Jabra Nicola

Jabra Nicola (February 16, 1912 – 1974) was an Arab Israeli and Palestinian Trotskyist leader, the author of numerous articles and pamphlets who also translated some of the classics of Marxism into Arabic. Born in Haifa, he joined the Palestine Communist Party before he turned 20, and was responsible for its publication al-Ittihad.

The Communist Party split along nationalist lines in 1939, and Jabra Nicola refused to join either wing, and, after being imprisoned by the British occupation from 1940-1942, was recruited to a small Trotskyist movement by Yigael Gluckstein, later better known as Tony Cliff. However with the collapse of the group in the late 1940s, Jabra Nicola returned to the Palestinian Communist Party. While in the Communist Party he played a leading role on the party's publications, but when, after 1962, a small new left movement, the Matzpen group, revived in what was now Israel, he was to join it for a second and final time.

Placed under house arrest after the Six-Day War in 1967, he left Israel for London in 1970, where he lived until his death in 1974.

Jabra Nicola lived with political activist Aliza Novik (b. 1912, Tiberias, d. 1970 Haifa), with whom he had three children: Victor Sami (July 11, 1943 Jaffa), Elias (b. March 30, 1947 Jaffa), and Dunia (b. October 5, 1948 Haifa).

Jabra Nicola's grandchildren are Liza (b. October 26, 1982) and Amira (b. May 26, 1984) from Victor; Nadia and Nassira Dunia (b. January 17, 1984) from Elias, and Edward (b. November 12, 1987) and James ( b. June 5, 1990) from Dunia.

The Fourth International The Long March of the Trotskyists

"Chapter 10: Those Who Died So That the International Might Live

Jabra Nicola (Abu Said) (1912-1974), was born in Haifa and joined the Palestinian CP before he was 20. As a member of its leadership, he was given responsibility for its organ in Arabic, At Ittihad, but the party split in 1939 along nationalist lines and he refused to join either wing. He was imprisoned under the British occupation from 1940-42. In 1942 he joined a group of Trotskyists, many of them refugees from Europe, but the dislocation of the Trotskyist organisation in the Middle East after the war led him to rejoin the CP, and he was once again given the editorship of its paper in Arabic. In 1956, however, the CP leadership suspended him from his functions because of political disagreements, and in 1962 he joined with others who had left the CP to form the Matzpen group, from which the Israel section of the Fourth International was to develop. Placed under house arrest after the Six Day War in 1967, he left Israel for London in 1970, where he died.

Jabra Nicola was a member of the IEC of the Fourth International from its Seventh World Congress (1963). A brilliant journalist, he wrote numerous articles and pamphlets and also translated some of the classics of Marxism into Arabic. His contribution, both theoretically and politically, to the Fourth International on the problems of the Arab East and the question of Israel within it was unparalleled."