In 1960 he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he became the editor of several newspapers, all with an Arab nationalist affiliation. You were huddled there, as far from your childhood as you were from the land of oranges—the oranges that, according to a peasant who used to cultivate them until he left, would shrivel up if a change occurred and they were watered by a strange hand.

The trip was dangerous, for the group had to evade Kuwaiti as well as Iraqi patrols, which often meant walking up to 120 miles. When I posted online that I was about to read 'Men in the Sun' by Ghassan's Kanafani, a friend remarked that it was, "unbearably sad. Three Palestinian dudes hide in a truck to get themselves smuggled into Kuwait for work and money for their families. He turned right round once, but he was afraid he would fall, so he climbed into his seat and leaned his head on the wheel.

Growing up in high school, it was required reading to read about the Holocaust and there were fiction books on the Holocaust in our curriculum. The third refugee heading east is Marwan, for whom ‘the last threads of hope that had held together everything inside him for long years had been snapped’ He is 16 years old. But to me it seems that the extent and speed of this migration has increased a lot in the 20th and 21st centuries beyond anything experienced before.

Diabetes” who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me” (Kanafani, Palestine’s Children, p. A more convincing reading, however, would take account of the position of Arab nationalism at the time of the novel’s composition and publication.I don't know but what I know is that Ghassan had a great vision and he visualized it in his masterpieces. Assad fl ed the refugee camps because the police are looking to arrest him for his political activities. They lead a rather miserable life without any perspective in the huge refugee camps in Jordan, Iraq and other Arab countries. On this day, we remember Ghassan Kanafani as the martyr who wrote about martyrs, as the revolutionary whose legacy lives on through his profound works and inspires us to, as pleaded by the lorry driver in Men in the Sun, knock on the tank.

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. The thought slipped from his mind and ran onto his tongue: "Why didn't they knock on the sides of the tank? Its members turned to Marxism-Leninism, adopting it as the way to achieve “real” national unity, forged among the masses rather than regimes. I loved Nadia from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation which has been so brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation. These schools, which emphasized the Arabic language and its literature in contrast to Turkish culture, helped raise a national consciousness among their students.Through a series of fl ashbacks and stream-of-consciousness narratives, the text shows that even though all three imagine Kuwait to be a paradise of riches, they each fl ee the refugee camps of Palestine for different reasons. On his way to Kuwait, he reminisces about life in Palestine (he is the only one of the three old enough to harbor pre-1948 memories). Having taken the necessary precautions, Abdullah was pleased to see his population more than double and his kingdom expanded by the addition of the West Bank. The other stories are just as powerful, and talk about refugees who have already left Palestine and how that has impacted them.

Men in the Sun, set during the late 1950s, tells the story of three Palestinians, each from different generations, who attempt to immigrate illegally into Kuwait from southern Iraq. Men in the Sun clearly and bluntly describes that horrible journey that many people have taken or attempted to take in their efforts to try and find a better life for them and their families. The harmony between Kuwait and its Palestinian community was neither absolute nor permanent, however, as shown by events that transpired between the publication of the novella in Arabic in the 1960s and its translation into English in the late 1970s.They are no longer able to feel proud of their own achievements, but rather constantly find themselves at the mercy of others. His decision to tell Palestinian stories in this way doesn’t of course diminish the work of other authors who chose to highlight both the stories and the roles of the Israel forces; this style is just another valid form of amplifying Palestinian stories. A short novella about Palestinian refugees struggling to make ends meet and deciding to try and smuggle themselves to Kuwait for work, and some other stories. There he negotiates with the smuggler Abul Khaizuran, not only for himself but also for his two companions. The other stories in this collection are also very good; I was particular impressed by The Land of Sad Oranges, a short story about a family who is forced to flee their home and escape to Lebanon.