Both groups were Arab peoples, but their backgrounds differed and the influx posed a threat to the Jordanian status quo. The population of Jordan skyrocketed as some 900,000 Palestinians joined the 400,000 Jordanians already there. A great number of Palestinians fled to the West Bank of the Jordan River, which fell under the control of the Jordanian Arab Legion, and to Gaza Strip, controlled by the Egyptian administration. Moving outside the newly established Jewish State, they became a dispersed people-scattered among Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. This declaration of the State of Israel led to military confrontation between the Arabs and Jews, which drove more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland. On May 14, 1948, the Jews declared statehood on the territory allotted to them. When the British realized in 1947 that they would be unable to strike a compromise between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, they turned the whole matter over to the United Nations, whose members voted to partition Palestine between the two peoples. Events in History at the Time of the Novella The Palestinians in Jordan His novella remains a biting illustration of this indivisibility, and of the Palestinian author-activist’s point of view. “Insofar as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case” (Kanafani in Wild, From his perspective, his political interests were always directly tied to his literary career.

Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb on July 8, 1972.

He stepped into the job of official spokesman for the PFLP in 1970. In 1969 Kanafani left the security of his job at al-Anwar to publish the weekly, al-Hadaf (The Goal), organ of the PFLP. Kanafani worked for several more newspapers, becoming editor-in-chief of the daily al-Muharrir (The Liberator), publishing the weekly Filastin (Palestine), and serving on the editorial board of the daily al-Anwar (The Lights) and as editor-in-chief of its weekly magazine. Here the writer met and married the Danish teacher Ann Hoover, and the couple had a son and daughter. In 1960 George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), convinced Kanafani to leave Kuwait for Beirut, Lebanon, to work on al-Hurriyah (The Freedom). Diabetes” who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me” (Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, p. And now, now, just as I have begun to perceive my path… along comes “Mr. There he was devastated to learn he had a severe form of diabetes that entailed daily insulin injections, which he self-administered until the end of his life, an ordeal he compared to his uprooting from Palestine: “When I was twelve, just as I began to perceive the meaning of life and nature around me, I was hurled down and exiled from my own country. In 1955 Kanafani traveled to Kuwait to teach art and sports in a government school for six years. Attracted to journalism, Kanafani contributed to a number of periodicals, including al-Ra’y (The Opinion), organ of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). He earned his high-school certificate, then enrolled in Damascus University. In 1952, Kanafani’s father moved the family to Damascus, Syria, where Kanafani worked during the day and continued his studies at night. Overnight life changed drastically, with the family’s plummeting from an upper to an under class. In 1948, when Kanafani was 12 years old, his family fled Acre empty-handed to a small village in southern Lebanon, near the border, hoping to return home after the fighting ended. His father, a lawyer and anti-British Mandate activist, was expelled to Acre at the start of the 1936 Palestinian revolt. After his family moved to Jaffa, Kanafani attended a French Catholic school. Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre on the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine in 1936. Three Palestinian refugees who seek security and a future outside their homeland meet a grim fate without achieving their goal.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novella A novella set in Iraq and Kuwait in 1958 published in Arabic (as Rijal fi al-shams) in 1963, in English in 1978.

The sun origin quest