Born in Al-Bireh in 1952; son of Abdul Jawad Saleh Hamayel; joined the Palestinian national movement in 1968; was imprisoned three times by Israeli authorities without trial; active in the PLO but has be en critical of some of Chairman Yasser Arafat’s stances since 1971; studied at Cairo University and was active in both the GUPS and the Egyptian student movement, for which he was repeatedly imprisoned in 1972-73; graduated with a BA in Political Science in 1974; shifted his political positions in the mid-1970s from believing in armed struggle to believing in institutionalization and non-violent resistance; continued his studies and received an MA (1979) and PhD (1986) in Political Science from Paris X-Nanterre University; works as Professor of History and Political Science at Birzeit University since 1981; served as Director of Birzeit’s Research Center from 1994-97; was a researcher and Visiting Professor at various international academic institutions, incl. the French National Center for Social Research (1989), the Free University, Brussels (1990), the Orient Institute, Hamburg (1990), the Vilanova University, Pennsylvania (Fulbright Fellow, 1998), the Pantheon, Paris (2003), the French M aison des Sciences de L’Homme (2003), and Harvard University (2004); emphasizes the term “Sociocide” in understanding the Israeli policies in the OPT, referring to the pressures of destruction, Judaization and expulsion imposed on the Palestinian people; spoke out against the militarization of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000; specialized in the Palestinian Question, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the documentation of Palestinian collective memory; among his books are: The Israeli Assassination Policy in the Aqsa Intifada (JMCC, Dec. 2001) and Palestinians and the Historiography of the 1948 War (Muwatin, 2005).

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Added: June 2006