Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2019, pp. 71
Compiled by Amin Gharad
Ambassador Carleton S. Coon Jr., 91, died in Warrenton, VA on Dec. 3, 2018. Born in Paris in 1927, Ambassador Coon served briefly in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II, and then graduated from Harvard in 1949. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service shortly thereafter and was posted in Damascus, Delhi, Tabriz, Morocco, and, finally, Nepal where he served from 1981-1984.
After retiring from the Foreign Service in 1985, Coon became involved with the American Humanist Association where he eventually served a five-year term as vice president. He also wrote and pursued intellectual interests in human evolution—a curiosity he inherited from his anthropologist father—as well as musical pursuits, composing a number of chamber and piano works.
Ambassador Coon and almost 90 U.S. diplomats signed a letter initiated by the Washington Report in 2004 to President George W. Bush urging him “to reassert American principles of justice and fairness” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While neither the White House nor the State Department agreed to meet with the diplomats, the Palestinian American Congress invited the delegation to visit the West Bank and meet with President Yasser Arafat. Their visit included witnessing Israeli checkpoints, the apartheid wall, harassment by settlers, all designed to make life intolerable for Palestinians.
He’d recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with his wife Jane Abell Coon, who was also a career Foreign Service Officer and an ambassador in her own right. He is survived by his five children, 13 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.
Amos Oz, 79, died on Dec. 28, 2018 at home in Tel Aviv after a short bout with cancer. Born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem to a family of Eastern European Jews who migrated to British-occupied Mandate Palestine, Amos would go on to pursue a prolific writing career and accumulate a long list of accolades and honors.
He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Legion d’Honneur, the prestigious German Goethe Prize, named Officer of Arts and Letters in France, and won several Israeli literary prizes.
A longtime advocate of the two-state solution, Oz grew critical of Israeli occupation despite having participated in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. He would eventually help found the well-known Peace Now movement committed to realizing a two-state solution and criticizing Israeli settlement expansion.
The famed novelist produced almost two dozen works of fiction, and hundreds of articles and essays over the course of his prolific career. His final book, Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land, addressed rising extremism in Israeli society.
He is survived by his three children.
Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, 87, died on Dec. 22, 2018 in Riyadh after several years of illness. The prince was a senior member of the ruling al-Saud family and father of Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal.
Born to King Abdulaziz ibn Saud (his 20th son) and an Armenian woman, Munaiyir, Prince Talal was notable for his record of dissident activity as well as his support for political reforms and greater rights for women in Saudi Arabia.
“The Red Prince,” as he would come to be known, spearheaded a group of princes allied with Egypt’s then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser to push for constitutional reforms. His activity in the “Free Princes Movement” and an escalation in rhetoric during the height of an Egyptian-Saudi regional cold war would result in the eventual revocation of Prince Talal’s passport and a period of self-imposed exile. With the ascent of King Faisal to the throne, however, Prince Talal would eventually recant his previous activity and return to the Kingdom.
In 2011, Prince Talal stepped down from his post as a member of the Allegiance Council which is responsible for managing future succession to the Saudi throne.
Lamin Sanneh, 76, died in New Haven, CT on Jan. 6 following a stroke. Remembered globally as a leading expert on religion and global Christianity, Dr. Sanneh is celebrated for having influenced contemporary discourse on both Islam and Christianity in Africa.
In his memoir, Summoned From the Margin: Homecoming of an African, he describes his youth as being engrossed in existential questions around God and suffering—a period he credits as having propelled not only his personal spiritual journey, but his scholarly trajectory as well.
Born into a large rural Muslim family in Gambia, Dr. Sanneh converted to Christianity in his teens and eventually became a practicing Roman Catholic.
His scholarship boasts a body of more than 20 books and hundreds of articles as well as a series of teaching posts at the University of Ghana, Harvard University, and Yale, where he remained active for the last three decades of his life.
Dr. Sanneh is survived by his wife, Sandra, and their children and grandchildren.
Mohamed Ben Khalifa, 35, an Associated Press photojournalist, was fatally wounded by shrapnel while covering clashes between militia groups in Tripoli, Libya on Jan. 20. Since Libya’s uprising and ensuing civil war, almost 20 journalists have been killed, with dozens more disappeared or unaccounted for or forced to flee the country. Friends and co-workers lauded Ben Khalifa both for his rapid rise to fame as Libya’s most prominent photojournalist and his concern for preserving the dignity of his subjects. They recalled his compassion, good humor, kindness, and all around decency
Described by family members as having been “obsessed” with photography and cameras since childhood, Ben Khalifa went on to study the fine arts and formally began his professional photography work in the wake of the 2011 Libyan uprising against Muammar Gaddafi. His reporting focused extensively on tracking political and militant conflicts in the country, as well as the plight of the wounded, internally displaced persons and migrants.
He is survived by his wife, Lamia, and 6-month-old daughter, Rayan.
