Journey through the Embers Pages from Mounir Shafiq’s Memories

The Center for Arab Unity Studies has published the third edition of the book Journey through the Embers Pages from Mounir Shafiq’s Memories, edited by Nafez Abu Hasna.

The journey of the Palestinian resistance stores from memory, as well as, political and struggle experiences what can constitute a store of knowledge and information that can represent one of the largest tributaries of the Palestinian national identity, despite the harshness of those experiences and the disappointments it has been exposed to and the gaps in which it fell in some aspects.

The pages of this book present the memoirs of a prominent Palestinian resistance figure who has lived through the Palestinian issue since the Nakba in 1948 until today. Mounir Shafiq accompanied this issue since his childhood, before the Nakba, and joined its path early. He lived through the major historical stations that this issue went through, and the Arab, regional and international transformations that affected it, and dealt with them according to different intellectual, ideological and organizational approaches, sometimes even contradictory; but he was in control of those approaches, putting ideology in the service of the national cause, not the national cause in the service of ideology, as many did. This prompted him to switch from one ideological framework to another when he felt that this or that framework was no longer capable of accommodating the national issue, which also prompted him to join the political and militant organizations of different ideological orientations, but he maintained his distinct positions within each of these Organizations, so he had his vision and his reading of events, alignments and contradictions.

Therefore, these memoirs do not reflect the viewpoint of the leaders of the first row in the Palestinian resistance. Rather, they were dominated by the presentation of the personal experience of Mounir Shafiq, which is undoubtedly a rich and distinguished experience, and it provides many struggle, intellectual and moral lessons. Also, the memoirs were dominated by his approach to the political situation at every stage of his struggle. It may be useful to return back today to these approaches considering the consequences of the choices of the first row leaders on the Palestinian issue.