The New York Times · New York, New York · 17 April 1973

CP-1973-017

Israel Holds Arab Editors On a Censorship Charge

By TERENCE SMITH

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, April 16—Two Palestinian editors of an East Jerusalem Arabic weekly were arrested by the Israeli police today on charges of evading censorship and inciting revolution among the residents of the West Bank of the Jordan River. The two men were the first such editors to be arrested on political grounds since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

They are Joseph Nasr, editor and publisher of the weekly Al Fajr, and Jamil Hamad, the assistant editor. They were taken into custody after publishing an article asserting that Israeli and Jordanian intelligence officers had met and exchanged information before the Israeli commando raid directed against Arab guerrilla headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, last week.

Israeli officials dismissed the report as a fabrication. A court today ordered the editors held in custody for 15 days while the prosecution prepared its case. Announcing the charges today, a police spokesman said that the two editors had published the article about alleged collusion between the Jordanians and Israelis without having submitted it to the censor.

Israeli law requires that all material intended for appearance in the press be submitted to a military censor for examination before publication. Emotional Editorial In addition to the news report, the paper ran an emotional editorial on the front page mourning the death of the three guerrilla leaders assassinated during the Beirut raid.

The editorial said that the funeral for these “martyrs should be the occasion for a national procession in which we celebrate the birth of a thousand more Abu Yussefs and Kamal Nassers.” Abu Yussef—the code name for Mohammed Yussef Najjar—was one of the three guerrillas. He was chairman of the political department of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Kamal Nasser was spokesman for the organization, which is the over-all guerrilla group. The third victim was Kamal Badwan, an organizer of guerrilla activity on the West Bank. The editorial—with a photograph of Mr. Nasser bordered in black—said, “We should thank the Israelis because they have taught us again how to love Palestine, its people and its land to the death.”

The editorial was the most militant of a series of sympathetic articles about the slain guerrillas and their cause in the three Arabic dailies and three weeklies published in the former Jordanian sector of Jerusalem.

Israelis Startled This sudden and conspicuous display of identification with the guerrilla movement has startled many Israelis and has forced them to question the apparent goodwill toward Israel that seemed to have developed among West Bank Arabs since 1967. Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir expressed disappointment in a weekend interview with Maariv, an Israeli daily.

He said that the fiction of a gradual reconciliation between Israelis and the West Bank Arabs “has crashed up against the wall of cruel reality.” Although violations of the censorship law are frequent, and journalists in past cases have lost their credentials as a result of them, none had been arrested.

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