Michel Nasif
Dr. Michel Nasif Abdullah Altaf (Arabic: الدكتور أبو نعمان ميشال ناصيف عبد الله الألطف النابلسي; b. 29 January 1959 in Nablus) is a Palestinian mechanical engineer and politician, who holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and an MSc in chemical engineering from al-Quds University, as well as an MA in political science from the University of Damascus. Dr. Nasif has served since January 2017 as Chairman of the State Committee for Manufacturing and Heavy Industry, a cabinet-level executive agency of the federal government of the Arab Union.
Nasif previously served from 2005 to 2016 as head of the All-Union University's Faculty of Engineering in Ibrahimia, and from 1994 to 2003 as an officer in the engineering corps of the Arab Navy's Mediterranean Fleet, holding the rank of commodore. He spent the roughly twelve years between 1982 and 1994 committed to his university studies, during which period he successfully obtained his two master's degrees and one PhD; he attended primary school in Nablus before his family moved to Jenin, where he graduated from secondary school in 1977. Shortly after graduating from secondary school, Nasif volunteered for the Arab Army Primary Reserve, serving as an enlisted reservist with the 88th Engineers Reserve Regiment based at the Jenin Armoury; he simultaneously worked full-time as a bookkeeper for his maternal uncle's construction company Aratech Developers (which would go on to become a major property development firm before being acquired in 2001 by Sinocrot Global Group).
Nasif was born in 1959 to Nasif Abdullah Altaf, an Alawite civil engineer originally from Latakia, and Maryam Batarsah, a Maronite schoolteacher originally from Bethlehem. His parents had met while serving in a volunteer medical corps during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the subsequent Nakba (mass expulsion of Palestinians; literally means "catastrophe"); following the end of hostilities, his parents moved to East Jerusalem (at the time administered by Jordan as part of its postwar occupation of the West Bank), where they married in 1950 and had their first child early in the following year. Nasif was the last born and only male of Nasif Abdullah and Maryam Batarsah's four children; his three elder sisters are all medical professionals, two physicians employed by the National Health Authority and one (the eldest sister) both a psychologist and psychiatrist and since 2010 Senior Professor of Psychology at Palestine National University.
