Episode 76: The assassination of Ghassan Kanafani

First aired on 08 July 2023

On July 8, 1972, a light was stolen from the world. The thinker, teacher, writer, and fighter with his pen, Ghassan Kanafani, was killed in a cowardly assassination by the Zionist intelligence agency Mossad in Beirut.

The car bomb also took the life of his 17-year-old niece, Lamees. Kanafani was born in Akka, Palestine, in 1936, the third of eight siblings. At the age of 12, he was driven from his home by Zionist racism in the Nabka of 1948.

His family went on to settle in Damascus, Syria, which Kanafani wrote about in his short essay The Land of Sad Oranges. Kanafani studied Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus, only to be expelled for his involvement with the Arab Nationalist Movement of George Habash and Wadie Haddad.

Kanafani then moved to Kuwait, where he worked as editor of the Arab Nationalist Movement's newspaper, "Al-Rai." The opinion. Kanafani then moved to Beirut in 1960 and edited another newspaper linked to the organization, الحرية Freedom.

With the Naksa of 1967, the Arab Nationalist Movement of Haddad and Habash became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The organization would haunt Israel across the planet, carrying out some of the most original and daring operations in the history of the Palestinian freedom struggle. Kanafani worked as the PFLP spokesman and editor of their weekly newsletter, الهدف The Aim.

In his legendary short stories like Return to Haifa and Men in The Sun, Ghassan Kanafani deals with the Palestinian struggle from several different unorthodox angles. Return to Haifa deals with the taboo subject of children left behind in the Nakba and what possible fate could befall them.

The complex but moving story also serves to discredit Zionism as an ideology and the biological determinism's of racism. Men in The Sun deals with the overlapping tragedies of refugees searching for sustainable lives in Arab states.

The last words of the short story, which depict Palestinian refugees suffocating to death in the back of a water tank while trying to enter Kuwait for work, haunt the reader.

"Why didn't they bang on the walls?" The words serve as an eternal reminder to our long-suffering people—bang on the walls.

Long live Ghassan Kanafani, and long live the resistance.