Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre on 9 April 1936, the son of Fayiz Kanafani, a lawyer, and A’isha al-Salim. He attended the Collège des Frères in Jaffa. He was twelve when his family was forced out of Jaffa before the city fell in 1948; they went first to Lebanon and then to Damascus. In exile he worked in a printing press, distributed newspapers and worked in a restaurant, studying at night until he took the intermediate school certificate in 1953, after which he taught art in UNRWA schools in Damascus. In 1953 he met George Habash and began writing for the Arab Nationalist Movement’s weekly al-Ra’i; in 1956 he joined his sister in Kuwait, teaching art and athletics and writing for the movement’s weekly al-Fajr. He published his first story, “A New Sun,” in 1957.

He moved to Beirut in 1960, joining the editorial board of the movement’s magazine al-Hurriyya. In 1963 he became editor of the daily al-Muharrir and of its monthly supplement Filastin, and from 1967 to 1969 edited the weekly supplement of al-Anwar. His fiction belongs to those years: Rijal fi-l-shams (Men in the Sun, 1963), in which three Palestinians suffocate in a water tanker being smuggled across the desert to Kuwait; Ma tabaqqa lakum (All That’s Left to You, 1966), which won the Friends of the Book Society prize in Beirut; Umm Sa’d (1969); and A’id ila Hayfa (Returning to Haifa, 1969). He also wrote criticism and history — On Zionist Literature (1967), Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, 1948–1966 (1968) and The Revolution of 1936–39: Background, Details and Analysis (1972) — and he painted.

Kanafani took part in founding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December 1967, was elected to its political bureau, became its official spokesman and, in 1969, editor of its magazine al-Hadaf. He held that post until his death. He was therefore the public voice of the front through the years of its aircraft hijackings, run by the external operations branch under Wadi Haddad, and through the attack on Lydda airport of 30 May 1972, carried out by that branch with a cell of the Japanese Red Army — an operation the PFLP’s own leadership was by then formally committed against, Habash having stated in Beirut on 14 March 1972 that the front’s executive committee had resolved on 5 November 1970 to end aircraft hijackings.

On 8 July 1972 Israel’s Mossad placed an explosive charge in his car in Beirut. It killed Kanafani and his seventeen-year-old niece Lamis, who happened to be with him. He was thirty-six. He was buried in Beirut; Kamal Nasser, who attended the funeral and was himself killed nine months later, asked afterwards whether he would one day have a funeral like it, and was buried beside him. Kanafani was posthumously awarded the World Union of Democratic Journalists prize in 1974, the Lotus Prize for Literature by the Union of Asian and African Writers in 1975, and the PLO’s Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature in 1990. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and Men in the Sun was filmed by Tawfiq Salih as The Deceived (1973).

Selected works

• Rijal fi-l-shams (Men in the Sun, 1963)
• Ma tabaqqa lakum (All That’s Left to You, 1966)
• A’id ila Hayfa (Returning to Haifa, 1969)
• Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, 1948–1966 (1968)
• The Revolution of 1936–39: Background, Details and Analysis (1972)

Sources

• Ghassan Kanafani — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — PalQuest