Filastin Newspaper Founded

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution and, with it, a press. Newspapers appeared across the empire’s Arab provinces, and Palestine’s most important was founded in Jaffa in January 1911 by Isa al-Isa, a Greek Orthodox journalist from Jaffa, with his cousin Yusuf al-Isa. Filastin began as a twice-weekly concerned above all with the affairs of the Orthodox community and its long conflict with the Greek higher clergy over control of the patriarchate’s property.

It did not stay there. Within a short time the paper was reporting systematically on the purchase of land by Zionist organisations and the eviction of the fellahin who worked it, and warning that a national movement was establishing itself in the country with the resources of European Jewry behind it. What made Filastin significant was less its alarm than its address: it spoke to its readers as Palestinians, and treated Palestine as a country with an identity and interests of its own — decades before there was a state, a mandate or a border.

In October 1913 the Ottoman authorities closed the paper down, on the ground that it had published articles inciting ethnic prejudice. The closure was contested, in the press and in the imperial parliament, and became one of the episodes through which Palestinian political opinion learned to organise itself.

Isa al-Isa returned to Jaffa in early 1921 and reissued Filastin in March of that year, now three times a week and squarely opposed to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that had enshrined it. Under his editorship it became the most professional Arabic paper in the country — known for its wide network of correspondents and the accuracy of its reporting, and taken as a model by newspapers across Greater Syria. It was suspended repeatedly by the British administration, and it published until 1948, when the fall of Jaffa ended it. Its files remain one of the fullest records of Palestinian public life before the Nakba.

Sources

• Filastin Newspaper — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Isa al-Isa (1878–1950) — PalQuest