The Morning Call · Allentown, Pennsylvania · 31 July 1939

CP-1939-005

Editor in Jail, Arabs Aroused

United Press, Jerusalem

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM, (UP) — The first Arab woman to serve sentence under the emergency defense regulations, Mrs. Sathij Nassar, is serving a three-month term in a concentration camp after her arrest at Haifa. Mrs. Nassar, 48, the granddaughter of Abbas, founder of the universal Bahai religion, was alleged to have aided and abetted Arab rebels and to have contributed inflammatory articles in El Carmel, Arabic weekly of which she was co-editor. News of her arrest was suppressed for a week in the interest of public security, but it spread rapidly and brought numerous protests. Arab women societies planned a series of public demonstrations in protest. Mrs. Nassar lived in Balad esh Sheik village, near Haifa, with her 60-year-old Arab husband, Najib Nassar. She was widely known as a worker among women’s organization. Last year she attended the All-Arab Women’s Congress at Cairo to discuss the Palestine question as a member of the Palestine delegation. She was elected permanent secretary on the standing executive committee of the congress.… She was accompanied by Maiman[…]ah, daughter of the late Sheik Izzeddin Kassam, founder of a secret order whom Arabs regard as the herald of armed resistance to Zionist aims. Mrs. Nassar received her primary education in the home of her grandfather, Abdul Baha Abbas, at Acre. Then she completed the English High School for girls at Haifa. In her teens she was regarded as the prettiest of her town and at the age of 20 she married a cousin who died a few years later. Her marriage with Najib Nassar, proprietor of El Carmel, in 1926, was the romantic culmination of some previous years of ‘literary acquaintance,’ a phenomenon in Arab harem society. It started by her contributing articles on social subjects to his paper. She professed Bahaism, a religion that reveres three great faiths, and Najib Nassar was a Christian. The Nassars have a 10-year-old son named Farouk, because his birthday coincided with that of King Farouk of Egypt. Mrs. Nassar has always preferred to serve behind the scenes in her various organizations, refusing to accept leadership. In speeches she has propagated the theme that Zionism does not limit its program to Palestine, but looks forward to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and eventual domination of the Arab and Moslem East.”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian newspaper editor imprisoned for what she printed, and the paper reporting it says so plainly: the arrest was suppressed for a week, and Arab women’s societies organised demonstrations when it came out. The detention is called a concentration camp, in 1939, by United Press. The emergency defense regulations she was jailed under are the same body of British law that the Communist Party of Israel names in this archive in 1967, when Mahmoud Darwish is among those arrested under it. Her name is more usually written Sadhij Nassar; the spelling here is the paper’s. The story runs on two pages and both scans are held. The jump carries her whole life: the Bahai grandfather at Acre, the English High School for girls at Haifa, the years of “literary acquaintance” with the editor she married after writing for his paper, the son named for the king of Egypt, and the line that she refused leadership of the organizations she worked in. Her companion at the Cairo congress is identified as a daughter of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.

Cite this item

"Editor in Jail, Arabs Aroused," The Morning Call, 31 July 1939. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1939-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1939-005

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