Children under occupation: Conflicts, camps and agential identity in Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories

This article closely analyses four stories of Ghassan Kanafani from his collection of short stories titled Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories (2000), translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley. The chosen short stories narrate the stories of Palestinian children who are subjected to violence, oppression and exile. The article, by analysing the historical events of Palestine and its repercussions on the Palestinian ‘child’, foregrounds the ‘Bare Life’ and the agential identity of children in the crisis, who are forced to take on adult caretaking roles. Kanafani’s stories mourn the generations of child refugees who live a ‘Bare Life’ in the refugee camps, frequently exposed to conflicts, violence and poverty. However, the article argues that the figure of the child becomes an agent for Kanafani to delineate the Palestinian problems, history and political movements and acts as a potential symbol of resistance and change in the liberation struggles.