1922 - 1996
Noted Palestinian writer and politician.
Born in Haifa to a Protestant family, Emile Habibi worked in an oil refinery and later as a radio announcer. In 1940, he joined the Palestine Communist Party and helped form the Israeli Communist Party (ICP) in 1948. Habibi became one of leading Arab communists in Israel. He represented first the ICP in the Knesset (Israeli legislature) from 1952 to 1965 and later the New Communist List (also called RAKAH) from 1965 to 1972. He was also the longtime editor of the communist newspaper al-Ittihad. He left RAKAH in 1991 in the wake of disagreements about how the party should deal with the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Throughout his career, he was one of most important leaders of the Arab community that remained in Israel in 1948, after the first Arab - Israeli war displaced over 725,000 Palestinians.
Habibi was also a leading Arabic-language writer whose works, which included plays, novels, and short stories, were read throughout the Arab world even though he was an Israeli citizen. His 1974 novel, translated as The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessopti-mist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, rose to become a classic work of modern Arabic fiction and provided political insight into the challenges of being a Palestinian Arab citizen of a Jewish state. He was awarded the Jerusalem Medal of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1990 and the Israel Prize in 1992.
Habibi died in May 1996 and was buried in Haifa. He instructed that his epitaph simply read, "Emile Habibi - Remained in Haifa."
Bibliography
Fischbach, Michael R. "Emile Habibi." In Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, edited by Philip Mattar. New York: Facts On File, 2000.
Habibi, Emile. The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist:A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, translated by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick. New York: Vantage, 1982.
Jayyusi, Salma, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
— MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH
