Kamal Nasser

Kamal Nasser was born in Gaza City, where his father was then working, in 1924 or 1925; the Protestant Christian Nasser family was one of the best-known families of Birzeit. He was educated at Birzeit College and at the American University of Beirut, where he took a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1945, writing poetry and working as a journalist while still a youth. Back in Palestine he taught at the Patriarchal School of Zion in Jerusalem, enrolled in the city’s Law Classes, and in 1947 was appointed professor of Arabic literature at Al-Ahliyya College in Ramallah. That autumn he began publishing poems and short stories in the Jerusalem weekly al-Qafila and the daily Filastin. The Nakba marked him permanently. In his memoirs he wrote: “In the early years after the defeat of 1948, I would wake up from my sleep in panic as a result of nightmares that tormented me constantly… depicting in my mind the slaughter, mass killings, and forced displacement that befell my people as they were expelled from their homeland, Palestine.”

He joined the Ba’th group in Ramallah and Jerusalem, helped launch the daily al-Baath in March 1949, and in late 1949 founded the illustrated political weekly al-Jil al-Jadid, which carried on its masthead the motto “Hope, Conviction, Struggle.” In October 1956 he was elected to the Jordanian parliament for the Ramallah district on the Ba’th Party ticket, where he proposed legislation guaranteeing women’s political rights; the proposal was defeated. After the April 1957 coup against the Arab nationalist government of Suleiman al-Nabulsi he went underground, moving from village to village for a year and a half before escaping to Damascus, and later Cairo. His first poetry collection, Jirah tughanni (Singing Wounds), appeared in Beirut in March 1960. He returned to Birzeit under the 1965 amnesty, was arrested by the Israeli military authorities after the June 1967 occupation, and was expelled to Jordan on 23 December 1967.

In February 1969 Nasser was elected to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and became its official spokesman. From June 1972 he was editor-in-chief of the PLO’s weekly Filastin al-Thawra in Beirut, where his editorials — among them “In Defense of Ourselves, and not in Defense of the Soviets,” written after Sadat expelled the Soviet advisers from Egypt — often became the organisation’s official positions. After attending the funeral of Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated in July 1972, he exclaimed: “Incredible! This is how a writer’s wedding with martyrdom should be celebrated!” — and wondered whether he would have such a funeral one day.

On 10 April 1973, Israeli Mossad agents infiltrated the Verdun neighbourhood of Beirut and assassinated Nasser together with the senior Fatah leaders Kamal Adwan and Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar. As his will requested, he was buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Beirut next to Kanafani. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) called him “the conscience of the Palestinian revolution,” writing in his eulogy: “The revolution has lost an intellectual, a man whose words were courageous, calm, rational, and revolutionary all at once.” His collected poetry and prose were published in Beirut in 1974, and Birzeit University named its largest auditorium after him.

Selected contributions

• Jirah tughanni (Singing Wounds), poetry (Beirut, 1960)
• Editor-in-chief, Filastin al-Thawra (1972–73)
• Kamal Nasser: The Complete Poems and The Complete Prose Works, ed. Ihsan Abbas and Naji Alloush (Beirut, 1974)

Sources

• Kamal Nasser — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question