Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Azmi Bishara, was born in 22 July 1956 in Nazareth, Israel, a former member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament and founder of the Balad Party, is a Palestinian and an Israeli citizen. an intellectual, academic, politician, and writer.
In 2007, Bishara was questioned by police on suspicion of aiding and passing information to the enemy during wartime, contacts with a foreign agent, and receiving large sums of money transferred from abroad. Bishara denied the accusations and said they were part of an effort to punish him because he had opposed Israel's invasion of Lebanon the preceding summer. He soon fled Israel and resigned from the Knesset. stating he could not receive a fair trial there. In February 2011, the Israeli parliament passed the so-called “Bishara bill”, which stripped Bishara of his parliamentary benefits, including the pension he had received as a former Knesset member.
Bishara is the General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, and a member of its Executive Board.
Bishara was born in Nazareth into a Roman Catholic lower-middle-class family. His mother was a teacher and his father a health inspector and trade unionist with connections to the Communist party. He is the brother of Marwan Bishara and noted chef and cookbook author Rawia Bishara. According to The Guardian, the family's history goes back hundreds of years to a village north of Nazareth. Bishara attended Nazareth Baptist school, where he established the first National Committee of Arab High School Students, becoming its chairman in 1974.
He studied at Haifa University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where in 1976 he founded and headed the Arab Student Union. In the same year, he was instrumental in setting up the Arab Student Committees and Campus Lands Defense Committee against the occupation of the Israeli-occupied territories. At the time he was a member of the Israeli Communist Party Rakah (now part of Hadash), and supported an Internationalist-Marxist political agenda.
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