Translator’s Foreword by Mahmoud Najib
Introduction by Steven Salaita
Preface to the 1967 Edition by Anis Sayegh
Preface by Anni Kanafani

Introduction

1. Zionism Fights on the Linguistic Front

2. The Birth of Zionist Literature

3. Race and Religion in Zionist Literature Beget Political Zionism

4. The Birth and Development of the Character of the Wandering Jew

5. Zionist Literature Marches in Lockstep with Politics

6. Jewish Infallibility and the Unworthiness of Other Peoples

7. Zionist Rationalizations for the Usurpation of Palestine

8. From the Nobel Prize to the 1967 Aggression

“Searing, precise, and gloriously revealing, Kanafani lays bare the deceptive practices that give voice to the Zionist literary tradition's boorish and arrogant refrain. As Zionism haplessly shapeshifts into a pseudo-indigenous liberation movement, nearly five decades after its debut, On Zionist Literature is more necessary and timely than ever. This translation is a welcome event.”

Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. RIFQA (2021), his debut collection of poetry, was published by Haymarket Books

“In this searing critique, Kanafani laid bare the ways in which language, fiction and film were employed in the service of Zionism to manipulate popular western imagination – paving the way for political Zionism, a chauvinist and supremacist ideology that aimed to colonize Palestine and usurp the natural rights and claims of indigenous Palestinians. Kanafani provides an audit of key literary pivots that mark the invention and evolution of a Zionist narrative that managed, through deceit, to not only embed itself in an ancient historic context to which is has no actual connection, but to also alienate the peoples who forged that very same history. Although written in 1967, this work is crucially relevant to contemporary examination of Zionist mythos underpinning Israel's ongoing incremental genocide and theft of Palestine. Finally translated into English, this work is a monumental contribution to anglophile Palestine studies and to critical postcolonial and neo-colonial theory.”

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American political activist and the author of Mornings in Jenin (2006), The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), and her latest novel Against the Loveless World (2019) won the Palestine Book Award

“This superbly translated book is a splendid example of the Palestinian political commitment to know one's enemy. If Ghassan Kanafani was one of the earliest Palestinian novelists to humanize the Israeli Jewish enemy as he did with several characters in his 1969 novella Returning to Haifa, in this 1967 study of Zionist literature, he was also one of the first literary critics in the Arab World to examine and analyze Zionist literature, whose output he studies since the early 19th century as an ideological formation and preparation of the ground for the settler-colonial project that the Zionist movement pioneered in Palestine at the end of the century. Brilliantly argued and comprehensive in its coverage, the book remains most relevant to understanding Zionist and western representations of Palestine and the Palestinians historically and at present. Its searing insights are as accurate and revealing today as they were when it was published in 1967. This is a Palestinian classic!”

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. His books include Colonial Effects (2001), The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006), and Islam in Liberalism (2015)

“Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium… this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers – but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.”

Head of Covert Action, CIA, 1961.

This series, a collaboration between Liberated Texts and Ebb Books, is dedicated to re-publishing, or publishing in English for the first time, works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release.

We do so in the belief that despite the dramatic shift in the educational and media landscape that has taken place in the six decades since the statement quoted above was made, books remain powerful tools with the ability to fundamentally transform people’s view of the world and spur them into action to change it for the better.

Series Editor, Louis Allday

July 2022
188 pages, Ebb Books
9781739985233