Birth: NULL/NULL/1904 Death:NULL/NULL/2004
Born in Jerusalem on 6 March 1904; got educated privately; after his father, a soldier in the Ottoman army, was killed in WWI, moved with his family to Amman in 1915; became an unofficial translator for British troops in 1918; returned to Palestine in 1919; worked for the British Palestine Authorities as a clerk in the Jerusalem district administration from 1920 and later (in 1927) with the Land Settlement Dept.; served as an inspector and land value assessor from 1938-48, contributing to the British government’s exhaustive work Village Statistics 1945: A Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine which brought to the world’s attention mandate records of Palestinian land ownership; went into exile following the Nakba of 1948; worked in the Jordanian Land Authority from 1949-52; then as land specialist for the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine in New York, determining the extent of property left behind by Palestinian refugees; in 1959, helped open the Palestinian Information Office in the US; worked in the Arab League offices in New York and Dallas in the 1960s; served as Director of the IPS in Beirut from 1960 until his retirement; then moved to Toronto, Canada, in the 1970s; his book Bitter Harvest: a Modern History of Palestine (first published in 1989) is a valuable reference on the Palestinian question; he also wrote Palestine – Loss of a Heritage (1963), and Palestinian Rights and Losses in 1948 (1988); died in 2004.
