Ghassan Kanafani: A Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck

On 16 October 1970 the Australian journalist Richard Carleton interviewed Ghassan Kanafani for ABC. Kanafani was then spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and editor of its magazine. ABC now publishes a 14-minute, 22-second archival recording. It is among the most circulated pieces of film in Palestinian political history, largely because of two exchanges in which Kanafani refuses the interviewer’s vocabulary rather than his questions.

The first is about naming. Carleton reaches for a hedge; Kanafani will not take it. “It’s not whatever, because this is where the problems start,” he answers. The scholar Tahrir Hamdi, co-editor of Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, points to this moment as characteristic: for Kanafani, the terms on which a struggle is described are part of the struggle, and a liberation movement that accepts being called something else has already conceded ground it cannot recover at the table.

The second exchange is about negotiation. Kanafani first rejects the premise of the proposed peace talks as “capitulation, surrendering.” When Carleton asks again why the parties cannot simply talk, Kanafani asks who the other party would be. Carleton answers: the Israeli leaders. Kanafani names that relationship a “conversation between the sword and the neck.”

Those are separate replies. The widely shared wording “capitulation between the sword and the neck” is a false composite, not a sentence Kanafani speaks in the recording. Transcripts also normalize his English grammar differently. The phrase above preserves the uncontested contiguous words; readers can hear the complete exchange at approximately 4:07–4:31 in ABC’s recording.

The image is precise rather than rhetorical, and that is why it has survived. It does not say that talking is wrong. It says that a conversation between parties of radically unequal power, one of whom holds the instrument and the other of whom is beneath it, is not a negotiation and should not be given the name of one. Two decades later the same objection would be made in different words by Palestinians who watched Oslo signed, and it is still the sentence most often reached for whenever a Palestinian leadership is invited to negotiate the terms of its own subordination.

ABC describes the footage as recorded two years before Kanafani’s assassination in a car bombing in July 1972.

Sources

• ABC’s Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani — official 14:22 archival recording, recorded 16 October 1970
• Ghassan Kanafani: The life of a Palestinian writer — Middle East Eye
• What Ghassan Kanafani’s writing on the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle tells us about Gaza’s resistance today — interviews with Tahrir Hamdi and Louis Brehony, Mondoweiss, April 2025
• A conversation between the sword and the neck — Ghassan Kanafani, PalestineRemembered.com