Emile Habibi

Habibi remained in Haifa after 1948, becoming one of the roughly 150,000 Palestinians who stayed inside the new state of Israel and gained citizenship: an ambiguous position, neither fully accepted nor able to leave, that he lived out as both a journalist and, for decades, a Communist member of the Israeli Knesset.

The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974) turned that impossible position into absurdist satire: Saeed, a hapless informant and collaborator, narrates his own passivity under Israeli rule with a naive cheerfulness that curdles into pure farce, eventually escaping into a flying saucer rather than resolve his contradictions. The novel's title coined a new Arabic word (combining pessimist and optimist) that entered common usage to describe the condition of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Habibi later broke with the Communist Party over the 1993 Oslo Accords, accepted Israel's Prize for Literature amid controversy from fellow Palestinians, and died in Nazareth in 1996; per his wishes, his gravestone reads simply 'Emile Habibi, stayed in Haifa.'