Ilan Halevi

Ilan Halevi (Hebrew: אִילָן הַלֵּוִי‎; born Georges Alain Albert; 12 October 1943 – 10 July 2013) was a Jewish Palestinian journalist and politician, and one of the very few high-ranking Jewish members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was also a novelist.

He was born to a Jewish family in Lyon, France, in 1943, "under a false name ... in a post-office that was a Resistance hide-out", as his older brother Marc Albert has confirmed. After the death of their father Henri Levin, his mother Blanche married Emile Albert and he adopted her children. (Some sources mistakenly state that his father was a Yemeni Jew whose family had settled in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 20th century.)

In the early 1960s he had work published in the literary journals Les Temps modernes and Présence Africaine. His first novel, The Crossing, published in 1964 was favourably reviewed, described by Lillian Smith in The Saturday Review as "a brilliant, mind-smacking account of a young man's journey from nowhere to hell....a fresh way of looking at the multileveled agony of the walled-in young."

In 1965, at the age of 22, Halevi moved to Israel. He is quoted as having said: "I came to Israel because in Algeria I discovered the importance of the Palestinian problem. I sat there in coffee houses, I heard people, I spoke with intellectuals and I understood that the Palestinian question preoccupies the people of the Arab world. It is really in the center of their obsessions. I decided I want to study this reality up close and from the inside…I wanted to study the Israeli reality." Halevi joined the Palestinian resistance movement and Fatah in particular after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and subsequently became a prominent member of the PLO. He was the PLO's representative in Europe and to the Socialist International, former PLO vice-minister of Foreign Affairs, and participated in that capacity in the Madrid Conference of 1991. He was also a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, elected in 2009, and served as an adviser to Yasser Arafat.

According to Hanan Ashrawi (in This Side of Peace), in the early 1970s, Halevi was a member of Ma'avak (Struggle), a "small, radical Israeli anti-Zionist group". In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and subsequent shift of Palestinian activism into the Occupied Territories, he switched his activity to groups which included Israelis and Palestinians working together against the occupation, and helped secure permission for Bashir Barghouti, a Palestinian activist and member of the Jordanian Communist Party's governing council, to return to the West Bank.

Halevi was a critic of Zionism, and wrote several books on the subject. He was a founding member of the Revue des Études Palestiniennes (Palestinian Studies Review) in 1981. Halevi lived in Paris and the West Bank, and described himself as "100% Jewish and 100% Arab."

He was awarded the Medal of Distinction for his role in support of the Palestinian struggle by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Halevi died in Clichy on 10 July 2013 at the age of 69. His funeral took place in Paris at the crematorium of Père Lachaise Cemetery.