Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Faisal Abdul Qader Musa al-Husseini was born in Baghdad on July 17, 1940. He is married and has a son and a daughter. He completed his primary and secondary education in Cairo, where he obtained his high school diploma in 1958. He studied science in Cairo and Baghdad, and earned a bachelor's degree in military science from the Military College in Damascus in 1967. He enrolled at Beirut Arab University to study history in 1977. He worked as a technical supervisor in the X-ray department in Jerusalem from 1969 to 1977. He co-founded the Arab Studies Society in 1979 and served as its president. He established the Arab Jerusalem Council in 1993 and managed Orient House, the PLO headquarters in Jerusalem, until its closure in 2001.
Al-Husseini was influenced by his family’s history of struggle, especially his father, the martyr Abdul Qader al-Husseini. He volunteered for the Popular Resistance Forces on the eve of the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956, joined the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1957, participated in the founding of the General Union of Palestinian Students in Cairo in 1959, received military training in Egypt through the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1963, then worked as deputy director of the Popular Organization Department in the Palestine Liberation Organization during the years (1964-1965), joined the Palestine Liberation Army after the June War of 1967, became one of the military officials in the Popular Struggle Front, supervised a training camp for Palestinian volunteers in the Lebanese town of Kfoun, was a member of the National Guidance Committee in the occupied territories, was elected as a member of the Supreme Islamic Council in Jerusalem in 1982, and was one of the prominent Fatah leaders in the First Intifada.
He was arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities on October 15, 1967, and sentenced to one year in prison. He was deprived of his Jerusalem identity card for ten years and placed under house arrest in Jerusalem between 1982 and 1987. He was repeatedly arrested during the First Intifada until 1990.
Al-Husseini is considered one of the pioneers of settlement in the occupied territories, as he called early on for accepting the new reality imposed by the results of the Nakba in 1948, and reaching an agreement between the Palestinians and the Zionists on the basis of the two-state solution. He initiated dialogues with the occupation officials and met with Israeli Likud party member Moshe Amirav in September 1987. He headed the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, and supervised the Palestinian team in the peace negotiations in Washington (1992-1993).
He headed the Fatah movement’s senior leadership in the West Bank in 1994, took over responsibility for the Jerusalem file in the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1995, was elected as a member of the PLO Executive Committee in 1996, and participated in the campaign to confront Ariel Sharon’s desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyards on September 28, 2000.
In his political career, Al-Husseini faced challenges related to the apprehension of the Palestinian leadership in Tunisia that he might be part of an alternative leadership based in the occupied territories. As a result, he was subjected to attempts to marginalize him. He also encountered increased tension between the Palestinian factions in the occupied territories due to the organization’s acceptance of the settlement and the participation of its representatives in the Madrid Peace Conference.
Al-Husseini was criticized by many for being one of the first Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories to call for accepting a settlement and theorize about the two-state solution, and for striving to reach a Palestinian-Zionist agreement on this basis. He was also criticized for the weak official Palestinian interest in the city of Jerusalem, its institutions and its people, and for its inability to confront the occupation’s attempt to Judaize the city.
Al-Husseini died on May 31, 2001, following a sudden heart attack during his visit to Kuwait.
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