He moved with his mother to Mandatory Palestine in 1944, after his father had been abducted by the fascist movement of Francisco Franco and was never seen again.
As a young man, Ghilan joined Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, and participated in the struggle to free Palestine from British rule.
[1] In 1966 Bul, a tabloid which employed Ghilan as its deputy editor, published a story accusing the Mossad of involvement in the 1965 disappearance of the Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka.
Ghilan moved to Paris in 1969 and returned to Israel after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.
Ghilan died suddenly in his Tel Aviv home, in Jean Jaurès St., on 2 April 2005.