936-39 revolt — whether this be the popular example of the martyred Shaykh al-Qassam or various British White Papers — it is Kanafani's argument that it was rather the violent internal contradictions,the class and religio-ethnic differences, produced by the enforced “transformation of the Palestinian agricultural economy into an industrial Jewish economy” that must be analysed if the specific contributions of the uprising to the history of popular revolution can even begin to becomprehended.