Name: The Trinity of Fundamentals
ISBN: 9798988260219

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.

And the anarchists, who were enamored with life along chaotic European lines of thought, flocked together like a clique which elicited nothing other than annoyance.

He began to listen to Sheikh Imam and to buy books

They [the occupation] put checkpoints at the entrances to the university and closely checked students’ ID cards and raided their houses

Surveillance is the death of secret political organizing; surveillance tears it apart and attacks its communications, activities, and hideouts. The eyes of the enemy infiltrate into the fortress of the party, and soon the party and its internal work would be laid out on their table. What sort of clandestine work would that be?

Everyone must get organized such that every comrade is doing the work they are best suited to perform based on the needs of the organization, which is not necessarily going to be the work a comrade wants to be doing nor even their strongest skill. Maintaining the robustness of the organization is the top priority. The collective trumps the individual.

The experience of the group is more significant than the experience of the individual.

Kan’an should know this already as a Christian, with the faith’s rich tradition of asceticism, especially in Palestine. Anyways, this is another key quote about the liberal and capitalist tendencies (i.e. individualism) that undermine the movement’s work.

On a separate note, I do appreciate Wissam Rafeedie’s subtle use of religious imagery. Kana’an goes into hiding and takes on his new life around Christmas — the birth of the Redeemer in a secluded farm in Beit Lahem. Then, around Easter — the martyrdom and resurrection of Christ — the occupation soldiers visited Umm Kan’an and described the gruesome death they would bring upon her son. Just days later, Kan’an is reborn to his mother through his written correspondence. I’m interested in seeing if/how the analogy of Kan’an as a Christ figure develops in the novel.

“Can human instincts and needs be frozen?”

“Yes, they can. That is what experience has shown us. Through patience and endurance one can cleanse the self.”

He had yet to become an example of the party’s vision. For that, he understood that he would need to be calm, he would need to reawaken his gentle nature and carry out the struggle with a revolutionary self that is not aggressive and inflamed.

I must transform a victory they would gain in arresting me into a loss for them as a result of my endurance. Think about how to protect the party, the comrades, and the secrets.

The development of a refined sensitivity for justice and the adherence to sublime human values will lighten the weight of daily existence's hardships.

There is no organized struggle without maintaining robust security culture.

These rules and measures were designed to prevent chance occurrences, which can sometimes be more catastrophic than party members falling apart during interrogation. Clandestine activities in their entirety depend on preventing these chance events as much as possible.

I would absolutely recommend this book, especially to community organizers. The novel offers a crash course in movement culture and helps conceptualize the ebbs and flows of movements, and I found it especially useful for navigating the role of an organizer during the inevitable decline of a movement. The plot line was compelling, and certainly unique. It gets a bit hard to follow at times, as the narrative is not chronological and constantly jumps around — it's easy to lose track of which safe house Kan'an is at or which girl he's fixating over throughout the book. Most of the characters in the book are also denied depth, reduced to their roles in relation to Kan'an and his personal development and journey through the Intifada. The book does get extra points though for the incredible feat of its creation, through handwritten drafts smuggled through zionist prisons and later compiled into this manuscript. Wissam Rafeedie is nothing short of a genius.

An amazing fictional (but based on the authors life) piece highlighting the life of solitude that many Palestinian revolutionaries, or party members had to engage in during the time period building up to, and during, the first intifada. Through Kanaan's internal dialogue we see the contradictions and eb's & flows between revolutionary dedication and the "human-self". Which to me, acted as a necessary grounding for seeing my role in the struggle and for my view on discipline through hardship. 

Historical context: In the 70's and early 80's it was common for Palestinians to turn themselves into authorities when called upon. Until many political parties realized this was hindering their ability to build up organizational capacity so they made the decision to put many of their high ranking members into hiding (and deem telling party secrets an act of treason), hence Kanaan's placement. This structural longevity allowed for the first intifada to take place, with an organized connection to the masses. 

Adam Arif-Pardy

An amazing fictional (but based on the authors life) piece highlighting the life of solitude that many Palestinian revolutionaries, or party members had to engage in during the time period building up to, and during, the first intifada. Through Kanaan's internal dialogue we see the contradictions and eb's & flows between revolutionary dedication and the "human-self". Which to me, acted as a necessary grounding for seeing my role in the struggle and for my view on discipline through hardship. 

Historical context: In the 70's and early 80's it was common for Palestinians to turn themselves into authorities when called upon. Until many political parties realized this was hindering their ability to build up organizational capacity so they made the decision to put many of their high ranking members into hiding (and deem telling party secrets an act of treason), hence Kanaan's placement. This structural longevity allowed for the first intifada to take place, with an organized connection to the masses. 

I appreciated the dialectic between the revolutionary self embodied by devotion to a collective and party and the individual self expressed in Kan'an's personal desires and ambitions. Tragic in many areas but on the whole an inspiring account of steadfastness.

Winnie

This is novel is packed full of the emotion of many years spent living in isolation, on the run from the military in the occupied West Bank. Jumping around chronologically between safe houses, he wrestles with his machismo and is plagued by internal conflict.  

The book is often poetic, and is very raw and emotional. He is flawed, and the story presents his feelings honestly. Mostly takes place in the 80s, and the story of how it was smuggled out of prison piece by piece is almost as captivating as the book itself.

Devin Jack-Haber

This is novel is packed full of the emotion of many years spent living in isolation, on the run from the military in the occupied West Bank. Jumping around chronologically between safe houses, he wrestles with his machismo and is plagued by internal conflict.  

The book is often poetic, and is very raw and emotional. He is flawed, and the story presents his feelings honestly. Mostly takes place in the 80s, and the story of how it was smuggled out of prison piece by piece is almost as captivating as the book itself.

The Trinity of Fundamentals

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