Gantry 5

 

Tribute to Leila Shahid

Bulletin N°62 2026   Born in 1949 in Beirut, into a family of the Palestinian bourgeoisie in exile, a victim of the Nakba, Leila Shahid became one of the most recognizable faces of Palestinian diplomacy in Europe for nearly thirty years,
Joining the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s, she held several positions in Europe (Ireland and then the Netherlands) before being appointed General Delegate of Palestine to France in 1993, following the Oslo Accords. A close associate of Yasser Arafat, she represented Palestine in Paris until 2006, and then at the European Union in Brussels until 2015.
A regular presence in French public debate, she tirelessly advocates for the recognition of a Palestinian state. In a media landscape often reluctant to use the terms occupation or colonization, she holds firm to her position.
In recent years, she had been facing health problems. Suffering from depression and deeply affected by the genocide in Gaza, where she had many friends, she took her own life in her home in the Cévennes.
Leila Shahid, like other people close to Yasser Arafat, had understood, perhaps a little later than others, that the Oslo process, in which she had put her whole soul, had been a second catastrophe for Palestine, that it was the beginning of the coffin of a free Palestine.
But the coffin is not closed. Since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Resistance has risen again and seized the initiative. The Zionist colonial state is being exposed to the world for what it truly is: the result of a replacement colonization, with its attendant massacres and injustices. The Zionist entity is in dire straits. Perhaps this grand lady, this noble figure of a free Palestine, had not foreseen this final aspect.
In a moving tribute, Muzna Sihabi, who knew Leila Shahid well, tells us this: “  Leila was not only a pioneer. She shattered the fixed image of the Palestinian in Europe. She challenged the Israeli monopoly on the narrative. She built alliances, opened breaches, and blended the activist, the intellectual, and the diplomat. She spoke to the West in its language, but without ever dissolving into it. […] She spoke the language of France with elegance, loyalty, and love. She believed in its universalism with a lucid fervor, as one believes in an idea greater than oneself. She frequented its institutions with constancy and respect, without ever ceasing to belong to the Palestine she carried within her. And it is on this land that she chose to live her final years. To make her home here. To write her end here. Will France honor Leila Shahid?  ” [1]