Saoirse

On this day, 8 July 1972 Palestinian novelist and communist Ghassan Kanafani was killed along with his teenage niece, Lamees Najim, in a bomb attack in Beirut in an act for which the Israeli intelligence service Mossad claimed responsibility. Kanafani had been forced to flee his home following the 1948 Nakba (the ethnic cleansing which accompanied the creation of the state of Israel), and live as a refugee in Syria. He began writing fiction, much of which looked at the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far 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". He subsequently joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. His obituary in the Lebanon Daily Star described him as "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages." Learn more about Palestinian history in these books: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/palestine