The Greek writer and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) is considered one of the literary giants of the 20th century. Famed for the novels Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, and God’s Pauper: Saint Francis of Assisi, he also wrote plays, poetry, philosophical essays and translated many works into Greek.

As a son of Hellenic culture, it was only natural that he would contribute to the genre of the epic.

The prolific writer and intellectual Shawqi Jalal (1931-2023) was celebrated for his translations of many literary works into Arabic, including of Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified. In his introduction to this superb translation, Jalal describes Kazantzakis as “a towering pinnacle of world literature… endowed with a unique innovative power, mastery of style, and profundity in his meditations on life.”  

In addition to his literary legacy, Kazantzakis bequeathed a philosophical legacy of “great power and creativity” that established him as a true contemporary of the classical Greek philosophers and poets, Jalal said.  

The Lebanese writer Ibrahim Al-Aris also wrote of Kazantzakis that “this man managed to explore the whole of Hellenic literary and philosophical knowledge and fuse it into work that was rarely equalled in the 20th century.”

He tried his hand at all genres of writing, including travel writing. His first work in this genre, published in 1927, was called Journeying, and recounts his travels to Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem, and Cyprus.

While he was strongly affected by the situation of the Jews in Europe, Kazantzakis’ trip to Palestine more than 20 years before the Nakba influenced his thinking on the subject. As the great Egyptian critic Farida Al-Naqqash once observed, as early as the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, Kazantzakis foresaw the perils of Zionism, its distortion of historical, geographical, and national realities, and the terror and oppression it would unleash in the region.

Kazantzakis’ account of his visit to Palestine is regarded as one of the most significant early anti-Zionist tracts written by a world-renowned novelist and thinker. Certainly, he was prophetic. He warns of Zionism “before the world became aware of the Zionist threat and the disasters that this movement would unleash on the entire world,” write translators Monia Samara and Mohamed Al-Zahir in their forward to the Arabic edition of Journeying published in 1989.

His foresight was confirmed by the many crimes that the Zionist movement and then the Zionist state have perpetrated in the course of nearly a century since he wrote that the Zionist dream was destined to meet a tragic end. It had no spiritual or humanitarian value, he wrote. “This modern Zionist movement is a mask that your unsmiling fate wears to deceive you,” he warned.

The Kazantzakian vision, if we may coin the term, emanates from his direct interaction with the place and his first-hand discovery of the diverse motives that drove the different people he met on the ground in Mandate-era Palestine. Through his own first-hand experiences, combined with sociopolitical and philosophical ruminations that sometimes took the form of an imagined exchange, he concluded that the idea of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine was wrong.

One writer on Kazantzakis describes him as an embodiment of “Odyssean yearning,” referring to the inner drive of the hero of the famous Homeric epic. Kazantzakis’ “entire life and works were a manifestation of a continuous journey,” he says. His outlook on Palestine and Zionism was not informed by preconceived ideas, prejudices, political biases or ideological doctrines. Instead, it was the product of his unique intellectual and physical journey.

For me, the source of Kazantzakis’ invaluable works lies in his awareness of the need to probe the heart of a phenomenon and to grasp it fully in all its constituent aspects and surrounding circumstances. He expressed this in his work The Saviours of God, first published in 1927, inviting readers to “look upon men and pity them. Look at yourself amid all men and pity yourself. In the obscure dusk of life, we touch and fumble at each other, we ask questions, we listen, we shout for help.”

“Free yourself from the race; fight to live through the whole struggle of man. See how he has detached himself from the animal, how he struggles to stand upright, to co-ordinate his inarticulate cries, to feed the flame between his hearthstones, to feed his mind amid the bones of his skull.”

For Kazantzakis, struggle is the path to liberation. “The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom,” he wrote.  

The Zionist project in Palestine has reaped a grim harvest in the century since Kazantzakis wrote these words. Testimony based on experience on the ground and the opinions of many across the world agree that this project has bequeathed nothing but a long train of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, enforced deprivation and starvation, the deliberate targeting of civilians in war, maltreatment and torture in prisons, and uninterrupted persecution, degradation, and disregard for the rights of an occupied people.

All of the preceding fall under the heading of a decades-long genocide.

But as Kazantzakis’ prescient vision reminds us, we must swallow the bitter pill with courage, summon our resolve, gird our minds and bodies, and take our positions on the field of battle, each according to his own abilities. Every person of conscience must marshal his God-given potential in the struggle against occupation, oppression, hatred, dispossession and genocide and in defence of truth and justice.

To borrow once again from Kazantzakis, the superior virtue is to resist in the fight for freedom.

The writer is an intellectual and author.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly