Arab Literary Travels

Lili Clift: Background Page

Ghassan Kanafani’s “Return to Haifa” takes place in the aftermath of the Six Day War. It focuses on the return of Said and Safiya, a Palestinian couple, to their hometown of Haifa. The couple was expelled from Haifa in April 1948 to make room for Israeli immigrants. This push to expel the Palestinians by “ Zionist forces [was] led by the Haganah” who were on a mission to implement what was called “Plan D, which called for the conquest of entire Arab villages” (World History Encyclopedia, 353). In May of the same year, the state of Israel was officially founded which caused a massive amount of backlash from “Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq” (World History Encyclopedia, 353). The couple ended up fleeing to Ramallah in Jordan, a major destination for Palestinian refugees.
            Meanwhile, back in Haifa, a polish couple called Miriam and Evrat had moved into the former home of Said and Safiya. This couple had fled Europe in the wake of WWII; they were Jewish and had narrowly avoided getting sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. According to the story, the couple left Warsaw in 1947, which was out of the ordinary because most people escaped the area after “the end of the deportation” with less that “41,000” jews remaining in Warsaw before the uprising in 1944 (Paulsson, 56). After this uprising, the number of Jews in the area would have seriously diminished, especially by the time of 1947. It is possible that Miriam and her husband managed to remain in hiding in the Aryan Quarter of the city, and were never placed in the Warsaw Ghetto to begin with. Though this is never directly stated, it is most likely the case since Miriam describes hiding from the authorities in her (presumably Aryan) neighbor’s apartment. This was an uncommon situation, and it required massive amounts of help from the Aryan community and “utmost secrecy” even between family members (Paulsson, 101). With help from some Zionist groups who were pushing Jewish Europeans to move to Israel, the couple first fled to Italy in 1947 and then to the outskirts of Haifa in 1948 while they waited for the city to be cleared. The couple then proceeded to move into the home of Said and Safiya and make Haifa their new home in the wake of the conflict. By this time “the remaining Arab population in Israel amounted to 158,000, versus a Jewish population then estimated at 901,000” (Fannack).
            After the Six Day War in 1967, Said and Safiya were allowed to return to their old home in Haifa. The question of right of return for Palestinians was a major issue at this point in time, many Palestinians even seeking reparations and the return of their property (Fannack). Though Said and Safiya didn’t seek anything like this since they had built their life in Ramallah (not to mention the new Haifa was nothing like the Haifa they once new), they still faced tense conversation with Miriam and their abandoned son about the implications of their return and the relations between Palestinians and Israelis. 
 

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