Emil Habibi
| Emile Habibi | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Date of birth | 28 January 1922 |
| Place of birth | Haifa, Palestine |
| Date of death | 2 May 1996 (aged 74) |
| Place of death | Nazareth, Palestine |
| Knessets | 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 |
| Faction represented in Knesset | |
| 1951–1959 | Maki |
| 1961–1965 | Maki |
| 1965–1972 | Rakah |
Imil (Emile) Shukri Habiby (Arabic: إميل حبيبي, Hebrew: אמיל חביבי, 28 January 1922 – 2 May 1996) was a Palestinian writer of Arabic literature and a communist politician, son of a Christian family.
Habibi was born in Haifa on 29 August 1922, into an Anglican Palestinian Arab family. His family had originally belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem but converted to Anglicanism due to disputes within the Orthodox church. In his early life, he worked on an oil refinery and later was a radio announcer.
Under the Mandate he became one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party. When the 1948 Arab-Israeli War began, he bravely stayed in Haifa while many others were forced to leave the country by the Israeli Army or fled in fear of attack. Having stayed in Haifa, however, Habibi was eventually granted Israeli citizenship. After the war, he helped to create the Communist Party of Israel and established the communist paper Al-Ittihad.
In 1956 he moved from Haifa to Nazareth and remained there for the rest of his life. He died in 1996 in Nazareth, but in his will, he expressed his wish to be buried in his beloved home, Haifa. His will also asked that his tombstone include the phrase "remained in Haifa."
Habibi was one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party during the Mandate era. He supported the 1947 UN Partition Plan. When Israel became a state he helped form the Israeli Communist Party (Maki). He served in the Knesset between 1951 and 1959, and again from 1961 until 1972, first as a member of Maki, before breaking away from the party with Tawfik Toubi and Meir Vilner to found Rakah. In 1991, after a conflict about how the party should deal with the new policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, he left the party.
...
Wikipedia