Palestine: Remembering <PERSON> · Global Voices
On 2 August, founder member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) <PERSON> died. He was born and raised in Jaffa, but his family were forced to leave Palestine in 1948, and went to Lebanon. <PERSON> helped found the PLO in 1964, was appointed PLO representative in Lebanon, and survived ten Israeli assassination attempts during the Lebanese Civil War. He was twice a member of the PLO Executive Committee, but left because of the Oslo accords. <PERSON> was also an accomplished writer. Arab bloggers have been paying tribute.
At his blog Jafra, Palestinian political activist, writer and artist <PERSON> says:
منذ أن تفتّحت عيوننا على السياسة كان فيها اسم شفيق الحوت قبل أن نعرفه عن قرب ومنذ أن بدأنا نلاحق أخبار القضية في الصحافة كان قلمه. 990
لم أحاوره عن قرب إلا وهو خارج المناصب القيادية، الممثل السابق لمكتب منظمة التحرير والعضو المستقيل من لجنتها التنفيذية، وهو يردّد لقد استقلت من الوظيفة ولكن ليس من القضية، القضية ليست وظيفة هي قدر الفلسطيني. ولا يستطيع الاستقالة منها.
From the time that our eyes were opened to politics, the name of <PERSON> was there, before we knew him from close up. Since we began to follow the news of the Palestinian issue in the newspapers, his pen was there. I only conversed with him when he was outside the leadership, the former representative of the PLO office and a future member of its executive committee. He kept saying, “I have resigned from the job but not from the [Palestinian] issue; the issue is not a job, it is the destiny of the Palestinians, and one cannot resign from it.”
At his blog Nostalgia, Gazan blogger <PERSON> writes:
قال فيه ادوارد سعيد رحمه الله
“هذا الرجل يصعب افساده” فقال شفيق الحوت رحمه الله ضاحكاً “ارأيت الى اي حضيض وصلنا.صرنا في زمن يُمدح فيه المرء اذا لم يكن فاسداً”
<PERSON> (may he rest in peace) said of him, “This man is difficult to corrupt.”
And <PERSON> (may he rest in peace) said, laughing, “Have you seen what a low point we’ve reached; we’re in an era that a person is praised if he is not corrupt.”
At The Angry Arab News Service, Lebanese blogger <PERSON> writes about <PERSON>:
He used to say that he was a communist when everybody else was an Arab nationalist (like in the 40s and 50s), and that he became an Arab nationalist when everybody else was a communist (in the 60s and 70s). […] He was blunt and truthful, when lying was a job description in <PERSON>'s apparatus. […] Something about him I liked: not only the politics but the personality. 990