Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese fighter who devoted much of his life to the Palestinian liberation struggle and became known as Ahmad al-Yabani, died in Beirut on Thursday at the age of 78.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which had supported and protected Okamoto during his decades in Lebanon, announced his death and said he had suffered from poor health for an extended period.
The Front praised a life marked by “immense sacrifices” alongside the Palestinian cause, saying Okamoto remained committed to his principles and never abandoned the struggle he had chosen.
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas also mourned the Japanese fighter, describing his journey as an embodiment of humanitarian values and sincere, sustained support for the Palestinian people and their rights.
Known affectionately among Palestinians as “Ahmad the Japanese,” Okamoto adopted the name Ahmad after converting to Islam. The name reflected both his Japanese origins and his close association with the Palestinian Resistance.
🇵🇸 🇯🇵 Kozo Okamoto (Ahmad the Japanese), pro-Palestinian JRA militant dies
Japanese activist Kozo Okamoto has died more than five decades after taking part in the 1972 Lod Airport operation near Tel Aviv, which killed 26 people. Okamoto was one of three Japanese Red Army members… pic.twitter.com/rfH8nFm5yf
Okamoto was born in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture in 1947 and studied botany before becoming politically active in his youth. He eventually joined the Japanese Red Army, a Marxist-Leninist organization whose members developed close ties with Palestinian and Lebanese factions, particularly the PFLP.
The Japanese organization operated internationally and viewed the Palestinian struggle as inseparable from the wider confrontation with imperialism, colonialism, and Western political domination.
Okamoto left Japan and joined Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, where he received training and became closely involved with the PFLP.
His background made him an unusual figure within the Palestinian movement and allowed him to operate in circumstances where Israeli security forces were primarily watching for Arab or Palestinian fighters.
The Al-Lydd Airport Operation
Okamoto became internationally known following the May 30, 1972 operation at Al-Lydd Airport, later renamed Ben Gurion Airport. He and two other Japanese Red Army fighters arrived on a flight from Rome carrying weapons concealed inside luggage and opened fire inside the airport terminal.
Twenty-six people were killed, and dozens were wounded during the operation. Contemporary reporting identified many of those killed as Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, alongside Israelis and other passengers.
The operation was organized jointly by the Japanese Red Army and the PFLP and was described by the Front as retaliation for Israel’s 1968 attack on Beirut International Airport, during which Israeli forces destroyed a large part of Lebanon’s civilian aircraft fleet.
Okamoto’s two companions were killed during the operation. He was wounded, captured, and brought before an Israeli military court.
Thirteen Years in Israeli Prisons
Okamoto was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent approximately 13 years in Israeli prisons, much of that period reportedly in solitary confinement. According to accounts later cited by the PFLP, he endured severe abuse and was at times forced to eat from the ground with his hands restrained behind his back.
He was released in 1985 under the Jibril Agreement, a major prisoner exchange in which three captured Israeli soldiers were freed in return for approximately 1,150 Palestinian and Arab prisoners.
Among those released in the exchange were figures who later assumed leading roles in the Palestinian Resistance, including Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah.
Following his release, Okamoto traveled through Libya and Syria before eventually settling in Lebanon.
Lebanon Grants Political Asylum
Lebanese authorities arrested Okamoto and four other Japanese Red Army members in 1997 on charges relating to forged documents and illegal residency.
After serving his sentence, four of the Japanese nationals were extradited to Japan. Okamoto, however, was permitted to remain in Lebanon and became the first person granted political asylum by the Lebanese state.
Japan repeatedly requested his extradition, but Lebanese authorities refused to surrender him. Okamoto lived quietly under the protection of Palestinian and Lebanese organizations, making only rare public appearances.
One of his final widely reported appearances came in Beirut in May 2022, during an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Al-Lydd Airport operation.
Kozo Okamoto, May 20, 2022.
It was his last public appearance.
Although he was Japanese, Okamoto took up arms and dedicated his life for Palestine. pic.twitter.com/h8GHkvD3tB
The PFLP remembered Okamoto as an international fighter who had crossed national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries to stand alongside the Palestinian people.
His life became closely associated with a period in which international revolutionary organizations viewed Palestine as a central arena in the global struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
Hamas said Okamoto would remain a symbol of freedom and resistance against injustice and tyranny, praising what it described as his tireless commitment to Palestinian rights.
Okamoto remained in Lebanon until his death on Thursday, July 23, more than five decades after the operation that made him one of the most recognized international figures associated with the Palestinian Resistance. Palestine Chronicle
Descriptions of assassinated Palestinian writer and leader Ghassan Kanafani are not merely superlative. A novelist, political theorist, Marxist-Leninist, newspaper editor, visual artist, playwright, public speaker and more, Ghassan had so many strings to his bow that his late comrade Fadle al-Nakib called him an example in “total resistance.” Fellow cultural activist and PFLP leader in Lebanon, Marwan Abd el-’Al told me that anytime those in his organization introduce Ghassan’s works, his name is necessarily prefaced with “the martyr, the leader” and other titles, both honorific and viscerally embedded in a multilayered legacy.
Coining the term “resistance literature” through his introduction of Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad, and other then-young Palestinian poets to the displaced masses, Ghassan was himself a genre-defying pioneer in the field. But, in the era of Arab singers Fairuz, Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafiz, and with the rebirth of Palestinian revolutionary song by the late 1960s, was there also a musical Ghassan? Could “musician” be added to his titles?
Fear not, dear reader. In a world of misattributed poetry, false quotations and AI slop images, this is not my attempt to add another myth to a cause grounded in violent materialism and real-life resistance. At the same time, with music central to Palestinian liberation, musical themes in Ghassan’s works are a present and unique window into understanding the assassinated writer’s worldview.
A strong case in point came in 1957 when a then 21-year-old Ghassan was living between Syria and Kuwait. Unable to finish his university studies in Damascus “for political reasons,” he had already been recruited to the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) founded by George Habash, Hani al-Hindi and other activists. Working as a teacher in Kuwait, Ghassan also worked on the editorial board of the ANM newspaper al-Ra‘i (The Viewpoint) and published short stories there and in the organization’s al-Tali’a (Vanguard) magazine. During these years of exile, camp poverty and reorganization, music for Palestine was largely voiced by non-Palestinians.
A rising star, Lebanese singer Fairuz released Rajioun (We are Returning) in 1957. Composed by the Rahbani brothers and steered by Palestinian producer Sabri Sharif, the album was filled with imagery of village life, olives and Palestine, less than a decade on from the horrors of the Nakba:
Love and Jerusalem on the mind
Despite the impossible
and a night where beauty did not depart
Yet justice has vanished
and the shadows have turned black
Built operatically around Western orchestration and Fairuz’ voice, the 12-minute title track broke through bleakness to declare in its finale:
Amidst sand and shadows, in ravines and on hills
We are returning! We are returning! We are returning!
Ghassan Kanafani was among the Palestinians to take heart from these words. Also a budding artist, he produced an artwork, “The Return,” in the wake of Rajioun’s release. Like the Fairuz album artwork, Ghassan used a black canvas and white paint, in a simple line-drawing. On mountains dotted with village buildings, below birds migrating in the same direction, a huddle of refugees walk together: elderly people carrying walking sticks, children, women carrying babies. Above them is the figure of a youth, carrying a pointed weapon; behind him, the flag of Palestine, glowing like a torch. Below the imagery, Ghassan wrote the words:
We are returning! We are returning! We are returning!
The reference was direct and an indication of the popularity Fairuz and others singing for Palestine found among young ANM activists of the time.
Ghassan would work Fairuz into his literature too. In August of the same year, he wrote the short story “Path to a Traitor” (Darbu ila-Kha’in) in Damascus. Travelers on the desert road from Baghdad to the Jordanian transit city of al-Mafraq find a stopping point at a shelter built by Bedouins:
“We were waiting for tea.
The desert was open in front of us, vast and silent, bathed in the gentle glow of the moon. Cool breezes passed lightly through the tent, lending the place a certain holiness. I felt no desire to talk nor listen to others, just to gaze outwards. But, despite this, I felt a touch of delight when I caught the words of someone over on the wooden platform opposite:
‘All that this atmosphere is missing is the voice of Fairuz.’”
Music could also be used in symbolic ways that recreated the “atmosphere” of Palestine before its colonization. During his time as a militant of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and two months before he became founding editor of its al-Hadaf newspaper, Ghassan wrote the Nakba story, “He was then a Child” (Kan Yumathak Tiflan). The story’s opening describes the backdrop of a winding journey of passengers on the back of a transport car from Haifa to Acre, of treetops, stone walls and the Mediterranean breeze. The narrative centers on a young boy:
“Ahmad took the shabbabeh (reed flute) from his basket, leaned back in the corner of the vehicle and began to play an ‘ataaba – the heartbroken melody for an eternal lover, at home in any of the villages scattered like an earthly constellation across the length and breadth of Galilee.”
As the passengers traveled to the sounds of this skillful young boy, “the melody emanated from everything around them,” and their conversation was dispersed with talk about the olive harvest and a Zionist massacre of orphans in Haifa. At one point, the driver joins Ahmed, singing romantic lyrics along to his melody.
The ‘ataaba is a folk form found historically in Palestine, Lebanon and the near region, relying on improvised poetry around a set rhyming scheme and a known melody. In the same oral tradition, Ghassan would later include examples of sahja, another genre of folk poetry, in his 1966 book Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine, 1948-66. It is clear that he and the musical revolutionaries of his generation saw these traditional song forms as referential to Palestinians’ rootedness on the land.
In “He was then a Child,” the journey of the passengers is cut short when a band of Zionist terrorists orders them off the bus. After being searched, their leader orders a young machine-gun-toting recruit to kill them, their bodies falling into a trench. The boy is the only survivor – the killers want him alive to tell others, to spread the fear of more massacres among the Palestinians and hence expel them from their land. Told to run or face gunfire, the boy, who had been beaten by the paramilitary leader, soon stops in the middle of the road to ponder what just happened. He walks away calmly, rhythmically. Palestine would live to carry its melody onwards.
Ghassan was clearly drawn to music. Seeking deeper understandings of world politics, his early forays into Marxism were accompanied by both the literature and music of the Soviet Union – the composer Sergei Prokofiev is named in his notebooks of the 1950s. Family members remember that Ghassan collected vinyl records at their home in Hazmieh, Beirut, and that he had a particular affinity for Nina Simone and other black US singers. Finding out that Ertha Kitt and other touring musicians had performed on Israeli stages, he wrote them letters denouncing normalisation and demanding a boycott.
Later, as Ghassan edited al-Hadaf, pages of the newspaper would increasingly connect the black struggle in the US to the global fight against racism and imperialism, reporting on the 1971 Attica prison uprising and demanding freedom for imprisoned activists like Angela Davis.
His comrade and widow Anni Kanafani remembers that “Ghassan and I loved singing and dancing,” and during their 1964 trip to visit her family in Denmark, their gathering featured “speeches, songs and dances. Ghassan even taught the guests the Palestinian/Lebanese folkdance, the Dabke…” The next year, while traveling in China as a journalist with al-Muharrir newspaper, he attended the 1 October Revolution celebrations and wrote:
“From early morning we heard the loud crescendo of singing and music before we were driven to the main square. There we were looked on, amazed by the indescribable spectacle of half a million people marching in columns amidst the vibrant colours so characteristic of China.”
Ghassan and his comrades took worldly influences as they forged a new path ahead, with internationalism in politics and culture already part of their practice as they formed the PFLP. As leftists in the liberation movement engaged in years of intense debate, writing and guerrilla training, Ghassan produced two epochal studies on resistance literature. Both contained long collections of poems by figures who were then rather obscure, including Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Rashid Hussein. Some of these poems became songs, with lyrics used by Sabreen and al-Fajer bands, and musicians like George Kirmiz and Mustafa al-Kurd in the 1980s found in the poetry compendiums Ghassan compiled in the mid-1960s.
Indeed, the resistance poetry of this era still finds musicians keen to put the words to song, as in a 2021 version of “A Lover from Palestine” by Gaza’s Sol band and songwriter Nahed Elrayes. The Darwish poem appeared twice in Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine, with emphasis on the stanza that said, “Our songs are swords when we brandish them.”
This work of poetic rebellion serves to push back against Zionist attempts to smash Palestinians’ connections to a vibrant heritage of political culture. Verses of “Hizz al-Rimh” (Shake the Spear) quoted in Ghassan’s 1972 work The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine were sung by Rawan Okasha’s Dawaween band in Gaza between the Second Intifada and al-Aqsa Flood.
The brutal assassination of Ghassan Kanafani and his niece Lamis Najem on July 8, 1972 did not have the intended effect of severing the revolutionary influence of the PFLP writer and leader from the cause of Palestine. One indication of this comes through his own immortalization through song. When we compiled the book Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, we began with the words of Ghazi Mikdashi, who led a children’s choir in Lebanon in the 1970s, singing “Ghassan taught us the love of the cause.”
Dedications to his legacy have also been sung by Lebanese icon Wadi’ al-Safi, Palestinian vocalist Amal Kaawash, and by the mothers of political prisoners released from the jails of the occupation. Whether or not we call Ghassan a musician, the role of revolutionary music in his life and afterlife is undeniable. May he continue to dance dabke along the path of total resistance.
– Louis Brehony is a musician, activist, researcher and educator. He is author of the book Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance (2023), editor of Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024), and director of the award-winning film Kofia: A Revolution Through Music (2021). He writes regularly on Palestine and political culture and performs internationally as a buzuq player and guitarist. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Freed Palestinian leader, politician, and activist Khalida Jarrar said Israeli authorities do not treat Palestinian prisoners as human beings, describing the conditions in jails as “the worst and most difficult since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967.”
In the early hours of Monday, Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners under a ceasefire and prisoner swap agreement that suspended its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, which has claimed more than 47,000 lives since Oct. 7, 2023, and left the enclave in ruins.
Jarrar, who was held in administrative detention in December 2023, was among those set free. It came after three female Israeli hostages held by the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza were released. Administrative detention is a policy that allows Israeli authorities to hold individuals without charge or trial.
Khalida Jarrar is free after over 5 months of solitary confinement!! Glory to the Resistance! pic.twitter.com/DcgWyV3xVY
Speaking to Anadolu, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who has been arrested multiple times, said Israeli prison conditions “have never been as harsh as they are now, be it the repeated assaults or constant use of tear gas.”
Describing the state of prisons in Israel, Jarrar said the Palestinians endure “poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, as well as the solitary confinement policy practiced by the occupation authorities.”
“I spent six months in solitary confinement,” she said, adding that “many Palestinians are held in solitary cells in very harsh conditions.”
The senior politician said what is happening in Israeli prisons is a result of policies by the current Israeli government and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister who resigned after the Gaza truce, trying “to deal with the prisoners as if they are not humans.”
As Jarrar, 61, was led through a cheering crowd, it could be seen her once-dark hair had grayed, and she looked exhausted.
“We were subjected to extreme harshness and physical assault in a deliberate and intentional attempt to humiliate and demean us,” she said.
The lawmaker stressed that the prisoners’ cause is “an integral part of our people’s causes,” and all Israeli policies against the prisoners must be confronted nationally.
Jarrar was elected as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council in the last parliamentary elections held in 2006. She has served as the head of the assembly’s prisoners commission and was also appointed to the Palestinian committee for follow-up with the International Criminal Court.
Jarrar was arrested by the Israeli army several times on accusations of affiliation to an “outlawed” party and for her role in activities supporting Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.
According to prisoners’ affairs groups, she was repeatedly mistreated by prison guards, affecting her well-being.
Estimates put the number of Palestinian detainees at Israeli prisons at over 11,000.
Khalida Jarrar, the imprisoned leader, academic and struggler for Palestinian prisoners, emerges liberated after 5 months and 1 week in solitary confinement in the occupation prisons, freed by the Resistance in the Flood of the Free! pic.twitter.com/2UZSexWEeH
For over 93 days, Khalida Jarrar, a leading figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been subjected to a systematic campaign of oppression and mistreatment that threatens her life in Israeli detention, according to Hanzala Center for Prisoners and… pic.twitter.com/J2XdiMFAc1
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