Arab Literary Travels

Lili Clift: Conclusion Page

The story of “Return to Haifa” by Ghassan Kanafani may seem like a specific account of the experiences of a Palestinian family and a Polish and Jewish family in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it serves as an example for the experiences of a multitude of families who went through the exact same thing. This more personal view of the conflict allows the reader to more easily connect to and understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kanafani's writing shows the conflict from both sides, showing the reader that both sets of characters went through similar and horrible traumas that ended up connecting their lives in very interesting ways. Through my mapping of the couples' journey, I hope to similarly illustrate both sides of this conflict, and show how their journeys and destinations reflect each other. Kanafani's narrative style also fits in with the other texts we’ve read in the semester, focusing on personal stories to better contextualize broader problems. By focusing on the specific travel stories of the characters in this story, my project aims to illustrate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a more accessible way than reading through scholarly articles on the topic. In this project, I hope I succeeded in providing more of a background to Kanafani’s excellent narrative so that my classmates from both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. 
During the Q&A portion of my presentation day, one of my classmates encouraged me to look into an organization called Friendship Across Borders. This organization seeks to "train young Jewish Israelis, Palestinians and Germans... to understand "the other", to see conflict through the eyes of the "enemy" and thus to find mutual empathy and respect" (FAB, Mission Page). I thought this was a beautiful way to contextualize my work into the modern moment. Just as Kanafani seeks to illuminate both sides of the conflict, this organization seeks to bring both sides together to understand each other and get a better understanding of how their conflicts have divided their communities. Before this project, I really had no knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and my work has helped me to understand the history of the area and the modern context of the ongoing problems. Unlike other things that we read or watched that focused on the Palestinian point of view, Kanafani's piece helped me to see the conflict from the other side and realize the importance of seeing the plights of both parties in the conflict. I hope that through my project, others might gain some understanding of this conflict and have the desire, as I did, to go after more information in order to understand the world we live in today and the conflicts that shaped it. 

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