Sami Hadawi - After Exile

After Exile

Hadawi had similar work with Jordanian land authorities as he did with the British. He retained that job until 1952 when he became a land specialist for the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine in New York. His job was to determine the extent of property that Palestinian refugees left behind after the 1948 War. This led him to co-found the Palestinian Information Office in 1959 and then two Arab League offices in the United States. His final work years were as Director of the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) in Beirut throughout 1960–70 in which he published Palestine - Loss of a Heritage.

Hadawi's wife died of a heart attack in 1965. He retired in 1970, moved to Toronto and began writing books on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including Palestinian Rights and Losses in 1948 (1988) and Bitter Harvest: a Modern History of Palestine (1989). Hadawi died on April 22, 2004, at the age of 100. He was buried in Toronto instead of his desired request to be buried in his hometown of Jerusalem. "I would like to be buried in Jerusalem, but I have no choice," he told journalist Hicham Safieddine, in the last interview he gave.