I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child.

In September 1970, battles broke out between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM), a movement headquartered in Jordan and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Israeli forces. Such an outlook arguably goes against a culture that is heavily influenced by the idea of a pre-determined destiny lifted from a particular interpretation of the God described in the Qur’an. After World War I, Qustantin Zurayq, an Orthodox Christian from Damascus, Syria, and a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, devoted himself to articulating the concept of Arab nationalism.Men in the Sun clearly and bluntly describes that horrible journey that many people have taken or attempted to take in their efforts to try and find a better life for them and their families. West Asia found that the Palestinians “constituted 28 percent of all [Kuwait’s] engineers, 34 percent of surveyors and draftsmen, 27 of all doctors and pharmacists, 25 percent of all nursing staff, 38 percent of all economists and accountants, [and] 30 percent of the teaching staff” (Peretz, p.

It left me with an immense sadness for the characters upon completion; and more importantly, I really enjoyed Kanafani’s writing style. He longs for his modest crop, now in Zionist hands: ‘Ten trees with twisted trunks that brought down olives and goodness every spring. I was sure that the God we had known in Palestine had left it too, and was a refugee in some place that I did not know, unable to find a solution to his own problems. The other stories are just as powerful, and talk about refugees who have already left Palestine and how that has impacted them. In 1960 he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he became the editor of several newspapers, all with an Arab nationalist affiliation.Literally above ground, like the “underground railroad” used by slaves in antebellum America, this clandestine network of travel took the Palestinians on a long arduous route from Amman, Jordan, to Basra, Iraq, through Syria.