The Assassination of Ghassan Kanafani

On the morning of 8 July 1972, Ghassan Kanafani started his Austin 1100 outside his home in Beirut. A grenade wired to the ignition detonated a plastic charge planted behind the bumper, killing him instantly along with his niece Lamees Najim, who was seventeen. Israel’s Mossad carried out the assassination; it was widely read as retaliation for the Lod Airport attack carried out weeks earlier by Japanese Red Army gunmen, which Kanafani, as spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had publicly defended on the organization’s behalf — though the operation may have been planned earlier.

Kanafani was thirty-six. Born in Acre in 1936 and driven into exile in 1948, he had become the Arab world’s most celebrated Palestinian writer: Men in the Sun (1962), All That’s Left to You (1966), Return to Haifa (1970), and the studies in which he was the first to frame Palestinian writing as “resistance literature” (adab al-muqawama). From 1969 he edited the PFLP’s weekly al-Hadaf, and he drafted the program in which the Front adopted Marxism-Leninism. Beirut’s Daily Star wrote in its obituary that he was “a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.”

He was, in 1970, the man who told an Australian interviewer that talks between the PLO and Israel would be a conversation “between the sword and the neck” — the phrase by which a generation remembered the era’s impasse. The killing opened a decade in which Israel and Palestinian organizations traded assassinations across Europe and the Middle East, and it fixed Kanafani’s place: the writer as combatant, mourned as both.