Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani (Arabic: غسان فايز كنفاني; 8 April 1936 – 8 July 1972) was a prominent Palestinian author and militant, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading writers. Kanafani's works have been translated into more than 17 languages.
Kanafani was born in Acre, then part of Mandatory Palestine, in 1936. During the 1948 Palestine war, his family was forced out of their hometown by Zionist militias. Kanafani later recalled the intense shame he felt when, at the age of 12, he watched the men of his family surrender their weapons to become refugees. The family settled in Damascus, Syria, where he completed his primary education. He then became a teacher for displaced Palestinian children in a refugee camp, where he began writing short stories in order to help his students contextualize their situation. He began studying for an Arabic Literature degree at the University of Damascus in 1952, but before he could complete his degree, he was expelled from the university for his political affiliations with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), to which he had been recruited by George Habash. He later relocated to Kuwait and then Beirut, Lebanon, where he became immersed in Marxism.
In 1961, he married Anni Høver, a Danish pedagogue and children's rights activist, with whom he had two children. He became an editor and wrote articles for a number of Arab magazines and newspapers. His 1963 novel Men in the Sun received widespread acclaim and, along with A World That Is Not Ours, symbolizes his first period of pessimism, which was later reversed in favor of active struggle in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. That year, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and became its spokesman. In 1969, he drafted a PFLP program in which the movement officially adopted Marxism–Leninism, which marked a departure from pan-Arab nationalism towards revolutionary Palestinian struggle.
In 1972, while he was in Beirut, Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece Lamees were killed by a bomb planted in his car by the Mossad, which was suspected to be in response for the PFLP's role in the Lod Airport massacre; however, Kanafani's assassination may have been planned long before. Kanafani had appeared with the massacre's perpetrators in a photograph shortly before, and he defended their tactics before being assassinated.
Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936 to a middle-class Sunni Muslim family with Kurdish roots. He was the third child of A'isha al-Salim and Muhammad Fayiz Abd al-Razzag Kanafani, a lawyer who was active in the Palestinian nationalist movement that opposed the British Mandate and its policies of enabling Jewish immigration, and who had been imprisoned on several occasions by the British when Ghassan was still a child. Ghassan received his early education in a French Catholic missionary school in the city of Jaffa.
In May, when the outbreak of hostilities in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War spilled over into Acre, Kanafani and his family were forced into exile, joining the Palestinian exodus. In a letter to his own son written decades later, he recalled the intense shame he felt on observing, aged 10, the men of his family surrendering their weapons to become refugees. After fleeing some 17 kilometres (11 mi) north to neighbouring Lebanon, they finally settled in Damascus, Syria. They were relatively poor; the father set up a small lawyer's practice, with the family income being supplemented by the boys' part-time work. There, Kanafani completed his secondary education, receiving a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) teaching certificate in 1952. He was first employed as an art teacher for some 1,200 displaced Palestinian children in a refugee camp, where he began writing short stories in order to help his students contextualize their situation.
In 1952, Kanafani also enrolled in the Department of Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus. The next year, he met George Habash, who introduced him to politics and was to exercise an important influence on his early work. In 1955, before he could complete his degree, with a thesis on "Race and Religion in Zionist Literature", which was to form the basis for his 1967 study On Zionist Literature, Kanafani was expelled from the university for his political affiliations with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) to which Habash had recruited him. Kanafani moved to Kuwait in 1956, following his sister Fayzah Kanafani and the brother who had preceded him there, to take up a teaching position. He spent much of his free time absorbed in Russian literature. In the following year, he became editor of Jordanian Al Ra'i (The Opinion), which was an MAN-affiliated newspaper.
In 1960, he relocated again, this time to Beirut, on the advice of Habash, where he began editing the MAN publication al-Hurriya and took up an interest in Marxist philosophy and politics. In 1961, he married Danish pedagogue and children's rights activist Anni Høver, with whom he had two children. In 1962, Kanafani was forced briefly to go underground since he, as a stateless person, lacked proper identification papers. He reappeared in Beirut later the same year, and took up editorship of the Nasserist newspaper Al Muharrir (The Liberator), editing its weekly supplement "Filastin" (Palestine). He went on to become an editor of another Nasserist newspaper, Al Anwar (The Illumination), in 1967, writing essays under the pseudonym of Faris Faris. He was also editor of Assayad magazine, which was the sister publication of Al Anwar. In the same year, Kanafani also joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and in 1969, resigned from Al Anwar to edit the PFLP's weekly magazine, Al Hadaf ("The Goal"), while drafting a PFLP program in which the movement officially took up Marxism-Leninism. This marked a departure from pan-Arab nationalism towards revolutionary Palestinian struggle. Kanafani was also one of the contributors to Lotus, a magazine launched in 1968 and financed by Egypt and the Soviet Union. At the time of his assassination, he held extensive contacts with foreign journalists and many Scandinavian anti-Zionist Jews. His political writings and journalism are thought to have made a major impact on Arab thought and strategy at that time.
Though prominent as a political thinker, militant, and journalist, Kanafani is on record as stating that literature was the shaping spirit behind his politics. Kanafani's literary style has been described as "lucid and straightforward"; his modernist narrative technique—using flashback effects and a wide range of narrative voices—represents a distinct advance in Arabic fiction. Ihab Shalback and Faisal Darraj sees a trajectory in Kanafani's writings from the simplistic dualism depicting an evil Zionist aggressor to a good Palestinian victim, to a moral affirmation of the justness of the Palestinian cause where however good and evil are not absolutes, until, dissatisfied by both, he began to appreciate that self-knowledge required understanding of the Other, and that only by unifying both distinct narratives could one grasp the deeper dynamics of the conflict.
In many of his fictions, he portrays the complex dilemmas Palestinians of various backgrounds must face. Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of "resistance literature" (أدب المقاومة, adab al-muqāwama) with regard to Palestinian writing; in two works, published respectively in 1966 and 1968, one critic, Orit Bashkin, has noted that his novels repeat a certain fetishistic worship of arms, and that he appears to depict military means as the only way to resolve the Palestinian tragedy.
Ghassan Kanafani began writing short stories when he was working in the refugee camps. Often told as seen through the eyes of children, the stories manifested out of his political views and belief that his students' education had to relate to their immediate surroundings. While in Kuwait, he spent much time reading Russian literature and socialist theory, refining many of the short stories he wrote, winning a Kuwaiti prize.