Zahi Karkabi was born in Shefa-Amr in 1926. He moved to Haifa in the 1940s and joined the National Liberation League and then the Israeli Communist Party. Over the years, he held several partisan and public assignments, including secretary of the Haifa region of the Communist Party, member of the Political Bureau, secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Haifa municipality, representative of the party in the magazine "Qadaya as-Silm wa al-Ishtirakiyya" (Problems of Peace and Socialism) in Prague, and director of the Emile Touma Institute. He married Maggie Tobi Karkabi in 1951 and had Khaled, Walid, and Bashir with her.

The Zahi Karkabi Collection includes two sub-collections covering his personal and professional life. The first sub-collection contains personal photographs of himself and members of his family, and from conferences and visits he attended as a member of the Communist Party. As for the second sub-collection, the documents consist of letters, newspaper clippings about Karkabi and his partisan work and others mourning Emil Touma, studies and clippings handwritten by him.