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From the Introduction
For nearly a century, politics, violence, and diplomacy have all failed to resolve the complex, mythified, and misunderstood clash that since 1948 has come to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Certainly it is not for lack of study; books on the subject in English alone could fill a small-town library. Perhaps what has been missing - or ignored - throughout is the quotidian human reality underlying the vital history that continues to connect Palestinians everywhere to the land once called Palestine. Often, literature can provide the human dimension that the historian's work alone cannot. The literary works of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani resonate with precisely that human dimension.
About the Book
"Politics and the novel," Ghassan Kanafani once said, "are an indivisible case." Fadl al-Naqib has reflected that Kanafani "wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it." His narratives offer entry into the Palestinian experience of the conflict that has anguished the people of the Middle East for most of the twentieth century.
In Palestine 's Children, each story involves a child - a child who is victimized by political events and circumstances, but who nevertheless participates in the struggle toward a better future. As in Kanafani's other fiction, these stories explore the need to recover the past - the lost homeland - by action. At the same time, written by a major talent, they have a universal appeal.
Born in Acre (northern Palestine) in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a prominent spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and founding editor of its weekly magazine Al-Hadaf. His novels and short stories have been published in 16 languages. He, along with his niece, was killed in Beirut in 1972 in the explosion of his booby-trapped car. An Israeli journalist later quoted a Mossad agent as saying that Kanafani should not have been on the list of assassinations which were carried out by the Israeli intelligence agency.
Excerpts from the novella
When he reached the edge of Haifa, approaching by car along the Jerusalem road, Said S. had the sensation that something was binding his tongue, compelling him to keep silent, and he felt grief well up inside of him. For one moment he was tempted to...