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Abstract

This thesis is a study of the Zionist imagined geography. It explores how Israel developed from a fictional territorial aspiration to a settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. This thesis interprets On Zionist Literature (1967; 2022) by martyred Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani through the seminal framework of imaginative geographies put forth by the late Palestinian thinker Edward Said (1978), thereby locating Kanafani’s examination of Zionist literature as a groundbreaking study of the Zionist imagined geography. In tandem with Kanafani’s examination of Zionist literature, this thesis extrapolates historical flashpoints that facilitated the materialization of these narratives over time. In alignment with Kanafani and Said’s methodological and theoretical approach, this thesis follows the British empire’s role in establishing the discursive and material infrastructures that enabled the Zionist conquest of Palestine. Kanafani understood subversive knowledge production, such as his study of Zionist literature, as a faction of Palestinian armed struggle. Accordingly, this thesis concludes by examining “do you condemn Hamas” as a contemporary example of discursive and material violence in the making of the Zionist imagined geography, which remains pending so long as the Palestinian resists. This thesis fills a gap in the literature by using Said’s imaginative geographies framework, a circulated concept from a credible figure in Western academia, as a vessel for conveying Kanafani’s intellectual legacy in a rather hostile realm for the kind of unabashedly militant politic he embodied. In the face of an imperial world order increasingly bent on de-historizing Palestinian armed struggle to condemn the Palestinian to death, Kanafani’s incisive study of the Zionist enemy offers necessary interventions. Bringing together two emblematic anti-imperialist Palestinian intellectuals, one rooted in the region who primarily wrote in Arabic and the other based in the West whose formative intellectual contributions are often detached from his positionality, also serves to re-centre Said’s legacy in relation to the Palestinian cause. This consolidation interrupts the erasure and fragmentation of Palestinian peoples and lands that the Zionist imagined geography is predicated on. This intervention foregrounds Palestinian epistemology that represents a decolonial inverse to the Zionist-imperialist default and, thus, contributes to confronting anti-Palestinian racism within academia and beyond.