Mufid Nashashibi: 1915-1999

By Pat McDonnell Twair

Mufid Said Nashashibi’s lifetime of working for Palestinian self-determination ended March 24, 1999. He was born July 16, 1915 in Jerusalem. His father, Said, was an engineer who planned the city of Beersheba in 1904.

After graduating from St. George’s School in Jerusalem, Mufid matriculated to the American University in Cairo. His studies ended abruptly when he was deported for organizing and marching against the British occupation of Egypt. After receiving a civil engineering degree from Robert College in Istanbul, he returned, in 1936, to Jerusalem, where he served as an environmental engineer for the Jerusalem Municipality under the British Mandate.

In 1942, along with Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi, the late Mukhlis Amer, Emil Touma and Emil Habibi, Mufid was a founder of the Palestinian National Liberation League, a progressive nationalist organization that continues to publish Al-Ittihad (“The Union”) newspaper in Haifa.

In discussing this landmark effort, Elias Nasrallah, political editor of the contemporary London-based Arabic language daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, stated: “Mufid and his comrades of that generation believed in great ideas that will prevail. They are people whose memory will remain alive in our hearts and minds.”

In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) scheduled deliberations on the fate of Palestine. Mufid and other nationalist Palestinians were appalled at the disparity between the Palestinians and the Jews. They met secretly in Jerusalem with the Yugoslav alternate representative to UNSCOP and formulated the federal solution for Palestine which was later known as the UNSCOP “Minority Opinion” (see Jan./Feb. 1999 Washington Report, p. 44).

When the British Mandate ended on May 15, 1948, Mufid and his Jerusalem Municipality colleagues drove municipality vehicles to form a barricade that successfully blocked Zionists from entering the Old City through the Hebron Gate.

After the armistice Mufid, as the city’s environmental engineer, joined forces with then Jerusalem Mayor Rawhi al-Khatib and the city engineer, Yusef Budeiri, to expedite the issuance of restaurant and hotel business licenses. In this way, they jump-started East Jerusalem’s Palestinian tourism industry whose service infrastructure had been concentrated in Israeli-occupied West Jerusalem.

In 1949, Mufid joined the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as manager of engineering services. His responsibilities included the construction and environmental maintenance of refugee camps on the West Bank and Jordan. This was a task that entailed building housing for tens of thousands of new refugees. With his colleague and friend Farid Harb of Ramallah and later San Diego, CA, Mufid surveyed, planned, designed and supervised the construction of refugee dwellings that remain in use today.

Mufid married Widad Buderi in 1950 in Jerusalem. Two years later, he began studying for his master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a World Health Organization scholarship. His field work in Appalachia exposed him to the abject poverty in this part of the United States during the 1950s.

Mufid moved his family from Jerusalem to Kuwait in 1962 when he became the project manager for the construction of the Kuwait Sewage System. After the project was completed in 1970, he was unable to return to Jerusalem because of the 1967 Israeli occupation of Arab East Jerusalem. He initially retired with his family in Lebanon, and in the early 1980s moved to Seal Beach, CA.

During his retirement in California, Mufid dedicated himself to researching the history of Palestine and to recording Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and the empowerment of Arab Americans. He advocated Arab-American involvement in all levels of politics and took special pride when his daughter, Rima, ran for the California State Assembly in 1998.

From the onset of the court hearings for the L.A. 8 (seven non-citizen resident Palestinians and the Kenyan wife of one of them tried by the U.S. government) in 1987, Mufid traveled from Seal Beach to Los Angeles to attend each hearing to demonstrate his belief in freedom of speech in the United States. Michel Shehadeh, a member of the L.A. 8, commented: “Mr. Nashashibi’s presence was our anchor during those trials that stretched more than a decade.”

He made his first return to Jerusalem in 34 years in December 1996 to promote and support the Deir Yassin Remembered organization headed by Dr. Daniel McGowan and upon whose board Mufid Nashashibi’s son Issam serves. The objective of DYR is to build a memorial for more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children slaughtered by Jewish extremist militias at the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948. Mufid introduced DYR directors to Palestinians who played key roles in the fighting of 1948.

Although he was frail and unsteady on his feet, Mufid joined demonstrators in front of the Jewish Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles on April 9, 1998, the 50th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. The placard bearing a photo of Deir Yassin which he held carried the message “Hope Lives When People Remember.”

On April 5, the California State Senate adjourned “in memory of Mufid Said Ahmad Nashashibi.” He is survived by his wife, Widad, daughter, Rima, sons Issam and Tareef, and two grandchildren, Mufeed and Rasha.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.