Accompanied by a 17-year-old niece, Palestinian Guerrilla Leader Ghassan Kanafani, 36, walked out of his apartment in a Beirut suburb, sat down at the wheel of his Austin 1100 and turned on the ignition. The car disintegrated in a horrendous explosion that killed the occupants and shook the neighborhood. Ten pounds of plastique had been stuffed under the right front fender; a hand grenade that served as detonator was wired to the ignition.
Acre-born Novelist Kanafani (Men in the Sun, That Which Remains for You), an exile from his homeland since 1948, was an ideologist and spokesman for the Marxist Popular...