Hasan AlRadee (al-Rad‘ī) (حسن الرضيع), 35, was a prolific leftist political economist who wrote in several registers—academic papers, policy proposals, and an acerbic running commentary on the Palestinian economy, pitched to a lay audience.

AlRadee was born and lived in Bayt Lahya. He received a master’s degree in economics from al-Azhar University in 2015, for a thesis on the effects of the global financial crisis on Israeli financial markets. Five years later, he earned a PhD from the Holy Qur’an and Ta’seel al-‘Ulum University in Wad Madani, Sudan, for a dissertation on economic crisis in Palestine and its effects on income distribution. He was a lecturer at Israa University and an independent scholar.

In spring 2021, AlRadee had an abortive stint in electoral politics, running as a candidate for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) on the slate of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). DFLP and 35 other contending groups included many young people such as AlRadee on their lists, reflecting the thirst to renovate political institutions after a 15-year period of no elections. 

The elections did not take place. President Mahmoud Abbas indefinitely postponed the poll, citing Israel’s refusal to allow East Jerusalemites to vote. DFLP, Hamas, and PFLP opposed Abbas’s action.

AlRadee’s academic essays center on development economics, making a case for it as an urgent and viable alternative to hegemonic neoliberal models. One paper critiques what he characterizes the “parasitic, rentier” character of the Muslim Brothers’ economic thought and practice. Another plumbs the postwar economic experience of Rwanda as a model to reorient Palestine’s economy. And a third chronicles the near-extinction of Gaza’s furniture industry after Israel’s 2007 imposition of the blockade; at its height, the industry employed 11,000 workers in 770 workshops.

AlRadee also penned numerous online pieces that offer a 360-degree view of the engineered debilitation of Gaza’s economy. In lacerating prose and a style he characterized as satirical (sakhir), AlRadee castigated the Israeli siege that reduced Gazans to paupers surviving on foreign handouts. He did not absolve the PA for its corrupt cronyism nor the Hamas government for profiting from the tunnel economy.

He termed this complex of dysfunction “Gazan disease”: “If Dutch disease is a boom in the government sector and a decline in the agricultural and industrial sectors, Gazan disease is the disappearance of agriculture and industry and all the elements of development economics.” 

The cure to the disease is a keynote than runs through all of AlRadee’s writings: restoring Palestinian political cohesion. In a 2020 concept paper that led to an expanded project for an edited volume, AlRadee envisioned a grassroots initiative, “the Palestinian Army of Reconciliation,” to overcome the vendettas and polarization between families loyal to Fatah and to Hamas, still smoldering after the armed clashes between the two factions in Gaza in 2007. 

On 4 November 2023, AlRadee was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in Bayt Lahya. He is survived by his wife, artist Fayza Yousef, and their triplet daughters, whom he called his “princesses.” Now living in Egypt, Yousef frequently posts memories and messages to her departed partner. Read one missive: “May God have mercy on you, my soulmate, and make you among the blessed in His Heaven.”

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