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Azmi Bishara (عزمي بشارة, עַזְמִי בִשַארָה , born 22 July 1956, Nazareth) is an Arab public intellectual, political philosopher and author. is presently the General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. ِِAs per the Guardian, for many years, Bishara was one of the most figures representing the Arab citizens of Israel.

Bishara's political activities began early when he was a high school student in 1974. Later, Bishara's political activities were question when he visited Lebanon and Syria after the 2006 Lebanon War. He left Israel after a criminal investigation for alleged treason and espionage on behalf of Hezbollah. Bishara refused all the allegations.

Bishara is currently living in Qatar, and established at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. He also helped establish the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab) media conglomerate, which includes a newspaper and television station. . In 2017 he announced his retirement from direct political work at the beginning of 2017.

Most of Bishara's works and researches are in the fields of civil society, theories of nationalism, religion and secularism. Also, he published in topics like renewing the Arab thought and analysis of society and the state in Israel.

Early life and education
Bishara was born in Nazareth into a Christian Arab family. His mother was a school teacher and his father a health inspector and trade unionist with connections to the Communist Maki party; his siblings include Marwan (now a political commentator) and Rawia Bishara (a chef, cookbook writer and restaurateur). According to The Guardian, the family's history goes back hundreds of years to a village north of Nazareth.

His political activism started at his Baptist high school. In 1974, when he was 18 years old, he established the "National Committee of the Arab High School Students", and became its Chairman on 1974. Bishara stated that he established the organisation because "the general national feeling among Arab students of the need to struggle against racist practices".

During his studies at Haifa University, he established the Arab Students Union, as well as being one of the founders of the Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands in 1976. He went on to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem between 1977 and 1980, where he chaired the Arab Students Union and was a member of the Front of Communist Students-Campus. After that he went to Berlin and completed his PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Academic career
Upon completing his PhD in philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin (then East Germany) in 1986, he joined the faculty of Bir Zeit University to work as Lecturer in Philosophy and Cultural Studies, he stayed there until 1996. He went on to head the Philosophy and Cultural Studies Department for two years, from 1994-1996. He has also worked as a senior researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

He is one of the founders of the Society for Arab Culture and of Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy founded by a group of scholars and academics in 1992. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Arab Democracy Foundation.

Political career
Balad, an Arab nationalist party, was founded by Azmi Bishara and headed by him for several years.]] Azmi Bishara disposed of the communist ideology early after the student movement stage and began to express his criticism of it, through the Arab democratic principles during his activity in the student movement, and totally abandoned it during his studies in Germany. In 1995 Azmi Bishara co-founded the National Democratic Assembly Party, (or called Balad), on a democratic Arab point of view. The party brought together a number of active political patriots, bringing together the Movement for Equality, the Sons of the Country, the Progressive Peace List, university students and former members of the Communist Party and independents. Azmi Bishara was the theorist of this party and its leader from the beginning of its establishment until he resigned from it and left Israel in 2007. The party stated its objectives and principles at its third conference in 1999 as: "A national Arab Palestinian national democratic party in its political ideas and objectives, and struggles for social justice. It is based on the linkage between national identity and the principles of democracy in the circumstances of the Arab masses in Israel and in Israeli society in general, by emphasizing the organization of Arab citizens as a national minority with collective rights and applying the idea of equal citizenship in the face of the Zionist idea and the socio-political system founded upon it."

Azmi Bishara decided to participate in the elections to enter the Israeli Knesset, explaining why he entered the Knesset by saying, "We decided to go to parliament to present a different model without embracing Zionism. We entered not to celebrate the Knesset membership, but to represent a line of struggle. And to present a counter Zionist discourse through the democratic discourse, which is no longer exclusive to them." In 1996, he was elected as a member of the Knesset after being nominated for a joint list between the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality and the National Democratic Assembly. He was re-elected in 1999 as a candidate for the National Democratic Assembly, re-elected in 2003, re-elected in 2006 and remained in office until he resigned in 2007 and left Israel on suspicion of "collaborating with the enemy in times of war." He participated in these periods in a number of committees, including the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on the Trafficking of Women, the Education Committee, the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, the State Control Committee, and headed the first committee to examine the fate of absentee funds after 1948. His call to the state of citizens raised sharp reactions from the Israeli parties expressed in attempts to criminalize this call, which some writers, researchers and leaders of the Israeli parties considered the most dangerous call against Zionism and Israel, because it diagnoses a contradiction between democracy and Jewish statehood and escalates this contradiction, which pushed them to enact a set of laws that emphasize the Jewishness of the state.

While in the Knesset, Azmi Bishara ran for Prime Minister when the elections were held directly. The direct elections for the premiership were later canceled. He was the first Arab to run for this position, and that was in the 1999 election, and Bishara says he has strategic and tactical goals behind his candidacy for the presidency related to the demands of the Arabs at home. The direct political objectives are related to demands submission and negotiation, but the main long-term goal is "To challenge the Israeli Zionist nature", and to develop a path that stands in the face of "Zionization" of the Arabs of the interior, according to his point of view. However, he withdrew from the competition on the eve of the elections. In the end, only Ehud Barak and Benyamin Netanyahu were left as final candidates, with Barak emerging victorious.

In 2003, the Israeli Supreme Court "overturned Central Elections Committee decisions to disqualify MKs Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara, and Bishara's party, Balad, from running in the elections to the 16th Knesset." The CEC's decision was supported by Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, "who went so far as to submit his own petition to the CEC against the party and its leader." "The CEC ruled that Bishara and Balad sought to destroy the Jewish character of the state and supported the armed struggle against it."

2001 Visit to Syria
Bishara visited Qardaha, Syria in 2001, and gave a speech at a memorial ceremony for Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and other Arab leaders, among them the secretary-general of Hezbollah and the vice-president of Iran, where "he called for promoting the armed struggle ("The resistance") against Israel". He was accused in Israel of expressing support for Hezbollah, and upon his return to Israel was charged with incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization, as defined by Israel's Prevention of Terror Ordinance. After Bishara's visit to Syria, the Knesset passed a law forbidding MKs from visiting enemy states.

2006 Israel–Lebanon War
During the 2006 Israel–Lebanon War Bishara criticized the Israeli government for not providing bomb shelters to Arab areas in Israel's north, and said Israel was using Arabs as "human shields" by putting artillery units next to Israeli Arab villages towns and villages. Bishara also predicted that, because many Arab Israelis opposed the war or applauded Hezbollah's surprisingly strong resistance to the Israeli invasion, there would be negative repercussions for the community when the war ended. "We will have to pick up the bill on this," he said. "If [the Israelis] lose they will turn against us, if they win they will turn against us." In September 2006, shortly after the conclusion of the Lebanon war, Bishara again visited Syria and in a speech warned of the possibility that Israel might launch "a preliminary offensive in more than one place, in a bid to overcome the internal crisis in the country and in an attempt to restore its deterrence capability."

Bishara and members of his party also visited Lebanon, where they told the Lebanese prime minister that Hezbullah's resistance to Israel during the preceding summer's war had "lifted the spirit of the Arab people". Soon thereafter at Interior Minister Roni Bar-On's request, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz ordered a criminal investigation against Balad MKs Azmi Bishara, Jamal Zahalka and Wassel Taha over the visit to Syria.

Resignation from Knesset and leaving Israel
In 2007, Bishara was questioned by police on suspicion of aiding and passing information to the enemy during wartime, contacts with a foreign agent, and receiving large sums of money transferred from abroad. Bishara denied the accusations and said they were part of an effort to punish him because he had opposed Israel's invasion of Lebanon the preceding summer.

On 22 April 2007, Bishara resigned from the Knesset via the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, following a police investigation into his foreign contacts, and accusations of allegedly aiding the enemy during wartime, passing information on to the enemy and contacts with a foreign agent, as well as laundering money received from foreign sources. Bishara has denied the allegations, and claims he is staying abroad because he believes he wouldn't receive a fair trial. Following a petition by Haaretz and other media outlets to lift a gag order preventing publication of information relating to the specific charges being laid against Azmi Bishara, on 2 May 2007 the Petah Tikva Magistrate's Court announced the gag order would be fully lifted. One week prior, the court had allowed only for the fact that Bishara is suspected of assisting the enemy in wartime, transmitting information to the enemy, contact with a foreign agent and money-laundering to be publicized.

Bishara is accused of giving Hezbollah information on strategic locations in Israel that should be attacked with rockets during the 2006 Lebanon War, in exchange for huge amounts of money. Wiretaps were authorized by the Israeli High Court of Justice. Investigators say that Bishara recommended long-range rocket attacks which would serve Hezbollah's cause.

According to court documents "Bishara was questioned twice in the case and during the last encounter he told interrogators that he intends to leave Israel for a couple of days. He said he would attend a third questioning session soon upon his return to Israel". Bishara addressed a rally of supporters in Nazareth via telephone in April 2007. He told the thousands of supporters that, "My guilt is that I love my homeland... our intellect and our words are our weapons. Never in my life did I draw a gun or kill anyone." Said Nafa, Bishara's replacement in the Knesset, commented on the charges leading up to Bishara's resignation, saying, "There were many instances in which the Shin Bet tried to set people up ... They're just trying to behead a prominent Arab leader. They will fail."

In February 2011, the Israeli parliament passed the so-called "Bishara bill", which stripped Bishara of his parliamentary benefits, including the pension he had received as a former Knesset member.

Work in Qatar
As he moved to live in Qatar, Azmi Bishara became a member of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Foundation for Democracy, founded in Doha, Qatar in 2007, which aims to advocate democracy as a culture and way of life. He also occupied the Jamal Abdul-Nasser's chair at the Center for Arab Unity Studies between 2007 and 2009. In 2010 he established the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, also known as the "Doha Institute", as an independent Arab research institution for social sciences, applied social sciences, regional history and geostrategic issues. The Center recently launched the Historic Dictionary of Arabic Language. The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies was inaugurated in 2014 as an independent academic institution for education and research. It offers master's programs at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and the Faculty of Public Administration and Development Economics. The Institute started its first academic year 2015-2016 in October 2015.

Not only did Bishara establish several research and cultural centers which focus on the Arab world and its issues, but he also established a number of media institutions to disseminate the ideas and culture he believes in, including the of The New Arab newspaper (Al-Araby Al-Jadeed) in March 2014 in Arabic and English. Its headquarters is in London and has several offices in Arab capitals and a network of correspondents. He also founded the London-based Al Arabi Television.

Retirement from politics
In the beginning of 2017, the book "Exiled in Exile" was published, a lengthy interview by Azmi Bishara with journalist Saqr Abu Fakhr, in which he summarized his intellectual and political biography and announced his retirement from direct political work. He said he retired "to dedicate all his time to research and intellectual production, as it is the most important, urgent and possible in these circumstances." He explained in an interview with Al Araby TV that his decision was made two years ago, and he wants to focus only on the intellectual and research side and educate the generations as an essential task. "But I will take positions as an educated person committed to people's issues. I will not forsake my personal conscience."

Personal life
Bishara is married and has two children. According to The Jerusalem Post, he received a kidney transplant in March 1997 at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. According to his website, he is a citizen of Qatar.

Palestinian issue
Azmi Bishara focuses on the character of apartheid in Israel and on the need for a democratic Palestinian national project to confront it,as per his point of view. He also supports the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation. He has written lengthy studies on the dilemma of the idea of a Palestinian state after the Oslo Accords, which he has opposed since it was signed as it replaced the Palestinian national rights with the rescue of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), describing the accord as "a calamity" for the national liberation movement. In his articles, he introduced the need to deal with Israel as a colonial settlement that established an apartheid system, which requires a national democratic program to face it. Throughout the life of Azmi Bishara, he was part of the resistance of what he called "the Zionist project", seeking a democratic and secular state based on equality. Since he was a high school student, he sought with his colleagues to combat the Judaization of educational curricula and fought against "the discrimination against Arabs" according to him. At university, he lectured extensively on land expropriation, the struggle against settlement in the occupied territories, the situation of the Palestinian Arabs in Israeli prisons, defied racist calls to lecture at the university and defended freedom of expression at the university. As for the Arab dimension of the Palestinian cause, Bishara says: "The Arabs will not be liberated unless the Palestinians are liberated, and the Palestinians will not be liberated without the Arabs being liberated." In 1999 he was hit by a rubber bullet while participating in a demonstration in defense of a house against the demolition order in the city of Lod. His home in Nazareth was attacked by hundreds of organized racists after he was charged with responsibility for the October 2000 demonstrations inside the occupied territories at the start of the Second Palestinian Uprising.

Civil society
In his books and lectures, Azmi Bishara discusses the development of the concept of civil society (i.e., the process of its evolution and historical change) by reviewing the history of Western political thought, and the social developments that are related to differentiation within society, and between society and the state, in an attempt to analyze the common notion of this concept in the Arab cultural and political milieu, which dealt with it as a ready-made concept, regardless of the context of its development in Europe.

In his book "Civil Society: A Critical Study", Bishara reintroduced the concept of the term through its philosophical origins. In the beginnings of modernity, before the normative dimension was attributed to it after the collapse of the socialist camp. He pointed out that it used to mean 'organized society' in political thought as opposed to 'natural society', and when it became compliant with the state, when the bourgeoisie, based on a market economy, became distinct from the state, it was used to describe the space of rational communication independent of market laws and state violence. And finally, it arrived to us distorted, to designate all that is not related to the state in the eyes of some romantic trends of Arab thought, in the beautification of society and demonization of the state, or made equivalent or identical to non-governmental organizations, because it is not "state" run, which deprived it of its critical and democratic function. At the end of this book, in presenting civil society as "a nation" to the outer world, and as a civil society inside the country, Azmi Bishara also made a theoretical contribution to the question of nationalism, distinguishing between ethnic or cultural nationalism on the one hand and the political nation on the other, (i.e. the separation between the nation and nationalism). This idea was later developed in his book "The Issue of Nationalism".

Contribution to the Theory of Nationalism
Azmi Bishara focuses on the idea of Arab nationalism as a cultural identity corresponding to sectarianism, tribalism and others, but after linking them to democracy and citizenship. It is supposed to move to the concept of the "citizenship nation" even if the nation is formed of a certain nationality.

Sect and sectarianism
Azmi Bishara was also preoccupied with the issue of sectarianism to put together a sociological work (once again interdisciplinary) on an issue that concerns the Arab community, the issue of "sect and sectarianism." He believes that Western sociological theories do not help the researcher in this field at the Arab level. He wrote a research named "The Sect, Sectarianism, and Imaginary Sects" where he discussed the idea that sects or denominations produce sectarianism, trying to prove that in the modern era, the opposite is true, i.e., sectarianism produces the sect, but he sees that "it produces it as an imaginary sect". He therefore devotes his research effort to writing a book that places a concept of the religious community as a "local community" distinct from the followers of a certain religion which, in his opinion, is an imagined group that is not a self-contained social entity such as the local community or group, but the political sectarianism reproduces it as a group that he calls "the imaginary community". To this end, Bishara is doing what he has done in the case of civil society and secularism, by distinguishing between the word, the term and the concept, indicating the disparities in its development and the evolution of the phenomenon itself (the religious community and the political sectarianism) in search of a concept that is a synthetic analytical tool with explanatory power. Bishara describes the political sectarianism as a modern phenomenon, manufactured by power and state, not religion. He also explains the factors of political sectarianism since the colonial intervention to protect the minorities in the Ottoman Empire and the conservative social response to the reforms of the Ottoman organizations due to the uneven development between the center and the periphery and the failure of the application of Ottoman citizenship through the national state and the military regimes that bet on local loyalties at the point of losing their legitimacy, including sectarian loyalties, and the most dangerous is the transformation of the majority into an imaginary political group in the context of opposing the existing regime, considered to be related to minorities.

Bishara also explains the factors of the failure nation-building on the basis of citizenship and its relationship to the sectarian issue. The book deals in detail with the transformation of Shiites and Sunnis through political sectarianism into imaginary sects, the roots of this historical process and the impact of local and regional political polarization. He also referred to the so-called theory of compatibility in democracy, indicating that it is a set of inductive generalizations, which are modified after each experiment in kind and do not live up to the theoretical level, reflecting upon the Lebanese and Irish experience, and presenting the Iraqi experience extensively.

Secularism and Religion
Bishara presented a theory in secularism and secularization, after criticizing previous theories. He was preoccupied with the issue of obstacles that hinder democratic transformation. He referred to this issue in his book "On The Arab Question" in which he pointed out the relationship between the non-resolution of the Arab issue and the impediment to democratic transition, as Arabism turned into the ideology of state on the one hand, or a pretext for intervening in the affairs of other countries on the other.

This preoccupation led him to criticize the study of the relationship between Islam and democracy, which spread at the end of the last century, in a study published in several languages ​​confirming the absence of a meaningful relationship between religion and democracy. He called for a discussion of the relationship between "democracy and patterns of religiosity, rather than the pointless search on Islam and democracy". He began to study this subject, when he found himself3 compelled to study patterns of secularization which in his opinion defined patterns of religiosity to a large extent.

Bishara put his intellectual and philosophical ideas on secularism in his extensive research project "Religion and Secularism in a Historical Context", a cumulative knowledge project that began a decade and a half ago and has now been published in three volumes. Bishara suggests a different formula for dealing with dualisms such as religion and secularism. He sees that the problem of research is not in religion (as a religion in itself), but in "patterns of religiosity". He distinguished between religion and religiosity4. Bishara describes religion as "a natural and complicated progress in the experience of the sacred", meaning being affected by beauty, in awe of the mysterious, and fear of nature. Religion in this sense is not just the experience of the sacred, it is, above all, a group of human beings with common faith, religious establishment, worship, rituals and rites...etc. To explain the difference between religion and patterns of religiosity, Bishara showed the similarities and differences between religion and myth, between religion and magic, between religion and morality and other topics, and thus turned the introduction of the book into a self-contained folder that generally addresses religion and religiosity, and analyzes the relationship between religion and myth, religion and morality, religion and science before reaching a definition of religion and religiosity, which is considered as a secular effort. In the second part, he deals with the history of the evolution of the secular idea in the first volume by reviewing the history of ideas in Europe5, since the emergence of the term within religious thought until secularism became a separate ideology. He followed this development through the development of rationality and the scientific approach to nature and society on the one hand, and the development of the concept of state on the other. After studying the evolution of secularism in thought, the second volume of the second part discusses the theories of secularization, which are sociological theories, introducing his vision of secularization as a process of continuous differentiation between elements of the sacred and secular in thought and society, between religion and politics, private space and public space. He concludes that the longing for the sacred is inseparable from humans, and remains in the fields and activities of humanity, such as art, literature and other activities, as well as in worldly ideologies separated from religion, but continued to secularize the terms of religion and its ritual practices in the sanctification of secular values, such as the state, the people, the homeland, the party, etc. Finally, Bishara moves on to an important part of his research: examining the models of secularization of politics and the state applied in Europe (France, Germany, Poland, Britain), the United States and others, showing the relationship between secularism (one that is hardline anti-religion, and another that is soft, tolerant towards religious practices) and the type of democracy in each country. He criticized trying to impose or import a particular model as the only possible secular model. He presents a model of secularization theory at the end of the book, in an attempt that is the only one of its kind. Azmi Bishara promised in his book that the last part will deal with the model of secularization in the Ottoman state and the Arab state and its consequences.

In the meantime, he published books discussing the Arab revolutions, notably his seminal book on the Egyptian revolution. He also published a small philosophical book, An Essay on Freedom, and another book, The Army and Politics, Theoretical Problems and Arab Models, to fill an important gap in the Arab library concerning this issue, theoretically and through Syrian and Egyptian models in particular.

His position on the Arab revolutions
Azmi Bishara supported the Arab Revolutions that swept through several countries in late 2010, starting from the duties of what he calls the "moral intellectual" to take a stand against injustice and association with the fair aspirations of people, especially the young generation that launched the Arab Spring. His recent books such as "Being Arab in Our Times" and "The Arab Issue" insisted that the task of democracy is to raise the issue of democratic governance in parallel with education on the values of democracy and not wait for the spread of democratic culture. Since the end of the 1990s, the idea of "citizen states" has been promoted. In many cases, it has been a reference to the change and many have relied on it to analyze the situation. He considered the first uprisings of the Arab Spring at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 as an existential cry for freedom and dignity. Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, Bishara has been preoccupied with a research project that is keeping pace with the revolutions. He began with the Tunisian Revolution in his book "The glorious Tunisian revolution", following the fundamental reasons that led to the Tunisian revolution and making scientific comparisons between some of the social and economic aspects that prevailed in Tunisia before the revolution, and similar circumstances in other Arab countries also candidates for the revolution. The writing was an analytical attempt to understand the structure of the Tunisian revolution and its evolution through its diaries. The book also monitors the history of the uprisings and explains the map of parties in Tunisia on the eve of the revolution. He then presents the details of the facts in the diary of the uprising, and how the events gradually evolved so that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had to escape. At the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Azmi Bishara was a supporter of the revolution in writing and media appearance. In his book "Syria-A Way of Suffering to Freedom (2011 - 2013)" (2013), he chronicled its two phases: peaceful and armed civilization, based on an analysis of the structure of the regime and the relationship between society and the state in Syria. The book deals with the mobile facts in the main cities in Syria, how the protests began peacefully and then moved to militarization and took up arms later. Azmi Bishara accompanied the Egyptian revolution of 2011 with his intellectual views, political views and analyses. He completed a series of articles and studies on the Egyptian revolution. Bishara was one of the most prominent political commentators on the events of the Egyptian revolution. He also published a huge research book on two volumes: The Egyptian Revolution. The history of the so-called Republic of July and the transfer of power in the authority from the army to the presidency and the security services, and the emergence of institutional conflict and the history of protest in Egypt, documented the revolution since 25 January until the military coup, indicating the dynamics that led to the coup in the army's ambition to rule, the conflict between the Egyptian elites before receiving power and the dismantling of the deep state, and in the lack of consistency on the democratic system and its bases before resorting to the elections.