JERUSALEM -- Aziz Shehadeh, a famed Arab West Bank lawyer and one of the first Palestinians to propose a Palestinian state, was stabbed to death Monday outside his home.
His brother and law partner, Fuad Shehadeh, told reporters a commotion was heard outside his home about 7 p.m. Family members investigated and found him stabbed to death outside his home in Ramallah on the occupied West Bank.
The family said they believed only one assailant was involved. Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij said Shehadeh had been threatened in the past.
Shehadeh was in the past condemned by the Palestine Liberation Organization as 'a traitor' for proposing a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel. The PLO and most Palestinian activists now favor the proposal.
Mayor Freij said Shehadeh, 73, was 'very wise, down to earth and honest.' Freij said Shehadeh had been very depressed recently because of what he saw as Palestinian setbacks.
Shehadeh, whose father was a judge in Jaffa, proposed establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the first Arabs to do so.
'He was ahead of his time,' one associate said. At one time he drew up a proposed Palestinian constitution.
Shehadeh took part in 1950 in an abortive round of U.N.-sponsored talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the problem of the approximate 500,000 to 750,000 Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from Israel in the first Israeli-Arab war of 1948, which resulted in Israel's birth.
Shehadeh was a delegate to the U.N. talks in 1950 for the Arab Refugee Congress, which he founded after the 1948 war, but the Israelis refused to talk to him.
Shehadeh, whose first name Aziz means 'the dear one,' was imprisoned several times by Jordan's King Hussein because he viewed Jordanian control of the West Bank after 1948 as occupation. Jordan then lost the West Bank to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day war.
Even before the 1967 War Shehadeh called for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. After the war he toured Israeli towns, arguing for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Shehadeh was known for his defense of Bishop Hillarion Capucci, Malakite bishop of Jerusalem, who was accused of smuggling arms in the late 1970s. Capucci was later deported.
But among Arabs and colleagues, he was best known as a lawyer in land cases, particulary in defense of Arabs who charged their land had been confiscated by Israelis.
He is survived by his widow, Widad, and four children, one of whom is Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer and the author of 'The Third Way,' a chronicle of life on the West Bank under Israeli occuaption.
Raja Shehadeh, who has carried on the law firm founded by his father, is the founder and co-director of Law in the Service of Man, a human rights organization.
