Palestinian Refugees

Ghassan Kanafani begins his story with a couple returning to the city of Haifa after 20 years. Without much description or setting, it is clear based on their dialog that the couple are displaced people returning to Haifa, Israel after a war had taken place between the Jews and the local Arabs. This story is a great first hand account of the events that took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that saw Israel rise to a regional power that would eventually take control of most of the Palestinian land in the area. It tells a side of both how war affects the local population and also of the persecutions of the Palestinians by the Israelis during their many years of conflict, a side which has been coming to light more in the last few decades. Kanafani goes into extreme detail during his story about the shock and confusion felt by refugees and how quickly things can go from null and quiet to chaotic turmoil. This one sentence from page 155 is a good summary of what it was like during the outbreak of the war, “The sky was on crackling with shots, bombs and
explosions, near and far. It was as though the very sounds themselves
were pushing everyone toward the port. Even though he could
not concentrate on anything specific, couldn’t help but see
how the throng of people thickened with every step. People
were pouring from the side streets into main street leading
down to the port. Men, women and children, empty-handed
or carrying a few small possessions, crying or being floated
along in a paralyzed silence in the midst of the clamor and confusion.” I think that one of the reasons that Kanafani wrote this book is to shed light on the Palestinian refugee issue that has been ongoing for decades now. A very controversial topic, with both sides believing they are correct and a lack of international influence on the matter, Returning to Haifa is a good reference for any study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with it being recently published and very descriptive in detail.

Arab refugees fleeing to Lebanon, 1948, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Margolick-t.html

I believe that the thesis for the second reading, Return to Half-Ruins by Lila Abu-Lughod is stated in the second page, 79, as, “What I, as the daughter of someone who lived through the Nakba learned from my father’s return to Palestine, was that, for Palestinians, both memory and post-memory have a special valence because the past has not yet passed.” This story is told through a different perspective than that of Kanafani. Kanafani wrote in the first person perspective of someone who was a “primary source” witness to the events of the story, whereas Abu-Lughod’s story is told from a first-person perspective but all the details are stories told to the main character from her dad. In Kanafani’s story, everything is as it was remembered, and Abu-Lughod’s is what was told and passed down to the daughter of the Palestinian father. Through this story telling method by Abu-Lughod, a different aspect is shown as the more the father tells of his past, the more emotion that can be put into his stories which translates into the daughter. A good example of this is on page 80, “Stories of paternal tenderness and moral training gave us glimpses into the character o f his father, the grandfather we had never known, and the nature of family life in pre-1948 Palestine.” Although both readings relay the same emotions and feelings towards the Palestinian issue, they’re told through different means which can both be inferred differently based on the reader.