#highlighting how every one is a vague and meaningless platitude

[hussyknee]

[Video description: Dated black and white video of an interview between a man off-screen who speaks in an upper-crust English accent and a handsome brown man in his thirties seated at a table. He is lean with short curly dark hair, a very sixties moustache, and wearing a casual shirt with an open collar. The camera is zoomed in on him, leaning forward on his elbows, head low and tilted towards the interviewer, brow furrowed, and an intense gaze that flicks down at the table after each question in careful contemplation. He speaks with an Arab accent. The timer of the video recording ticks away at the top left of the frame.

Transcript:

Interviewer: "Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?"

Ghassan Kanafani: "You don't mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation. Surrendering."

Interviewer: "Why not just talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk to whom?"

Interviewer: "Talk to the Israeli leaders."

Ghassan: "That's the kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."

Interviewer: "Well, if there's no swords or guns in the room you could still talk."

Ghassan: "No. I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement."

Interviewer: "But despite this, why not talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk about what?"

Interviewer: "Talk about the possibility of not fighting."

Ghassan: "Not fighting for what?"

Interviewer: "Not fighting at all, no matter what for."

Ghassan: "People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something so you can't even tell me speak about what—"

Interviewer: "—Stop fighting—"

Ghassan: "—Talk about stop fighting why?"

Interviewer: "Talk to stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction, the pain."

Ghassan: "The misery and the pain and the destruction and the death for whom?"

Interviewer: "Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs."

Ghassan: "Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name Palestinian?"

Interviewer: "Better that way than dead though."

Ghassan: "Maybe to you, but to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself."

Ghassan Kanafani is one of the heroes of the Palestinian liberation and celebrated in the canon of modern Arab literature. Forced out of his home with his family during the Nakba in 1948 at the age of ten, the shame of their surrender to Zionists moved him to devote his life to Arab nationalism, Marxist movements and Palestinian liberation through his career as a newspaper editor, journalist, novellist and non-combatant member of the armed resistance group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He coined the term "resistance literature" for the genre of his writing, that came to be instrumental in shaping the Palestinian national identity and ideology of its resistance. In 1972, he and his 17 year old niece were murdered in a car bomb by Mossad.

His obituary read:

"He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."