Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari (Hebrew: מוחמד נימר אל-הווארי), is a Palestinian lawyer born in the city of Nazareth in 1907. He led the Palestinian paramilitary organization Najada in the city of Jaffa in the 1940s. He was appointed at a later stage after the establishment of the State of Israel as a judge in the Central Court in Nazareth In 1955, he published the book "The Secret of the Nakba", in which he criticized the Palestinian and Arab leaders and held them responsible for the loss of Palestine.
his life
Al-Hawari worked in his youth as a teacher in Gaza and Hebron, then studied law and graduated as a lawyer from the Institute of Law in Jerusalem in 1939. After graduating, he worked as a lawyer in the office of lawyer Saeed Zain Al-Din in Jaffa, then moved to work in the courts, where he worked as a chief translator in the Jaffa Court during the Mandate era .
In 1944 he joined the "Al Najada" organization after it was established by the Islamic Sports Club in Jaffa as part of the club, and became one of its most prominent leaders after its independence from the Islamic Club in late 1944. Throughout Palestine at that time, when it was officially established and registered with the Mandate government in 1945, the organization developed until 1946, and it had branches in most Palestinian cities, and members of its members began to train in weapons, although its official goals were in the social, youth and sports fields. And it did not include military action in order to preserve its license from the Mandate government, which followed emergency regulations and prohibited the carrying and training of weapons. During the Hawari period, the organization expanded and the number of its members reached 5,000. It organized a number of military sports parades in Jaffa, Gaza and Acre, and participated in Arab activities and meetings. In Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and others.
It is known that Al-Hawari started his activities in support of Mufti Amin Al-Husseini, but later disputes erupted with the Al-Husseini family, which, according to certain sources, tried to control the organization and its followers in their party: the Arab Palestinian Party. With intense competition and disagreements between the two organizations, it weakened their strength and disturbed the atmosphere of their work, followed by attempts to unify them into one organization called the Youth Organization, but it quickly collapsed and ended its existence and the existence of the Najada and Fatwa Movement as well.
After the decision to divide, Al-Hawari, accompanied by a group of the remaining Najada organization, tried to defend Jaffa and organize the arms and the warriors, but their attempts failed after it weakened and the strength of the Najada organization disappeared in its struggle with the former with the Fatwa youth. This was the military occupation of Jaffa on 28/4/48. Despite the military training of these teams, their training was superficial, simple and sporadic and did not affect the battlefield.
Al-Hawari left Jaffa before its military fall in December 1947 for fear of assassination, and sought refuge in the West Bank, where he worked as an official for one of the refugee camps. in these meetings.
In 1950, al-Hawari returned to his city of Nazareth with the approval of David Ben-Gurion, and there he tried to establish a political party competing with the Communist Party, but he did not succeed. Among the well-known cases he pleaded was the case of the return of the people of Iqrit to their country. In 1968, he was appointed as a judge in the Nazareth Central Court, at which time he retired from political work. He died in Nazareth in 1984.
General Refugee Conference
The first general conference of refugees was held on March 17, 1949 in the city of Ramallah, where Al-Hawari was elected as president and Yahya Hammouda and Aziz Shehadeh were also elected as deputies, but they failed with Said Beidas and Francis Galad to win the role of the independent delegation of refugees in the Rhodes talks in February 1949.
During the informal meetings that took place in the Lausanne peace talks in May 1949, Al-Hawari participated as the head of the delegation of Palestinian refugees, and there his disagreement with the Palestinian delegations emerged. Al-Hawari is an argument that the Arab countries do not want the refugees, and will not absorb them, and that the masses of refugees who live on the ceasefire lines, the stateless and the poor will not give Israel anything but grief. In June 1949, Al-Hawari contacted the Israeli government, which proposed an early solution to the refugee problem with two alternative plans; To create an independent Palestinian state or annex the West Bank to Israel.
Iqrt issue
Houari was the first to file a legal case against the State of Israel in 1951 on behalf of 5 men from Iqrit. Hawari, as a lawyer, was instrumental in winning the right of return for the people of Iqrith, and on July 31, 1951, the Israeli courts recognized the villagers’ rights to their lands and their right to return to it. The decision to return was not implemented after the Israeli forces destroyed the village after the decision was issued, and they are still preventing all Palestinian refugees from returning to their villages.
Published works
The Secret of the Nakba (The Secret of the Catastrophe) Nazareth 1955.
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