Ghassan Kanafani: The Revolutionary Who Wrote for Palestine

On this day, 53 years ago, Israeli Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut. A car bomb took his life and that of his 17-year-old niece, Lamees Najim. He was 36 years old. She was on her way to register for classes at the American University of Beirut.

Kanafani never fired a gun. His weapon was language. And for that, they killed him.

Born in Akka, Palestine, in 1936, Kanafani’s life was shaped by the violence of Zionist colonisation. At 12, during the Nakba of 1948, he and his family were forced from their home by Zionist militias. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, they fled into exile—ending up in Damascus, Syria.

In Damascus, Kanafani finished his education and became a teacher for displaced Palestinian children in refugee camps. It was there he began to write. His short stories and novels spoke to the lives of refugees, helping his students and readers alike understand their condition—not as a passive tragedy, but as part of a larger struggle for liberation.

After moving to Kuwait and then Beirut, Kanafani immersed himself in political organising and resistance. He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), where he became a spokesman and editor of Al-Hadaf (“The Target”), the organisation’s newspaper. Through journalism, essays, novels, and plays, he worked tirelessly to expose the realities of Israeli occupation and the Palestinian struggle.

His 1963 novel Men in the Sun remains one of the most celebrated works in modern Arabic literature, telling the story of three Palestinian refugees trying to cross into Kuwait. The novel is not just a literary masterpiece but also a searing indictment of Arab complicity and Palestinian dispossession.

Kanafani understood the power of words. As his wife Anni Kanafani later said:

“You were able to explain in simple terms the most difficult political ideas. That is why people listened to you, read your articles and books, and will continue to do so. And that is why the enemies had to destroy you.”

Perhaps nowhere is his clarity of thought and tenderness more evident than in his words about Palestinian children:

“I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: ‘Where were you?’ They would say ‘We were playing in the clouds.’”

On 8 July 1972, Mossad operatives placed a three-kilogram bomb in Kanafani’s car. He and Lamees were killed instantly. His murder was part of Israel’s campaign of assassinations targeting Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and activists—the people who refused to let the world forget.

Ghassan Kanafani left behind a legacy that continues to inspire Palestinians and solidarity movements worldwide. He taught that storytelling is resistance. That liberation is the only answer—not capitulation, not compromise.

From occupied Palestine to refugee camps and the far diaspora, Kanafani’s voice endures. His words live on in the children of Gaza, Jenin, and Rafah, who still read him—and write back with their own stories.

As he once wrote:

“To us, to liberate our country… is something as essential as life itself.”

They feared his pen.

They feared his ideas.

And yet, 53 years later, they have not silenced him.