Loading ...Pathbreakers of Arab America—Mohamed Anwar Hadid
By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer
This is the seventy-ninth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, arts, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our seventy-ninth pathbreaker, Mohamed Hadid, is a Palestinian-born American real estate developer, classic car merchant, and recent entrepreneur in a new venture producing caviar. Their father is deeply proud of his daughters, Gigi and Bella, world-famous fashion models and activists, who are deeply committed to their Palestinian roots.
Heartening origin story of Palestinian refugee, Mohamed Hadid transforms into an ultimate American success
Born in Nazareth on November 6, 1948, to a Palestinian Muslim family, Mohamed Anwar Hadid is the son of Anwar Mohamed Hadid and Khairiah Daher. Hadid claims descent through his mother from an 18th-century Arab ruler of northern Palestine. In Mohamed’s origin story, from his family’s historical narrative, he explains, “I was only about 18 months old. After we were expelled from our beloved Palestine into the Syrian refugee camp.”
Further, according to Mohamed Hadid’s Instagram account, his family emigrated to Syria during the 1948 war, when Israel declared its independence and a wave of nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled or fled from their homes, defined as ‘Nakba,’ or ‘catastrophe.’ “We lived in Syria for 18 months. My mother checked with the Red Cross but couldn’t find any trace of my father. Finally, my uncle found us and told her my father was alive, and we were reunited.”
Hadid said his parents never told him the ‘complete story’ of their lives in that period until some years later. They apparently “didn’t want me to feel hatred for the Jews. It sounds too good to be true. They taught us that hatred stops you from moving ahead.” The underlying story, however, was, according to Hadid, that “…we became refugees to Syria and we lost our home in Safad to a Jewish family that we sheltered when they were refugees from Poland on the ship that was sailing from country to country and no one would take them… they were our guest for 2 years till they made us refugees and they kicked us out of our own home.”
Due to the 1947–1949 Palestine War, Hadid and his family fled to Lebanon, ultimately settling in Syria. In this process, Mohamed’s father and the rest of the family separated, and his mother attempted to return with her baby son and daughter to her husband’s grand home in Safed. There, she found the Hadid residence locked. The family of Polish Jews that they had taken in and sheltered as their guests in 1946 had claimed the property.”
Hadid later reported that his parents never told him or his siblings about their exodus from Palestine until they were older. They wanted to suppress the tragic story of their ejection from Palestine, but also because “they wanted us to go forward with our lives without having hatred towards the Jews.” Reuniting with his father and two other sisters in a camp in Gaza only came later because Hadid’s uncle, a doctor with UNESCO, located both parts of the family.
While Hadid remembers nothing of the refugee camp, he does recall “the day that he watched his father win Jordanian passports for the entire family in a game of backgammon with the Jordanian ambassador in Damascus. By then, they had been stateless for seven years.” We could find no further corroboration of this intriguing claim.
Meanwhile, in moving from refugee status to a more stable life, Mohamed’s father had studied English at the teachers’ college at the University of Jerusalem and subsequently taught English. His father then studied law in Syria before working for the British authorities on land settlement issues. From there, Hadid’s father joined the United States Information Agency (USIA) and Voice of America (VOA) moving his family from Damascus to Tunisia and Greece before moving to Washington, D.C. By then, Mohamed was 14 years old and his father continued his work with VOA, then later with USIA as a writer, editor and translator.
Hadid graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, where he was the only Arab student, before attending North Carolina State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first marriage was with Mary Butler, with whom he had two daughters, Alana Hadid and Marielle Hadid. He and Butler ended their marriage in 1992. From 1994 until their divorce in 2000, he was married to the Dutch model, Yolanda Van den Herik. They had three children, who all became models: Gigi (1995), Bella ( 1996), and Anwar (1999). In 2014, Hadid was engaged to Shiva Safai, a model and businesswoman, born in Iran and raised in Norway, and in December 2019, they split.
Hadid is a dual Jordanian-American citizen and Muslim. He does “not consider himself a devout Muslim,” even though he does not drink or smoke and fasts during Ramadan. Although Mohamed says he has never drunk alcohol, he nevertheless has a 5,000-bottle wine cellar, including some from his own Beverly Hills winery.
Successful American real estate mogul, Hadid fathered ‘proud Palestinian’ fashion model daughters extraordinaire—Gigi and Bella
Mohamed Hadid has made his fortune, “as one of the most successful property developers in America,” according to ‘The Times.’ Today, he is known for being the father of Gigi and Bella, the supermodels. While upscale real estate and classic cars have been his livelihood, Hadid is now preoccupied with his new business venture – “selling the world’s best caviar.” In an interview at his Bel Air, CA, estate, he appears self-assured, knowing he has competed successfully with other real estate developers. One such competition included a hotel at the base of the central ski mountain in Aspen, a property then owned by future American president Donald Trump.
Hadid shared with The Times that “he has loved luxury for as long as he can remember–maybe because I was a refugee but also because we had a great heritage background, so I always feel like I should have lived in a different era, I should not have been here.” He recalled the high social and political status of an ancestor on his mother’s side, known as Daher al-Omar. That ancestor was “an 18th-century provincial leader in the Ottoman Empire who carved out an autonomous region in northern Palestine and was known for his religious tolerance, deft political skills and ambitious construction projects.”
Reflecting positively on his historical links with the Middle East, Hadid became heavily involved with building a mosque, Islamic school, and cultural center in Virginia in the 1980s. That mosque reportedly feeds thousands of needy people a week. Today, Mohamed remains highly proud of this particular achievement. He claims his confidence in succeeding is “because I can always start from nothing. Because I started from nothing.”
Perhaps more than anything else, Hadid is known as the proud father of his daughters, two of whom are Gigi and Bella Hadid. An earlier ‘Pathbreakers of Arab America’ depicted them as “Arab Americans, world-famous fashion models, and activists, who are deeply committed to their Palestinian roots.” While the sisters started on different professional career paths, they later converged in careers as star American models. Important to know is that their common fashion interests parallel their commitments to charitable causes and pro-Arab and Palestinian initiatives.
Gigi and Bella have learned well from their Palestinian American father. Besides their place in society as super fashion models, they are deeply committed to who they are as Arab Americans, especially willing to speak their minds on their Palestinian identity. In so doing, they contribute significantly to American understandings of multiculturalism generally and especially to knowing more about the plight of their fellow Palestinians.
Their father has taught his daughters well.
Sources:
–Mohamed Hadid,” Wikipedia Series on Arab Americans, 2025
–”Not the only ‘proud Palestinian’ in the family–Gigi Hadid’s father details refugee history in Syria,” Arab America, 1/2/2016
–“Unmasking the Mysterious Mohamed Hadid,” by Harry Jaffe, Regardies, 3/1/1988
–“Mohamed Hadid on raising Gigi and Bella – and beating Trump at his own game,” The Times, 9/26/2020
John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017. He has taught at the University of Libya, Benghazi, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo; John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.
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