Summary
Palestinian journalist, novelist, short story writer and PFLP spokesman, author of the essay at the centre of The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine and of the story Letter From Gaza in the same booklet.
Details
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Born in Acre, Palestine on 9 April 1936, and lived in Jaffa until May 1948, when he was forced to leave with his family first to Lebanon and later to Syria; he lived and worked in Damascus, then Kuwait, then Beirut (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.35).
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He worked as a teacher and journalist in Damascus and Kuwait, then wrote for several papers in Beirut before starting Al Hadaf, the weekly paper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in 1969 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.3 / printed p.4).
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He was first active in the Arab Nationalist Movement and later, with George Habash, became a Marxist, holding that the Palestinians’ problems could not be solved without a social revolution throughout the Arab world (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.3 / printed p.4).
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The front matter presents his study of the 1936-39 revolt as the initial piece of a projected modern history of the Palestinian people’s struggle, left unfinished by his assassination, and his 1970 pamphlet The Resistance and its Problems as a critique built on the political line of the resistance, praxis, and organisation and leadership (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.4 / printed p.6-7).
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He was a member of the PFLP Politbureau and its spokesman, and was assassinated in Beirut on July 8, 1972, with his niece, by a car bomb the booklet attributes to Israeli agents (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.33 / printed p.65; PDF p.35).
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By his death he had published 18 books and written hundreds of articles; his works were republished in Arabic editions and collected in four volumes, and many were translated worldwide (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.35).
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Sources update for this page: this page also draws on raw/1979-said-question-of-palestine.pdf (see sources in The Question of Palestine).
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In Said, Chapter Three II: Kanafani remained inside Israel until the early sixties, thereafter went into exile, became a militant journalist and writer, and in 1972 was assassinated by the Israelis in Beirut (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.171 / printed p.150). This agrees with the booklet’s account of his assassination in Beirut on July 8, 1972, above, which the booklet attributes to Israeli agents.
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Said quotes at length, in his own translation, the opening scene of Kanafani’s novella Rijal fil Shams (Men in the Sun) (fiction) and reads its unstable present, synesthesia and broken-off past as the form of the Palestinian predicament in exile (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.171-173 / printed p.150-152).
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In Said, Chapter Three II concluded: Kanafani comments on the rudimentary struggles facing the Palestinian in the early days of his dispossession, and the Palestinian must make the present as a literal, existential necessity (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.174 / printed p.153). Said sets Kanafani’s work beside Emile Habibi’s as together sketching the complete picture of Palestinian identity as no purely political tract can (PDF p.174 / printed p.153).
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In Manna, Dalia Karpel’s documentary Emile Habibi: A Remainer in Haifa was a response to Kanafani’s famous novel Returning to Haifa, and Habibi and Kanafani represented two distinct generations of fathers and sons who gave expression to the Nakba of the Palestinians through the novel (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.36).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Gaza, Resistance Poetry