Late twentieth-century Palestinian literature is generally divided into two periods, that between 1948 and 1967, and that after 1967. Within these two major divisions, however, the period of the early 1960s stands out. It is in this extended moment that the idea of returning to Palestine is given narrative form: in the first visible stirrings of broad political organisation and armed struggle, through the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and in literature. The exemplary literary expression of this narrative may be found in two novels by Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fi al-Shams (Men in the Sun), published in 1962, and Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (All That's Left to You), which appeared in 1966. Kanafani was arguably the key Palestinian literary intellectual of the 1960s and his literature played a significant role in shaping how the post-1948 Palestinian experience has been understood. This chapter argues that gender is intrinsic to the narratives established in these novels, and that in them new forms of masculinity are constructed in relation to national loss and national restoration. Moreover, a fuller analysis of the mutual construction of masculine and national identity reveals a dynamic and historically specific symbolism at work in the well-known association between land and woman.

Born in Acre in 1936, Kanafani left with his family for Lebanon in 1948. Following his attendance at Damascus University, he went to teach in Kuwait. He returned to Lebanon in 1960 and worked for several newspapers.