Birth: NULL/NULL/1947 Death:NULL/NULL/NULL
Born in Haifa in 1947; was forced to flee with his family in the course of the 1948 Nakba; grew up in Beirut, Lebanon; got involved with the Palestinian resistance movement; went to Paris in mid-1968 where he studied History; back to Lebanon, where he worked for the Institute for Palestine Studies; in 1969, was on the production team of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who made a film on the PLO entitled “Until Victory” (Jusqu’à la victoire); again moved to Paris in 1978; co-founder, in 1982, and editor-in-chief of the French-language Revue D’Etudes Palestiniennes (Review of Palestinian Studies) which is published by the IPS in Paris; also serves as Director of the IPS Paris office; PNC member since 1988; member of the PLO Central Council; was involved in the 1991 Madrid peace conference and the subsequent Washington negotiations as well as in the Multilateral talks on Refugees during 1993-96; was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, US, in the early 1990s; has taught in Lebanon, France (Paris VII University) and the US (Princeton University); co-directed, together with Simone Bitton, a documentary entitled “Mahmoud Darwish: The Land as Language” in 1998; has extensively written on issues related to the Palestinian cause; among his publications are Palestine 1948, l’expulsion (1984), Les Palestiniens dans le siècle (1994), Palestine, le pays à venir (Palestine: the Land to Come), Jérusalem, le sacré et le politique (Jerusalem: The Sacred and the Political; co-edited with Farouk Mardam-Bey, 2000), his memoirs Le Bien des absents (Absentees’ Property; 2001), Le Droit au Retour: le problème des réfugiés palestiniens (The Right to Return: the Problem of the Palestinian Refugees; co-edited with Farouk Mardam-Bey, 2002), and Figures du Palestinien, identité des origines, identité de devenir (Figures of the Palestinian: Identity of Origins and Identity to Come; 2004); has translated the works of Mahmoud Darwish into French; was appointed to become the Palestinian representative to the UNESCO in Oct. 2005.
