Born in Egypt, Henri Curiel spent much of his active political life in France, where he was the guiding force behind the Solidarity organization, a group that provided assistance to revolutionary movements in countries like Algeria and South Africa. This role earned Curiel many enemies: in 1976, the French right-wing magazine Le Point denounced him as “the boss of the terrorist support networks.”

Two decades after Curiel’s assassination in 1978, the late Israeli journalist Uri Avnery recalled his impressions of the Egyptian activist:

A thin, rather ascetic man, his eyes hidden behind thick glasses, unassuming, quite unobtrusive, he looked more like a professor of literature than a professional revolutionary. A casual observer would never have suspected that here was a man involved in a dozen struggles of liberation, hated and threatened by a dozen secret services.