Abu Ahmed told me what happened in the spring of 1948, his family’s version of a story I’d hear over and over during my time in Palestine. Despite the soldiers edging al-Birwa, the Sa’ad and Darwish families refused to leave the village. They changed their minds, though, when soldiers shot Mohammad Asham, a man both families knew. Mahmoud and Abu Ahmed’s fathers instructed their wives to flee with the children and the other women to Shaab, a village a few kilometers to the east, where they were to stay with relatives until the fighting ended and al-Birwa was safe. Abu Ahmed walked with Mahmoud Darwish and his family along the dirt road to Shaab. They were the last families to leave al-Birwa, and they took nothing with them. Darwish later wrote: “We left everything as it was—the horse, the lamb, the open doors, the hot dinner, the call to the evening prayer, the one radio set continuing, perhaps to this day, its broadcast of the news of our victory.”
The soldiers reached al-Birwa on June 11. Most of the villagers had left by then. The few women and children who remained took refuge in the village church, while a small group of villagers, armed with what Abu Ahmed called “old-fashioned rifles,” clashed with Israeli troops. The soldiers quickly overwhelmed al-Birwa’s defenders, who fled to the surrounding villages. Two weeks later, the villagers decided to return to al-Birwa to harvest their crops before they spoiled. Two hundred men and women marched on al-Birwa. Half carried rifles; the others wielded shovels, axes, and sticks. They surprised the occupying Jewish soldiers and forced them out of al-Birwa. “They liberated it at nightfall,” Darwish wrote, “drank the conqueror’s hot tea, and spent their first night of victory in sleep.” The villagers harvested their fields for a couple of days before soldiers from the Arab Liberation Army, a collection of volunteer soldiers from nearby Arab countries, convinced them to entrust the protection of the village to them.
The ALA failed to hold al-Birwa. Israeli forces routed the Arab soldiers a day later and occupied the village for a second time. While clashes continued on the outskirts of al-Birwa, some of the exiled villagers managed to enter to gather their possessions. Abu Ahmed’s father snuck in to retrieve olive oil and wheat from the family larder. By mid-July, though, al-Birwa was lost.
Shaab’s villagers ridiculed al-Birwa for surrendering to the Israelis. “They said the people from al-Birwa were cowards,” Abu Ahmed told me. “They said they would fight the Jewish soldiers and not give up as the people in al-Birwa had done. They said, ‘In Shaab, we are not afraid.’” In spite of their insults, the determination of Shaab’s residents heartened the Sa’ad and Darwish families and the other refugees from al-Birwa. But their confidence in their hosts crumbled when Israeli forces occupied a hilltop in the neighboring village of Mi’ar and began firing on Shaab’s resistance fighters.
The Sa’ads fled east to the village of Majd al-Krum while the Darwish family headed north to Lebanon. “We slept one night by the filthy Rmesh pool, next to pigs and cows,” Darwish wrote. “The following morning, we moved north. I picked mulberries in Tyre. Then our journey ended in Jizzine. I had never seen snow before. Jizzine was a snow farm, and it had a waterfall. I had never seen a waterfall before. And I had never known that apples hung from branches, I used to think they grew in boxes.”
Abu Ahmed’s family continued east in an attempt to stay ahead of the advancing Israeli soldiers. “It was summer, and we were very hot and thirsty,” he told me. “All the children were crying.” They arrived first in Deir al-Assad and then camped around a freshwater spring near Nahf before the Nahf villagers invited them to take refuge in their homes. The Sa’ads thought they were safe in Nahf until a Jewish soldier was killed in fighting near Majd al-Krum. Vengeful Israelis entered Nahf, lined four young men up against a wall, and shot them dead. Abu Ahmed watched their execution, and he still remembers their names: Youssef Taha, Salim Khashan, Showis Shaleh, and Kassem Aieshi. “When I saw them shot, I was totally convinced that what I’d heard before about the shooting and killings was true,” Abu Ahmed said. “It was not propaganda or rumors.” The family fled Nahf for villages named Yarka and Kafr Youssef, but these were already overcrowded with refugees. Eventually, Abu Ahmed and his family found safety in a village called Joolis.
The war would last fourteen months. By the time the final armistice agreement was signed in July 1949, Israel had seized control of all of the land promised to them by the partition plan, plus half of the land allocated for the Arabs. Seventy-eight percent of the British Mandate territory of Palestine became part of the State of Israel, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip and Jordan annexed the West Bank. Israel had effectively erased over four hundred Palestinian villages from the map, and between seven hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes. Most never returned. The refugees and their descendants, many still residing in refugee camps, now number in the millions. For Israelis, May 15 is Independence Day. Palestinians call it the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
The Darwish family lived in a Lebanese refugee camp for about a year before a guide smuggled them back across the border. By then, the Israelis had destroyed al-Birwa. Darwish discovered he was now both homeless and stateless. Because they had been absent during the new Israeli government’s first census of Arabs in 1949, the Darwish family were considered infiltrators. “Our legal status according to Israeli law was ‘present absentee,’ meaning that we were physically present, but without papers,” Darwish said in a 2005 interview. “Our lands were taken and we lived as refugees.” The family settled in a village in northern Galilee near Haifa and, like all Arabs in Israel, lived under Israeli military rule.
Darwish would later write that living in a state of internal displacement, a refugee in his own country, drove him to hate the second half of his childhood. “Everything here is proof of loss and lack,” he wrote. “Everything here is a painful reminder of what had once been there. What wounds you most is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’ A neighbor forbidden to visit.” Darwish’s father found work at a quarry but struggled financially. One afternoon, he summoned his three sons and told them that he could not pay for all of their educations. He asked for one of them to volunteer to quit school and join him at the quarry to help support the family. In unison, all three boys said, “I will.” Their father started to weep. This was the first time Darwish had ever seen him cry. Then he said, suddenly, “No, none of you.” They would somehow get by.
As a boy, Darwish found solace in reading and writing, in “escaping the mire into an imagined world, ink on paper.” When he was twelve years old, village officials invited Darwish to write and recite a poem marking Israel’s Independence Day. Darwish would enrage them. Instead of rejoicing in Israel’s founding as a nation, Darwish’s poem reflected on how Arabs were forced to celebrate the anniversary of their own occupation. “You can play in the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I cannot,” wrote the boy poet. “You have a house, while I have none. You have celebrations, while I have none.” The military governor of Galilee called Darwish into his office to scold him and warned that if he continued writing such poems, the governor would have Darwish’s father fired from his quarry job. “In a sense he was my first literary critic,” Darwish later said. “The incident made me wonder: the strong and mighty state of Israel gets upset by a poem I wrote! That must mean that poetry is serious business. My deliberate act of writing the truth as I deeply and honestly felt it was a dangerous activity.”
Darwish finished his schooling in Haifa before beginning a journalism career as a translator and editor for two communist newsletters. He published his first book of poetry, Birds Without Wings, in 1960. Darwish was under a confinement order and had to register twice a day at the local police station. One night, during a literary festival in Haifa, Darwish stood up and excused himself from a dinner with his fellow writers, saying he had to check in with the police. This outraged Dalya Rabikovitz, an Israeli poet, who shouted, “Don’t give us your Arab propaganda! In our country, we don’t
have people who have to check in with the police twice a day!” Darwish invited Rabikovitz to accompany him to the station. She did, and when she discovered Darwish was not lying, she scolded the policeman on duty.
Like other present absentees, Darwish also required a permit to travel throughout Israel. He often flouted this law and was imprisoned five times during the 1960s for the crime of leaving Haifa without permission. Police once arrested Darwish in Jerusalem as he came offstage from reciting poems at a poetry evening held in his honor. Darwish wrote of one of his prison sentences in his memoir In the Presence of Absence:
The expanse of the earth here is two meters, with a permanently shut iron door. The stocky sound of shoes bringing you lentil soup cooked with weevils. . . . You do not know if a new war has erupted, or if the old one has ended. You do not know if your clothes have stopped giving off their smell, or if your sense of smell has dulled.
At the same time the Darwish and Sa’ad families were escaping al-Birwa, another future lion of Palestinian literature, Ghassan Kanafani, was also in flight. Both writers’ stories begin with frightened boys fleeing a war. Both follow Palestine’s frayed plotlines. And both stories end with a detonation.
Kanafani was twelve years old and living in Acre when the city fell to Israeli forces. Like Darwish, Kanafani fled with his family to southern Lebanon—the two future writers may well have followed the same route across the border during the same merciless nights. Unlike Darwish, though, Kanafani never returned to what had become the State of Israel. His family moved from Lebanon to a UN-run refugee camp in Syria. Living as desperate refugees shocked the Kanafanis. The family had been well-off in Acre. Ghassan’s father worked as a lawyer, and young Ghassan studied in first-rate schools run by French missionaries. He read very little literature in Arabic at those schools, and even though he was still a boy, Kanafani realized he lacked a connection to the language and writings of his people. When he broke his leg jumping on boulders with his friends, Kanafani spent his six-month convalescence studying Arabic literature.
After graduating from high school, where he wrote some of his first stories, Kanafani began a course of study in Arabic literature at Damascus University. His political awakening occurred after he met George Habash, who led the Arab Nationalist Movement, a group of socialist activists committed to promoting unity among the region’s Arab states. Kanafani traveled to Kuwait in 1955 to take a teaching job in a government school, and in 1960 he moved to Beirut to join the editorial staff of Al-Hurriya (Independence), a political magazine Habash had started.
As a Palestinian, Kanafani could not legally take the magazine job. He needed to be a member of the writers’ union to work as an editor, and he could not join the union because he was not a Lebanese citizen. Eventually, Kanafani managed to leverage the fact that his grandmother was Lebanese and obtained a passport. Until then, he was forced to live and work in secret. He wrote his first novella, Men in the Sun, while in hiding. The book told the story of three exiled Palestinians being smuggled into Kuwait inside the empty tank of a water truck. Men in the Sun earned much praise in Lebanon and elsewhere after its publication in 1962, and established Kanafani as one of the Arab world’s newest literary talents.
I traveled to Beirut to meet Kanafani’s widow, Anni. Her office shares a street with a Lebanese government minister, which means military checkpoints blocked the road at both ends. The soldier at the security booth demanded my passport and asked me whom I wanted to see. He didn’t recognize Anni’s name. I called her on my cell phone and held the phone out to the guard. He refused to touch the phone, took a half step backward, and said Anni would have to come to the checkpoint herself before he would let me pass.
Anni walked up the street from her office to meet me. She is in her seventies now, small and a little hunched from age. I felt guilty for compelling her to hike up the hill, but she didn’t seem bothered. We went up to her office on the tenth floor, where she made Arabic coffee and served me little date cookies. We sat at a sunny table and talked about her husband.
Kanafani met and married Anni in 1961. She was a teacher from the Netherlands with a soft spot for political reactionaries—her own father spent five years resisting the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. The sixties proved productive for Kanafani. He became editor in chief of a daily newspaper that included a weekly supplement called Filastine. Then, in 1967, Kanafani started the newsletter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organization dedicated to Palestinian statehood that morphed out of the Arab Nationalist Movement. He also acted as the PFLP’s spokesman.
Kanafani somehow found time to edit an anthology titled Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, which introduced a young Mahmoud Darwish to the greater Arab literary scene. Kanafani also contributed journalism and editorials to several publications. “He had a sharp and satirical pen,” Anni said. “He used that sharp pen in many ways.” Kanafani wrote a regular political satire column under the pseudonym Faris Faris, a character who would often “argue” with Kanafani in print. Kanafani’s sense of humor frequently shocked those who considered him a sober political thinker. “We had foreign visitors and journalists in our home, and one evening a man said he couldn’t believe we were the same people who were so serious and so strong in the office,” Anni said. “Ghassan told him you need to get rid of some of that seriousness or you wouldn’t survive.”
With his days filled with politics and journalism, Kanafani wrote his short stories and novellas in the evenings once he returned home from work. “He was a very fast writer. Incredibly fast,” Anni said. “And his manuscripts would need very few corrections.” After the critical success of Men in the Sun, Kanafani’s friends encouraged him to abandon political journalism altogether and focus on his stories. But Kanafani refused to limit himself to fiction. In a 1962 letter, he wrote:
Now the advice from my friends to pay less attention to journalism is growing stronger. In the end, as they put it, journalism will destroy my artistic ability to write stories. In truth I don’t understand this logic. . . . I want to say something. Sometimes I can say it in the official news of the morning, sometimes fashioned into an editorial, or into a small piece on the society page. Sometimes I can’t say what I want to say in anything but a story.
Kanafani saw no disconnect between his literary impulses and his political activism. But Anni told me he considered himself a fiction writer first. Kanafani himself once said, “My political position springs from my being a novelist. Insofar as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.”
Returning to Haifa, published in 1969, may be Kanafani’s most beloved work. I remember sitting in a café in Haifa with a Palestinian who wept as he described the novella’s plot. The story begins in the wake of 1967’s Six-Day War, when Israel defeated armies from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Israeli army captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanians, the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria—all territories populated mainly by Palestinians. Arab governments were humiliated. Palestinians were despondent. Israel would eventually return the Sinai to Egypt, but its occupation of the rest of the territory seized in 1967 is ongoing.
In the aftermath of the war, with boundaries blurred by the occupation, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were permitted to travel to Israel for the first time since the Nakba. In Returning to Haifa, a Palestinian couple from Ramallah—Said and Safiyya—make their way to Haifa to see what has become of their former home. As they drive, Safiyya recalls the scene in Haifa in the spring of 1948, when Jewish forces advanced on the city. Haifa’s Arab population panicked and fled toward the sea, where British boats waited to transfer them out of Haifa. The streets were chaos. Eyewitnesses described children and the elderly being trampled in the stampede to the port. In Kanafani’s novella, Safiyya sees the fire of war approaching from the hills b
ehind her neighborhood. Leaving her five-year-old son, Khaldun, in his crib, Safiyya rushes down to the main street to look for Said and ask the crowds what is going on. “Suddenly she found herself in the middle of a wave of people pushing her as they themselves were being pushed from all over the city in a massive, unstoppable, powerful stream,” Kanafani writes. “She was carried along like a twig of straw.” Saffiya and Said somehow find each other in the confusion but are unable to escape the “flood of humanity” surging toward the port. They end up on a boat to Acre. Khaldun is left behind. For twenty years, silenced by sadness and guilt, Safiyya and Said never even utter Khaldun’s name. “The few times they had spoken of the child they always said ‘him,’” Kanafani writes.
Miriam, a Jewish woman from Poland who lost her father in Auschwitz, answers the door of Safiyya and Said’s old house in Haifa. She invites them inside and serves them coffee and biscuits from a tin. Then she reveals that she and her husband adopted Khaldun in 1948. They named him Dov. “I don’t know what his name used to be, nor if it even matters to you,” Miriam tells them, “but he looks a lot like you. . . .”
When Khaldun, or Dov, returns home, Said is shocked to see the young man, his lost son, in the uniform of an Israeli soldier. Dov treats Said and Safiyya roughly. He declares that Said is “on the other side” and the true nature of his parentage does not change anything. He scolds them for leaving him behind in his crib twenty years earlier. “Perhaps none of that would have happened if you’d behaved the way a civilized and careful man should behave,” he tells Said and calls him weak and backward. “I belong here, and this woman is my mother,” he says. “I don’t know the two of you, and I don’t feel anything special towards you.”
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