Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani (; 8April 19368July 1972) was a prominent Palestinian author and militant, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers. He became an editor and wrote articles for a number of Arab magazines and newspapers. His 1963 novel Men in the Sun received widespread acclaim and, along with A World that is Not Ours, symbolizes his first period of pessimism, which was later reversed in favor of active struggle in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. That year, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and became its spokesman. In 1969, he drafted a PFLP program in which the movement officially adopted Marxism–Leninism, which marked a departure from pan-Arab nationalism towards revolutionary Palestinian struggle. He was the third child of Muhammad Fayiz Abd al Razzag, a lawyer who was active in the Palestinian nationalist movement that opposed the British Mandate and its policies of enabling Jewish immigration, and who had been imprisoned on several occasions by the British when Ghassan was still a child. Ghassan received his early education in a French Catholic missionary school in the city of Jaffa. joining the Palestinian exodus. In a letter to his own son written decades later, he recalled the intense shame he felt on observing, aged 10, the men of his family surrendering their weapons to become refugees. After fleeing some north to neighbouring Lebanon, they finally settled in Damascus, Syria.

Political background

In 1952, Kanafani also enrolled in the Department of Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus. The next year, he met George Habash, who introduced him to politics and was to exercise an important influence on his early work. In 1955, before he could complete his degree, with a thesis on "Race and Religion in Zionist Literature", which was to form the basis for his 1967 study On Zionist Literature, Kanafani was expelled from the university for his political affiliations with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) to which Habash had recruited him. Kanafani moved to Kuwait in 1956, following his sister Fayzah Kanafani and the brother who had preceded him there, He was also editor of Assayad magazine, which was the sister publication of Al Anwar. At the time of his assassination, he held extensive contacts with foreign journalists and many Scandinavian anti-Zionist Jews. His political writings and journalism are thought to have made a major impact on Arab thought and strategy at that time.

Literary output

Though prominent as a political thinker, militant, and journalist, Kanafani is on record as stating that literature was the shaping spirit behind his politics. Kanafani's literary style has been described as "lucid and straightforward"; Ihab Shalback and Faisal Darraj sees a trajectory in Kanafani's writings from the simplistic dualism depicting an evil Zionist aggressor to a good Palestinian victim, to a moral affirmation of the justness of the Palestinian cause where however good and evil are not absolutes, until, dissatisfied by both, he began to appreciate that self-knowledge required understanding of the Other, and that only by unifying both distinct narratives could one grasp the deeper dynamics of the conflict.

In many of his fictions, he portrays the complex dilemmas Palestinians of various backgrounds must face. Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of "resistance literature" ("adab al-muqawama") with regard to Palestinian writing; was published to great critical acclaim. The story is an allegory of Palestinian calamity in the wake of the nakba in its description of the defeatist despair, passivity, and political corruption infesting the lives of Palestinians in refugee camps.

Three Palestinians, the elderly Abu Qais, Assad, and the youth Marwan, hide in the empty water tank of a lorry in order to cross the border into Kuwait. They have managed to get through as Basra and drew up to the last checkpoint. Abul Khaizuran, the truck driver, tries to be brisk but is dragged into defending his honor as the Iraqi checkpoint officer teases him by suggesting he had been dallying with prostitutes. The intensity of heat within the water carrier is such that no one could survive more than several minutes, and indeed they expire inside as Khaizuran is drawn into trading anecdotes that play up a non-existent virility—they address him as though he were effeminized, with the garrulous Abu Baqir outside in an office. Their deaths are to be blamed, not on the effect of the stifling effect of the sun's heat, but on their maintaining silence as they suffer.

The ending has often been read as a trope for the futility of Palestinian attempts to try to build a new identity far away from their native Palestine, and the figure of Abul Khaizuran a symbol of the impotence of the Palestinian leadership. Amy Zalman has detected a covert leitmotif embedded in the tale, in which Palestine is figured as the beloved female body, while the male figures are castrated from being productive in their attempts to seek another country. In this reading, a real national identity for Palestinians can only be reconstituted by marrying awareness of gender to aspirations to return. A film based on the story, Al-Makhdu'un (The Betrayed or The Dupes), was produced by Tewfik Saleh in 1972.

All That's Left to You (1966)

All That's Left to You (Ma Tabaqqah Lakum) (1966) is set in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. This story won the Lebanese Literary prize in that year.

Umm Sa'ad (1969)

In Umm Sa'ad (1969), the impact of his new revolutionary outlook is explicit as he creates the portrait of a mother who encourages her son to take up arms as a fedayeen in full awareness that the choice of life might eventuate in his death. The father searches for the real Palestine through the rubble of memory, only to find more rubble. The Israeli occupation means that they have finally an opportunity to go back and visit Haifa in Israel. The journey to his home in the district of Halisa on the al-jalil mountain evokes the past as he once knew it. The dissonance between the remembered Palestinian past and the remade Israeli present of Haifa and its environs creates a continuous diasporic anachronism.

The novel deals with two decisive days, one 21 April 1948, the other 30 June 1967; the earlier date relates to the fall of Haifa, when the Haganah launched its assault on the city and Palestinians who were not killed in the battle fled. Sa'id and his wife were ferried out on British boats to Acre. A Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, Evrat Kushan, and his wife, Miriam, find their son Khaldun in their home, and take over the property and raise the toddler as a Jew, with the new name "Dov". When they visit the home, Kushen's wife greets them with the words: "I've been expecting you for the a long time." Kushen's recall of the events of April 1948 confirms Sa'id's own impression, that the fall of the town was coordinated by the British forces and the Haganah. When Dov returns, he is wearing an IDF uniform, and vindictively resentful of the fact they abandoned him. Compelled by the scene to leave the home, the father reflects that only military action can settle the dispute, realizing however that, in such an eventuality, it may well be that Dov/Khaldun will confront his brother Khalid in battle.

The novel conveys nonetheless a criticism of Palestinians for the act of abandonment, and betrays a certain admiration for the less than easy, stubborn insistence of Zionists, whose sincerity and determination must be the model for Palestinians in their future struggle. Ariel Bloch indeed argues that Dov functions, when he rails against his father's weakness, as a mouthpiece for Kanafani himself. Sa'id symbolizes irresolute Palestinians who have buried the memory of their flight and betrayal of their homeland. At the same time, the homeland can no longer be based on a nostalgic filiation with the past as a foundation, but rather an affiliation that defies religious and ethnic distinctions. Notwithstanding the indictment of Palestinians, and a tacit empathy with the Israeli enemy's dogged nation-building, the novel's surface rhetoric remains keyed to national liberation through armed struggle. An imagined aftermath to the story has been written by Israeli novelist Sami Michael, a native Arabic-speaking Israeli Jew, in his Yonim be-Trafalgar (Pigeons in Trafalgar Square).

His article on Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, published in the PLO's Research Centre Magazine, Shu'un Filistiniyya (Palestinian Affairs), was influential in diffusing the image of the former as a forerunner of the Palestinian armed struggle, and, according to Rashid Khalidi, consolidated the Palestinian narrative that tends to depict failure as a triumph.

Assassination

On 8 July 1972, Kanafani, was assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. When Kanafani turned on the ignition of his Austin 1100, a grenade connected to the ignition switch detonated and in turn detonated a 3 kilo plastic bomb planted behind the bumper bar. Both Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece Lamees Najim, who had been accompanying him, were killed. As the PFLP's spokesperson, Kanafani had claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the organization. He was also identified in photographs taken with the three Japanese militants shortly before the operation, which reportedly contributed to his inclusion on a Mossad hit list.

During the 1970 hijackings, Kanafani and his deputy, Bassam Abu Sharif, publicly demanded that Israel release Palestinian prisoners. According to journalist Kameel Nasr, both had begun to express opposition to indiscriminate violence by the time of Kanafani's death. His assassination occurred amid a broader regional escalation: Israel had arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—actions Haaretz described as taking "counter-hostages"—and launched a large-scale military operation in southern Lebanon. Around the same time, the Jewish Defense League in London abducted three Egyptian embassy employees.

Rumors circulated that Beirut's security forces may have been complicit in Kanafani's assassination. Two weeks later, Abu Sharif survived an attempt on his life. He later alleged that Israel had worked with Arab intermediaries to carry out both attacks. One suspected collaborator, Abu Ahmed Yunis, a senior PFLP member, was executed by the group in 1981 for embezzlement and ordering the killing of another official.

Kanafani's obituary in Lebanon's The Daily Star wrote that: "He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

On his death, several uncompleted novels were found among his Nachlass, one dating back as early as 1966.

Commemoration

A collection of Palestinian poems, The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, which took its title from the eponymous poem by Mahmoud Darwish, was published in his honor. He was the posthumous recipient of the Afro-Asia Writers' Conference 's Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975. Ghassan Kanafani's memory was upheld through the creation of the Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation, which has since established eight kindergartens for the children of Palestinian refugees. His legacy lives on among the Palestinians, and he is considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers.

Works

<!-- NOTE: Some names are roughly translated -->

  • Mawt Sarir Raqam 12 (1961) (موت سرير رقم 12, The Death of Bed Number 12) (short story)
  • Ard al-Burtuqal al-Hazin (1963) (أرض البرتقال الحزين, The Sad Orange Land).
  • Rijal fi ash-Shams (1963) (رجال في الشمس, Men in the Sun).

<!-- Deleted image removed: thumb|right|200px|Ninth Commemoration of Comrade Ghassan's Martydom (1981) poster. Designed by Marc Rudin. Published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -->

  • Al-bab (1964) (الباب, The Door).
  • Aalam Laysa Lana (1965) (عالمٌ ليس لنا, A World Not Our Own).
  • Adab al-Muqawamah fi Filastin al-Muhtalla 1948–1966, (1966) (أدب المقاومة في فلسطين المحتلة 1948–1966, Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine).
  • Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (1966) (ما تبقّى لكم, All That's Left to You).
  • Fi al-Adab al-Sahyuni (1967) (في الأدب الصهيوني, On Zionist Literature).
  • An ar-Rijal wa-l-Banadiq (1968) (عن الرجال والبنادق, On Men and Rifles).
  • Umm Sa'd (1969) (أم سعد, Umm Sa'd).
  • A'id ila Hayfa (1970) (عائد إلى حيفا, Return to Haifa).
  • A 'ma wal-Atrash, (1972) (الأعمى والأطرش, The Blind Man and The Deaf Man)
  • Barquq Naysan (1972) (برقوق نيسان, The Apricots of April)
  • Al-Qubba'ah wa-l-Nabi (1973) (القبعة والنبي, The Hat and the Prophet) – incomplete
  • Thawra 1936-39 fi Filastin (1974) (ثورة 1936-39 في فلسطين, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine) (45–page pamphlet)
  • Jisr ila-al-Abad (1978) (جسر إلى الأبد, A Bridge to Eternity).
  • Al-Gamis al-Masruq wa-Qisas Ukhra, (1982) (القميص المسروق وقصص أخرى, The Stolen Shirt and Other Stories)
  • Arabic Short Stories (1983) (transl. by Denys Johnson-Davies).
  • Faris Faris (1996) (فارس فارس, Knight Knight)

Novels

  • Men in the Sun | رجال في الشمس (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • All That's Left to You | ماتبقى لكم (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • Umm Saad | أم سعد (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • The Lover | العاشق (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • Returning to Haifa | عائد الى حيفا (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • The Other Thing (Who Killed Laila Hayek?) | الشيء الآخر (, Rimal Publications, 2013)

Short stories

  • "Death of Bed No. 12"] | موت سرير رقم ١٢ (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • "Land of Sad Oranges" | ارض البرتقال الحزين (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • "A World Not Our Own" | عالم ليس لنا (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • "Of Men and Rifles" | الرجال والبنادق (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • "The Stolen Shirt" | القميص المسروق (, Rimal Publications, 2013)

Plays

  • A Bridge to Eternity | جسر إلى الأبد (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • The Door | الباب (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • The Hat and the Prophet | القبعه والنبي (, Rimal Publications, 2013)

Studies

  • Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966 | أدب المقاومة في فلسطين المحتلة ١٩٤٨-١٩٦٦ (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • Palestinian Literature of Resistance Under Occupation 1948–1968 | الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الإحتلال ١٩٤٨ – ١٩٦٨ (, Rimal Publications, 2013)
  • In Zionist Literature | في الأدب الصهيوني (, Rimal Publications, 2013)

Translations into English

References

Bibliography

  • <!--|access-date = 5 January 2016-->
  • Ghassan Kanafani: The Founder of the Modern Palestinian Novel, Yemen Times, 06.10.2008.
  • Ghassan Kanafani and the era of revolutionary Palestinian media. Al Jazeera.