I was enormously saddened to learn of the death of Leila Shahid, the leading Palestinian intellectual, activist, and diplomat. She passed away on 18 February.
I first encountered Leila, and got to know her, when she was posted to the Netherlands as the representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during the early 1990s.
Leila replaced the brilliant Afif Safieh. Safieh, a former advisor to PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, had since 1985 been a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs.
As part of the Reagan administration’s extremist tilt towards Israel, amplified by anti-Palestinian legislation drafted by AIPAC and adopted by the US Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, Safieh was in 1987 forced to leave Harvard and the United States. He was shortly thereafter appointed Palestinian representative to The Netherlands, and remained there until 1990, when he took up the post of PLO representative to Great Britain.
Succeeding Afif, Leila had large shoes to fill. From the outset, she wore them very comfortably. In an era in which the Palestinian diplomatic corps was increasingly staffed by cronies and mediocrities, she stood out as not only a consummate professional, but also an independent and critical mind whose network spanned the worlds of politics, activism, scholarship, and culture.
Leila had a particularly interesting personal history. She was a great-great granddaughter of Baha’ullah, the founder of the Baha’i faith who died in Acre, Palestine after his exile from his native Iran. One of her paternal great-grandfathers, Mirza Muhammad-Hassan, considered one of the apostles of the Baha’i faith, was beheaded on account of his religious beliefs and subsequently consecrated as “King of the Martyrs”. The Arabic for “martyr” is “shahid”, and this is how Leila’s paternal family acquired its surname.
Leila’s maternal grandfather was Jamal Husayni, a leading member of the prominent Jerusalem family and a Palestinian political leader during the British Mandate period. Jamal was for many years Secretary to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress, the national body formed by the Muslim-Christian Associations that were established after the First World War to promote independence in opposition to the Zionist project and its sponsorship by Great Britain.
In 1935, apparently unaware that the KGB would not invent Palestinians until 1964, Jamal Husayni founded the Palestinian Arab Party, and the following year became a member of the Arab Higher Committee, which was formed at the outset of the 1936-1939 national revolt against British rule and its Zionist surrogate.
Leila’s father, Munib, was born in Acre into the Baha’i faith, but was excommunicated when he married her mother, Serene Husayni of Jerusalem, in a Muslim ceremony. Leila herself was born in Beirut in 1949, the year after the Nakba, which swept her family along with so many others out of their homeland. Munib went on to become a department chairman at the American University of Beirut’s medical school, ensuring that Leila and her two sisters were raised in comfortable surroundings.
Like so many activists of her generation, Leila cut her political teeth at the American University of Beirut and through volunteer work in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. To the best of my understanding, she was broadly aligned with the leftist camp within the mainstream nationalist movement, Fatah, but never joined it.
She once recalled the initially dismissive attitude of Fatah leaders when she first approached them, who arrogantly dismissed her and fellow activists on account of their “bourgeois” background. As a young woman from a comparatively privileged background who additionally was not an armed cadre (fida’iyya), she had to prove herself. Her subsequent achievements and appointments demonstrate that she succeeded, and then some.
I recall one conversation in which she spoke at length about the impact of Beirut, its pluralism, and its open political and intellectual cultures upon the Palestinian national movement. Lebanon, in her view, exposed the movement to the world, and to its many and shifting currents, in ways that its previous base, Jordan, did not and could not. The impact was of course far from uniformly positive, and she recognized this, while also maintaining that on balance Lebanon expanded the movement’s horizons and enhanced rather than diminished it.
By the time I met Leila Shahid in the early 1990s she had long since made her mark. Fluent in Arabic, French, and English, she moved to Paris in the mid-1970s to pursue her doctorate, and became a leader in the General Union of Palestinian Students, which was in those days an influential and politically consequential organization.
She socialized easily, and was as naturally drawn to others as they were to her. Her extensive network within French society and the Arab diaspora spanned the realms of politics, academia, and culture.
Among them were the Moroccan novelist and literary critic, her future husband Mohammed Berrada. She also became close with the celebrated French author and activist Jean Genet, who at the beginning of the decade was among the first European cultural celebrities to champion the Palestinian cause.
In early September 1982, after Israel’s murderous siege of the Lebanese capital came to an end, Leila informed Genet that she was traveling to Beirut, and he immediately responded that he would join her. They arrived during the period between the PLO’s evacuation of the city and Israel’s invasion of it on 15 September, and were thus in the city during the Israeli-orchestrated Sabra-Shatila Massacre of 16-18 September.
Genet was among the first foreigners to enter the camps after the massacre, and his resulting essay, “Four Hours in Shatila”, is among the most powerful testimonies produced. The experience also spurred him to write his final book, Prisoner of Love, about his longstanding involvement with the Palestinian cause. Published shortly after Genet’s death in 1986, the text affectionately refers to Leila as an “ardent heroine”.
Leila Shahid was also an ardent talker. But she was one of those rare individuals who spoke both incessantly and interestingly. In this respect I remember an evening at my parents’ home with Leila and a visiting Palestinian official, where something seemed to be off. Only after I left did I realize the incredible event I had just witnessed. The visitor was such a motormouth that I hadn’t heard Laila’s voice all evening. It had never happened before, and would never happen again. But in contrast to Leila’s voluminous word counts, the following day I couldn’t remember a word the visitor had uttered.
During the 1980s, and before joining the Palestinian diplomatic corps, Leila had also been the director of the Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes, the French-language periodical published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. Given her extensive ties to France, and the PLO’s decision to close its mission in The Hague on account of its financial crisis after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a decision reversed after Oslo), Leila was in 1993 posted to Paris, where she would remain until 2006. Thereafter, and until her retirement in 2015, she headed the Palestinian mission to the European Union in Brussels.
I had only sporadic contact with Leila after she left The Netherlands. She occasionally visited The Hague, and on one occasion when I was in Paris she insisted on taking us to the Institut du Monde Arabe. When I met her in Brussels a few years before her retirement, her disillusionment with the incompetence, mediocrity, and failures of the leadership in Ramallah was total, and she was absolutely scathing in her assessments. But she considered it her duty to continue representing her people and cause as best she could, and also took a particular interest in nurturing emerging talent within her staff. Where others perceived a potential threat, she saw future leaders.
Whether she initially supported the catastrophic Oslo accords, or at least went along with the process, because she believed it offered a genuine opportunity, or represented the lesser of the available evils, or did so out of loyalty to Arafat, or because it was endorsed by virtually the entire planet, I don’t really know. I do however know that she was not naïve, and would not have endorsed it merely because it offered her the opportunity to visit the homeland she had been deprived of from the day she was born.
When I was studying for my unfinished doctorate on the history of Ottoman Palestine, I learned that Leila had become the custodian of the family archive, which apparently passed to her mother from Jamal Husayni and was then transported out of Beirut by Leila to safeguard it from the ravages of Lebanon’s civil war. She allowed me to photocopy the Ottoman documents, some of them several feet long and more than a foot wide. Making those copies was a bit more complex than putting them through a digital scanner, which didn’t exist in those days. Like Leila, they represent a valuable piece of Palestinian history.
Leila Shahid was not only the best of us, she was the very best of us.