Fadi Elsalameen

Fadi Elsalameen (born in Hebron on December 12, 1983, Arabic: فادي السلامين ) is a Palestinian op-ed writer, blogger, commentator, and public speaker. He served as research fellow with the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program. He was also the director general of Palestine Note. Before that, he served as the director of Institutional Advancement at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) where he established the Development Department by securing the first foundation grant to the organization.

Elsalameen worked as a program adviser at the Imaginenations Group where he worked with teams of international development finance and youth experts to design investment strategies for youth in the Middle East and South America.

Political life

Elsalameen has been involved in the political arena at a young age. Since 1998, Elsalameen has been an active participant in the international organization Seeds of Peace participating in and lecturing at numerous leadership summits and conferences on topics related to Middle East youth, conflict resolution, and extremism. He was handpicked to take part in this organization by late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat.

Elsalameen was invited personally by US President Bill Clinton to attend the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, and helped secure a commitment for a political risk insurance initiative to encourage investment in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal at the time.

In recent months Elsalameen became a vocal critic of the current Palestinian government. In February, 2011 Elsalameen called for the resignation of Palestinian President Mamhmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an article he first published on Ma'an News.

Elsalameen is also part of a new non-partisan Palestinian youth movement that calls for reform in the Palestinian territories in a non-violent way. Writing for ''Time Magazine, Joe Kleine write about Elsalameen and his involvement in the movement. He says: "El-Salameen has spent much of his time in the U.S. and has achieved a certain prominence—he is quietly charismatic, a world-class networker, the sort of person who is invited to international conferences—but he is now spending more time at home in Hebron, organizing the March 15 movement in the West Bank's largest city. 'I met some of the leaders of the Tahrir Square movement at a conference in Doha,' he tells me. 'They don't fit the usual profile of a 'youth leader.' They are low-key, well educated but not wealthy. They are figuring it out as they go along, trying to figure out what works.' His comments about the non-violent resistance among Palestinians were also highlighted in an article in the Economist''

The political prospects of Elsalameen was highlighted by American commentator MJ Rosenberg who predicted that he will run for president one day in this piece published on TPM cafe.

Elsalameen also calls for the use of green environment and technologies to resist the Israeli occupation as seen in his Huffington Post piece.

Fund for Palestinian students

According to an interview with Haaretz newspaper, Elsalameen funded around 30 Palestinian students to go to the universities of Hebron and AlQudus where he also chooses their fields of study.

Education

Elsalameen received a full scholarship to The Gunnery private boarding school in Washington, Connecticut. Later he graduated from Earlham College with a B.S. in biochemistry and political science and then got a Masters in International Relations and Economics with a specialization in China Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Elsalameen speaks Arabic, Hebrew, English, French, and Mandarin-Chinese.

Personal life

Elsalameen is the oldest of nine children. He is married to Ashley Elsalameen and lives in Hebron in the Palestinian territories with his extended family. He came from a modest family from Hebron. His mother is a fourth grade teacher his father is a plumber. His grandfather, Hussein Elsalameen, was the vice mayor of a small town in southern Hebron and was one of the founders of the current municipality. He was also the Mukhtar of the Elsalameen tribe in Palestine. Members of the Elsalameen tribe are scattered between Hebron, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan.