Anchorage Daily Times · Anchorage, Alaska · 11 July 1972

CP-1972-007

Kanafani: The Artist Who Turned Revolutionary

Mike Doogan, Times Staff Writer

Transcribed from the clipping

“Editor’s Note: Times staff writer Mike Doogan spent the summer of 1970 in the Middle East studying the situation of Palestinian refugges and guerrilla organizations as preparation for a model United Nations meeting held in San Francisco in November. The following are his remembrances of Ghassan Kanafani, guerrilla spokesman, editor and novelist who was killed in a booby trapped car in Beirut, Lebanon last Friday… Ghassan Kanafani came in out of the afternoon sun looking like a man who had been dragged through a strainer. His green sport shirt and tan pants were rumpled and sweat stained and there were stress lines running from the corners of his dark eyes toward his short sideburns. ‘I must apologize for being late,’ he said as he moved around the scarred wooden desk and slouched into a swivel chair behind it, ‘but I have been extraordinarily busy. Last night someone tried to kill a man in our organization and we have been looking for him.’… ‘telling was not enough. So I joined the Front and work on the newspaper. I work where I am most effective, but I will fight too. We all fight.’ He was serious about the fighting but he had no illusions about it. ‘I carry a gun you know,’ he said and produced a black automatic from a pocket. He set it down on the table and looked at it. ‘I can see what will happen when they come for me. I’ll say, “Wait a minute” and try to get the gun out. They’ll shoot me full of holes while I am trying to get the gun out.’ He was laughing and so were his dinner companions. ‘It will make headlines in all the papers: “Ghassan Kanafani got caught with his pants up but his gun down”.’… The woman, dressed entirely in black, sat on the curb, begging. She had been driven from her home in southern Lebanon by the continued fighting between fedayin and Israelis and the resultant collapse of the area’s chronically depressed economy… ‘That’s why we struggle,’ Kanafani said, gesturing at the woman with the end of one in a chain of smoldering cigarettes, ‘we struggle for these people and the people in the (refugee) camps.’ He turned back into the room. ‘I would rather have peace,’ he said. ‘I would rather have the time to spend with my family, my wife and daughter, and my writing. But because of these people, we must continue the struggle.’ He shrugged and sat with the cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘Please,’ he said to a visitor who was fingering an antipersonnel grenade of Eastern European manufacture, ‘put that down carefully. Out of all my decorations, you are now handling the one that is not deactivated and we could all be gravely inconvenienced. I don’t have time to be blown up, I have too much to do.’”

Context added by this archive

Ten American papers in this archive carried his killing. This is the only one whose headline calls him an artist. Two years before the car bomb he acted out for a reporter how they would come for him, and made a joke about what the headline would say. The headlines said Arab militant leader, and guerrilla chief, and one of its leaders. The paper’s own spelling, refugges, is kept.

Cite this item

"Kanafani: The Artist Who Turned Revolutionary," Anchorage Daily Times, 11 July 1972. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1972-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1972-007

Elsewhere in the archive

• Artist Seeking Mideast TogethernessThe Daily Progress · 3 May 1972 · the same year
• Arab Militant Leader Dies In Car ExplosionJacksonville Journal · 8 July 1972 · the same year
• Israel Accused in Assassination BlastThe Flint Journal · 9 July 1972 · the same year