Birth: 15/2/1929 Death:23/5/2001
Born in Jaffa on 15 Feb. 1929; educated at Amariyya School; while in high school, involved in the struggle for Palestinian rights and against British and Zionist policies; fled Jaffa in 1948 and moved to the US via Beirut; gained his BA and MA from the University of Illinois (1953 and 1954) and his PhD in Middle East Studies from Princeton University (1957); worked three years as a field expert for UNESCO in Egypt, then returned to the US; founded in 1968 and led thereafter the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG); taught Political Science at American universities in the 1970s and 1980; was elected to the PNC in 1977 and began work on the establishment, under the auspices of Unesco, of a Palestine national Open University in Beirut (which came to an end with the Israeli 1982 invasion of Lebanon); one of two PNC members (with Prof. Edward Said), who met US Sec. of State Shultz in March 1988 to discuss his peace proposals; resigned from the PNC in 1991 in order to be able to return to the West Bank as an American passport holder the year after; was appointed Vice-President of Birzeit University and helped establishing the Faculty of Graduate Studies; author and editor of many works on the question of Palestine, incl. The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Northwestern, 1971); co-founder of and active in the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights (PICCR), the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center, and the Qattan Cultural Center in Ramallah; one of the leading Palestinian academics and intellectuals; died on 23 May 2001 of cancer in Ramallah, and was buried next to his father in the family plot, at the Ajami district cemetery in Jaffa.
