Returning to Haifa

You haven’t asked, but yes, you both may stay in our house for the time being. And use our things. I figure it’ll take a war to settle it all.

A compelling story of two families – one Palestinian, one Israeli – forced by history into an intimacy they didn’t choose.

In 1948, Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya fled their home during the Nakba. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the borders are open for the first time in twenty years, and they dare to return to their home in Haifa. They are ready to find someone else living where they once did, but nothing can prepare them for the encounter they both desire and dread with the son they had to leave behind.

Ghassan Kanafani’s classic novella Returning to Haifa has been adapted for the stage by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. The play premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London, in February 2018 to coincide with the seventieth anniversaries of both the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ – the mass dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 – and the foundation of the State of Israel.