Mahmoud Darwish once joked with his friends Elias Sanbar and Farouk Mardam-Bey that he envied Leila Shahid and tried not to walk beside her in the streets of Paris, because people would constantly stop them to greet her or ask for a photo. He would be left waiting until she had acknowledged her admirers, or else she would have to point out, smiling, that the person with her was the celebrated poet, “none other than him,” the one who truly deserved the greeting…
Leila Shahid, Palestine’s representative in France, then in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and to the European Union between 1993 and 2015, was, beyond any doubt, the most visible Palestinian figure in Europe’s media and political arenas for two decades. Born in Beirut in 1949 to a father from Acre and a mother from Jerusalem, she came from a family for whom political struggle had been a destiny ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Great Revolt of 1936, and then the Partition Plan and the Nakba of 1947–1948. In her youth, she joined Fatah. She rose through political engagement and cultural activism, especially during her studies in Paris, where the Mossad assassinated, in 1973, Palestine’s envoy Mahmoud al-Hamshari, one of the first to build a Palestinian “diplomatic” narrative abroad. There, Leila became part of a circle of Palestinians and Arabs who gathered around al-Hamshari’s successor in the role of “ambassador,” Ezzedine al-Qalaq (among them Sanbar and Mardam-Bey) and with them she forged close ties with French left-wing intellectuals and writers throughout the 1970s. That continued until the Abu Nidal group assassinated al-Qalaq in the summer of 1978, an operation whose dark day Leila would recall, in striking detail, for years, given her attachment to him and the imprint he left on her generation’s political culture.
In the early 1980s, Leila - recently married to her life companion, the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Berrada - helped launch the French-language edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She sat on its first editorial board alongside Roger Naba’a, Nawaf Salam, Elias Sanbar, and Farouk Mardam-Bey; the latter two later oversaw it for nearly a quarter of a century. Before long, Camille Mansour joined as well. French and Arab writers contributed to the journal, most notably and most consistently Ilan Halevi, who wrote in every single issue without exception. Simone Bitton, then Samir Kassir, and others also became regular contributors. In the summer of 1982, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres that followed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Leila was among the first to reach Beirut. Accompanying the French writer Jean Genet, she went into the devastated camps; Genet then wrote his famous text “Four Hours in Shatila,” which left a deep mark on French cultural circles—where attitudes, slowly, began to shift toward the Palestinian cause.
In that same period, Mahmoud Darwish’s presence shone, newly departed from Beirut, moving between Tunis and Paris, and Leila counted among his closest friends. The Palestinian cause grew more prominent in France, particularly with the expansion of French-language publishing and the translation of literature, poetry, and intellectual work. Political and media attention improved further with the First Intifada, Yasser Arafat’s declaration of a “Palestinian state” in 1988, and his official visit to Paris, opening the era of negotiations and the moment when the Palestine Liberation Organization, after decades of struggle, established itself as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Leila, the Israel’ Media Nightmare
In 1993, despite Oslo’s signing and the Palestinian disagreements around it - its clauses and its grave shortcomings - Leila Shahid took up her post as the ambassador in Paris. In that moment, she distinguished herself as a brilliant spokesperson: incisive, eloquent, and exceptionally deft with the press, explaining Palestinian realities while answering Israeli propaganda head-on. Her clarity remained dazzling through the Second Intifada in 2000, as she dismantled Ehud Barak’s falsehoods and the talking points of his representatives against the backdrop of what came before and after: the spread of settlements, the siege of Yasser Arafat in the Muqata‘a in Ramallah, and Benjamin Netanyahu, followed by Ariel Sharon, pursuing their long-proclaimed project of crushing any Palestinian authority and extinguishing any prospect of statehood, culminating in Arafat’s poisoning and his death in a French hospital in 2004.
There is no doubt that, in those years, Leila Shahid helped shift public opinion in France, among a whole Francophone generation of students, and among Arab and international residents alike. Her media and diplomatic mastery - together with the exceptional cultural presence of her friends - compelled Israel to replace advisers at its embassy more than once, and then to replace its ambassador, in an attempt to stem its loss of popularity.
In 2006, after thirteen years of unbroken effort in Paris, she moved to Brussels as the Palestinian ambassador to Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and to the European Union. Yet despite the reputation that preceded her, her old and new friendships, and her relentless diplomatic activity, Israel’s destruction of any possibility of “peace,” America’s continued collusion, the deterioration of the internal Palestinian situation and the bloody split between the Authority in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza, then the Authority’s growing slackness and Israel’s periodic wars on besieged Gaza, made her task brutally difficult. It became harder still with the Authority’s faltering positions on the Arab revolutions in 2011, especially the Syrian revolution, one that Leila, like Elias Sanbar, supported loudly, refusing to let the “Palestinian cause” be used to justify hesitation toward it.
In 2015, she chose to leave official diplomatic life and devote herself to cultural, political, and social work, as well as to supporting Palestinian research and academic institutions. She settled in the south of France, traveling between her new home and Beirut, the city of her childhood and youth, which she loved and where she formed friendships that, until her final breath, remained among her dearest.
But the Arab failures that followed
the crushing of the revolutions, the closing of the Palestinian horizon, then
Lebanon’s vast financial collapse in 2020, followed by the annexation war in
the West Bank in 2022 and the genocidal war on Gaza after the October 7 attacks
in 2023, with images of killing, torture, destruction, and the starvation of
Palestinian children, along with the discovery of the effects of the far
right’s rise, Islamophobia, and the dominance of a propaganda machine that
strips Gazans of their humanity in French political and television discourse:
all of this struck Leila to the core. One world after another collapsed inside
her. She withdrew, isolated herself, and fell silent - she who, years and
decades earlier, had “filled the world”. Efforts to draw her out of that
silence, through interviews and platforms repeatedly offered to her, did not
succeed.
Fortunately, a film and a book about her mother, Sirine al-Husseini - and, through them, about Leila herself, and about Jerusalem, Palestine, Beirut, and France - have recently been released, leaving a younger generation a rich, recorded legacy of her life’s work.
When Generosity Takes Form
Her public biography still does not fully render justice to Leila Shahid. Palestine, which inhabited her throughout her life, fueled her labor and her struggle, and became her very being. Yet beyond that, she was also a woman of extraordinary generosity: light-hearted, quick-witted, the star of gatherings and evenings, of friendship itself. She was a superb cook, a true connoisseur of visual art and of literature. And before all else, she was loyal to her friends, devoted to them across differences of temperament and age. That devotion enriched her world; it also likely became a constant source of fear, given the personal losses that accumulated into so much sorrow. From Ezzedine al-Qalaq to Khalil al-Wazir; from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Darwish; from Jean Genet to Elias Khoury - alongside Samir Kassir and Patrice Barra in between - Leila knew loss, and it wounded her, just as it wounded her to see her parents die far from Palestine…
And when she chose February 18, 2026 as the date of her departure, she left in everyone who knew her, whether from a distance or up close, an imprint that neither time nor anything else can erase. She also left behind stories, anecdotes, and remarks that we will keep repeating, and remembering, for as long as we live.
Originally published in Arabic, in Megaphone.
