Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Ziad Abdullah Hanna Al-Bandak was born in Amman in early February 1960. He is married with a son and a daughter, and resides in Bethlehem. He completed his secondary education in Jordan in 1978 and then earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany in 1985.
He worked in the field of electrical engineering between 1985 and 1997, and was appointed Deputy Mayor of Bethlehem, Minister of Tourism in 2005, Minister of Local Government in the Emergency Government in 2007, and Advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas on Christian Affairs. He is a member of several institutions and committees, such as the Presidential Committee for the Restoration of the Church of the Nativity.
Al-Bundak joined the Jordanian Communist Party in the early seventies of the last century and remained in it until 1989. He was active in the student movement during his university life, and after graduating he became a member of the Engineers Syndicate in the city of Bethlehem. He pays special attention to the Christian presence in Palestine as part of the Palestinian social fabric, especially in light of the decreasing percentage of Palestinian Christians in Palestine.
Al-Bandak has never been arrested or prevented from traveling, but he has been harassed by the occupation forces more than once while traveling and moving around.
Al-Bunduq believes in a settlement based on the two-state solution, whereby a Palestinian state would be established within the 1967 borders. He maintains that the Oslo Accords could have led to a Palestinian state were it not for Israel's obstruction of the agreement and the United States' complete bias towards the occupation. He believes that the division within the Palestinian ranks poses a significant threat to the Palestinian cause and that Hamas bears responsibility for it.
Al-Bandak supports all types of struggle and resistance, but under the current circumstances, he sees peaceful struggle as the only way to reach a political agreement, and thus to establish the Palestinian state. He points out that armed struggle is what brought the Palestinian cause to the world’s attention, but there are international resolutions that will not be implemented because international powers do not deal with the Palestinian issue in a balanced way. He sees the need to involve all factions in the Authority and the PLO, including Islamic movements, and believes that Palestinians must have patience in their struggle with the occupation, especially since a political solution to the Palestinian issue under the current regional and international circumstances has become unlikely.
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