1908 - 1980
Diplomat, activist, and first head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Ahmad Shuqayri was a Palestinian born in Tibnin, Lebanon, while his father, the Islamic judge Shaykh Asʿad Shuqayri, was living there in exile. Ahmad returned to the family's home town of Acre in 1916. After studies there and in Jerusalem, he entered the American University of Beirut in 1926 but was expelled by French Mandate authorities the following year for Arab nationalist activities. Following his return to Palestine, he studied law and wrote for a newspaper; after graduating from college, he went to work in the law offices of the nationalist figure Awni Abd al-Hadi and became involved in the pan-Arab nationalist Istiqlal Party. During the 1930s, Shuqayri put his legal skills to work on behalf of Palestinians charged by the British with security offenses. He fled Palestine for Cairo following the end of the Palestine Arab Revolt, returning only at the end of World War II. During the late 1940s, he was appointed head of the Arab Higher Committee's Arab Information Office in Washington and later headed the central Arab Information Office in Jerusalem. He fled to Lebanon during the 1948 fighting.
In exile, Shuqayri rose to become a leading Arab diplomatic figure during the 1950s and early 1960s. He served in the Syrian delegation to the United Nations from 1949 to 1950 before being appointed assistant general secretary of the League of Arab States (Arab League) from 1950 to 1957. He then served the government of Saudi Arabia as minister of state for UN affairs and as its UN representative until he was dismissed in 1963 for disagreeing with the Saudis over Egyptian intervention in the first Yemeni Civil War. Shuqayri began to play a major role in Palestinian nationalist affairs in September 1963, when he was asked to serve as the representative of Palestine at the Arab League. At the Arab summit of January 1964, he was asked to begin investigating the possibility of creating a uniquely Palestinian organization. That February, Shuqayri called for the convening of a Palestine National Council in East Jerusalem. At that meeting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created, with Shuqayri as its head. The PLO sought to mobilize Palestinians politically and militarily. It established offices in several Arab countries and worked to raise men to serve in the PLO's fighting force, the Palestine Liberation Army, brigades of which were attached to the armies of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.
Shuqayri and the PLO remained close to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Arab regimes. Far from a revolutionary organization, the PLO consisted of conservatives and nationalists willing to work with the regimes in liberating Palestine in coordination with overall Arab strategies toward Israel. Younger Palestinian militants, such as those in the al-Fatah organization, believed instead in a policy of independent, guerrilla-style struggle. Israel's massive defeat of Arab forces during the Arab - Israel War of June 1967 rendered the policies of the Arab states and the PLO bankrupt in the eyes of many Palestinians. For them, Shuqayri's elegant and sometimes heated rhetoric about liberation contrasted starkly with his failure and that of the established Arab elites. Associated with Nasser and the catastrophe of defeat, and facing criticism for his administration of the PLO, Shuqayri resigned on 24 December 1967.
He lived thereafter in Cairo until his opposition to the 1978 Camp David Accords prompted him to leave Egypt and move to Tunisia. He died in Amman, Jordan, while receiving medical treatment there on 25 February 1980, and was buried in the Jordan Valley just across the cease-fire line from his native country.
Bibliography
Cobban, Helena. The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People,Power, and Politics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Lesch, Ann Mosely. Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917 - 1939: TheFrustration of a Nationalist Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
— MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH
