Media, emancipation and resistance

A Century of Journalistic Excellence. Supporting women, the arts, independent thinking, and resistance to colonisation

Falastin Newspaper

In 1908 The Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire lifted press censorship, and Falastin was born on January 15th, 1911. The newspaper was initially focused on the Christian Orthodox Renaissance, a movement aiming at weakening the Greek clerical power over the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Palestine. All the vast financial resources in Palestine were and still are under Greek control to this day. Falastin addressed the issues of Palestinian modernization, reforms, and improving the welfare of the land’s peasants, connected its readers to the region and the world, and built bridges between classes, religions, and geographies. Falastin aimed at empowering its readers as active and thinking individuals taking their destinies into their own hands. Falastin helped shape Palestinian identity. 

Palestine used a printing machine already in 1830 and the Palestinian media emerged in 1876 with the first newspaper. From 1908 until WWI there were thirty-six Palestinian newspapers. Between 1919 and 1948,  there were 241 Palestinian newspapers. The same period witnessed the beginning of Palestinian radio broadcasting, the Near East Broadcasting Station was airing from Jaffa in 1941/42. The station began as “Freedom Broadcasting Station”, using British Royal Air Force equipment in Jaffa. The identity of the station’s owner and operator was an official secret. Officially, Britain, which occupied Palestine, had nothing to do with the Near East Broadcasting Station. Britain only acknowledged its responsibility to the BBC as late as 16 June 1948. In response to a Parliamentary Question, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin denied that the station was run by the British Foreign Office, the Information Department claimed instead that it was “operated by a group of people connected with the Arabs”. Just before the British left Palestine, in early May 1948, the station was moved to Cyprus. 

Issa El Issa 

Issa El Issa is one of the most prominent Palestinian journalists of the twentieth century. The history of the founder of Falastin, Issa El Issa, reads as one of a statesman. With multiple exiles, and an extreme amount of international congresses dealing with the fate of his country. Issa (Jesus in Arabic) was active and vocal in the resistance, first of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the resistance to British occupation and rule and the planned Zionist takeover of Palestine. Issa was one of the very first Palestinians who realised the Zionist plan of taking over Palestine and its ethnic cleansing and used his newspaper to inform about that plan and process. El Issa was an open-minded intellectual and cosmopolitan, promoting new thinking, culture, equality, and independent thinking and all this needed an independent frame, an independent Palestine.

Issa El Issa was born in Jaffa in 1878. Issa’s family had made its fortune with the old and traditional Palestinian businesses in olive oil and olive oil soap. He attended the Collège des Frères in Jaffa and continued schooling in Lebanon, finally graduating from the American University of Beirut where he studied English, Turkish, and French in addition to his mother tongue, Arabic.

In 1897, when Issa was 19 years old at university, he issued a weekly publication printed on gelatin, called al-Nukhab. In 1901-02, he worked at the Persian Consulate in Jerusalem and was a translator at the Coptic Monastery. In 1903 he traveled to Cairo and was a reporter for the Egyptian Al-Ikhlas newspaper. After that, he worked as an accountant at the offices of the Sudani Government in Cairo, and then as an inspector with an American tobacco company. In early 1910, Issa returned to Jaffa and worked at the Ottoman Bank. After this diverse international career experience,  Issa founded the newspaper Falastin with his cousin Youssef El Issa. Falastin’s first issue saw the light on January 15th, 1911 in Jaffa. Falastin began as a twice-weekly publication focused on the Christian Orthodox community, to which El Issas belonged. Soon, it grew into a proper national paper and became the most informative and reliable press source in Palestine. Falastin was also a source of independent new thinking, supporting the arts, culture, and national Palestinian autonomy.

Issa was a supporter of the Ottoman Decentralization Party and was part of the Arab Club which promoted Palestinian autonomy. In June 1913, Issa, with other people, sent a message of support and solidarity to the “First Palestinian Conference” (also called The First Arab Conference) held in Paris, demanding more autonomy. This period is known as Al Nahda, (Renaissance in Arabic) and was a time of new consciousness. Al Nahda was a strong cultural, social, and political movement in the Shaam (Levant) region: Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria; and the newspaper Falastin was part of Al Nahda. There was a new awareness of intellectual, political, philosophical, social, class, gender, cultural, and questions of identity. The Lebanese thinker and poet Gibran Khalil Gibran, (though he was living in the United States), was a key figure in the movement and supported these conferences aiming at an independent Shaam region. 

In October 1913, the Ottoman authorities shut down Falastin newspaper after it had been published for two years. Six months later, in April 1914, Issa sought refuge in Egypt, attempting to publish articles in Egypt warning against the Zionist project of erasing Palestine. On the eve of the outbreak of World War I, Issa returned to Palestine and his newspaper, Falastin, and called on the Ottoman government to remain neutral during the war. El Issa unnerved the Ottoman government, which banned Falastin in 1915. Issa was tried in Damascus and sentenced to 300 days in prison. Upon appeal, the sentence was commuted to a penalty of fifty Ottoman gold liras (about 20,000€). At the end of 1916, the Ottoman authorities exiled Issa and his cousin Youssef (the co-founders of Falastin) to Anatolia. Issa was not silenced even in exile. On 12 December 1918, he was among Palestinian figures who signed a statement addressed to the Paris Peace Conference and the British Foreign Office, protesting the Zionist movement’s attempt to turn Palestine into a Jewish land. There was never an issue with Palestinian Jews with Issa El Issa or his paper Falastin the issue was the Zionist colonization and taking over Palestine. During his exile and World War I, El-Issa moved to Damascus and became Chief of the Royal Court for King Faisal’s government, of The Arab Kingdom of Syria. The French attacked the newly formed Arab Kingdom of Syria, and it fell in July 1920 after it had functioned for only five months. Issa and his cousin now founded a newspaper in Damascus called ‘Alif Baa’.

Issa El Issa wrote in his memoir, that he was told by British Colonel Stirling: “You don’t know that your exile from Palestine was due to your campaigns against Zionism and that it was the Zionists who opposed your return, so do not do anything which could damage your situation.”

El Issa returned to Jaffa at the beginning of 1921 and reissued Falastin in March as a thrice-weekly publication and in 1930 it turned into a daily paper. Issa soon co-founded the Muslim-Christian Association in Jaffa whose aim was to unite Palestinians to oppose the disappearance of Palestine. The intellectual was busy traveling, being exiled, returning, and founding new media. At the age of 42 years, Issa married Jaffan Zahia Malak. The same year of the wedding in August 1922, he attended the sessions of the Fifth Palestine National Congress and on 14 October the same year, Malak and Issa’s son Raja was born. Issa had two sons Raja and Saad and two daughters, Laila and Malak.

In 1927, El Issa co-founded the Palestine Free Party in Jaffa which aimed to “attain complete independence and the fulfillment of national aspirations and sovereignty” in Palestine. In June 1928, he was elected to the 7th Congress of the Arab Executive Committee (AEC) as a representative of Jaffa. In September 1932, he was selected to join the higher committee of the Nation’s Fund and was also an elected member of the central committee of the National Defense Party. 

During the Revolution in August 1936, there was an assassination attempt on Issa El Issa, but that attempt failed. Nothing seemed to deter him and he took part in the Arab National Congress held in Bludan in 1937 which rejected the partition of Palestine between its indigenous Palestinians and the Zionist newcomers.

Falastin continued to appear in Jaffa until 7 April 1948, 18 days before the city fell to the Zionist forces on April 26, 1948

​​From Issa El Issa’s memoir: “Falastin was published in Jaffa from 1911 until April 1948. In 1948 All newspapers stopped in one day. After we closed, they started firing mine launchers at Jaffa city very intensively. The sea was filled with boats…The people of Jaffa left homes, interests, and jobs. They are all gone… they are all gone… there was no one left.”

All of Falastins printing equipment, storage, old issues and collections, drafts, and material possessions were left as they were. Issa’s house, the printing house, Falastin’s headquarters and offices, the archives, the schools of his children, the banks, and bank accounts were left as they were. All the journalists and workers were turned into refugees scattered in different parts of the region. Everything was looted. Issa and his family became refugees. Two years after the erasure of his city, on  29 June 1950, Issa El Issa died in Beirut. Falastin was reestablished in Jerusalem (which was then under Jordanian rule) by Issa’s son Raja. The newspaper continued until 1967 when Jerusalem came under Israeli rule and Falastin was merged with Al-Manar newspaper, together they produced a new newspaper called Ad Dustour which saw daylight in Amman. Ad Dustour is still published to this day, as a Jordanian newspaper.

When Jaffa fell and was ethnically cleansed, it had 9 Palestinian daily newspapers and 4 regular magazines in Arabic.

The disappearance of money

“The Arab accounts are twice blocked”: UK Treasury currency regulations (Feb 22, 1948) and Israeli Government “freeze order” (June 12, 1948)

On February 22, 1948, the British Treasury suddenly announced, “without any prior notice or explanation, that it would “exclude Palestine from the sterling area and henceforth suspend the free convertibility of Palestinian pounds into pounds sterling.” It also stated that the Palestine Currency Board would no longer, after May 14, 1948, continue to issue Palestinian pounds,” so that the “termination of the Mandate for Palestine would be accompanied with the end of Palestinian currency as legal tender.”

A History of Money in Palestine

Missing Checks, Vanished Funds: a Financial Accounting of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948