Biography
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) was a Palestinian writer and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). While studying Arabic literature in Damascus he became a member of the left-wing Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) but moved to Kuwait before completing his degree to edit an ANM newspaper and study Marxism. He edited several Nasserist newspapers in Beirut, supporting Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabic movement, before founding and editing the PFLP’s newspaper.
He was killed by a bomb planted in his car, apparently in retribution for his involvement in the Lod airport massacre in which 24 people were killed and 80 were injured by Japanese terrorists working with the PFLP. He wrote short stories, novels, and criticism as part of his commitment to “engaged literature,” literature committed to his belief that “the class struggle within Palestinian and Arab society was intrinsically linked to the struggle against Zionism and for a Palestinian state” (Wikipedia, Kanafani, 2009).
Summary
His short story, “Return to Haifa,” is an example of engaged literature. The story relates the return of Said and Safiyya to their former home in Haifa after a twenty-year absence. They were dispossessed during the attack launched by the Israelis against Palestinian Arabs on April 21, 1948, in order to secure their territory which had, up until then been under the administration of Great Britain. Pulled along by the fleeing crowds, Said and Safiyya are forced to leave their 5-month baby, Khaldun, behind.
They settle in Ramallah but when the Six-Day War of June 1967 opens the borders, permitting Arabs to revisit their former homes, they decide to return. Said and Safiyya are admitted to their house by its present occupant, a Polish Jewish woman, Miriam Koshen who has been expecting them. Her twenty-year-old son Dov turns out to be Khaldun. Raised as a Jew he rejects Safiyya’s claim based on flesh and blood. “Man is a cause,” he says, a statement with which Said agrees.
From this statement, says Karen E. Riley (2000), the reader is meant to understand that Miriam and Dov’s correct arguments are less compelling for being “appended to an unjust cause” (p. 193). Dov/Khaldun accuses his biological parents of weakness for not fighting their way back to the house to get him. Said agrees; and at that point, Dov becomes the personification of Palestine, Arab by birth, Jewish by adoption. Once that parallel has been established, Said realizes that he was indeed weak and hopes that his other son, Khalid, will have disobeyed him and joined the fedayeen over his objections.
Argument
There is much more to the story than that but everything works toward making that one point: Israel is strong, Palestine is weak, therefore all Palestinians must be prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sake of regaining their homeland. Engaged literature is another term for propaganda, and Kanafani handles his material skillfully to bring the reader around to this point. He begins by depicting Said’s inner turmoil upon his return to Haifa and his wife’s sorrow over the child she abandoned twenty years earlier.
Rather than blaming themselves, they dramatize the panic that drove Palestinian Arabs from their Haifa homes at the sound of distant gunfire. Now that the Mandelbaum Gate has been opened from the other side, that is, by the Israelis entering it from East Jerusalem, Arabs living in Israel’s expanded territory are free to travel. Instead of being grateful for this new freedom, Said tells his wife that this is the Israeli’s way of flaunting their power. “They’re saying to us, ‘Help yourselves, look and see how much better we are than you, how much more developed” (Kanafani, 2000, p.151).
The events of that day in 1948 are told in flashbacks, not only Said’s but also in the telling of their neighbor, Farris al-Luba’s story. He escaped to Kuwait but returned to Jaffa to reclaim his home. He finds an Arab living there, and the portrait of his brother, killed by the enemy, is still on the wall where he had left it. The occupant was released from a prison camp, then rented the house, but kept the martyr Badr’s picture because it showed a man who did what all Palestinians should do.
In this way, Khanafani depicts the rage smoldering in every Arab’s heart even though they are powerless to fight their powerful enemy, and at the same time, he implicitly criticizes Said for failing to lay down his life for the cause.
Miriam adds her voice to the narrative, likening the sight of a dead Arab child being tossed on a truck to sights she had seen in Auschwitz. She almost left Israel after that and if she had she would have been a moral person; but the gift of the house and the five-month-old baby found inside kept her in Haifa, which makes her immoral. She serves Kanafani’s propagandistic purpose by drawing a parallel between the Haganah and Nazis, and by seeing the baby as a gift from God when obviously it belonged to the rightful owners of the house.
When Dov has to choose who his real parents are, he opts for the woman who raised him and her husband, who died in the war between Israel and Egypt in 1956. Dov, now an Israeli soldier, defends his position mechanically as if it were “a long lesson he had learned by heart” (Kanafani, 2000, p. 181) Said now realizes that a human being “is made up of what’s injected into him an hour after hour” (Kanafani, 200, p.183). It is at this point in the story that Khanafani admits that Palestinian Arabs are weak – not just militarily but in character.
Israel’s strength is its determination to make Palestine its own. The Palestinians’ weakness is in complaining about it but not fighting hard enough to stop the process. Said sees all that in his own character. Dov is right, they should not have spent the last twenty years crying but doing everything they could have done to reclaim their child/Palestine. To atone for their weakness, Palestinians must go to extremes; no other course of action will suffice. He leaves, telling Miriam and Dov that they may continue to occupy his house until he takes it back, but “it will take a war to settle that” (Kanafani, 2000, p.187).
Said’s story is movingly told but engaged literature has a way of avoiding inconvenient facts. A clash of extremes is in no one’s interest and could easily have been avoided had Palestinian Arabs had better leadership. One alternative would have been to abide by the United Nations Resolution of the 29th of November, 1947 calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine (Karsh, 2008, p. 1), which most Palestinians wanted but their leaders chose war instead.
There are many points at which Kanafani’s imaginative recreation of the events in Haifa, preceding the establishment of the state of Israel, differs from the historical record, but then a short story should not be expected to report the facts. The problem with this story is that it sanctions the extremist perception of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by putting a nationalist principle before all human considerations.
References
Kanafani, Ghasan (2000). “Return to Haifa.” Trans. Karen E. Riley. Palestine’s Children & Other Stories. Boulder CO.: Lynne Reiner Publishers.
Karsh, Efraim (2008). “1948, Israel, and the Palestinians—The true story.” Commentary Magazine. Web.
Anonymous. “Ghassan Kanafani.” Wikipedia. Web.