Emile Habibi

Habibi was born and raised in Wadi Nisnas, a neighborhood of Haifa, and belonged to a Protestant Christian Arab family originally from Shafa Amr.[1][5] His childhood and education were connected to Haifa and Acre: he attended elementary school in Haifa and secondary school in Acre, while also undertaking secondary studies in Haifa.[1][6] He completed his school-leaving certificate in 1939.[6]

Before establishing himself as a journalist and political figure, Habibi worked at the Haifa oil refineries and undertook correspondence studies in petroleum engineering through the University of London.[1][6] He did not complete the engineering course.[1] His early employment also included broadcasting: from 1941 to 1943, he worked as an announcer and cultural director of the Arabic section of the British-established Palestine Broadcasting Service.[3]

Habibi’s political outlook developed while he was a secondary-school student during the 1936 revolt.[7] He entered Communist political activity as a young man in Haifa and subsequently became involved in organizing the National Liberation League.[1][7] His early writing opposed the British Mandate, and his literary activity developed in the postwar magazines Al-Ghad and Al-Mihmaz, the latter established by the Arab Intellectuals’ League.[8]

His political writing in the 1940s included arguments against Palestinian supporters of German and Italian fascism.[9] He criticized the reasoning of those who treated fascist powers as useful allies simply because they opposed their own political enemies.[9] This opposition to fascism formed part of his political writing before his later parliamentary career in Israel.[9]

Habibi helped found the National Liberation League in 1944 and became one of its leaders.[7] The league supported the 1947 partition resolution, and Habibi subsequently joined the Israeli Communist Party in 1948.[1][6] After Israel’s establishment, he participated in the development of Communist political life within the new state.[1]

Journalism and Al-Ittihad

Al-Ittihad first appeared on May 14, 1944, as the official journal of the National Liberation League, with Habibi among its founders.[8] He became its editor-in-chief and, after May 1948, led the newspaper when it appeared on a biweekly schedule.[8] Alongside editorial work, he wrote a weekly column under the name Juhaina, also transliterated as Juhayna.[10]

His literary beginnings in magazines and his continuing newspaper work accompanied a career that included short stories, plays, novels, political commentary, and parliamentary activity.[1][8] His short stories circulated in journals in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt.[3] Al-Ittihad remained a particularly important institutional connection throughout much of his public life: he returned to its editorship from 1971 to 1989, and the newspaper became a daily in the early 1980s.[6][11]

Habibi left Al-Ittihad amid the Communist movement’s divisions during the glasnost and perestroika period.[11] His withdrawal from editorial leadership coincided with a broader separation from party responsibilities, although his subsequent departure from the party did not end his identification with communism.[1][3]

Parliamentary Service and Communist Politics

Habibi served in the second, third, and fifth Knessets as a representative of the Israeli Communist Party, and in the sixth and seventh Knessets for the New Communist List, known as Rakah.[2] His parliamentary career ended in 1972.[1] He was therefore active in both the journalistic and parliamentary spheres, combining his role at Al-Ittihad with service as a Communist representative in Israel’s legislature.[1][2]

Following the Communist Party split in 1965, Habibi became one of the leaders of the New Communist List and served on its political bureau.[7] His political activities extended beyond parliamentary representation to questions of Palestinian national identity, Jewish-Arab relations, and the place of Arab citizens within Israel.[6][10]

At the Israeli Communist Party’s thirteenth congress in 1957, Habibi expressed confidence that Jews and Arabs could live together in a shared homeland characterized by equality, brotherhood, and peace.[12] Speaking of the “Arab nation,” he also expressed faith that democratic forces would prevail.[12] Around 1957 or 1958, he and other Palestinian Communist figures directed their efforts toward asserting Palestinian national identity within the Jewish state rather than joining an active struggle against it.[10]

Habibi later advocated lasting peace based on a Palestinian state alongside Israel.[1] In 1989, ideological and tactical differences led him to resign from his party responsibilities.[3] He left the party itself in 1991 amid disagreement over its response to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, but continued to regard himself as a communist.[1][3]

Haifa, Nazareth, and the Experience of Remaining

After the fighting in Haifa during the 1948 War of Independence, Habibi returned to his flat on Abbas Street and encountered new residents throwing out his furniture.[10] When he asked why they were removing his belongings, they told him, “This house is now our home”; he eventually rented a house on the same street.[10] The episode belonged to his personal experience of the transformations affecting Palestinians who remained in the country after the war.[10]

Habibi subsequently moved to Nazareth.[10] In a later recollection, he described his distress when his two daughters were afraid to speak to a boy in the street there.[10] He contrasted their behavior with their life before 1948 on Abbas Street in Haifa, where Christian and Muslim children had socialized and attended parties together.[10] His recollection linked the changes in his family’s surroundings to a remembered pattern of everyday sociability in Haifa.[10]

The experiences of Palestinians who remained after the War of Independence became a central subject of Habibi’s writing.[9] His fiction portrayed their adaptation to changed political and social circumstances, their separation from the wider Palestinian and Arab world, and the lives of Arabs within Israel rather than treating Palestinian experience solely through exile outside the country.[1][9][3]

Six-Day Sextet

Sources give different publication years for Habibi’s Six-Day Sextet. The National Library of Israel dates it to 1968, while reference accounts list 1967 or 1969.[7][3] The collection depicted events associated with the 1967 war, addressing political and social dimensions of Palestinian life during and after the conflict while combining contemporary circumstances with historical memory and attention to Palestinian places.[7]

The six stories were “When Saad Masoud Met His Cousin,” “At Last the Almond Blossomed,” “Umm al-Rubabika,” “The Return,” “The Blue Bead and Jabina’s Return,” and “Love in My Heart.”[7] Together, they formed a six-part treatment of the political and social world surrounding the war rather than an account limited to its military events.[7] The work belonged to the body of fiction through which Habibi explored the experiences of Arabs living in Israel.[3]

The Pessoptimist

Habibi published his best-known novel in Arabic in 1974 under the title Al-Waqa’i al-Ghariba fi Ikhtifa Sa’id Abi al-Nahs al-Mutasha’il.[1] Known in English as The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist, it appeared in English translation in 1982.[3] Its narrative follows an Arab living within Israel and places fictional and personal events within a historical framework encompassing the 1948 and 1967 wars.[1]

The central character, Saeed Abu al-Nahs, flees in 1948 and returns clandestinely after the war.[2] He subsequently tries to survive in circumstances that draw him between guile, submission, longing for his former homeland, and the question of whether to remain or live abroad as a refugee.[2] The novel’s time span extends from 1948 to approximately 1972.[3]

Saeed is a Palestinian refugee-turned-informer who tells his story through letters to an unnamed journalist.[3] The narrative frame places him in outer space, while the experiences he recounts concern life in Israel.[3] His encounters with officials include moments in which he attempts to navigate humiliating situations by pretending to be a village clown or idiot.[10] These episodes form part of the novel’s portrayal of hardships associated with military rule.[10]

The novel combines comic and tragic elements, using satire to convey the viewpoint and experiences of Palestine’s Arab population.[3] Its title brings optimism and pessimism together in the coined expression “pessoptimist.”[13] The protagonist’s name also carries wordplay: Sa‘id means “happy,” while Nahs means “calamity.”[14] The conjunction of these terms accompanies a character whose story includes both hardship and persistence.[14]

Habibi described Saeed in deliberately contrasting terms, calling him both “the worst of God’s creatures” and an “example of resilience, absorbing injustice, and continuing life in the worst conditions.”[15] In developing the novel, he drew on his political experience and on world literature, including Voltaire’s Candide, while also incorporating Arabic literary traditions.[3]

The novel was first published in Haifa and immediately republished in Beirut.[14] It received a warm response from readers and critics, including favorable reception among both Arab and Jewish critics.[3] A Hebrew translation by Anton Shammas appeared in 1984, and the book eventually reached readers in 16 languages.[2] It was ranked sixth in a list of the 100 best Arabic novels.[15]

Later Writing and Publishing

Habibi’s later works included Ikhtiyah, published in 1985, and Saraya bint al-Ghul, published in 1991.[3] These works continued his treatment of aspects of Arab life in Israel.[3] His writing appeared in several languages, including English and French, extending its readership beyond the Arabic-speaking public in which his journalistic and literary career began.[3]

The Hebrew edition of Akhtia appeared in 1988, translated from Arabic by A. Shams and published by Am Oved in its Proza Aheret series.[16] The work portrays life in Haifa across past and present.[5] Its attention to the city belongs alongside the prominence of Haifa in Habibi’s biography, from his childhood in Wadi Nisnas to his eventual choice of burial place.[1][5]

Habibi also established the Arabesque House Publishing Company in Haifa and, in 1995, founded the literary journal Al-Masharif.[1] These publishing ventures added institutional work to his activities as an author and editor during the final years of his life.[1]

Literary Honors

In 1990, Habibi received the PLO’s Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature.[3] Two years later, he received the Israel Prize in the category of Arabic literature.[4] He was the first Arab recipient of the Israel Prize for Arabic literature.[17]

Habibi accepted the Israeli award and donated its accompanying money to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.[3] He explained his acceptance through his commitment to coexistence between two states and through the importance he attached to remaining in the country and coping with its circumstances.[1][3] He also regarded the award as official recognition of a national culture and argued that dialogue over prizes was preferable to arguments conducted through stones and bullets.[4]

Reference accounts agree that Habibi died in 1996 and was buried in Haifa, but differ on whether he died in Nazareth on May 2 or in Haifa on May 3.[1][3] He requested that his gravestone identify him as one who “Remained in Haifa.”[1][3] The inscription connected his final resting place to the city where he had been born, grown up, studied, worked, and developed his early political commitments.[1]

His literary legacy centers particularly on The Pessoptimist, whose protagonist gave a distinctive name to the combination of optimism and pessimism.[2][13] The expression became associated with Palestinian citizens of Israel after the establishment of the state.[13] Through Saeed, Habibi portrayed an individual attempting to survive while negotiating submission, ingenuity, attachment to place, and the possibility of departure.[2] The character’s comic behavior coexists with the novel’s treatment of the difficulties experienced by Palestinians who remained within Israel.[10][3]

The book’s reach extended beyond the printed novel through a successful one-person stage adaptation created and performed by actor Mohammad Bakri.[2] Its circulation in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and other languages, together with its positive reception among Arab and Jewish critics, gave it an audience across linguistic and communal boundaries.[3][2] Habibi’s use of Arabic literary traditions alongside influences such as Candide was part of the novel’s literary construction.[3]

His broader contribution included early literary depictions of Palestinians adapting to life after the War of Independence.[9] He addressed their changed political and social circumstances and their separation from other Palestinian and Arab communities.[9] Six-Day Sextet added a treatment of Palestinian life during and after the 1967 war, while later works continued to explore the experiences of Arabs living in Israel.[7][3]

Habibi’s public career also left a record of institutional activity extending from the National Liberation League and Al-Ittihad to the Knesset, Arabesque Publishing House, and Al-Masharif.[1][8] His roles as novelist, playwright, editor, journalist, and political representative were therefore accompanied by work creating and sustaining platforms for political and cultural expression.[1][8]

His writing and public positions continued to attract academic attention decades after his death.[18] A session titled “Give Peace a Chance – Emil Habibi and Yoram Kaniuk” was scheduled for July 2, 2024, within the panel “Israeli / Palestinian Authors on War and Peace” at the fortieth AIS-EAIS joint conference.[18] Adia Mendelson-Maoz and Huda Abu Much were listed as its presenters.[18]

Habibi’s acceptance of the Israel Prize in 1992 provoked objections from some Arab intellectuals and from Israeli opponents of the award.[1][4] Twenty-five Arab scholars demanded in the London daily Al-Hayat that he return it, criticizing his acceptance as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.[3] Habibi defended his decision through his commitment to coexistence, while retaining the award and donating its money to the Red Crescent.[1][3]

Physicist Yuval Ne’eman returned his own Israel Prize in protest against Habibi’s award.[4] In a letter opposing the selection, he argued that Habibi’s work expressed hatred of Israel.[19] Habibi rejected that characterization, responding: “I asked myself whether I should be offended or Israeli society. I wasn’t offended. There was no hatred in my books, but I mock the rulers and the government, and that is permitted.”[19]

Ruth Kartun-Blum, who chaired the literature prize committee that year, later recalled that the committee had unanimously chosen Habibi and poet Avot Yeshurun, without objection from the government officials she identified.[19] The dispute therefore concerned the political meaning of honoring Habibi as well as conflicting readings of his writing.[4][19]

The National Library of Israel reports that Habibi’s positions on partition and the Oslo Accords drew criticism and remained subjects of disagreement among Palestinian writers and political commentators.[6] Ephraim Lavie places him among writers who treated the Nakba as an established past event, looked toward building a Palestinian future, and sought a territorial, two-state solution focused on the consequences of the 1967 war.[16] That interpretation concerns the political meaning of Habibi’s work and commitments rather than a direct statement by Habibi himself.[16]