Palestinian media before the catastrophe: newspapers, magazines, radio and theaters

Fadi Al-Asa-Bethlehem

In one of his famous interventions, Professor of Information at Al-Quds University, Dr. Ahmed Rafeeq Awad denounces the Zionist term, which described Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land", and considered it fallen from the beginning to justify its occupation, and he says, "In Palestine there were theaters, newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and integrated media work."

The cities of Haifa and Jaffa were considered before the Palestinian catastrophe in 1948 to be Mediterranean cities that host culture and art, such as Athens, Naples, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, etc., and embraced Arab intellectuals, artists, and poets.

The researchers enumerated between 45 to 50 Palestinian newspapers that were issued before the catastrophe, in addition to magazines specialized in agriculture, engineering, industry and others, except that the Palestinians operated the second radio at the level of the Arab world after the Egyptian radio, and it was broadcasting from the city of Jerusalem.

The media work was not limited only to the Arabic language, but the work was in different languages ​​such as English and German, and the British mandate insisted on introducing the Hebrew language to the Palestinian media.

Historians have also documented the existence of a theater in Palestine before the Nakba, which moved from the 1920s from a school theater to a church theater before it became a commercial theater considered one of the most successful means of communication with society at the time.

Dr. Awad believes that the Palestinian media was numerous at the time, due to the multiplicity of political parties as well as tribal tendencies, and they spoke in the language of their owners, in addition to their cheap cost and ease of issuance, and they were considered prima facie and political diversity, but the form of newspapers was primitive.

Military censorship
The English censorship of the Palestinian press was severe, while the British mandate was trying to buy the receivables of these newspapers or threaten them to pass the Zionist project in Palestine.

And matters have reached the point of denying and deporting journalists, the most prominent of whom is journalist Muhammad Ali Al-Tahir, who was deported to Egypt and established a newspaper there.

Prior to the Nakba, the Palestinian press reflected the events that occurred in the country, but there was no unity in the text or narration due to the English censorship that the Israeli occupation later used to suppress the Palestinian word, except that some newspapers were issued with white pages because the military censor prevented press materials from Publishing.

In a process believed to be orchestrated at the level of the Mandatory Authority, the matter reached the explosion of the Palestinian radio station in Jerusalem completely, knowing that all Palestinian newspapers were closed after the Nakba, which divided the Palestinian territory into three sections.

After the Nakba in 1948, several newspapers were published in the occupied land, the most prominent of which were Al-Anbaa and Al-Liqa newspapers, and they were pronounced in Arabic and under Israeli supervision.

Awad says to Al Jazeera Net that the most prominent newspapers in the West Bank were the jihad and defense newspapers, which were closer to expressing the new situation integrated with Jordan.

In Gaza, Al-Sharq Magazine was the one that expresses Palestinian party tendencies and preserved - somewhat - the Palestinian identity, because the Egyptian rule of Gaza was administrative, before all that ended after the 1967 war.

Underground press
In the context, a member of the General Secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Nabhan Khraisheh, said that the press during this period had a militant role in fighting the occupation and revealing its policies by participating in the secret "underground" press, because it was not possible to publish issues related to settlement, and confiscation Land leakage, and talk about occupation brokers and agents in the public press.

On his graduation in 1980, Khraisheh worked with the Jerusalem-based Al-Fajr newspaper, which was among three Palestinian newspapers alongside Jerusalem and the people, and was under great Israeli military control, to the point that the Palestinian journalist was obliged to send the material he wanted to publish to the Israeli military censor's office to delete or authorize his article.

In his talk to Al-Jazeera Net, Khreisheh recalls the martyr journalist Hassan Abdel Halim from the town of Qunnat al-Quds District, who was working as a correspondent for Al-Fajr newspaper and who was killed by brokers and hid his body for months, because he pursued issues of land leakage and published reports on them in secret organizational publications.

Khreisheh, along with a number of his fellow journalists, other Palestinian politicians and militants, was arrested during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, and placed in administrative detention without charge.

The Israeli occupation continued to target the Palestinian press after the coming of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 and to this day using British laws implemented in Palestine, and laws introduced by the Israeli occupation accused of incitement, violence, and the arrest of the free Palestinian word.