Leila Shahid, who became the first female Palestinian diplomat to serve as an ambassador and later represented the Palestine Liberation Organization across Europe, died in France at 76, the Associated Press reported on Feb. 18. She had held prominent positions during some of the most tumultuous years of the Middle East conflict, including periods tied to the peace process and later uprisings.
In a statement carried by the official WAFA news agency, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas praised Shahid as “a model of diplomacy committed to the values of freedom, justice and peace,” and said she “remained faithful to her people’s message until her final days.” Abbas’s remarks highlighted the role Shahid played in projecting Palestinian positions abroad, including in European diplomatic circles.
Shahid was born in Beirut in 1949, a year after the war surrounding Israel’s establishment, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, the AP reported. Her parents were from Jerusalem and what is now northern Israel. After working in Palestinian refugee camps, she traveled to Paris in the 1970s to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology.
In 1976, Shahid was elected head of the Palestinian student union in France. She then returned to Beirut in 1982 during the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militiamen killed hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in two refugee camps, according to the AP account.
The Palestine Liberation Organization posted Shahid to Ireland in 1989, making her the first female Palestinian ambassador, and she was posted to the Netherlands the following year. From 1993 until 2005, she served as the Palestinian envoy to France, a tenure that the AP said coincided with the height of the peace process and the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in 2000.
Shahid was also in France with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his final days before his death in a French military hospital in 2004, the AP reported. Later, from 2006 to 2014, she served as the Palestinian envoy to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Outside of her diplomatic posts, Shahid was also the longtime director of “The Review of Palestinian Studies,” a French-language periodical focused on the history of the conflict, the AP said. Her death closes a long career that linked academic training, diaspora activism and official diplomacy during major turning points in the Palestinian national story.