The Key is a new magazine committed to covering Palestine as the core issue at the heart of the modern world. Support our work by becoming a subscriber today.
Editor’s Note: This text, written by the renowned Palestinian historian and scholar, Rashid Khalidi, is the foreword to a new, extended essay from the legendary writer, Ghassan Kanafani, translated into English for the first time by Tarif Khalidi. This text, which offers sharp social and political analyses of life in Palestine in this early period of occupation, is published by Verso Books, in partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies. Pre-order this book today from our Bookshop.org storefronts in the US, the UK and Europe.
Ghassan Kanafani’s writing was considered so dangerous to the Zionist enterprise that Israeli agents assassinated him in 1972 with a car bomb, along with his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamis. Kanafani was thirty-six years old at the time. Having met him and having been deeply impressed by his personality and his intelligence, I was among the tens of thousands of mourners who walked behind his coffin. A prolific and gifted writer of fiction and plays, he was a dedicated revolutionary, a militant editorialist and journalist, a talented graphic artist, and one of the most perceptive chroniclers of the history of Palestinian resistance in its many forms. Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968, here translated into English by Tarif Khalidi for the first time since its original publication in Arabic in 1968, reveals Kanafani to also have been an able literary critic and an insightful analyst of Palestinian society inside Israel in the two decades after the Nakba of 1948. Like all his work, this book resonates with Kanafani’s burning commitment to the Palestinian cause.
Kanafani’s reputation among readers, academics, activists, and militants has only continued to grow in the decades since his murder. His work, especially his novels, novellas, and short stories, are widely published and read in Arabic, English, and other languages, and are taught in Arabic literature courses all over the world. It is harder to access some of the rest of Kanafani’s wide-ranging written output, especially his extensive political and journalistic writings. These are mainly found in Beirut newspapers and periodicals of the 1960s and early ’70s, notably in the journal of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, al-Hadaf, which he founded and edited until his assassination.
