Najati Sidqi

Najati Sidqi was born in Jerusalem on 15 May 1905. His father, Bakr Sidqi, taught Turkish and loved music, painting and the theatre; his mother, Nazira Murad, was a Jerusalemite. He went through the Salahiyya, Ma’muniyya and Rashidiyya schools and the Maktab Sultani, followed his father into the Hijaz with Emir Faisal’s forces at the end of the First World War, and discovered modern theatre in Cairo on the way back. In 1924, under British rule, he took a job in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Jerusalem, and there encountered the communist movement that Jewish immigrants had founded in Palestine. He joined it.

In September 1925 the Palestine Communist Party sent him to Moscow to the Communist University for Workers of the East. He spent three years there, learned Russian, studied philosophy, political economy and the history of revolutionary parties, and took the party name Mustafa Sa’di. He returned in 1929 with a Ukrainian wife and a daughter, charged by the Comintern with a specific and awkward task: to Arabise a Palestinian communist party whose members were mostly recent Jewish immigrants. The seventh party congress, held in Jerusalem in December 1930, elected him to the central committee. In February 1931 the British arrested him and sentenced him to two years, which he served between the Jerusalem central prison, the Jaffa prison and the fortress prison at Acre, and after which he was kept under police surveillance for six months.

From 1933 the Comintern moved him around the map. Paris, to edit an Arabic monthly, al-Sharq al-Arabi, distributed clandestinely across the Arab countries until the French closed it in 1936. Moscow and then Tashkent, to study the Soviet handling of the national question. Then, in August 1936, Spain — where the civil war had begun, and where his assignment was to work on the Moroccan troops fighting for Franco and persuade them that they were on the wrong side of a war against fascism. At the end of that year he was sent to Algeria to help set up an Arabic radio station beamed at North Africa; the project failed.

He moved to Syria and Lebanon in 1937, wrote for the Syro-Lebanese party’s paper and magazine, fell out with its leadership, and turned to journalism in Beirut to live. When the German–Soviet non-aggression pact was signed in August 1939 he criticised it, and the party expelled him for it — a rare thing for an Arab communist of his generation to have done, and done at the moment it cost most. He returned to Jerusalem the same year and went to work for the Near East Broadcasting Service, then run by the British.

After that he wrote. Short stories, published in the Beirut and Cairo literary journals; studies of Pushkin in 1945 and Chekhov in 1947; translations from Russian and English. He left Palestine for Limassol in 1948, Beirut in 1950, and Athens in 1976, where one of his daughters lived and where he died on 17 November 1979. His memoirs, edited by the poet Hanna Abu Hanna, were published by the Institute for Palestine Studies.

Sources

• Najati Sidqi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), Institute for Palestine Studies
• Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Memoirs of Najati Sidqi — Institute for Palestine Studies