Henri Jibrayel

Who is Henri Jibrayel?

Henri Jibrayel, is a French politician with Lebanese and Assyrian roots.

His father was an Assyrian survivor of the Assyrian genocide who had taken refuge with his parents in a Beirut slum. He married in 1938 a Maronite young woman from Bkassine, then joined the Free French Forces after De Gaulle's Appeal of 18 June. After the war, the family got the French naturalisation and was hosted by its new fatherland in a slum near Marseille. The father was sent in Madagascar till 1950 to repress the anticolonial insurgency, then again in Indochina in one of France's colonial wars. In 1963, the family, including 8 children, tries a come back in Lebanon, and settle in Ain al-Remmane, but this attempt leads to a fiasco and two years later the family turns back to Marseilles, Henri leaves school at 15, becomes a crane driver, and afterwards enters the French Poste.

After being a trade-unionist at the Poste, he becomes conseiller général for the Socialist Party in a Marseille canton and maire-adjoint in a Marseille secteur in 2001, then he is elected member of the National Assembly of France on June 17, 2007 with 57.41% of votes, so becoming one out of three metropolitan deputies with non European family roots.