Kamal Udwan

Kamal Udwan was born on 9 May 1935 in the village of Barbara near Majdal Asqalan in southern Palestine. He was the son of Abdul Hafiz Udwan and Zahia Barzaq. He had two brothers, Issam and Mohammad Ali, and a sister, Souad. He was married to Maha al-Jayyusi and had a daughter, Dana, and a son, Rami.

Udwan received his primary education at the Barbara village school. During this time he led the school’s Boy Scout troop, and he led a student demonstration against the Partition Plan for Palestine adopted by the UN on 29 November 1947.

After the Nakba, he and his family were forced to leave their village; they went to Gaza City. The first three years were extremely harsh. He resumed his education at the al-Zeitoun School and then earned his high school diploma from the Filastin Secondary in 1954. In his penultimate year at the Filastin School, Udwan joined the Muslim Brotherhood and began writing articles for a magazine brought out by students.

After graduating from high school, he worked as a teacher for a brief period and helped establish the Palestinian Teachers’ Union within the framework of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Udwan then moved to Cairo, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University during the 1954–55 academic year and studied petroleum and mineral engineering there. In early September 1955, having just joined the Palestinian Students League, he supported the idea of establishing a joint leadership for the association and proposed that it include representatives from all political movements. Udwan continued to have an on-and-off relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood from the fall of 1954 until late 1956, when he permanently severed all ties with the organization.

The March Outburst of 1955 in the Gaza Strip was sparked by the plan to resettle Palestinian refugees in the north of the Sinai desert. This uprising, which was led by both communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, marked a turning point in Udwan’s life and inspired him to focus on the cause of national unity and the call for various ideological movements to work together.

After the Israeli army occupied the Gaza Strip in November 1956 during the Tripartite Aggression [by Britain, France, and Israel] against Egypt, Udwan participated in resistance activity against the occupation. As a result, he was pursued by the occupation forces, but he managed to escape to Egypt.

Udwan took part in a meeting held in Cairo attended by approximately twenty young Palestinians, one of whom was Yasir Arafat. Participants proposed establishing a new, nonpartisan movement that would adopt armed struggle as its path to the liberation of Palestine. At that time, he began working with Khalil al-Wazir [Abu Jihad] on this goal.

In 1957, Udwan moved briefly to Qatar, where he worked as a teacher for a year. He then returned to Cairo in 1958 and helped establish the commando resistance group Movement for Palestinian National Liberation, which was known by its acronym in Arabic fatah, or conquest. He was tasked with recruiting new members in Egypt for the nascent movement and with distributing the magazine put out by the movement, called Nida’ al-Hayat (Filastinuna) [Life Calls (Our Palestine)], launched in October 1959 in Beirut.

In 1959, Udwan moved to the city of Dammam, Saudi Arabia, to work as a trainee with the Aramco oil company. He also traveled to Kuwait during this period. After graduating from university in July 1961, he returned to Saudi Arabia to work as a petroleum engineer. In 1964, he moved to Qatar for work.

In May 1964, Udwan took part in the first meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) held in Jerusalem. He did so in a personal capacity rather than as a representative of the Fatah movement. During this meeting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established. He was one of the Fatah leaders who supported armed struggle, which was officially launched by the movement on New Year’s Day, 1965.

When the June 1967 war broke out, Udwan traveled to Kuwait, then to Damascus. However, as the war lasted for only six days, he returned back to Doha. In mid-September 1968, he decided once and for all to devote himself to working full-time for the Palestinian revolution, and he moved to Amman. During the second general meeting of Fatah, held in the town of Zabadani in the Damascus countryside, he was elected as a member of the movement’s Revolutionary Council.

In Amman, Udwan took charge of Fatah’s Media and Communications Office in Amman, serving as deputy to Farouk Qaddoumi, the movement’s Commissioner of Information and Foreign Relations. He succeeded in mobilizing a cadre of prominent media personnel to work for him, most of whom were left-leaning in their thinking; one of the most notable among them was Majid Abu Sharar.

To enhance Fatah’s media activity, Udwan established a camp, called Camp 99, to train Fatah members from around the world in outreach, attended by around 500 trainees. He then set up another such camp and also began organizing training camps for European supporters of the Palestinian cause in Jerash and Baqa‘a refugee camp in Jordan. In 1969, he was part of Fatah delegations that made visits to China, Vietnam, and North Korea. On the delegation’s visit to Hanoi, he commented: “It was a warm meeting in Hanoi, one that reflected the warmth of friendship, brotherhood, and solidarity between comrades now united by the reality of their common struggle on a single front in the same camp, and against a single enemy.” In early 1973, he commented on the [impending] end of the Vietnam War: “Now that the war in Vietnam is over, the baton has been passed to us, and Palestine has come to be at the heart of the struggle against world imperialism.”

On 21 July 1969, Udwan headed Fatah’s delegation to the first Pan-African Cultural Festival held in Algiers. During the festival, he delivered a message from the movement to its African brothers, in which he stated: “We [Palestinians] stand with Africans as one, for Africa is a cause of freedom and revolution, and we too embody the cause of freedom and revolution.” On 15 June 1970, under Udwan’s guidance, the first issue of the daily newspaper Fatah was published in Amman. He also began formulating the political line to be espoused by the movement’s radio station Sawt al-ʿAsifa [Voice of the Storm].

Following the outbreak of armed clashes between the Jordanian army and PLO forces in September 1970, Udwan served as the organization's media spokesperson and participated in some of the negotiations that occurred between Palestinian leaders and Jordanian officials, including those held in Jeddah under Saudi auspices. He then joined the leadership of the resistance in the forested region of Jerash.

After the exodus of the PLO forces from Jordan in July 1971 and their relocation to Lebanon, Udwan played a role in the establishment of the Palestinian News and Information Agency, which bore the name Wafa. He also helped to establish the PLO’s Unified Information Office.

At the third Fatah General Conference, held in early September 1971 in the town of Hamouriyya in the Damascus countryside, Udwan was elected a member of the movement’s Central Committee. Following that conference, he was given command of the Western Sector, taking over from Khalil al-Wazir. As commander, he directed the struggle that the movement was conducting within the occupied Palestinian territories and also focused on developing the media inside occupied Palestine, building up Palestine’s national universities, and revitalizing the Palestinian cultural movement. He was also a member of the organizing committee for the Palestinian Popular Congress, which was held in Cairo on 6–10 April 1972 in conjunction with the tenth (and extraordinary) session of the PNC.

Udwan was assassinated on the night of 9–10 April 1973 in the Verdun neighborhood of West Beirut, along with his two Fatah comrades, Kamal Nasir and Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, by a secret Israeli commando unit led by Ehud Barak. On 12 April, tens of thousands of people walked in the funeral procession of the three martyred leaders. His eulogy, published in the PLO official weekly magazine Filastin al-thawra [Revolution Palestine], stated: “It was as if he thought with a pen and a ruler — drawing lines and angles, defining directions to take. We sometimes disagreed with him, but we always respected his logic and his stubbornness in defending his stance and viewpoint.”

Udwan had defined the objectives of the Fatah movement as the following: to galvanize the Palestinian presence and resurrect the personality of the Palestinian individual both on the local and global levels through the image of the tough, resilient Palestinian fighter, one who would be capable of smashing the myth of Israel’s invincibility. He emphasized that a vanguard organization, one represented by a movement and not a party, should be outside the framework of ideology and be based on a solid foundation. Its focus should be on armed struggle and the fight for the existence of a distinctive Palestinian entity. In the last interview he gave to the journal Shuʾun Filastiniyya [Palestinian Affairs], and which was published one month after his death, he defined the starting premises of the Palestinian revolution: first, Israel is a colonial outpost in the region, one that is draining its effort and energy, and therefore Arab national security concerns dictate liquidating the existence of this outpost; second, armed struggle through a protracted people's guerrilla war is the only way to deal with it; third, the emergence of the Palestinian identity through the Palestinian resistance fighter constitutes a fundamental necessity to confront the intensive countereffort which is trying to erase the Palestinian people; fourth, the Palestinian people [will themselves] continue to be the vanguard of the Arab movement for the liberation of Palestine; fifth, the Palestinian revolution remains autonomous of and rejects official tutelage from any Arab regime, an essential condition for preserving the unique identity of the revolution.

At the time of his assassination, Udwan had written novels, short stories and other unpublished manuscripts. His most notable works are his novel Risalat akhi (My Brother’s Letter) and the [unpublished] manuscripts Dustur al-haraka (The Movement’s Charter) and Fi dawwamat al-aʿasir (In the Vortex of Hurricanes). Dozens of articles and letters were published anonymously. As part of the Memory of Palestine archive within its Palestinian National Movement project, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha has helped to preserve Udwan’s legacy in the Kamal Udwan Collected Papers collection.

Selected Works

"تحليل للموقف السياسي". "شؤون فلسطينية"، العدد 11 (تموز/ يوليو 1972)، ص 274-281.

[“An Analysis of the Political Situation.”]

"آخر حديث للشهيد كمال عدوان". "شؤون فلسطينية"، العدد 21 (أيار/ مايو 1973)، ص 137-153.

[“The Last Interview with the martyr Kamāl ʿUdwān.”]

Sources

عزم، أحمد. "كمال عدوان: رجل في ثورة، وثورة في رجل". الدوحة: المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات، 2024.

شفيق، منير. "حول كتابات الشهيد كمال عدوان". بيروت: منشورات الاتحاد العام للكتاب والصحفيين الفلسطينيين، 1974.

"الشهداء الثلاثة". بيروت: الاتحاد العام للكتاب والصحفيين الفلسطينيين-الإعلام الموحد لمنظمة التحرير الفلسطينية، 1974.

"الشهيد كمال عدوان، فتح، الميلاد والمسيرة". بيروت: الاتحاد العام للكتاب والصحفيين الفلسطينيين-الإعلام الموحد لمنظمة التحرير الفلسطينية، 1974.