BEFORE his assassination in Beirut in 1972 by the Israeli secret service Mossad, Ghassan Kanafani was one of the greatest Palestinian writers and political activists of his generation. His novella Returning to Haifa was highly influential in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel seized east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which it holds to this day.

[[{"fid":"2548","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ismael Khalidi ","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Ismael Khalidi ","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Ismael Khalidi ","class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"},"link_text":null}]]Kanafani got the inspiration for the book when his cousin and her husband crossed into Palestine after the June war in 1967. There they were told stories about how during the zionist attacks on Palestinian cities and villages, many families forced to leave their homes got separated during the Nakbah (“catastrophe”) in 1948 during a war in which 700,000 fled or were expelled from their homes.

When Ghassan’s cousin returned to Beirut she told the writer about a young couple who lost their young son. Out of this the novella emerged and it was recently adapted for the theatre by award-winning US playwright Naomi Wallace and co-writer Ismael Khalidi, himself born in Beirut in the bloody year of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

On stage at London’s Finborough theatre, it is a moving and emotionally devastating story of separation and loss. In it, Said and Safiyya return to their home in Haifa two decades after they fled in 1948. It's now occupied by a Polish woman who survived Auschwitz and her son, who it turns out is the baby boy they left behind in the Nakbah.

For Khalidi, now based in Chile, the connection to the novella which he helped adapt for stage was personal. His father knew the writer in Beirut in the late 60s and early 1970s before he was killed. “As a Palestinian you would be hard-pressed to find many Palestinian who don’t know who Kanafani is,” he told me.

Returning to Haifa had been adapted into Hebrew for a production in Israel in 2011. Then the Israeli writer Boaz Gaon translated his own version of the work into English and had it produced in the US. “He changed a lot of the book, much to the displeasure of the Kanafani family,” says Khalidi.

“That was one of the reasons we wanted to step in and adapt it because there had been this really problematic adaptation and we felt that our aesthetic and our politics would serve Kanafani’s work well.”

Returning to Haifa almost didn’t make it to the stage on this occasion after its initial co-funders — New York’s Public Theater — came under pressure and dropped the project last year.
Nothing appeared wrong after the initial read-through of the script. “They were incredibly happy with it according to them,” Khalidi recalls. “We did two readings in New York and Dublin in January 2015. “And then there was this long, slightly suspicious period of silence in which we were not getting any kind of further information about the process.”

Finally, US producer Oskar Eustis said he could not produce it because of political pressure from his own board. “Basically they would not let him produce it in New York.”
The Public Theater is a powerful mainstream theatre, producing huge and progressive-leaning works like Hamilton, the smash musical about the US founding father with a black cast and rap score, now wowing London’s West End.

With the theatre axing the play, Khalidi and Wallace were in danger of losing the rights to the piece. “One of the reasons it was important for us to get a production and keep the exclusive rights is there are many people at all times who want to adapt Kanafani,” he explains.

At the eleventh hour director Caitlin McCleod, who had read the play and wanted to do it, stepped in with independent producer Lynn McConway. The Finborough theatre in London agreed to co-present it.

Although the play looks at events from half a century ago, Khalidi insists that its message is essential today. “We are right now just past a century of Balfour, 70 years since the Nakbah, and partition. Those are all things we have to keep track off.

“One of the most destructive patterns and strategies in the West when you are talking about the zionist discourse and version of what’s happening in Palestine, is that we can be selective about what we include and what we don’t. We can start with a rocket being fired from Gaza.

“It’s simple chronology and political science, it's not something that started yesterday nor is it an ancient Biblical thing. It’s related directly to British imperialism, American hegemony and zionist settler colonialism.”
Khalidi is hopeful after the critical and commercial success of the London run that Returning to Haifa will find its way to other theatres — and back to the US.

“The big irony about the censorship of this play in particular is that Kanafani was so ahead of his time — it is probably a much more empathetic portrayal of an Israeli Jewish Holocaust survivor than you will find in any mainstream portrayal of a Palestinian, in terms of understanding.

“For all the talk of balance, which is usually a euphemism for excluding the Palestinian story, this is as balanced a story as you can find.”