Faisal al-Husseini

Faisal al-Husseini was born in Baghdad on 17 July 1940, to a family at the centre of Palestinian national politics: his grandfather Musa Kazim al-Husseini headed the Jerusalem municipality from 1918 and led the Arab Executive Committee from 1920 until his death in 1934, and his father, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, commander of the Army of the Holy War, was killed at al-Qastal in April 1948. Raised in Egypt, Faisal volunteered with his brothers in the popular resistance to the 1956 attack on Egypt, joined the Movement of Arab Nationalists in 1958, and in 1959 helped found the General Union of Palestinian Students in Cairo, where he met Yasir Arafat.

He returned to Jerusalem in 1964 to run the popular organisation department in the new PLO office, attended the military academy in Aleppo in 1966, and joined the Palestine Liberation Army. After the June 1967 defeat he supervised a training camp for Palestinian volunteers in Lebanon, then crossed the Jordan back into occupied Jerusalem, where the Israelis arrested him and sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment on 15 October 1967. On release he stayed in the city, joined Fatah, and fought a ten-year legal battle to obtain a Jerusalem identity card. In 1980 he founded the Arab Studies Society with a group of Palestinian academics; the Israeli authorities harassed and repeatedly closed it, and placed Husseini under house arrest from 1982 to 1987. In 1987 he set up the Palestinian Human Rights Center and the Committee Against the Iron Fist, and became one of the most prominent leaders of the First Intifada, detained intermittently until 1989.

In 1991 he held the talks with US Secretary of State James Baker that prepared the Madrid peace conference and helped supervise the Palestinian team in the Washington negotiations. From that year the Orient House in Jerusalem served as his headquarters and became the PLO’s political address in the occupied territories, where the negotiating team met and foreign officials were received. He took charge of Jerusalem affairs for the PLO in 1995 and was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 1996. He confronted settlement construction at Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghunaym, survived assassination attempts by Israeli settlers, and on 28 September 2000 stood with other Jerusalemites against Ariel Sharon’s tour of the Haram al-Sharif, which set off the Second Intifada.

Known as the Lion of Jerusalem, Husseini died on 31 May 2001 during a visit to Kuwait. He was buried the next day on the Haram al-Sharif beside his father and grandfather, mourned by tens of thousands of Palestinians; the UN Security Council observed a minute of silence in his honour.

Sources

• Faisal al-Husseini — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question