Hut, Shafiq Al- (1932–)

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HUT, SHAFIQ AL- (1932–)

Palestinian political figure and writer. Shafiq al-Hut was born in Jaffa and fled Palestine for Lebanon with his family in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. In 1953 he received a degree in biology from the American University of Beirut and taught for a while before being fired for Nasserist activities. In 1958 he joined the Lebanese weekly, al-Hawadith (Events) and later contributed to another weekly, al-Muharrir (the Editor). In 1961 he founded a group of intellectuals called the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF; not to be confused with the guerrilla group of the same name founded in 1977). The PLF (later called the PLF—Path of Return or PLF—PR) recruited for the Palestine Liberation Army. In 1964 al-Hut participated in the first meeting of the Palestine National Council, at which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was organized. He became its Lebanon representative.

In 1966 he became a member of the PLO's executive committee and joined the opposition to Ahmad Shuqayri, the first chairman of the PLO, who resigned six months after the June 1967 War. In 1967 al-Hut declared in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Between 1967 and 1969 he traveled widely on behalf of the PLO in the republics of the Soviet Union. In 1968 he left the PLF—PR, which was then absorbed into Fatah. During the summer of 1970 he opposed the new policy direction of the PLO, now led by Yasir Arafat, and was temporarily relieved of his functions as PLO representative in Lebanon, but he assumed them again a few weeks later. In June 1974 he was reelected to the PLO executive committee, taking the place of the poet Kamal Nasser, who had been assassinated two months earlier in Lebanon by the Israelis. He is said to have been offered Nasser's job as PLO spokesman but to have declined it. In November 1974 he was part of the Palestinian delegation, led by Arafat, to the UN General Assembly. From that time on, al-Hut was closely allied with Arafat and his Fatah organization (although he never joined), and participated in numerous negotiations concerning Palestinian interests.

In August 1975 he went to Japan to negotiate the opening of a PLO office in Tokyo. As the PLO's representative in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, he was the object of a number of assassination attempts, including one orchestrated by al-Saiʿqa in 1976. In April 1979 he was in Washington to participate in discussions at the Institute for Policy Studies, and in March 1980 he led a Palestinian delegation to the Council of Europe. In May 1985 he was elected to the PLO central council. Between 1986 and 1992 he participated in numerous negotiations, including those concerning the fate of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. He opposed the Oslo Accords, and in September 1993 a few days after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles in Washington he resigned from all his PLO positions. He remains in Beirut, with no organizational affiliation, working with various Palestinian groups there and in Damascus.