Kanafanis ability to transform the suffering of the Palestinian
people into resistance literature proved a serious threat to the
Zionist state.
Assassinated in Beirut on July 8, 1972, by Israeli agents,
Ghassan Kanafani served as a Palestinian journalist, author and
artist, member of the PFLPs Politbureau, and spokesman for the
Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). His
ability to transform the suffering of the Palestinian people into
resistance literature proved a serious threat to the Zionist
state.
Born in Acre, Palestine, on April 9, 1936, Kanafani fled with
his family in May 1948 during the Nakba (catastrophe), first to
Lebanon and later to Syria. He resided in Damascus, then Kuwait
followed by Beirut, where he and his young niece Lamis were killed
by a car bomb planted by Israeli forces.
In her study Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National
Identity (2023), Tahrir Hamdi writes that national identity is
constructed, imagined and dynamic rather than essential and static
(p. 5). While the ethnic cleansing of 48 creates a culture that is
shared among the exiled, it is part of a continuing trauma (p. 10),
and that is why Kanafanis legacy continues to be so urgent.
In a letter
to Mustafa, reprinted by the PFLP, Kanafani told his friend why he
would not be following him to California, the land where there is
greenery, water and lovely faces. His mind had changed when he went
to visit his niece Nadia in a Gaza hospital, where she was
recovering from an injury caused by Israeli bombs.
My friendNever shall I forget Nadias leg, amputated from the top
of the thigh. Although filled with grief, Kanafani left the
hospital to view the city in a different way: Everything in this
Gaza throbbed with sadness which was not confined to weeping. It
was a challenge: more than that it was something like reclamation
of the amputated leg!
For Kanafanis family, the Nakba was more than a past event that
led to the expulsion of his family, but an ongoing process that was
part of daily life for Palestinians living under occupation. Nadia
had thrown herself onto her brothers and sisters to save them from
the bombs, but in the process lost her leg. She could have run
away, like Kanafani had planned to do, but she refused. He had
found what life is and what existence is worth among the debris in
Gaza which awakened him to a caus...
