One of these concerns superstition, foretelling

the future, and the extent to which a supposed knowledge of what will happen can influence the course of events. The son who has respected his father’s superstitious belief fears that he may thus have brought about the disaster he sought to avoid. Kanafani set a puzzle for the reader, and by not supplying an answer he avoided committing himself on whether there might be anything in the idea that the future can be foretold or impending disasters averted by warnings. But aside from the metaphysical question, there is the level of practical action, and there Kanafani’s criticism of Arab society can be seen at work. Superstitions that provide a justification for passivity are to be condemned; through the false sense of security that they engender, they pave the way for tragedies that need not be inevitable, given a realistic appreciation of the situation.
The horse that appears in this story is more than a mechanical device to assist the flow of the plot. Kanafani liked to paint horses, and they play an important role in others of his stories and novels. His wife describes the meaning that they had for him: “The horse to us Arabs, he said, symbolizes beauty, courage, honesty, intelligence, truth, and freedom.” That Barq, the heartbreakingly beautiful horse, should have killed the wife whom Abu Ibrahim passionately loved reveals the connection that often exists in Kanafani’s work between ideal qualities and death, especially when these ideal qualities wake a great love.
A similar combination of motifs—beauty, mysterious tenderness, love, and death—is to be found in “The Falcon,” a haunting interweaving of symbol and reality. The setting, a nameless town being developed on the edge of the desert, and the engineers and guards working at the construction site could be duplicated all over the Gulf area. The use of this milieu by a Palestinian writer is particularly apposite, since its desolate but financially rewarding conditions have attracted many Palestinian professionals who have been unable to find work elsewhere. The figure of Jadaan provides a stark contrast with this world. As a bedouin, he represents an alien way of life, which in other circumstances may have been perceived as hostile and threatening; here, though, paradoxically, it is their contact with the bedouin guards that prevents the engineers from feeling completely isolated. Jadaan himself is a symbol of pride, of grandeur, and of devotion to an ideal so great that he sacrifices his life for it. Having given up all for a love that was doomed to tragedy, he waits, calm and unmoved, for death; only his pride remains to him.
In some of Kanafani’s stories, the hero chooses death not for individualistic reasons, but in order to further the struggle of his people, thus illustrating the attitude toward death that Kanafani himself came to hold. Anni Kanafani relates her husband’s response when a Western correspondent asked him, shortly before he was killed, whether death had a meaning to him:

Of course death means a lot. The important thing is to know why. Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an expression of the very highest understanding of life, and of the struggle to make life worthy of a human being. The love of life for a person becomes a love for the life of his people’s masses, and his rejection that their life persists in being full of continuous misery, suffering, and hardship. Hence, his understanding of life becomes a social virtue, capable of convincing the militant fighter that self-sacrifice is a redemption of his people’s life. This is a maximum expression of attachment to life.