Returning to Haifa
Ghassan Kanafani
A Palestinian couple return to their Haifa home after 1967 and find their son — raised as an Israeli soldier — behind its door.
After the June 1967 war opens the occupied territories, Said and Safiyya travel from Ramallah to Haifa to see the home they fled in 1948 — and the infant son, Khaldun, they lost in the chaos of the flight. They find him as Dov, raised by the Jewish couple who took the house, now wearing an Israeli uniform. The confrontation that follows refuses easy consolations: Kanafani turns the reunion into an unsparing argument about what makes a person — blood, or choice and cause.
Written at the moment the fedayeen movement was rising, the novella marks Kanafani’s shift from the despair of Men in the Sun toward a harder, more political hope. It is usually published in English alongside other stories as Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories.
About the author
Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972), born in Acre, was a novelist, journalist, and leading figure of Palestinian resistance literature. His fiction transformed the experience of exile into a precise anatomy of loss, dignity, and political awakening. He was assassinated in Beirut in 1972.
Details
- Published in Arabic as ’A’id ila Haifa, 1969
- English translation by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley, Lynne Rienner Publishers