Ghassan Kanafani
| Ghassan Kanafani غسان كنفاني |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | April 8, 1936 Akka, Palestine |
| Died | July 8, 1972 (aged 36) Beirut, Lebanon |
| Nationality | Palestinian |
| Political party | Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine |
Ghassan Kanafani (Arabic: غسان كنفاني, April 8, 1936 in Akka, Palestine – July 8, 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon) was a Palestinian writer and a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (FPLP). On July 8, 1972 he was assassinated by the Mossad.
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in 1936 into a middle-class Muslim family in city of Acre (Akka) under the British Mandate of Palestine. He was the third child of Muhammad Fayiz 'Abd al Razzag, a lawyer, who was active in the national movement that opposed the British occupation, with its encouragement of Zionist 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 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 11 miles north to neighbouring Lebanon, they settled in Damascus, Syria as Palestinian refugees. They were relatively poor: the father set up a small lawyer's practice and income was 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. His first employment was as an art teacher to displaced Palestinian children, some 1,200, in a refugee camp, where he began to write stories in order to help them to contextualize their situation.
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