27 Facts About Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was a prominent Palestinian author and politician, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers.

Ghassan 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.

Ghassan Kanafani 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.

Ghassan Kanafani 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, to which he had been recruited by George Habash.

Ghassan Kanafani later relocated to Kuwait and then Beirut, where he became immersed in Marxism.

Ghassan Kanafani became an editor and wrote articles for a number of Arab magazines and newspapers.

Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936 to a middle-class Sunni Muslim family of Kurdish descent.

Ghassan Kanafani was the third child of Muhammad Fayiz Abd al Razzag, 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 Kanafani received his early education in a French Catholic missionary school in the city of Jaffa.

Ghassan Kanafani 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, Ghassan Kanafani enrolled in the Department of Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus.

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, Ghassan Kanafani was expelled from the university for his political affiliations with the Movement of Arab Nationalists to which Habash had recruited him.

Ghassan Kanafani moved to Kuwait in 1956, following his sister Fayzah Ghassan Kanafani and the brother who had preceded him there, to take up a teaching position.

Ghassan Kanafani spent much of his free time absorbed in Russian literature.

In 1962, Ghassan Kanafani was forced briefly to go underground since he, as a stateless person, lacked proper identification papers.

Ghassan Kanafani reappeared in Beirut later the same year, and took up editorship of the Nasserist newspaper Al Muharrir, editing its weekly supplement "Filastin".

Ghassan Kanafani went on to become an editor of another Nasserist newspaper, Al Anwar, in 1967, writing essays under the pseudonym of Faris Faris.

Ghassan Kanafani was editor of Assayad magazine, which was the sister publication of Al Anwar.

Ghassan Kanafani was one of the contributors to Lotus, a magazine launched in 1968 and financed by Egypt and the Soviet Union.

Ghassan Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of resistance literature 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.

Ghassan Kanafani turns up in Jordan, they end up with an aunt in Gaza, and live united in a set of Oedipal displacements; Hamid seeks a mother-substitute in his sister, while Maryam entertains a quasi incestuous love for her brother.

On 8 July 1972, Ghassan Kanafani, was assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service.

When Ghassan Kanafani turned on the ignition of his Austin 1100, a grenade connected to the ignition switch detonated and in turn detonated a 3 kilo plastic bomb planted behind the bumper bar.

At the time, Ghassan Kanafani was the spokesperson of the PFLP, and the group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Ghassan Kanafani appeared in photographs together with the three Japanese Red Army members shortly before they carried out the attack.

Ghassan Kanafani's memory was upheld through the creation of the Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation, which has since established eight kindergartens for the children of Palestinian refugees.