Elias Davidson

Elias Davidson was born in Palestine in 1941, during the time of the British Mandate. He regards himself as a Palestinian Jew. He is (2002) a composer living in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he moved to live in 1962.

He seems to use the Icelandic naming convention – taking as his surname a patronymic derived from the first name of his father, David Kahn, a German Jew who moved to Palestine in 1931 for religious reasons. Davisson lived first in Tel Aviv and then in Jerusalem, in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood. His teen-years were spent mostly in France where met the phenomena of anti-Arab racism and of socialism. For a number of years in his teens in France, he was a member of Hashomer Hatza'ir, a leftist Zionist youth movement, but left the movement when he came to believe that Zionist ideology was based on racist premises.

At the age of 21, he settled in Iceland where he married an Icelandic doctor. He has for many years been involved in human rights activism. He is a co-founder of the Iceland-Palestine Association and supports the idea of a secular-democratic State in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs. He now lives in Iceland with his second wife.

Elias has for many years been involved in activism and research regarding social and global justice, peace, anti-racism and human rights. His writings include articles on multinational corporations, the IMF and the World Bank, the Palestine question, Zionism, economic sanctions and international law.