PLO founder member and staunch defender of Palestinian rights
Al-Hout was a larger-than-life figure who represented the PLO in Lebanon. Photgraph: Al Quds Al Arabi
Shafiq al-Hout, who has died aged 77 in Beirut, was a founding member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), its representative in Lebanon and a larger-than-life figure who championed the Palestinians' right of return to their homeland and a unified, democratic state there for Muslims, Jews and Christians. He was also a strong advocate of armed resistance.
Al-Hout has died a disappointed and frustrated man, his life's work, for the foreseeable future, buried in a divided and moribund PLO and a Palestinian national movement in the worst straits in its 50-year history.
He once wrote: "If I were asked after all these years, after that evil day I was wrenched from Palestine, if I remained convinced of my right to return, I would never hesitate to say 'yes'. It is not just that I will return to Palestine, but Palestine will return to me and to what it once was." He died still believing that, but the past 15 or so years gave him strong reason to doubt that his dream would be realised soon.
Al-Hout was born and raised in Jaffa, his secondary education at the Amiriyya high school ending abruptly in April 1948, when Jewish irregulars seized the city from under the noses of the British army, forcing most of the Arab population to flee. His own family sailed to Lebanon, from where they originated (though al-Hout never regarded himself as anything but Palestinian).
After a rumbustious five years studying politics at the American University of Beirut, the region's prime academy for Arab nationalists, and taking part in student politics and demonstrations, Al-Hout taught at schools in Beirut and Kuwait, another centre of Palestinian ferment, where he fell in with Yasser Arafat and other adherents of the cause. In the early 1960s he became a journalist on – and later editor of – the radical weekly Al-Hawadith (Events), and also wrote a satirical column for the equally radical daily Al-Moharrer (the Editor), whose days were ended in early 1976 by a bomb planted in its printing shop by Syrian agents.
Al-Hout left journalism for full-time Palestinian politics in 1963, and helped found first the leftist Palestine Liberation Front and then the PLO in May 1964. He was soon appointed full-time PLO representative in Lebanon, a post in which he survived 10 Israeli assassination attempts, the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli invasion in 1982 and the Sabra-Shatila massacre (the subject of the definitive oral and victim-sourced history by his wife, Bayan Nuwayhed). Al-Hout remained in Beirut after the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982. From 1974, he had also been the PLO's representative at the annual UN general assembly meetings.
He was twice a member of the PLO executive, before Arafat took over from Ahmed Shukairy, from 1966 to 1968, and – appointed by Arafat, who wanted his antagonistic but admired friend inside the tent – from 1991 to 1993. Al-Hout left the executive over what he, like many, regarded as the disaster of the Arafat-orchestrated PLO recognition of Israel under the Oslo accords, and the movement's effective return to the occupied territories under the control and aegis of Israel.
In that great division in the Palestinian movement between the "outside" – the diaspora of the refugee camps and the millions of exiles worldwide – and the "inside"– the Palestinian authority and its constituents – Al-Hout was a devout outsider. He believed that all of Palestine belonged to all Palestinians, in one state. In later years, he remained a member of the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in-exile, but stayed out of politics, writing his memoirs, spreading the word in his articulate and forceful way, in that familiar and formidable deep smoker's growl, usually alongside a rapidly diminishing bottle of Black Label whisky. He viewed recent Palestinian developments with dejection and pessimism, though never despair.
In all those years, from the early 1960s onwards, he was one of those rare senior Palestinian interlocutors who could, and would, make a decent stab at unravelling for baffled outsiders the machinations of Palestinian politics, and he wrote several books on Arab nationalism.
After Al-Hout's death had been announced, a contributor to the Angry Arab website recalled: "He had that voice that betrays long years of smoking and drinking … he was blunt and truthful when lying was a job description in Arafat's apparatus." He was not far off the mark.
Al-Hout is survived by Bayan Nuwayhed, his son, Hader, and his daughters, Hanin and Syrine.
• Shafiq al-Hout, politician and writer, born 13 January 1932; died 2 August 2009