Wisam Rafeedie

The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan'an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan'an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan'an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan'an's story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.Love, revolution, and life-these are the "Trinity of Fundamentals'' that pave Kan'an's path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.

The Trinity of Fundamentals

Jena

Bear up, Kan'an. Endure. If it is your duty to become acquainted with this house and life, then do it and endure. Your party and your experience make you a revolutionary. Can that be done without sacrifice? Bear up, then. Being revolutionary requires certain things, so do them. Show tolerance. Have you not read about the lives of great revolutionaries? What have you offered so far compared to them?…You are committed to the revolution, so be a man and pay the price without being frivolous. The revolution changes you, so help it do so by accommodating yourselves to its logic. Dont allow your nerves to turn you into a counter-revolutionary, a knife that stabs you in the back.

I hope that you will understand my position, even if it entails difficulties for you. I have chosen my path in life, the path of resistance in the name of our people and the freedom of our homeland… What sort of a man would I be if I remained an idle spectator while our homeland was occupied and out people enslaved and I did nothing…

Kan’an philosophized his position on death in this peculiar way and put a halt to any further thoughts about death. He concluded that some people die for a reason, others for none at all— it is best, then, to look for a good reason to die.

For years, Kan'an had sown in his mind the values of confrontation and steadfastness, and it seemed to him that the time for their harvest was near. The second door was about to collapse. Kan'an would not collapse from their blows. His trust in his party and in the struggle would not be wrenched from his heart!

Listen, I am a revolutionary and Marxist fighter who is confident that one day we will win and gain our rights. This gives me strength and makes me refuse to submit to terrorism and the conduct of you and your soldiers. Do not think that this will be of any use to you, for you do not scare me.

How strange is man: at moments of peace all he can remember is his weakness, his hesitancy, his impotence. During the battle, however, he discovers that he has heroic-even indescribable--strength. When a human being is fighting for his life, as he sees it, with a deeply rooted determination and conviction in the justice and legitimacy of the cause for which he is fighting, he is transformed into a strange being in his strength and conduct. Under normal circumstances, Kan'an would not have done what he did in his den even if he had been promised all the treasures of the world, The smoke that choked him, the sudden flare of flames and kerosene that nearly burned his face-none of that dissuaded him. Inside a human being is a huge capacity to bear suffering. He had come to understand this on several occasions throughout the course of his secret life. 

Indeed, it is plausible! For the sake of salvation from the army of boots that terrorized your daughters, everything we revolutionaries do is plausible. If the expulsion of a people is possible then everything that could put an end to this travesty of history at our expense becomes plausible, no matter how mad it seems.

Her happiness would not push her fears aside nor will her fears dominate over her happiness. She too would live her own contradictions.

Lukas

I feel within me all of the injustices that befall each persecuted person in the world. I consider everyone who struggles against that injustice to be my comrade, and my legitimate resentment of imperialists and capitalists in all of their varieties continues to build.

The preceding paragraphs discuss the “overly optimistic” propaganda from the Palestinian factions that inundated public consciousness and led the masses to believe that the resistance was invincible. While such propaganda is useful for maintaining mass morale, it proves dangerous when it is misused as the basis of analysis, as we see with the students. The students, basing their analysis in hyper-optimism, are unable to understand neither the enemy’s nor the PLO’s calculus, and ergo the students are blindsided by the Reagan Plan. Now, the student organizers must learn how the Reagan Plan came to be and formulate an analysis of and response to it on borrowed time. This, of course, isn’t a major problem, as the students in this case are merely witnesses to the resistance. However, this section does underscore the need for organizers to be scientific in their analysis, grounding it in material evidence rather than optimistic slogans disguised as absolute truths. Without scientific analysis, the enemy will always be many steps ahead, and the resistance will chronically be on the defensive.

The people and students did not understand the dangerous political consequences of the blow to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) military infrastructure. These consequences soon found expression in the Reagan Plan, which was announced directly following the Palestinian withdrawal.

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