Success stories of Palestinian achievers from all over the world

Faisal Darraj

Personal Info

  • Country of residence: Syria
  • Gender: Male
  • Born in: 1942
  • Age: 74
  • Curriculum vitae :

Information

Darraj was born in 1942 in al-Ja’una, a village in the Galilee area of Palestine. The village was emptied of inhabitants and destroyed in the 1948 War. His family took refuge in Damascus, Syria, where Darraj studied for a B.A. in philosophy. He later received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Toulouse University in France in 1974 and published a dissertation titled “Alienation and Religious Alienation in Karl Marx’s Philosophy.” Darraj returned from France to Beirut, where he worked from 1975 to 1979 at the Palestinian Research Center, affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He lived in Beirut until the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He then moved to Damascus where he continues to live and work, although he commutes regularly to Amman, Jordan, where his family is located.

For years Israel has imposed the very conditions guaranteed to push Palestinians into rebellion, or more dangerous still, into rebellious despair. And when Palestinians respond as their tormentor intends, Israel brands that response terrorist, and then uses its own definition of the response as an excuse to employ the massive force of Tel Aviv’s artillery and warplanes. Israel’s racist settlement policy, indeed, can only exist if this vicious cycle of oppression, rebellion and punitive response to expected rebellion is maintained. As if peace, or even the prospect of peace, constitutes a devastating threat to Israel’s identity and to its overwhelming superiority in the Middle East, or as if peace can only be founded on Palestinian annihilation, or at least the annihilation of the sense of dignity of the Palestinian, Israel’s version of the Native American.

Darraj has also been interested in intellectual history of leftists, European theorists, and Palestinians. He supervised the translation of works by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss into Arabic. He contributed to the special folio dedicated to Edward Said of al-Karmil , the Palestinian quarterly out of Ramallah edited by poet MAHMUD DARWISH (issue no. 78, Winter 2004). He also wrote about Edward Said in an edition of Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics (no. 25, 2005), discussing Said’s intellectual debt to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who also combined political activism and theoretical writing. In December 2005, Birzeit University in the West Bank hosted Darraj via a videoconference session titled “Questions on the Intellectual and Meaning Production.” His talk on “The Dilemma of the Arab Intellectual from Birth to Extinction” focused on the transformation of the role of the Arab intellectual in modern times. He has also regularly held a teaching position at the University of Damascus’s Higher Institute of Theatre Arts.



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Achievements and Awards

He has published several books on literary theory and criticism, among them Bo's Al-Thaqafa fi al-Mu'asasah al-Falestiniyeh (The Misery of Culture in the Palestinian Establishment).

He wined Best Arab Book at the Advent of the Third Millennium at the Cairo International Book Fair and the Palestine Literary Prize for Nathariyat al-Riwaya w’al-Riwaya al-Arabiyya

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