Hisham Sharabi is dead. I will probably write something about him, and his work, later. I saw him in Beirut last June: he looked very ill, but he was the happiest I have ever seen him. I asked him how he was adjusting in his relocation to Lebanon. If you read his memoirs Jamr Wa Ramad you know the story: how he was about to buy a house in Beirut, resign from his position at Georgetown University, sell his house in Washington, DC, and relocate to Lebanon in 1974. And then the civil war broke out. So he stayed. Only after his retirement from Georgetown did he relocate to Lebanon. He told me that he only regretted not relocating to Lebanon earlier. He was unhappy, I felt, in the US. Whenever an older Palestinian dies in exile, I have to think about all Palestinians, and the refugees, and the entire question of Palestine. And that saddens me. Sharabi tried very hard to change himself: from somebody deeply rooted in conservative political theory (he studied at the University of Chicago in the 1950s), into Marxism after 1967. I am not sure how the transformation worked for him, or whether it worked at all. He tried very hard, in his writings that is, to stress the importance of the gender question. His attachment to the Syrian Social National Party never wavered, although he considered himself free of the party; I was astonished when I heard him last summer in Beirut how much faith he still puts in the personality and leadership of Antun Sa`adah (the founder of the SSNP). He all but said that had Sa`adah lived, the conditions of the Arab world would not be as bad. I certainly disagree with that, having never admired Sa`dah or his ideology. Sharabi, to his credit, kept changing. He was early on less critical of Oslo, to become one of its fiercest critics. He was very serious, too serious, and perhaps that is not self-helpful. When I first met him in my first month in Washington, DC in 1983, I was very surprised (having read his leftist writings) to see his his office prominent pictures of himself with Arab leaders. I never understood that. Or maybe I did. I was never close to him personally, to be honest. But in recent years, he changed. He tried to be warmer, I thought. It did not come easy to him. Another Palestinian who will be denied a burial place in his birthplace.