Sari Nusseibeh is the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the Baker Institute and president of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.

Nusseibeh has extensive knowledge of the sensitive issues surrounding the Middle East through his work as a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 2001 to 2002, and his founding of the People’s Voice initiative, a nonpartisan civil initiative to advance the process of achieving peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The plan supports a two-state solution based on a return to 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as an open city.

Nusseibeh is working under the aegis of the Baker Institute’s Conflict Resolution Program, which is chaired by Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian. The program includes the work of the institute’s Israeli–Palestinian Working Group, which is comprised of an Israeli team headed by Yair Hirschfeld, the Isaac and Mildred Brochstein Fellow in Middle East Peace and Security in Honor of Yitzhak Rabin, and a Palestinian team headed by Samih Abid, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. Nusseibeh is also professor of Islamic philosophy at Al-Quds, Jerusalem’s Arab university.

In 1987 Nusseibeh voiced the unconventional suggestion that Palestinians recognize Israel and that Israel annex the occupied territories and give full citizenship to the Palestinians in a single binational state. Some of his comments on the binational state are relevant to ideas being discussed today. His ideas were published in a 1991 book that he co-authored with Mark Heller, “No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Nusseibeh’s memoir, “Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life,” was published in 2007. The New York Times described it as “one of the best personal accounts of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict ever written.”

The son of Palestinian parents and a native of Shaykh Jarrar, East Jerusalem, Nusseibeh has a B.A. in politics, philosophy and economics from Christ Church, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Islamic philosophy from Harvard University.