Faisal al-Husseini

Faisal al-Husseini was born on July 17, 1940, in Baghdad, Iraq. His father, Abdul Qadir, had fled Palestine to avoid imprisonment by the British after he had participated in the 1936–39 Great Palestinian Revolt; he took his family to Iraq. But the family did not stay in Iraq for long. In 1941, Abdul Qadir took part in an unsuccessful revolt led by four Iraqi nationalist army generals against the pro-British Iraqi government. This led the Iraqi government to exile Abdul Qadir and imprison him near the Turkish border. After his release in 1943, he moved to Saudi Arabia at the invitation of King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who had been friends with his father, Musa Kazim. Abdul Qadir’s family, including his wife, Wajiha, and baby Faisal, joined him in 1944.2

In 1946, Abdul Qadir moved the family to Cairo, Egypt, where young Faisal, just six years old, would finally enjoy some stability. But a little over a year later, in December 1947, Abdul Qadir returned to Palestine from Egypt and cofounded the Army of the Holy War, or Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas, to fight the Zionist forces. Though modest in number, al-Jihad al-Muqaddas was known as Abdul Qadir’s “personal army” and achieved significant victories in the months leading up to the 1948 War.3 In early April 1948, Abdul Qadir led his men to reclaim the village of al-Qastal, in the hills west of Jerusalem, from Zionist militias. He was killed on April 8 and buried on al-Haram al-Sharif next to his father, Musa Kazim.4 Faisal was eight years old.

Faisal attended primary and secondary school in Cairo. When he was 16, in the autumn of 1956, he joined his two brothers and volunteered in a popular resistance movement that confronted the Israeli, British, and French attack on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.5 By the time he was 18, he was committed to anti-colonial liberationist movements in the region.

He moved to Baghdad for university in 1958 where he also joined the Movement of Arab Nationalists, established in 1951 by the Palestinian revolutionary George Habash as a pan-Arab movement committed to liberating the region from foreign imperialism, especially Zionism, through Arab unity.6

But again, Faisal’s stay in Baghdad was brief. Following a conflict between Arab nationalists and communists in Baghdad, Faisal had to leave Iraq.7 He moved back to Cairo in 1959, enrolled in a university, and joined the League of Palestinian Students. That same year, he also joined the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), which launched in Cairo with chapters in universities throughout the region. For decades, GUPS served as a major political platform for organizing for Palestinian liberation.8 Many of its members, including Yasser Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Faisal al-Husseini, would later become prominent leaders in the PLO.

The early 1960s brought both great disappointment and hope for Palestinians. On the one hand, the greatest pan-Arab effort, which saw the merger of Egypt and Syria in 1958 into the sovereign United Arab Republic, was short-lived. It dissolved in 1961, and with it, the hope of a united Arab front to liberate Palestine. On the other hand, the late 1950s also saw the formation of Fatah in Kuwait, a Palestinian nationalist movement committed to Palestinian liberation through armed resistance. Palestinians would lead their own liberation struggle.

In 1961, Faisal joined Fatah. Three years later, the PLO was established, with Fatah as its dominant party. Palestinian liberation seemed more realizable than ever.

In 1964, and for the first time in his life, Faisal moved home to Jerusalem to work in the PLO office in the city and take charge of its popular organization department. He held this position for a year and then left Jerusalem to enroll in a military academy in Aleppo, Syria. In 1967, he joined the Palestine Liberation Army, the military wing of the PLO.9

When war broke out on June 5, 1967, Faisal was in Syria manning an antiaircraft gun. By the second day of the war, Faisal was losing hope: “I remember hearing on the radio the way that the Arabs—Jordan and Syria and Egypt—talked about the war: in grand but vague terms. Israel, on the other hand, talked in specifics. We were losing, I decided.”10

He was right. By the sixth and last day of the war, Israel had occupied the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Sinai Peninsula.

The plight of Palestinians worsened; Israel now occupied all of historic Palestine, and more than 300,000 Palestinians were exiled.

Faisal went to Lebanon to establish a military training camp in the mountain village of Kayfoun to train Palestinian refugees in guerrilla warfare.11 His goal was to bring the recruits to Palestine, though this proved impossible with the new borders.

From Lebanon, Faisal returned to Jerusalem. To get there, he “swam across the [Jordan] river by night on his way home”—a dangerous endeavor, he recalled in 1992, as he remembers seeing “other travelers being shot near him as he crossed.”12 But no amount of danger could keep Faisal from returning home to Jerusalem upon its occupation. “I preferred to work as a garbage man in Jerusalem than to be a general abroad,” he asserted.13

For the next two decades, with the majority of PLO leadership operating in absentia, Faisal carried out the political work of the PLO in the city, including hiding “weapons for Arafat at his home outside the Old City” and training “guerrillas for resistance.”14 As a result, Israeli forces arrested Faisal on October 17, 1968, and sentenced him to a year in prison.15 This was the first time Faisal was arrested by Israel. Following his release in 1969, he began working as an X-ray technician in Jerusalem16 while also working as a member of Fatah and as a leader of the PLO in the city.

Between 1969 and 1980, Faisal was primarily based in Jerusalem, and though committed to his role in the PLO and activism against the Israeli occupation, he was also an intellectual. In 1977, he enrolled in a graduate program in history at the Beirut Arab University, but he returned to Jerusalem in 1979 before completing his degree.17 

In 1980, with a group of Palestinian academics, he established the Arab Studies Society, a “specialized library focused on Palestinian history, politics, and society; the Arab World; and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”18 While the Society was a research and documentation center, it also served as the operations center for PLO activity in the city. Graham Usher, a journalist who later wrote a tribute to Faisal, described the Society as “an archive aimed at rescuing the Palestinian heritage in Jerusalem from an Israeli material and ideological offensive bent on denying it.”19 In this way, and through its many departments that operated as a veritable state, the Society (directed by Faisal) laid the foundations of the Palestinian pursuit of sovereignty from within Jerusalem.

Beginning in 1981, Faisal was embroiled in long legal battles with Israeli authorities that resulted in a number of administrative sentences being issued against him. Between 1981 and 1987, Israeli forces placed Faisal under both city and house arrest, forbidding him from leaving Jerusalem by day and from leaving his home by night.20

Notwithstanding, he continued his political work from his home and in 1983, he moved the Society into the Orient House, where it remained until Israeli forces shuttered the building in 2001.

Though he was released from house and city arrest in early 1987, he was arrested again shortly thereafter in April 1987 and placed in administrative detention—“on undisclosed charges of anti-Israeli activity” and without trial—for nearly two years.21 All in all, Faisal was imprisoned five times—a total of 42 months—throughout his political career.22 But he made use of this time behind bars. While in Israeli incarceration, he taught himself Hebrew, which proved hugely fruitful upon his release, as he used the language to “nurture dialogue with the Israeli ‘peace camp,’ first with dissident leftist groups but gradually with mainstream Israeli politicians . . . and academics.”23 These Israelis were allies of Faisal during the years of peace talks and especially each time Israeli forces attempted to shut the Orient House.

Faisal’s leadership in Jerusalem catapulted during the First Intifada. Though he was in prison when the Intifada broke out in December 1987, he nonetheless emerged as “the natural leader of Jerusalem’s Palestinians” throughout the nearly six-year uprising.24

Upon his release in January 1989, Faisal “became a voice for the uprising, together with like-minded intellectuals Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nusseibeh and the veteran Haidar Abdel-Shafi. He also helped create political committees to focus Palestinian opinion” and participated in various popular protests.25 His role as director of the Arab Studies Society, which was funded by the PLO, was central during the Intifada; from its base in the Orient House, the Society “dispensed funds to activists,” which made it a regular target of Israeli suppression.26

Faisal preached nonviolence as a means of achieving political goals, and he organized accordingly. At one nonviolent protest in Jerusalem, Faisal and the other protesters were met with a ferocious Israeli response; he later recalled that “the aggressive manner in which the Israeli police attacked us gave me the feeling that if they were afraid of such a thing, maybe this was the way.”27

But in the midst of the tumultuous Intifada, nonviolence was not always possible or effective. On October 8, 1990, for example, Faisal joined hundreds of Palestinians to protect al-Aqsa Mosque from a “group of Jewish nationalists and block a provocative cornerstone-laying ceremony at the golden Dome of the Rock.”28 These nationalists were part of a “messianic group” bent on razing al-Haram al-Sharif to make way for the construction of a Jewish temple. Though the ceremony did not occur, Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas on the Palestinians who had begun throwing rocks at the Jewish group. As a result, Israeli forces fired at the crowd, killing around 20 Palestinians.

“The events transformed Husseini,” journalist Daniel Williams wrote in June 1992.

“I had a sort of mystical experience in which I saw myself and my life very clearly,” Faisal recounted. “It was from that moment that I wanted to be less cautious, to take more chances.” As Williams put it:

Unlike many of his counterparts in the PLO and Fatah—especially Arafat, who considered Faisal a threat to his leadership due to his presence in Jerusalem and his legacy as a Husseini—Faisal was “more of a diplomat than a politician,” as an Israeli interlocutor put it.30 That is, while Arafat and other members of Fatah were more adamant in their stance of resistance, Faisal practiced a type of diplomacy “not only with diplomats, but also in the social struggles of institution building, protest, and dialogue.”31 In fact, Faisal advocated for a two-state solution before the PLO did, “popularizing mass, non-violent protests as the means to achieve it.”32

It was precisely this diplomatic approach to relations with Israel that made Faisal the ideal candidate to lead the Palestinians in the peace talks that started in Madrid in 1991 and “facilitated the first open negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.”33 Arafat, who was chairman of the PLO, had backed Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, which had angered the United States. It was thus Faisal, and not Arafat, who met with US Secretary of State James Baker in the lead-up to Madrid. During this time, Faisal led the Palestinian struggle for political legitimacy from Jerusalem, and specifically, from the Orient House, which “became the PLO’s political address in the occupied territories. All the meetings of the Palestinian negotiating team were held there, and official foreign visitors were received there when they came to meet prominent Palestinians.”34

During an interview with Faisal conducted on May 2, 1991, in the midst of the First Intifada, he was asked to describe how he felt about the different attempts to bypass and assassinate the PLO leadership. He said:

Faisal’s commitment to diplomacy and negotiation in the face of challenges both from Israelis and Palestinians was admirable. In January 1990, for example, Faisal was summoned to a police station by Israeli forces for allegedly contributing financially to the Intifada. As he entered the station, two Israelis “approached him and screamed, ‘Dirty Arab, we will destroy you.’ They spat on him and fled.” In response, Faisal said: “Nothing can stop the peace process.”36 In fact, and in a humorous anecdote relayed by his wife, Faisal was so committed to the peace process that on the day of his departure for Washington for negotiations, he “rushed out of the house with a cheese sandwich dangling from his mouth. He ran back in when his wife Najat called out to complain that he hadn’t said goodbye.”37

Faisal was a central figure in the negotiations in Madrid, Washington, and Rome, though he was “somewhat sidelined by the dramatic announcement of the secret Oslo peace accords in August 1993,” which saw Arafat take center stage.38 A year later, in 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was formed as an outcome of the negotiations, and Arafat was allowed to return to Palestine after 27 years in exile. In early 1994, Faisal led throngs of Palestinians to the Rafah crossing in Gaza to welcome Arafat “on his historic return to Palestine.”39 And a year later, Faisal officially accepted the PA’s Jerusalem portfolio and served on the PLO’s Higher Committee for the peace talks. With Ashrawi, he also set up the Palestine Human Rights Information Centre, which documented and advocated for Palestinian human rights across the occupied territories.40

Unsurprisingly, it was Faisal’s diplomatic approach that also irked Israeli authorities. As Usher put it:

During Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, Israeli leadership “repeatedly . . . tried to shut down [Faisal’s] operation, seen as a challenge to [Israeli] authority in a ‘united Jerusalem.’”42 Notwithstanding these attacks on Faisal and the Orient House, he “continued to promote his ideas: a strict constitution to safeguard nascent democracy; a free-market Palestinian economy, but one which can only fully integrate into the regional economy after it has established its own infrastructure. He mused about shared Israeli-Palestinian authority over Jerusalem.”43

Faisal’s openness to negotiating with the Israeli leadership also pitted him against many Palestinians, who saw his diplomatic approach and call for a two-state solution as a capitulating acceptance of Israeli sovereignty over lands occupied in 1948 and 1967. Likewise, Faisal “appeared to accept Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem as de facto realities, not ‘settlements’ to be dismantled.”44 He was evidently also open to “negotiate about the possibility of compensation” as an alternative to the Palestinian right of return, “even if that fell short of a ‘just peace based on absolute justice.’”45 For these and other positions calling for compromise and concession, Faisal was met with resistance by many of his counterparts and the Palestinian public. As he put it, “I decided I would tell the people things they didn’t want to hear.”46

While many disagreed with Faisal’s methods, his commitment to Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state and his devotion to the Palestinian people were undeniable. For example, he went on hunger strike twice in protest and solidarity—once in the spring of 1990 to protest the killing of seven Palestinian workers by Israeli forces, and then again in June 1995 in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. In January 1996, he made sure that East Jerusalem would be included as an electoral district in the Palestinian general elections.47

In the words of Faisal’s son, Abdelqader:

Notwithstanding his critics, many Palestinians saw that Faisal’s steadfast diplomacy tended to yield positive results with Israeli authorities. He was seen as “someone who can deliver,”49 and “On almost any day, ordinary Palestinians turned up at the gates [of the Orient House] to ask for Husseini’s help in fighting Israeli demolition orders or the withdrawal of ID papers.”50 His home was also the site of frequent visits from “suitors looking for an answer to problems: how to get their kids out of jail, for the name of a doctor in Jordan or for some money to tide them over. In response to these problems, Husseini might call anyone from the American consul to an Israeli peace activist or the PLO.”51

Faisal’s devotion to Jerusalem and to Palestinians was thus never in doubt, nor was his impressive career, his military training, his years in Israeli incarceration, or his courage even in the face of threats to his life. Indeed, over the course of the Oslo Accords, Faisal survived several assassination attempts by Israeli settlers, including in 1995, when settlers “opened fire at his house and one settler tried to drive his car into Husseini’s.”52

This earned Faisal the trust of many Palestinian leaders, including Arafat, despite their many differences.53 The Lion of Jerusalem may thus not have been aggressive in his methods, but he certainly knew how to confront the occupier effectively.

Over the course of the next few years, Faisal continued to champion Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, especially in light of the increasing radicalization of Israeli leadership. In 1997, for example, Netanyahu’s government approved the construction of the settlement of Har Homa on the Palestinian hilltop of Jabal Abu Ghunaym in southeast Jerusalem, despite international condemnation.54 Faisal led demonstrations and other efforts to protest the settlement and Israeli encroachments on East Jerusalem.

With the evident failure of the Oslo peace talks by the late 1990s, Faisal grew wary of the road ahead. In an interview with Usher, conducted in August 2000, the year before he died, Faisal expressed his concern that people would stop “listening to clowns like me who advocate peace and coexistence.” He continued: “There are many fundamentalisms in our region—Islamic, nationalist and Jewish . . . They have a lot of energy but no target, no rallying symbol. But once the peace process collapses, Jerusalem will become the symbol and the target. And then the only outcome is collision.”55

Faisal’s words could not have been more prescient. A month after the interview, right-wing Israeli politician Ariel Sharon’s incendiary visit to al-Haram al-Sharif with security forces sparked the Second Intifada. And six months later, Sharon was elected prime minister, ushering in a new phase of unprecedented Israeli oppression.

Following the outbreak of the Second Intifada, during which Faisal was beaten by Israeli forces for protesting Sharon’s provocative visit to al-Aqsa Mosque, Faisal continued to “harden his positions and lash out at settlement building.”56 In May 2001, during the 53rd commemoration of the Nakba, he “led 200 Palestinians towards an Israeli military checkpoint, where they were beaten back with teargas. Husseini, a lifelong asthmatic, was taken away by ambulance.”57

Two weeks later, on May 31, 2001, Faisal went to Kuwait on an official visit to mend relations with the Kuwaiti government, which was angered by the PLO’s sympathy with Saddam during the Gulf War. There, he suffered a massive heart attack in his hotel that killed him a month and a half before his 61st birthday.

The next day, in a heavily attended official funeral, he was buried on the Haram al-Sharif beside his father and grandfather.

Faisal’s funeral was attended by thousands of Palestinians, and members of the UN Security Council honored him with a minute of silence.58 His untimely death shocked many and left a void in Jerusalem “that no one, absolutely no one, can replace.”59

In the words of then MK Azmi Bishara, speaking shortly after Faisal’s death, “Faisal’s legacy was the struggle to keep Arab Jerusalem Arab. He represented Arab continuity and leadership in Jerusalem. And he combined this with reason and courage.”60

In addition to a city falling deeper into violent disarray, Faisal left behind a family—his wife, Najat, and their teenage daughter, Fadwa, and 20-year-old son, Abdelqader.

In his tribute to Faisal, journalist Lawrence Joffe wrote: “Husseini’s keen intellect, noble bearing and integrity, combined with the occasional naughty smile, set him apart.”61 Saida Nusseibeh, head of Medical Aid for Palestinians in London, said of her friend Faisal: “He was greatly loved for his gentleness; his face displayed an innocence and honesty you so rarely see nowadays.”62

On May 31, 2020, during the 19th commemoration of Faisal’s passing at the still-locked Orient House (as it remains today),63 Hanan Ashrawi remembered her late colleague and friend:

Abdelqader concluded his tribute to his father with the following words:

At once a lion, prince, and son of Jerusalem, Faisal al-Husseini will undoubtedly always be remembered as an emblem of the city for the Palestinian people.

“Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini.” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. Accessed April 29, 2025.

Al Jazeera Staff. “Faisal al-Husseini . . . the Prince of Jerusalem.” [In Arabic.] Al Jazeera, May 31, 2017.

Ashrawi, Hanan. “Dr. Hanan Ashrawi: Faisal Al-Husseini’s Inspirational Legacy Lives On.” Palestine Liberation Organization, May 31, 2020.

Editorial Staff. “The Arab Studies Society Library.” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 6 (1999).

“Faisal al-Husseini.” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. Accessed April 29, 2025.

Goldenberg, Suzanne, and Brian Whitaker. “Husseini the ‘Voice of Sanity’ Dies.” Guardian, May 31, 2000.

Husseini, Abdelqader. “Faisal al-Husseini.” This Week in Palestine, no. 303, July 2023.

Husseini, Faisal. “Palestinian Politics after the Gulf War: An Interview with Faisal Husseini.” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 4 (1991): 99–108.

Joffe, Lawrence. “Faisal Husseini.” Guardian, June 1, 2001.

Pappé, Ilan. The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.

Sayigh, Yezid. “Reconstructing the Paradox: The Arab Nationalist Movement, Armed Struggle, and Palestine, 1951–1966.” Middle East Journal 45, no. 4 (1991): 608–29.

Usher, Graham. “Mourning the ‘Son of Jerusalem’: Faisal al-Husseini.” Jerusalem Quarterly, nos. 11–12 (2001).

Williams, Daniel. “The Quiet Palestinian.” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1992.