The great Ghassan Kanafani said this. The 36 year old author, and politician, was assassinated along with his 17 year old niece in a car bomb planted by the Israeli Mossad. Yet his ideas, values and virtues, that empowered his will to resist, reverberate decades later. To this day he stands as an insurmountable symbol of strength, sumud (steadfastness), and uncompromising integrity.
On Friday, September 27, 2024, Israel assassinated another powerful figure of the Lebanese Arab resistance and secretary general of Hezb’Allah, Sayed Hasan Nasrallah. Israel’s weapon of choice for murdering Nasrallah was infinitely more barbaric and monstrous than that of any other Arab resistance leader that I can recall; carpet bombing six residential buildings in the Dahiyeh, a small suburb in Beirut Lebanon.
After 32 years, and multiple assassination attempt on his life, Nasrallah was martyred in his homeland, amongst his people, by the bloodthirsty, genocidal state known as Israel.
Israel’s barbaric assassination of Sayed Hasan Nasrallah, along with other Hezb commanders, and many many more Lebanese civilians has definitely shaken many people, Arab people in particular..
Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Falastini, and definitely Iranian people, were all connected in one way or another with Nasrallah. We pretty much grew up together.
Whenever Nasrallah spoke everyone tuned in and hung on to his every word. His speeches, the eloquence and poetics with which he communicated with our people as well as the uncivilized invaders, were nothing short of absolute genius.
To say that Israel, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, and other uncivilized states who are hell bent on dehumanizing and murdering Arabs, Black and Brown African people, both feared and respected him is an understatement.
Which is why Israel decided to drop 80+ bunker buster bombs, that’s over 115000 Kgs of explosives on him, without giving a single F*ck about all the other Lebanese people they murdered with him.
When I went back and listened to his last speech, I got the sense as if he knew that his time was at an end. He acknowledged the harm that Israel had dealt to them Lebanese people, when they terrorized us with their war crime of exploding pagers and walkie talkies. And still, the way he spoke did not give me the sense that he felt defeated. Acknowledging a vicious blow and waving the white flag are not the same thing, a difference that the Zionist invaders don’t seem to grasp.
Focus on the Goal and the Journey
Like many others I believe that, when it comes to anti-colonial resistance, the idea and the message are far more important than who is carrying them. I do not say this lightly. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about the messenger, who always seems to get shot… especially when part of the message is peace for the people and resistance to oppression.
Rather, if we agree that the idea and promise of liberation have a symbiotic relationship with the people who make up the resistance, including the messenger, then we cannot afford to let them be martyred with the body.
The idea and promise of liberation are born out of a people’s will to resist domination. Oppressed people depend on the values, responsibilities and virtues of freedom and liberation, just as the ideal of freedom and liberation from tyranny and oppression depend people to develop, nurture, and pass them onto the next generation.
What is more, and in hindsight, looking back and listening to Nasrallah’s many speeches, he consistently tried to remind people of his own finitude and mortality. That, among other roles, he was simply the next messenger in line to carry forward the idea and promise of liberation.
He asked his people to remembe and pray for him should he fall, to make time and space for sadness and grief. And, furthermore, not to dwell on the feelings, on the event, or on him. For many people this was and is a difficult task, and why shouldn’t be? He was a revolutionary who, like many other revolutionaries, sought to legitimate the Lebanese resistance and concretize the idea and promise of liberation politically and socially and physically, by any means necessary. 32 years.
He also consistently asked people to remember and pray for all the other martyrs who were murdered by the occupation, in another attempt to shift the focus off of himself. And I believe that he did this because he knew that if people became too attached and glorified him too much, they may lose focus on the idea and the promise of liberation. Glorification of the person might inevitably belittle and trivialize the idea.
The Hubris of U.S. Colonialism
“Bodies fall but ideas endure”, the colonial states of Europe and the West refuse to understand this about anti-colonial resistance movements. This is because they view the Lebanese resistance (as well as other Arab resistance movements) in the same way they’ve structured their own deluded and barbaric governments and militaries, as hierarchical.
Nasrallah used to say that it is a mistake to buy into the lie about “Jews controlling the U.S.”, and I agree; in one sense it is harmful and antisemitic to paint Jewish people in this light, especially since there are many Jewish people and Jewish organizations who vehemently oppose what the U.S. and Israel are doing in the name of Judaism.
In the other sense, the lie is harmful because it takes the onus away from the demented war rhetoric of the U.S. and allows them to escape responsibility and accountability.
Instead, Nasrallah used to say, the U.S. is using Israel to fulfill its own plans and agenda. That famous clip by Joe Biden where he says “If there were not an Israel in the Middle-East the U.S. would have to INVENT an Israel, to protect her interest in the Middle-East” is the absolute case in point, that the U.S. is using Israel and Judaism as a human shield to essentially fight a proxy war with Arab resistance.
And I’ve written about this in a previous post, that geopolitically and financially it makes so much sense for the U.S. to invest so heavily in what is basically a giant military base for it in West-Asia, to keep their eyes on and also as a threat to the Arabs and all the Arab and neighbouring countries.
That is how Colonialism and Settler Colonialism work. The former exploits Indigenous peoples human labour and land resources, and the latter works to eliminate the Indigenous populations to replace them
The Delusion of U.S. Colonialism
Having learned very little from its direct wars with Iraq, Afghanistan etc. namely that it cannot win against resistance and guerrilla militia, the U.S. remains determined to expand its colonial and imperial projects.
As much as U.S. politicians want to make it seem, to their people and others, that it won or is winning the “war on terror” against the “Axis of Evil” or “Axis of Resistance”, it has not. One only needs to look at the state of those countries and what the U.S. has accomplished, it amounts to delusion.
Yet the U.S.’s addiction for financial growth at the expense of Black, Brown, and Arab bodies has to be satiated through continuous wars on them. And as such, the U.S. knows it faces a tough challenge in terms of the resources and military power (soldiers, weapons, technology etc.), the wars on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. cost them a lot of troops, money, and moral.
So what is their solution? Proxy wars, whereby the U.S. uses the resources and military power of other countries to do its bidding, such as the cases in Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel. The U.S. will fund these countries with the money, weapons, technology, and to a lesser extent American ‘boots on the ground’ (though not nearly as much as it would cost them to send their own troops).
And I believe that this is part of the delusional thought pattern of the U.S. who is itself a tool of the colonial and settler colonial projects. Instead of learning from the fact that invading countries, massacring civilians, and fighting against guerrilla militia is a terrible idea, they shift their approach.
The U.S. still wants to invade and kill and destroy, but they want to do it through proxies. Because when the proxies fail and fall, the U.S. can place the blame, responsibility, and accountability on the proxy, while still spinning the narrative about the Indigenous people, who are defending themselves, as being the aggressors.
This is why Nasrallah encouraged people not to lose focus on who the real culprit is, and to not spread the lies and propaganda that has been manufactured by the U.S., Canada, countries in Europe etc. namely, that the Arabs and especially Muslims hate Jews.
Resistance Only Becomes Stronger
The Lebanese resistance, like many other resistance movements, learned the strategies and tactics and structures of guerrilla warfare from one of the best anti-colonial militia that beat the U.S., the Vietnamese resistance.
For anyone who understands how guerrilla militia knows that is structured laterally and not hierarchically. This means that whoever is the face of a given resistance movement has many people to their left and their right. And this is why the colonizers way of ‘decapitating the head’ of a resistance movement does little to disrupt its functions and its goals.
Still, part of the colonizer’s strategy with the Lebanese people is to terrorize and demoralize them and their resistance. This strategy may work in the short run, for it was certainly a shock for everyone to learn about Nasrallah’s assassination. It is also natural and expected for us to sink into despair and depression and we try to process and sort through our thoughts, feelings, and facts.
And through the haze and the fog, the fire and the smoke from the bombs they drop, we still see the idea and the promise of liberation, and the dissolution of the settler colonial entities that are causing so much pain and misery.
Our will to resist is born out of the idea and the promise of liberation from tyranny and oppression; that is why our will to resist cannot be broken, because the ideas and promises of liberation CANNOT be broken.
My family, friends, my people in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, are terrified and terrorized. They are suffering from trauma and despair on a daily basis. And still, with all the crying, wailing, rage, sadness and anger, we also laugh. We also work. We make art, we study and we exercise, we hug and hold and support each other and smile when we greet one another. Why? Because that is our will to resist, an ethereal phenomenon which manifests itself through our bodies.
That is the idea and the promise of liberation from settler colonialist entities expressing itself through us. Yet this is something that the narcissism and grandiosity of colonialist empires cannot understand.
This lack of understanding of the human will to resist oppression and seek liberation causes these colonialist empires to use more extreme means to try and destroy the resistance. And we should not forget the objective of settler colonialism: A future without any of the Indigenous people of the land. However, SC cannot do that until it succeeds at annihilating the resistance.
Therefore, with its desire to escalate its violence on both the resistance and the civilians, the settler colonial project DEMANDS that the settlers mutilate any sense of empathy, understanding, mercy, they have in an attempt to achieve victory over the Indigenous people.
The problem is that when the settler makes this sacrifice at the alter of the settler colonial project, they not only dehumanize the colonized people, they also succeed in dehumanizing themselves. The settlers cease to extend empathy, understanding, mercy, and all the human qualities needed to nurture the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual growth of human beings, to their own- selves.
It is as Aimé Césaire says, in Discourse on Colonialism, speaking about the colonizing act he explains its effect to:
“decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism”
Concluding Thoughts
“I know you’ve come here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man” -Che Guevara-
“Bodies fall. Ideas endure” -Ghassan Kanafani-
“For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butcheries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.” -Aimé Césaire-