Repeatedly held by Israel in administrative detention, Dr. Aziz al-Dweik, or Abu Hisham, was the Hamas-affiliated elected official who could have become the President of the Palestinian Authority.
Today, he stands as one of many Palestinians targeted by Israeli campaigns of intimidation.
Politics and Academia
Born in Cairo to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father, Dr. Aziz Dweik grew up in the West Bank city of Al-Khalil (Hebron).
His birth being on January 12, 1948, makes him older than the state of Israel. In his earlier life, Dweik committed himself to his professional life and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, with a PhD in regional and urban planning. In addition to his Doctorate, he also acquired three master’s degrees in education, city planning and regional urban planning.
Dr. Aziz Dweik also became a founder of the Geography Department at An-Najah National University, located in the West Bank city of Nablus, heading it for several years and playing a prominent role in supervising many masters and doctoral theses.
He also held the positions as a Public Relations Officer in the Patient’s Friends Association, a Member of the Council of the Faculty of Arts and Scientific Research Committee. On top of this, he was the Secretary of the Workers Union, all at An-Najah University.
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His political involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine and Hamas specifically, dates back to the early 1990s, with some indicating his affiliation with the Mujamma Islamiyyah that was the precursor to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
In 1992, he was one of some 415 Palestinians accused of having affiliations with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, who were deported by the Israeli occupation forces to Marj al-Zuhour in Southern Lebanon. During this time, Dweik was said to have been one of the closest companions to former Hamas leader Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.
Yet, despite the path that many would take following their release from Marj al-Zuhour, Dr. Dweik decided to proceed with his career as an academic instead of pursuing politics. This gave him time to dedicate more time to his university work, along with his family.
He is married and has seven children, one of whom is a school principal, while his wife used to run a daycare center out of their home.
2006 Elections
In 2006, Dr. Aziz Dweik, who had up until that point not claimed direct membership to Hamas, but instead provided favorable commentary, was nominated to run in the Palestinian National Legislative Elections on the Change and Reform list.
To the surprise of the United States Bush administration, which had encouraged the elections, the Hamas-aligned Change and Reform list won in a landslide victory against their Fatah Party rivals.
The Hamas victory in the 2006 elections would catapult Dr. Aziz Dweik to Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, technically making him the next in line to the Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, according to the PA’s own Basic Law. In 2009, as the term of President Abbas expired, Hamas announced that Dweik was the rightful leader of the Palestinian Authority in line with its basic law.
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Dr. Aziz Dweik was supposed to assume his position as mandated on March 29, 2006, as head of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). However, due to US and Israeli refusal to accept a Hamas government, he and other Palestinian officials from the Hamas Party were prevented from doing their jobs by the PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
As the US and European Union were the largest financiers of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), they imposed sanctions on Hamas and struck a deal with Mahmoud Abbas to prevent a Hamas government from functioning in exchange for continued support from their Western donors.
‘A Hungry Man is an Angry Man’
Shortly after he was sworn in as PLC speaker and under a movement ban by the Israeli military, Dweik famously reacted to the West’s refusal to accept Palestinian Democracy and stated that “a hungry man is an angry man…we hope the world will not allow the Palestinian people to suffer, because this will only make people more radical”, adding that “my message to Israel is to put an end to the occupation, and then there will be no fighting.”
Months after Dweik became the fourth PLC head, 20 Israeli military vehicles surrounded his home in the West Bank and abducted him by force. He was held in administrative detention (held without a charge) until 2009, where his health deteriorated under Israeli military detention.
In 2014, despite him having no connection to the incident whatsoever, Dweik was arrested in a mass roundup of Hamas members and affiliates in the West Bank, over the disappearance of three Israeli settlers; an incident used to justify Israel’s massive assault on the civilian population of Gaza that year.
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In 2018, Mahmoud Abbas officially dissolved the PLC and barred Dr. Aziz Dweik from entering Ramallah to attend a government meeting that had been called, a move made many times before, but this time when Dweik’s car was stopped by PA security forces on the way to Ramallah he was told that he could no longer consider himself head of the PLC or even a Palestinian minister.
Abbas did this as a largely symbolic gesture against Hamas, as he had already essentially held onto the position of Palestinian President by force and had no popular mandate to rule, nor the backing of the PA’s own law.
Dweik has been held under administrative detention seven times by Israel. His latest arrests came on October 17 of last year, followed by another arrest on June 20 from his home in al-Khalil, which Hamas released a statement condemning “in the strongest terms (Israel’s) re-arrest of the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Dr. Aziz Dweik, a few days after his release, in a brutal and vengeful manner”.
Although the US, Israel and Abbas’ PA never permitted Dweik to perform the duties he was democratically elected for, he serves as a reminder of the injustice carried out against the Palestinian people and their ability to govern themselves.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
