Returning to Kanafani’s Haifa

Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa (1969) remains one of the most discussed texts in Palestinian literature. This novella, his last before his assassination, tells the story of a Palestinian couple, Said and Safiyya, who return to their lost home in Haifa twenty years after being forced to flee during the 1948 Nakba. Upon their return, they find that their infant son, Khaldun—left behind in the chaos of their displacement—has been raised by a Holocaust survivor, Miriam, under the name Dov, and now serves as a soldier in the Israeli army.

Set against the aftermath of 1948 and the reverberations of 1967, Returning to Haifa is a story of personal loss and a meditation on historical rupture. The narrative unfolds as a confrontation between past and present and as an encounter between multiple displacements—Nakba and Holocaust, exile and return, memory and erasure. In its tightly woven structure, the novella stages a layered confrontation between competing claims to home, identity, and belonging, prompting the reader to confront unresolved historical traumas without offering the comfort of closure.

Despite the extensive scholarship on the novella, the text still allows further interpretations and contemplation. As Elias Khoury notes, Kanafani’s writing “encapsulates rather than narrates, condenses rather than draws out,” offering dense and multifaceted layers of meaning. While some readings have viewed the text as didactic, closer scrutiny reveals its deep contradictions and complexities, inviting continuous re-examination. Indeed, as Barbara Harlow articulates, Kanafani’s work does not merely present a set of ideological positions but rather “opens these contradictions to a productive analysis which would eventually redefine the borders.” It is in this spirit that we seek to return to Returning to Haifa.

Yet, by situating the novella as our point of departure, the workshop also goes beyond it, examining the afterlives and adaptations but also the debates, inconsistencies, and opposing perspectives the reading of the novella invites. What is more, we wish to ponder: what does it mean to situate Kanafani and this specific text as our focal point at this current moment?