[The following article appeared in the January 5 issue of Rouge, the French Trotskyist weekly. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Jabra Nicola (A. Said), a former member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, died in London on December 27.
The life of Jabra Nicola is an inseparable part of the history of the Palestinian communist movement. As a result of serious difficulties encountered by his family, he left school after only four years, at the age of eleven. Like other Arab youths under British colonial domination, he was obliged to go to work at a very early age. He drifted for a time in the cities of Jaffa, Haifa, and Beirut. He made the acquaintance of a wide range of militants in the struggle against the colonial system. He had already decided on his political orientation; all that remained was to define the content of his commitment as a militant in the Arab revolutionary movement.
It was in Haifa and Jaffa, where the workers movement was more concentrated and combative, that the most advanced political developments were occurring. The first regroupments of socialists had already taken place. Some socialist circles, while still small in size, foreshadowed the workers parties to come.
In Jaffa, Jabra joined these socialist circles. Following in their traces, he joined the PKP, the Palestinian Communist party, before he was twenty years old. From then on, his whole life was to be devoted to revolutionary activity. Jabra quickly served his apprenticeship as a communist activist: he served time in prison, and later was forced to go underground.
In spite of the extreme limitations of his formal education, Jabra stood out as one of the leading intellectuals in the party. Ably self-educated, an excellent editor in the Arabic language, which he mastered to perfection, he was also fluent in Hebrew and English, read French and German, and was thereby acquainted with a considerable range of cultures. He became one of the editors of the principal underground newspaper of the PKP, Al Ittihad (Unity). There he established definitively his reputation as a talented journalist and a first-rate editor. Jabra put these talents to good use. Long after he had broken politically with the PKP be cause of his anti-Stalinist and internationalist positions, the party's leadership continued to seek —and get-his aid and his contributions to Al Ittihad.
Like several other Arab Communist parties, the PKP had been founded and was still led by Jews. Among these militants, who for the most part took their lead politically from the European Communist movement because of their origin and culture, there were some who came out against the Kremlin's line. One of them in Tel Aviv, Dr. Stein, found in Jabra another communist oppositionist. Toward the latter half of the 1930s, Stein founded an independent anti-Stalinist organization, which was often characterized or attacked as Trotskyist in the press of the day.
Under the impact of the struggle against the British occupiers and the other struggle, still more difficult, against the Zionist colonization, which was beginning to acquire considerable scope, the crisis inside the PKP developed very quickly. Unable to provide a coherent response to these problems, the PKP broke up, a split taking place in 1939. On the one side were the Jews, on the other, the Arabs. It was a bad split, on a national, even nationalist basis, showing the regression of this once-internationalist party. The split signified the party's bankruptcy. The Arab members established the League for National Liberation. Jabra refused to join either wing of the split. He argued correctly that a communist could not have a national affiliation.
Imprisoned from 1940 to 1942 by the British occupation forces, he was released after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and worked in Jaffa as editor of an eve ning newspaper. He was politically isolated throughout this period. But during 1942 he joined a group of Trotskyists composed of both Jewish and Arab members. This group had a short-lived existence, because of the temporary nature of the presence of Jewish Trotskyist members from Europe in Palestine, where they struggled against the British and the Zionists.
With the end of the war, this group fell apart. Isolated again, Jabra decided to rejoin the Communist party. Once again, he was given the editorship of the Arab-language newspaper. This lasted until 1956, when Jabra warned on the eve of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party that something was brewing against Stalin. Not even imagining that such a thing could be true, the party leaders responded by suspending him from his functions. Having made the mistake of being right, Jabra remained isolated in the party, although formally a member for several years more.
In 1962, some intellectuals in the party decided to leave to found a regroupment that was to draw considerable international attention - Matzpen (the name of its newspaper, meaning The Compass). Jabra joined them, together with two other Trotskyists who had remained after the 96
war. He became a pillar of the newspaper and the organization, its spokesman in countless debates.
After the six-day war in June 1967, the Zionist authorities began to restrict his freedom of movement. He was placed under house arrest for a time. The death of his companion, Alisa, affected him deeply. He began to entertain the idea of leaving the country. Old age and sickness made their presence felt. "My friends and my country left me in 1948," he would say, with a touch of humor. In 1970 he took up residence in London, where he died on Friday, December 27. He was sixty-two years old. He was born on February 16, 1912, in Haifa.
During his last years he was collecting material to write a book on the Arab East and the effects of its colonization. He was able to finish only the preface, the introduction, and the first chapter. But the quality of the pages he wrote shows that the failure to complete this book, which he considered the crowning achievement of his life, is a loss for the international socialist movement.
It is rare to find concentrated in the life of one person the history of a people, of the communist movement, and such a strong internationalist consciousness. Our comrade, Jabra.