On July 8, 1972, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani walked out of his apartment in a Beirut suburb, got into his Austin 1100, and turned the ignition. A grenade containing a three-kilo plastic bomb, planted behind the bumper by Mossad agents, detonated, shaking the entire neighborhood. Kanafani was incinerated instantly, together with his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamis Najim. He was only thirty-six.

It was a tragic irony that Kanafani should be assassinated in his car. His Men in the Sun, a refugee odyssey recounting the exile of Palestinians in the wake of the Nakba, ends with the death of Palestinian refugees in the back of a truck in the heart of the Arabian desert, culminating in Abu al-Khaizuran’s memorable cry: “Why didn’t you knock on the walls of the truck?!” The allure of Kanafani’s story has proven so durable that one can hardly watch the horrifying images unfolding from Gaza today, featuring over one million displaced Palestinians sheltering in sun-beaten tents with nowhere to go, without harking back to the final scene of Men in the Sun.

For the exiled Kanafani, death was the final leg of the journey of Palestinian displacement. It haunted him, both in fiction and real life. His death was orchestrated by the very forces that had dispossessed him.