8 July

‘I saw pistols and machine guns thrown onto a big table, saw the long line of big vehicles coming into Lebanon, leaving the winding roads of the land of oranges far behind, and then I too cried bitterly. Your mother was still silently gazing at the oranges, and all the orange trees your father had left behind to the Jews glowed in his eyes… As if all those clean trees which he had bought one by one were mirrored in his face. And in his eyes tears, which he could not help hiding in front of the officer at the police station, were shining.

When in the afternoon we reached Sidon we had become refugees.’

Jaffa: Land of oranges, Ghassan Kanafani

Palestinian writer and spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated today in 1972, in car bomb for which Mossad later claimed responsibility.