Wael Zuaiter

Wael Zuaiter was born in Nablus on 2 January 1934, the son of Adel Zuaiter. He studied Arabic literature and philosophy at the University of Baghdad, moved to Libya and then to Rome, where he worked as a translator for the Libyan embassy and became the PLO’s representative in Italy. Besides his native Arabic he spoke French, Italian and English, and he was at work on the first Italian translation of the Thousand and One Nights — a project that, as the artist Emily Jacir has recorded, he never completed.

In Rome he lived the life of a man of letters rather than of an operative: a lover of Dante’s poetry, of Mahler’s music, of opera, art exhibitions and parties, whose friends included the writers Jean Genet, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and who even flits past David Niven as a waiter in the 1963 Peter Sellers film The Pink Panther. In August 1972 Italian police held him for questioning in connection with a Black September bombing at an oil refinery and released him.

After the Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the Mossad placed him on an assassination list, suspecting him of heading Black September in Rome. On the night of 16 October 1972, as he returned to his apartment building at Piazza Annibaliano, two Israeli agents shot him eleven times. He was the first of ten Palestinians — along with Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter shot in Lillehammer, Norway — killed in the Mossad operation known as Wrath of God. The PLO insisted he had no connection to Black September; Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the organisation’s second-ranking figure, stated that Zuaiter had been “energetically” against political violence. At his funeral in Rome, his friend Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, told Zuaiter’s friends he would be next; weeks later he too was assassinated.

Sources

• Wael Zuaiter — All4Palestine
• Wael Adel Zuaiter: One-man show captures a Palestinian life cut short — Middle East Eye