Kanafani was born in Acre, Mandatory Palestine in 1936. During the 1948 Palestine war, his family was forced out of their hometown by Zionist militias. Kanafani later recalled the intense shame he felt when, at the age of 12, he watched the men of his family surrender their weapons to become refugees.[2] The family settled in Damascus, Syria, where he completed his primary education. He then became a teacher for displaced Palestinian children in a refugee camp, where he began writing short stories in order to help his students contextualize their situation.[3] He began studying for an Arabic Literature degree at the University of Damascus in 1952, but before he could complete his degree, he was expelled from the university for his political affiliations with the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), to which he had been recruited by George Habash. He later relocated to Kuwait and then Beirut, where he became immersed in Marxism