Mogannam, Mogannam Ilyas

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MOGANNAM, MOGANNAM ILYAS

Palestinian Christian lawyer and political activist. Raised in Jerusalem, he immigrated to the United States before World War I and studied law. Some time in the early 1920s he married Matiel Mogannam and returned with her to Jerusalem (and in 1938 to Ramallah). Mogannam practiced law and was a founding member and officer of the National Defense Party, a conservative nationalist group favoring compromise with the Zionists and the British, supported by middle-class elites and associated with the Nashashibi family (in opposition to the Palestine Arab Party, equally conservative but opposed to compromise, associated with the rival Husayni family). As a law student, Ahmad Shuqayri, the first head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), worked in Mogannam's office. The National Defense Party was defunct by 1941, and Mogannam died in 1945.

SEE ALSO Mogannam, Matiel;Palestine Liberation Organization.