They Will Certainly Be Victorious: On Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu’s Japanese Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War
29 August 1969: Leila Khaled and Salim Issawi, both in their 20s, board TWA Flight 840 in Rome. Their destination: Tel Aviv. The plane would never make it. Instead, Khaled and Issawi, with pistols and grenades in tow, believing then-Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Yitzhak Rabin to be on board, force the pilots to divert the flight path to Damascus. Rabin isn’t on the flight. But that doesn’t matter—there’s an American diplomat named Thomas D. Boyatt on board. Now, 120 passengers and seven crew members are hostages of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Soon, the whole world will know who they are.
In recent years, the term propaganda has mostly been used in a negative, dismissive context. Anything we don’t like, or don’t agree with, is tossed aside and branded as “propaganda.” Revolutionaries become upset when our enemy classifies our actions and our words as propaganda, but we shouldn’t. The Latin “propagare,” of which propaganda is a gerundive, means to “set forward, extend, spread, increase,” a la “propagation.” Before its widespread use as a pejorative, propaganda, or the creation and dissemination thereof, was of the utmost importance for revolutionaries. The opening moments of Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu’s 1971 documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, filmed within two years of the first PFLP hijacking, assert "propaganda is, in fact information, and information is to communicate the truth…therefore, we believe that armed struggle is the best form of propaganda” (italics are mine). Here, there is no delineation between mediatic propaganda and propaganda of the deed—theory would inform praxis and praxis would inform theory ad infinitum. For Khaled, Issawi, and the rest of the PFLP, taking over the skies meant the question of Palestinian liberation, which now had a Marxist-Leninist element to it, would spread across the entire globe, invading the fore of global consciousness. On the ground, Adachi and Wakamatsu, supporters of the Palestinian cause, wanted to play their part in placing the camera next to the rifle.
While I do not have the space to give a complete history of the PFLP, a cursory survey of the group’s history can only benefit an analysis of the film.1 The PFLP arose in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967, commonly referred to as the “Naksa,” or setback.2 Inspired by the revolutions in Cuba and Algeria, and the guerilla struggle against the United States in Vietnam, the PFLP swiftly became a bellwether of the struggle against imperialism in the late-60s and 70s. Their highly influential 1969 text Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine was the first Marxist analysis of the Palestinian confrontation against Zionism, a document that, to this day, lives and breathes, as any good Marxist text should. Throughout the early 70s, the PFLP was headquartered in various places, first Jordan, then Lebanon. And it is in the latter location that Adachi and Wakamatsu find the militants.
Shot in and around Beirut and several other parts of Lebanon in 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu made Declaration of World War on their way home from the Cannes Film Festival. The 70-minute film consists of images from the Japanese revolutionary struggle, the everyday life of Palestinian militants, and interviews with several Palestinian and Japanese militants, including Leila Khaled, Ghasan Kanafani, and Fusako Shigenobu, the latter the founder of the Japanese Red Army.3 However, underlining most of the runtime are long uninterrupted shots of both the urban and rural landscape of Lebanon.4 In its focus on the Lebanese landscape, Declaration of World War was driven by a newly conceptualized Japanese film theory of fûkeiron, or “landscape theory.” Fûkeiron, which had become a dominant thread in the works of Adachi, Wakamatsu, and their peers, sought to posit the subjectivity of an individual, or individuals, as one “swallowed up by the reality of landscape being expropriated by power.” Via Fûkeiron as both theory and practice, Adachi and Wakamatsu transmogrify celluloid into movement, both in a literal and figurative sense. In a literal sense, we traverse the landscape inhabited by members of the PFLP, a landscape altered by the crimes of Zionism, as their camps serve as temporary homes due to their displacement at the hands of Israeli terror. The crimes which have shaped the landscape and its inhabitants have only compounded since the film was made: most of the militants in the film are dead, Lebanon has been bombed by Israel countless times in the last several decades, and the Palestinian people remain stateless. In the film, Palestinian, Japanese, and European militants accompany the audience’s experience of ecological and political violence, as they lay out their theories on what heights their revolutionary struggle must reach in order to be successful. These voices solidify Adachi and Wakamatsu’s refusal to differentiate between media and deed.
If, as the film argues, the highest form of propaganda is armed struggle, then it follows that the highest form of film propagates it. For Adachi and Wakamatsu, revolutionary demand necessitated moving the cinematic form from its increasingly capitalist production and distribution method, toward the collective and revolutionary, furthering the tradition established by Third Cinema. Upon completion of the film, Adachi, Wakamatsu, and their peers founded the Red Bus Screening Troupe. Beginning in Tokyo, the Troupe crisscrossed the country in a bright red microbus, screening Declaration of World War for various audiences. How else could a film founded upon various conceptions of movement be screened? In a 2008 interview, Adachi explains that, through his experiences with the Troupe, he decided to become a guerilla.5 Adachi would spend the better part of three decades away from Japan. He went from living in Lebanon and Palestine, amidst the company of various Palestinian political factions, to being imprisoned in Lebanon for a quarter-century. After being extradited to Japan, he was subsequently imprisoned again but was released several years later.
At a time when revolutionary fervor was ubiquitous, Adachi and Wakamatsu produced a film, part-newsreel and part-manifesto, bent on building the “world Red Army,” a borderless army of militants that would confront Zionism, imperialism, and colonialism wherever it reared its head. However, over 50 years later, in the midst of this global moment, a simultaneous genocide and war of national liberation, a rupture in time that will go one to define the rest of the 21st century, what does it mean to declare “world war?” Is it even possible to wage an armed struggle against the forces of Zionism and imperialism, as their strength, underlined by a blood thirsty arrogance, has reached a fever-pitch? I don’t know that I can answer that question with certainty (or within the realm of legality), but I do know that its answer will implicate all of us, as it should. The answer isn’t in Declaration of World War either—its lessons have to be applied to a radically altered set of historic conditions, including rapid and dramatic changes to state surveillance, making it nearly omniscient; the establishment, as part of the Oslo Accords, of the Palestinian Authority, a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation; and the cementing of reactionary Arab regimes.6 As such, it must be approached as a film whose promise, that of utter world war against the forces of Zionism and imperialism, remains unfulfilled. In a 2008 interview, Adachi excitedly mused that, due to various changes in how film is experienced, the “younger generation can understand my work better than audiences could during the Sixties.”7
Unfulfilled, too, remains the analysis of the PFLP. For the PFLP, it would be necessary for the Arab masses, alongside the Palestinian proletariat, to surround and ultimately defeat Israel—the solution to the confrontation would be an Arab one. Looking at the situation today, where the Palestinian people are surrounded by acquiescent Arab regimes, “the Axis of Condemnation,” as some have referred to them, I’m afraid the PFLP couldn’t be more right. Where the Western governments aid and abet Israel as it commits a genocide in the Gaza Strip, the Arab governments, those of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, amongst others, are keen to look away, towards business deals and normalization agreements, sentencing Palestinians to death for a few million dollars. The PFLP understood that national liberation battles are also class battles, and this remains true today. Because of this erudite analysis, the PFLP are more than just a remnant from the anti-imperialist struggle of the 60s and 70s. Through countless assassinations, such as that of Kanfani in Beirut, alongside his niece Lamis, in 1972, and imprisonment, with the current Secretary-General, Ahmad Sa’adat, languishing in the labyrinthine Israeli prison system, the PFLP remain relevant. At the current moment, they are the third largest faction amongst the Palestinian resistance’s Unity of Fields—the concept that binds together Palestine’s various armed groups in their confrontation against the United States and Israel. Behind Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades are the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Marxist-Leninist militants who have buried their fair share of IOF soldiers in the sands of Gaza. If we are to prove the PFLP’s calling card of “We will certainly be victorious” as a promise, we must ask ourselves what must be done to live up to what they have laid down.
For more on the PFLP, read the following: Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live, and Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings.
The defeat of several Arab armies during the June War led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West Bank. This significant defeat also led to a re-evaluation of Pan-Arabism as symbolized by the leadership of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) was, to steal a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre (which he used to describe Che Guevara), one of the most “complete” human beings of his generation—a novelist, a polemicist, a poet, an artist, and, above all, a militant—Kanafani’s every action was underlined by his commitment to the Palestinian cause.
This essay will primarily focus on the PFLP. For more on the Japanese Red Army, I suggest watching Adachi’s 2007 film Yûheisha - terorisuto (Prisoner/Terrorist), a conceptual film based, in part, by the life of Kozo Okamato, who, along with several of his JRA comrades, partook in a shooting operation at Israel’s then-named Lod Airport.
Harry Harootunian and Sabu Kohso, “Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi,” boundary 2, vol. 35, no. 3 (2008): 63-97.
For more on the Oslo Accords, I recommend Edward Said’s 1993 essay, written for the London Review of Books, “The Morning After,” in which he condemns the Oslo Accords as a “Palestinian Versailles.”
Harry Harootunian and Sabu Kohso, “Messages in a Bottle: An Interview with Filmmaker Masao Adachi,” boundary 2, vol. 35, no. 3 (2008): 63-97.