Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Najib Nassar was born in the village of Ain Anoub in Lebanon in 1865. He was married and had a son. He completed his primary education in Shweifat, his secondary education in Souk El Gharb, and earned a degree in pharmacy from the American University of Beirut. He worked as a pharmacist in Safed and at the Scottish Hospital in Tiberias, as a teacher in Jerusalem schools, and as a farmer in Tiberias. In 1908, he founded the Al-Karmel newspaper in Haifa.
Nassar began to take an interest in political affairs in 1905, and he was among the first to work on raising awareness among Palestinians and Arabs about the reality of the Zionist project, when he launched an awareness campaign about the Zionist movement and its goals by publishing articles in Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers, and in the Haifa-based Al-Karmel newspaper. He published his book “Zionism: Its History, Purpose, and Importance” in 1911, and he called for the establishment of Arab propaganda offices in Europe in 1920 with the aim of propaganda against the Zionist movement and showing its destructive impact on Palestinian society.
He launched a campaign against the traditional leadership in Palestine in 1914, opposed Turkey’s joining Germany in World War I, and after Britain’s occupation of Palestine, he called for the establishment of the Arab Economic Renaissance Association. He participated in the founding of the Arab Party in 1918, called for not selling land to the Zionists, and for achieving national unity in Palestine. He was a member of the Islamic-Christian Association in Tiberias, and then of the Islamic-Christian Association in Haifa.
Nassar participated in the proceedings of the Third Palestinian Congress in Haifa in December 1920, and called for the establishment of workers’ and peasant organizations to confront Zionist settlement. He also participated in the Fourth Palestinian Congress in Jerusalem in May-June 1921.
Nassar published a number of books, including: Zionism (1911), The Arabs’ Rescue or Arab Virtues (a play, 1919), The Arabs’ Loyalty (a play, 1919), In the Arabs’ Custody (a novel, 1921), Muflih al-Ghasani (a novel-memoirs, 1922), The Palestinian Cause, The Man (about the biography of King Abdul Aziz Al Saud, 1936), and he translated the book Dry Agriculture (1927).
Nassar endured hardship throughout his life. In 1909, Ottoman authorities shut down his newspaper for two months, and the Jewish community filed a lawsuit against him, accusing him of inciting sectarianism and stirring up trouble. He was tried in 1910, but the court acquitted him. The Ottoman authorities pursued him again, so he went into hiding with the Al-Fahoum family in Nazareth, and later with the Arab tribe of Al-Sardiyah in Transjordan, where he worked as a shepherd for two and a half years, adopting the name Muflih Al-Ghassani. The Ottoman authorities arrested him and imprisoned him in the military court in Damascus, but he was soon released. He also faced harassment from the British occupation, who arrested his wife in 1938 for a year on charges of supplying weapons to the rebellion. His newspaper was suspended several times before finally being shut down in 1944.
He died in Nazareth on March 3, 1948.
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