BEFORE his assassination in Beirut in 1972 by the Israeli secret service Mossad, Ghassan Kanafani was one of the greatest Palestinian writers and political activists of his generation. His novella Returning to Haifa was highly influential in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel seized east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which it holds to this day.

Kanafani got the inspiration for the book when his cousin and her husband crossed into Palestine after the June war in 1967. There they were told stories about how during the zionist attacks on Palestinian cities and villages, many families forced to leave their homes got separated during the Nakbah (“catastrophe”) in 1948 during a war in which 700,000 fled or were expelled from their homes.

When Ghassan’s cousin returned to Beirut she told the writer about a young couple who lost their young son. Out of this the novella emerged and it was recently adapted for the theatre by award-winning US playwright Naomi Wallace and co-writer Ismael Khalidi, himself born in Beirut in the bloody year of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.