Introduction

In the children’s section of all good bookstores in South Africa, you will find a brightly covered book titled “From the River to the Sea: A colouring book”. The illustrator and public face of the book is Nathi Ngubane, an engaging Soweto based cartoonist, who does work for Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation and also the Daily Maverick. The publisher is Social Bandit Media which is run by Azad Essa, a former Al Jazeera journalist currently working for Middle East Eye.

The book, which first came out in February, seeks to tap into the outpouring of sympathy for the Palestinian people, fuelled by the horrendous death and destruction the world has witnessed in Gaza since October 7th 2023. It attracted public attention in June after the South African Jewish Board of Deputies objected to it, but Exclusive Books said that it could find nothing “offensive” in it; and the whole controversy generated considerable publicity, and much sympathetic press coverage, for the work. By early July the book had sold 10 000 copies within South Africa.

The book received a further boost when the Daily Maverick’s newspaper, DM168, devoted its Maverickids section to promoting the book across a four-page spread. According to Maverickids the book “teaches children about the history of Palestine, its culture and people, and also helps young minds to understand what is happening in the Israel-Palestine conflict” and, also, “speaks about the meaning of peace and freedom for all across the world.” The supplement also reproduced an image from the book – of a young Gazan girl who aspires to be a journalist - which it encouraged children to colour in and send in.

The book is both professionally and cleverly done. Though the title suggests a certain agenda not particularly favourable to the survival of the State of Israel, it keeps the sort of red flags that would be obvious to a South African reader well out of sight. For the ordinary purchaser, the book could well be taken as innocent and well-intentioned as the Daily Maverick makes it out to be.

The framing of the book

The essential framing of the book is that the bountiful and beautiful “land of Palestine” was once a bucolic idyll where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived happily and peacefully together. This golden age was brutally ended with the catastrophe (Nakba) that was the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. At this point alien usurpers forced 750 000 Palestinians to “leave their homes so that the Israelis could settle there”, made Palestine into an outpost of Western imperialism, imposed the criminal system of “apartheid” on the native population, and ultimately turned Gaza into a prison.

The oppressed and persecuted Palestinians have, however, bravely resisted the occupation of their land for decades. Though they have endured repeated setbacks they continue to fight and sacrifice to achieve that moment of ultimate triumph when, in a final struggle, these alien hosts will be vanquished, a new age ushered in, and the Palestinians will be amply compensated for all their past suffering by the return of their homes and their land. Palestine will then be free from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.

Through the colouring in pages young readers are taught to identify with the Palestinian cause, the victims of “Israel’s” many cruel and seemingly inexplicable crimes, as well as with those who have given their lives for the “resistance”. They are also taught that by expressing support for the Palestinian cause they are joining a solidarity movement (and community) backed by a “majority of the people in the world”.

The text and illustrations are intended to tap into youthful idealism without, overtly, intruding to far upon childish innocence. The book thus introduces the readers to core beliefs of the Palestinian resistance while remaining somewhat elliptical as to the identity of the “oppressors”, or what “resistance” against them truly involves. Confounding historical facts and context - and the perspective of the ghostly villains of the piece - are notable only by their absence.

The book thus praises the concept of “intifada” which it says means to “rise up against oppression” and “resist persecution”. Palestinians “have risen up against their occupiers for decades”, it states, including through the first intifada of 1987-1993 and the second of 2000-2005. “The Palestinian struggle for justice and freedom”, that continues today, “is a lesson for us all”. The picture used to illustrate this section involves youth striking defiant poses and rock throwing directed at IDF tanks.

The book also invokes and idealises the concept of “martyrdom”. It states that in Palestine “those who are killed as they defend their land, their homes, their community, or their religion, aren’t considered victims. They are known as ‘shaheed’, one who bears witness or a martyr. They are heroes who have a special place in Palestinian society.”

A gateway to where?

The colouring in book describes itself as a “gateway” to the “story of Palestine” through which young readers (aged 6-10) will be introduced inter alia to the “key concepts driving and sustaining Palestinian resistance”.

If it is meant just as a starting point, on a longer journey, it is clearly important for South African readers to understand – given their unfamiliarity with the concepts, symbols, people, and history of the Arab-Israeli conflict - where the pathway down which it is trying to send young children may ultimately end up.

It is instructive here to turn to two of the heroes and martyrs that the book presents as intellectual leaders of the Palestinian struggle, Ghassan Kanafani and Refaat Alareer, images of whom children are invited to colour in. It is in the fate of the two men that one can find the “resistance” worldview fully revealed in all its tragic, disturbing, and sanguinary dimensions.

Ghassan Kanafani

Kanafani was, the book simply states, a “literary hero” whose “books and writings encouraged Palestinians to believe in themselves and never give up. He was the commander who never fired a gun. Israel was so afraid of his words that they killed him in 1972.”

A more complete version of this tale is that Kanafani was both the spokesman for, and in the top five leadership of, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). He also published and edited the PLFP journal Al-Hadaf (The Target).

The PLFP was founded in 1967 by George Habash and was the second largest group in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Kanafani first came to the notice of the world’s press in 1968 when the PLFP called a press conference in Beirut to boast of the successful hijacking of an El Al airliner, the first of many such actions over the next few years. Sitting next to Dr Wadi Haddad, the PLFP’s head of operations, Kanafani briefed the assembled world newspapermen, turning to Haddad when necessary for whispered details of the operation.

He reprised this role in September 1970, sans Haddad, during the PLFP’s spectacular hijacking of four airliners, three of which were flown to Dawson’s Field in Jordan. The attempt to hijack a fifth airplane, El Al Flight 219, ended in failure while in flight after hijacker Patrick Arguello - a Nicaraguan American revolutionary - was shot and fatally wounded and his partner Leila Khaled subdued and arrested. This mass hijacking and hostage taking triggered the civil war between the Jordanian state and the PLO – so called “Black September” - which ultimately led to the safe release of the hostages (in return for the release of Khaled and two others) and the expulsion of Palestinian guerrillas (fedayeen) from that country.

Another of Kanafani’s functions was to act as a liaison with foreign communist revolutionaries allying with the PLFP. He was, for example, the person who first welcomed the Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (“Carlos the Jackal”) into the organisation. Among the other groups he worked closely with was the Red Army Faction of Japan. In February 1971 two Red Army operatives, Shigenobu Fusako and Okudaira Tsuyoshi – who married for the purposes of facilitating Shigenobu’s exit from Japan – arrived in Beirut, where they were hosted by Kanafani in the offices of Al-Hadaf, where Shigenobu would go on to be based.

Later that year Shigenobu and Kanafani cooperated in the making of a propaganda film with two visiting filmmakers, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, who passed through Beirut on the way back to Japan from the Cannes Film Festival. In this film Kanafani, sitting in his office at Al-Hadaf, makes an appeal direct to camera to fellow Japanese comrades and revolutionaries:

“There is no end to our struggle. We have our final purpose, and we continue to fight for its realisation. No one and nothing can stop us. Japanese comrades we sincerely hope that you will fight our common enemy by supporting us. Support us by all means… Rise up and strike blows against the monster of American imperialism… Japanese comrades, let us charge together against the monster, and defeat it!”

The film, titled Sekigun PFLP sekai sensō sengen (Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), was screened to radicals across Japan. One of the student members of the Red Army involved in organising the film’s screening at Kagoshima University in the autumn of 1971 was Okamoto Kozo. Kozo’s brother Takashi was a Red Army operative involved in the hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 351, which eventually ended up in North Korea (an event also featured in the film).

Okamoto hosted the Red Army delegation, which included a PFLP delegate, who came along bearing the film reels and projector. At around this time he was asked if he was willing to go to Beirut for military training and he answered in the affirmative. He eventually left for Lebanon on 29th February 1972 travelling on a route that took him first to Montreal, then New York, and finally Beirut.

Following his arrival in early March he linked up with Shigenobu and Okudaira. After several days in Beirut, he relocated to Baalbek and began several weeks of military training alongside Okudaira and another Japanese comrade, Yasuda Yasuyuki. This training, provided by PLFP instructors, involved both physical conditioning and weapons training.

In early May the Black September Organisation of the PLO hijacked Sabena Flight 571 from Vienna to Tel Aviv. After the plane landed at Lod Airport the hijackers demanded the release of 315 convicted Palestinian prisoners in return for the safe release of the hostages. This operation ended in humiliating failure as the two male operatives were killed by an Israeli commando unit that stormed the plane after pretending to be maintenance technicians coming to fix a fault. The two female operatives were captured alive.

The PLFP now made plans to carry out an operation to avenge these deaths. The three-man Japanese unit were informed of their mission on 16th May and began their preparation and training for it. The men accepted the mission was a suicidal or “kamikaze” one. Shortly before they departed, they ate a last supper prepared for them by Shigenobu. The three men then exfiltrated out of Lebanon on 22nd May and, again using a circuitous route, travelled to Rome where they received Czech Vz. 58 V assault rifles with their butt stocks removed, spare magazines full of bullets, and Soviet-made fragmentation grenades.

Dressed conservatively, and using false passports, they checked in their luggage and boarded an Air France Flight 132 to Tel Aviv on Tuesday 30th May. Their tickets were booked through to Japan. As was common practice at the time their check in luggage was neither screened nor examined. The airplane itself was filled mostly with Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico on their way to tour the Holy Land. The plane arrived at Lod Airport at 10pm and the passengers made their way through passport control and into the baggage collection hall.

The men destroyed their passport photographs and went to collect their baggage. They then opened their bags and took out the weapons. Eyewitnesses described how the men then started raking the 250-300 people around them with machine gun fire. The bullets also smashed through the glass partition and into the arrivals section. When one of the men had emptied a magazine, he lobbed a hand grenade where people were clustered, reloaded, and started firing again. The Israeli authorities were caught off guard - given the novel nature of the attack and coming as it did from a wholly unexpected quarter - and had no meaningful security in the area.

Okudaira blew himself up with one of his own grenades, Yasuda apparently died after being hit by a stray bullet, though he too died with his face disfigured, and was not identified as one of the attackers until some time later. Okamoto ran out of the terminal and threw his two grenades at an airplane on the tarmac. He then fled but was chased down and arrested.

The whole incident reportedly lasted no more than a few minutes. At the end of it a pile of bodies lay next to the conveyer belt, with the floor of the hall covered in blood. 26 innocents were killed and some eighty wounded. Of the dead seventeen were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, eight were Israeli citizens, and one a Canadian.

From top to bottom: Blood splatters above the notice above the baggage conveyer belt for Air France Flight 132. The bloody aftermath of the massacre of the Puerto Rican tour group. Okamoto Kozo, in police custody, with the weapon he used to help perpetrate it.

Virtuous violence

The PLFP now broadcast a statement claiming its “complete responsibility for the brave operation launched by one of its special groups tonight in our occupied land.” It dubbed the group as the “squad of the martyr Patrick Urguello”. It did not identify the nationality of those involved but, alluding to their foreign origin, said “those three heroes came thousands of miles to take part with the Palestinian people in their struggle against the forces of Zionism and imperialism”. It also said that the “raid today” was a “revolutionary answer to the Israeli massacre performed in cold blood by the butcher [Israeli Defence Minister] Moshe Dayan and his devils”, a reference to the killing of the two Palestinian hijackers earlier in the month.

Kanafani devoted extensive space in the subsequent editions of Al-Hadaf to articles celebrating and defending this massacre. This combined PLFP-Japanese Red Army “operation” against “imperialism” was the front-page lead of the June 2nd edition of the magazine. The image on the cover was the movie poster for “Sekigun PFLP sekai sensō sengen”.

In a feature article running across two pages of the magazine the PLFP described the Japanese militants as heroic, daring and self-sacrificing - and the two men who had died as martyrs - and praised them for joining the Palestinian people in the “struggle against racist, colonialist Zionism and racist imperialism”. It stated that it expected the Israelis to launch a large and indiscriminate reprisal attack, of the kind that protected the Israelis from any risk, while putting civilians in harm’s way.

The PLFP also defended all aspects of the operation as it had played out. Lod Airport was a legitimate military and economic target. The killing of civilians was unavoidable as the “racist Israeli state” was based on settler colonialism and it was impossible to distinguish between the military and civilian status of those who had declared themselves to be citizens of land usurped from the Palestinians. The Christian pilgrims were not “innocent” as their use of “our occupied land as a place for tourism is in itself an act of siding with the usurping enemy” and they had taken their trip at their own risk, given prior PLFP warnings.

The PLFP also reiterated their determination to continue striking the “Zionist enemy” at home and abroad, and to inflict the greatest possible harm upon it. The piece concluded with the exhortation: “Death to the Nazi Israelis!”

The following week Al-Hadaf again defended the “brave attack” of the PLFP’s “suicide unit” at Lod Airport and accused the Israelis and West of shameful hypocrisy for condemning the killing of innocent civilians and visitors, while remaining silent over past Zionist atrocities. This article concluded: “Reactionary violence is a deadly disease inherent in all forms of colonialism and exploitation, and there is no way to cure this disease except with a single medicine, which is revolutionary violence.”

Kanafani, alongside other PLFP spokesmen, also defended the operation in interactions with Western foreign correspondents based in Beirut, and an edited version of these exchanges was published in Al-Hadaf the following week. In this the PLFP reiterated that Israel was a military society where it was not possible to differentiate between military and civilians (all were legitimate targets). Tourists too had been warned several times that they were putting their own lives at risk if they ignored the Front’s warnings and travelled to a war zone.

When challenged by one correspondent on the barbarous nature of the violence at Lod Airport the reply came: “What is violence? It is a political tool in our opinion, and it is either just or unjust, and nothing outside of that. This is the only morality we understand, and we use violence because it is our way of achieving justice.” “Revolutionary violence that aims at liberation and justice” could not be equated with (Israeli) violence that aimed at “terrorism, oppression, occupation and exploitation”.)

Okamoto’s trial was set down to begin on Monday 10th July 1972. On Saturday morning 8th July at 10.30am Kanafani walked down to his car in the ground floor garage in his apartment building in the Hazmieh suburb of Beirut. As he turned the ignition of his Austin 1100 it exploded, obliterating both Kanafani and his seventeen-year-old niece, who was sitting in the passenger seat alongside him.

In his subsequent trial before a military court Okamoto confessed to his role in the attack, which he said was a combined Japanese Red Army-PLFP operation, carried out at the instigation of the PLFP. He said the JRA would continue with such massacres and welcomed the prospect of being sentenced to death and executed for the killings. He concluded his statement:

“When I was a child, I was told that when people died, they became stars. I didn't really believe it, but I could appreciate it. We three Red Army soldiers wanted to become Orion when we died. And it calms my heart to think that all the people we killed will also become stars in the same heavens. As the revolution goes on, how the stars will multiply!"

In the end the court decided to deny him his death wish and sentenced him to life imprisonment instead. The front page of Al-Hadaf on July 22nd paid tribute to the three martyrs of the Lod Airport Operation with a photomontage of Kanafani (pictured in his office), while in front of him stand Okudaira and Yasuda, assault rifles in hand (this picture was taken during their training.)

Although Israel never formally declared responsibility for Kanafani’s assassination, more recent literature describes this killing as stemming from a high-level decision to launch retaliation operations against those individuals deemed responsible for orchestrating terrorist attacks against Israeli targets, a policy continued to this day.

According to some authorities the Lod Airport Operation was both the inspiration and the model for the use of suicide bombings first by Hezbollah in the 1980s, and then during the second intifada, when 545 Israelis were killed in 152 separate suicide attacks – carried out by Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and the PLFP - between 2000 and 2006.

Refaat Alareer

Another of the martyred writer-activists celebrated in the colouring in book is Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on December 6th 2023, that also claimed the lives of a number of his family members. The book describes him as an “English professor, writer and poet” and it republishes a poem he wrote in 2011 titled “If I must die” which Alareer pinned to his Twitter account on November 1st 2023.

In earlier commentary on Twitter (now X) Alareer, a professor at Hamas’s Islamic University in Gaza, repeatedly expressed the view that the Israelis – “Zionists” or “Zios” - were alien usurpers with no right to be in their land at all, let alone situate their own state on it. He also regularly equated them with Nazis: “Your daily reminder that ‘Zionists are Nazi criminals’”, one Tweet from February 2022 read, “Zionism is the offspring of Nazism and white supremacy”.

Alareer also rejected the notion that any moral distinction could be drawn between “cute liberal Israel” and the uncouth and less popular right-wing lot. “ALL Israelis are complicit in the occupation and crimes against Palestinians and with Palestinian blood on their hands”, he commented in February 2023.

Against such a people all forms of “resistance” were justified, Alareer believed. He reiterated in a series of posts in 2021:

“No form, act, or means of Palestinian resistance whatsoever is terror. All Israelis are soldiers. All Palestine is occupied”,

“ALL means of resistance are not only legitimate but also moral”’;

“it’s always right to show we resist by all means necessary. Hiding that is like we are ashamed of not only these acts of resistance BUT all acts of armed resistance by Palestinians and others throughout history”;

“Compromise with zios is still stepping on Palestinian blood. Israel is a colonial white supremacist entity. All resistance is legitimate.”

In response to an August 2021 Human Rights Watch report which condemned Hamas/others for firing a barrage of rockets from Gaza earlier that year - which led to the deaths of 12 civilians, including two children, in Israel, and seven people in Gaza after one misfired - Alareer posted:

“1) Under int’l law, occupied Palestinians have the right to resist the brutal Israeli occupation by all means possible.

2) ALL Palestine is occupied by foreign invaders.

3) ALL ‘israel’ is a military base, all Israelis armed and dangerous.

4) israel uses its ppl as human shields.”

October 7th

Such raging on social media by an influential Gazan academic may have appeared inconsequential at the time given the seeming invincibility of Israel’s military. However, on October 7th thousands of Hamas militants overran Israel’s defences around the strip in a successful surprise attack. In the killing frenzy that followed some 1 200 people, of whom 815 were civilians, were butchered, with a further 250 people taken hostage, dead and alive.

Disturbing real time reports soon started emerging of the indiscriminate slaughter of residents of the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope and the young attendees of the Nova Musical Festival held in that area. As in 1972 the attackers also drew no distinction between Israelis and foreign visitors and workers. As this was all happening Alareer celebrated, on Twitter, the Palestinian “freedom fighters” and their “pre-emptive attack against Israeli military occupation”.

He also reacted furiously to the shocked reactions of many usually reliably pro-Palestinian influencers in American and Europe at what they were seeing and hearing. He was also interviewed on the BBC that day, where he described the attack by the “Palestinian resistance” as “legitimate and moral. This is exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. This is the Gaza ghetto uprising against 100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation.”

In posts over the next few days, he rejected claims that the problem lay with the ideological orientation of the present Israeli government: “… this is NOT the current government or Netanyahu. They are mere symptoms. The real disease is Zionism, the existence of Israel as an occupation and an apartheid [state].” In another response he stated, “Israel is an occupation power built on death destruction and ethnic cleansing of native people. Of course it does not have any right to defend itself…. The Israeli occupation is the root cause of evil. It must end.”

Over the following weeks Alareer provided harrowing accounts, on Twitter and in interviews with the Western media, of the devastating progression of the Israeli Defence Force’s offensive against Hamas in the mostly built-up areas of Gaza, in which thousands of civilians were killed. Interspersed with his claims that the IDF was committing genocide in the strip he would reiterate his fervent desire to see the Jewish State - which he believed should never have been allowed to exist in the first place - disappeared off the face of the map. As he commented in a Twitter post on November 3rd there were no “both sides here. The occupier/oppressor can always go to hell.”

Conclusion

To conclude, the slogan “From the River to the Sea: Palestine will be free” is well known to be a call for the destruction of the State of Israel. It stems from the belief that the Jewish State (the so-called ‘Zionist entity’) is, despite its insignificant size, an abnormal, unwelcome, and painful imposition upon the Middle East.

The demand for the ‘right of return’, as represented by the symbol of a key, is the most presentable means of pressing for its excision. However, as Kanafani and Alareer made clear in their responses to the Lod Airport massacre and the October 7th atrocities respectively all conceivable forms of “revolutionary violence” or “resistance” against the “occupiers” were both legitimate and moral.

Since all Israelis are “guilty” they have no right to defend themselves, and nor was there any need for the “resistance” to differentiate between combatants and civilians, men and women, adults and children, or indeed, Israelis and non-Israelis (you ‘associate with the usurpers at your own peril.’) Considerations of self-preservation and avoiding causing harm to one’s own also seemingly did not apply, given the elevation of martyrdom (of joining the stars in the sky) as an ideal.

This then is the full and unexpurgated version of the “resistance” worldview, as expressed by Kanafani and Alareer at least - two martyrs whom thousands of South African children are now being taught to visualise as icons to be emulated, thanks in part to the Daily Maverick’s promotional efforts.