Najib Nassar

Who is Najib Nassar?

Najib Nassar was a Palestinian journalist.

Nassar was born in a mountain village called Ein Einub, Lebanon. The family left the village in the middle of the 19th century. Nassar was educated in Lebanon. He worked as a pharmacist for the Scottish Hospital in Tiberias. Later he became the founder and editor of Al-Karmil, the first Palestinian anti-Zionist weekly newspaper in Arabic, which appeared in Haifa in Decembrer 1908 and was closed down by the British government in the 1940s.

Nassar was involved in the formation of an association in Haifa with the aim of preventing the implementation of Zionist plans and colonial activities in Palestine. He warned against land sales to Jews and Zionist. In 1911 he published the first book in Arabic on Zionism, entitled Zionism: Its History, Objective and Importance, in which he described Zionism as a racist movement that aims to replace the Palestinians in the Holy Land. Najib Nassar was imprisoned in Damascus by the Ottoman authorities in 1918. He established the Arab Party in Nazareth in the same year. He maintained his Ottoman loyalty all his life, but called himself a Palestinian patriot.