Fayez Sayegh

Fayez Abdullah Sayegh was born in 1922 in Kharaba, in the Hauran region of Syria, where his father was a Presbyterian minister; his mother came from al-Bassa in Palestine, and he grew up in Tiberias and went to school in Safed. He took his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the American University of Beirut, left for the United States in 1947, and in 1949 earned a PhD in philosophy, with a minor in political science, from Georgetown University. He taught at Yale, Stanford, Macalester College and the American University of Beirut, and was a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Alongside the academy he worked as a diplomat and advocate: at the Arab League’s Arab Information Center in New York in the 1950s, as an adviser to the Lebanese and Yemeni delegations at the United Nations, and from 1967 as senior consultant to Kuwait’s foreign ministry and a member of its UN delegation. In 1965 he founded the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut and became its first director-general, publishing there his foundational study Zionist Colonialism in Palestine — the earliest systematic analysis of Zionism as a settler-colonial project built on what he called racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy — and the widely circulated pamphlet Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem. From 1968 until his death he served as rapporteur of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

His diplomatic effort culminated in 1975, when, speaking for Kuwait in the General Assembly’s debates on the elimination of racial discrimination, he was a principal intellectual architect of Resolution 3379 (10 November 1975), which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” His four UN statements of 1973–1975 were published as Zionism: A Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination (1976). Politically, he argued for a single democratic, secular state in Palestine — a “solution above them both,” as he put it — rather than the supremacy of either nationalism. He died in New York in December 1980 and was buried in Beirut.

Key works

• The Palestine Refugees (1952)
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict (1956)
• Arab Unity: Hope and Fulfillment (1958)
• Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)
• Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem (1965)
• Palestine, Israel and Peace (1970)
• Zionism: A Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination (1976)

Sources

• Fayez A. Sayegh collections — University of Utah Marriott Library (Archives West finding aid)
• Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) — full text at the Internet Archive
• Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem (PLO Research Center, May 1965) — scan at the Internet Archive
• In Memoriam: Dr. Fayez Sayegh’s Towering Legacy — Andrew I. Killgore, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
• Colonialism of a Dual Nature: Fayez A. Sayegh and a Palestinian genealogy of the settler colonial paradigm — Asia Maior (2025)