The Khatib family

The name is occupational — it stems, as one account of the family puts it, “from the deliverance of Islamic sermons by imams during Friday prayer and Eid prayers” — and Palestinian clan dictionaries record dozens of distinct Khatib families across the country, from Jerusalem and Hebron to Tubas and Khan Younis; not every notable Khatib belongs to this line. The Jerusalem–Hebron branch is the one the chronicles know best: a family of property and office whose documented notables cluster around the Jerusalem municipality in the Jordanian decades.

Anwar al-Khatib (1917–1993) was born in Hebron into “a prominent land-owning Hebron and East Jerusalemite family.” A lawyer, he headed the municipal executive committee of East Jerusalem in 1949–50 and was then appointed by King Abdullah I district commissioner of the Old City of Jerusalem, a post he held from 1950 to 1967. After the June 1967 occupation he was banished to Safed on charges of “incitement to subversion” and kept under police surveillance; he died in East Jerusalem in 1993.

Ruhi al-Khatib (c. 1914–1994) — Abu Hani — had defended Jerusalem in 1948, among the few notables who stayed to organize the Old City’s defenses. Elected to the municipal council in 1951, he was appointed mayor by Jordan in January 1957, becoming “Amin of Jerusalem” when the municipality was renamed an amana two years later. Israel dissolved the Arab council on June 29, 1967; al-Khatib refused to recognize the dismissal, and on March 7, 1968 he was deported to Jordan without trial, testifying before the UN Security Council that May. In exile he remained, for Palestinians, the titular mayor of Jerusalem — he had helped found the Jerusalem District Electric Company and the Arab Hotels Company, and sat on the preparatory committee of the first Palestine National Council. Allowed back in 1993 after twenty-five years, he died in Amman on July 5, 1994, and was buried in Jerusalem; The Guardian’s obituary remembered him as “one of the first Palestinian ‘notables’ to be deported by the Israeli government in the wake of the June War of 1967.”

Notable members

• Ruhi al-Khatib (c. 1914–1994) — mayor of East Jerusalem (1957–67); deposed by Israel and deported in 1968, he kept the title of mayor in exile until his death.
• Anwar al-Khatib (1917–1993) — born in Hebron; mayor of East Jerusalem (1949–50) and Jordanian district commissioner of the Old City (1950–67).

Sources

• Ruhi al-Khatib — Jerusalem Story biography
• Ruhi al-Khatib — Wikipedia
• Anwar al-Khatib — Wikipedia
• Izzat Tannous — PalQuest biography