Sabri Jiryis
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Sabri Jiryis (Arabic: صبري جريس, transliteration: Ṣābri Jiryis, also known as Sabri Jaris, Sabri Geries, Sabri Jirais) (born 1938 in the Christian Arab town of Fassuta) is an Arab Israeli writer and lawyer, a graduate of the Hebrew University law faculty, and prominent Palestinian activist. In 1966 the first edition of his book The Arabs in Israel was published in Hebrew.
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[edit] Palestinian Activism
About 1975 Arafat sent Sabri Jiryis together with Isam Sartawi to Washington, D.C. to open an office to represent the Palestinian people. These two held a series of meetings, among others with people prominent in American Jewish groups in New York and Washington. Rabbi Max Ticktin and Arthur Waskow (both members of "Breira") were among five American Jews at the Washington meeting. According to some sources, Jiryis and Sartawi were within a few hours of holding a press conference to announce the establishment of their new office. However, Henry Kissinger, then the Secretary of State, working in coordination with Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli Prime Minister, sent the FBI to the Capitol Hilton Hotel to deport Jiryis and Sartawi.
About the same time, Israeli doves General Mattiyahu Peled, Uri Avneri, and Arie Eliav had been meeting for months in Paris with Jiryis and Sartawi.[1]
In 1977 Jiryis, as a member of the Palestinian National Council, wrote:
The Palestinians may, in certain circumstances, be ready to seek a settlement in the area to which Israel is a party. But they are not prepared to conclude an agreement recognizing the legitimacy of Zionism; no Palestinian Arab can ever accept as legitimate, a doctrine that he should be excluded from most parts of his homeland, because he is a Muslim Arab or a Christian Arab, while anyone of the Jewish faith from anywhere in the world is entitled to settle there. Realism may require recognition of the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine and that this fact be taken into account in seeking a settlement. But this can never mean approving the expansionist and exclusivist tendencies of Zionism. The Journal of Palestine Studies, 1977.
During the 1982 Lebanon War the Palestine Research Centre's historical archives were seized by occupying Israeli forces, but were returned as part of the November 1983 prisoner exchange with the PLO.[1] In February 1983 a saboteur’s bomb destroyed the Centre; among those killed was Jiryis's wife.[2]
Jiryis moved on to Nicosia in July 1983. In 1995, after the Oslo accords, he returned to Israel.
[edit] 2005 Arrest
On Jan. 7th 2006 it became known that his brother, Jiryis Jiryis, age 57, a resident of the Christian village of Fassuta in western Galilee (northern Israel), had been arrested on December 12, 2005. The arrest was kept secret by the Israeli military censor until an Acre municipal court judge accepted the newspaper Haaretz's request to lift the ban on publication of the affair.[3] The Shin Bet security service and the police alleged that Jiryis Jiryis had been recruited by Iranian intelligence during a stay in Cyprus.
Sabri Jiryis, acting as his brothers attorney, claimed that the suspicions were baseless. Jiryis said the security services had been tracking his brother for nine months, and that during his interrogation, he was presented with a recording of a phone call during which his brother was heard rejecting the Iranian agents' offer of assistance. "'My brother is a very secular man, affiliated with the PLO's centrist stream, who believes in peace talks and a two-state solution for two nations,' he told the Haaretz newspaper, and added: "What they are trying to ascribe to him contradicts his political outlook."
"During the detention, the police dropped the spy charges initially ascribed to him" Sabri Jiryis added further, and he believed the additional suspicions against his brother would be refuted "because the police have no evidence on the matter."
[edit] Bibliography
- Sabri Jiryis: The Arabs in Israel 1st American edition 1976 ISBN 0-85345-377-2 (updated from the 1966 ed.) With a foreword by Noam Chomsky. (First English edition; Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968)
- Note: for the Swedish, German, French and Italian translations of this book his name his given as Sabri Geries.
- Sabri Jiryis: Democratic Freedoms in Israel. Beirut, 1972. (Institute for Palestine Studies, Monograph Series No. 30)
[edit] Bibliography, articles (partial):
- Jiryis, Sabri: Recent Knesset Legislation and the Arabs in Israel, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 1, no. 1 (Aut. 1971): 53-67.
- Jiryis, Sabri: The Legal Structure for the Expropriation and Absorption of Arab Lands in Israel, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 2, no. 4 (Sum. 1973): 82-104.
- Jiryis, Sabri: No Peace in Israel, interview in Journal of Palestine Studies, 4, no. 4 (Sum. 1975): 26-40.
- Jiryis, Sabri: On Political Settlement in the Middle East: The Palestinian Dimension in Journal of Palestine Studies, 7, no. 1 (Aut. 1977): 3-25.
- Jiryis, Sabri: Israeli Rejectionism in Journal of Palestine Studies, 8, no. 1 (Aut. 1978): 61-84.
- Jiryis, Sabri: The Arab World at the Crossroads: The Opposition to Sadat, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 7, no. 2 (Win. 1978): 26-61.
- Jiryis, Sabri: The Arabs in Israel, 1973-79, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 8, no. 4 (Sum. 1979): 31-56.
- Jiryis, Sabri: Secrets of State: An Analysis of the Diaries of Moshe Sharett, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 10, no. 1 (Aut. 1980): 35-57.
- Jiryis, Sabri: Domination by the Law, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 11, no. 1 (Aut. 1981): 67-92.
- Jiryis, Sabri: Forty Years since the Seizure of Palestine, in Journal of Palestine Studies, 18, no. 1 (Aut. 1988): 83-95.
[edit] Related link
[edit] References
- ^ Blaming the Victims, p. 229
[edit] External
- The PLO is his life's work By Yair Ettinger in Haaretz 17/11/2004
- Christian-Arab activists face minefield of identity, By Yoav Stern and Jack Khoury in Haaretz, 25/03/2005
