Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

232 • chapter 5

pay him [Nassar] anything given that this [Nassar’s claim] was a

fabrication, on the one hand. On the other hand, if the sum that

the man requested had been small, perhaps he would have given

up some of the rights of the company. But the sum was not small

at all, so it was impossible to fulfill this strange demand. When

Nassar saw that his hope was disappointed, he went and joined

with a well- known author (rashid haddad, who is the editor of

one of the large newspapers in Beirut) in haifa, and together they

produced the newspaper al- Karmil. Nassar’s sole purpose was to

write against the hebrew settlement in the Land of Israel, so that

arabs would no longer sell land to Jews.^177

Nassar’s anti- Zionism, in Malul’s interpretation, had nothing to do
with his Christianity nor with his beliefs about the future of palestine.
rather, “Nassar began writing harsh articles against ‘the Zionists’ and
thought that the Jews would be frightened of him and fulfill his [mon-
etary] demands.” When he discovered that he was unsuccessful and
that the Zionists were not taking him seriously, “he continued his war,
and so he is fighting against the Yishuv until today.”^178 according to
Malul, Nassar, “the known hater of Israel” who stood at the center of
the anti- Zionist arabic press that ha- Ḥerut’s editors and writers regu-
larly railed against as the “Great Danger,” was simply a self- interested
man seeking financial gain. had he continued to profit from the Zi-
onist movement, Malul implies, Nassar would have happily supported
Jewish immigration, and the entire phenomenon of the anti- Zionist
arabic press might not have evolved. If certain arabs considered the
Jews to be obsessed with the pursuit of money, the feeling, for Jews
like Malul, was mutual.

the influence and persistence of

the economic View of anti- Zionism

in this chapter we have encountered a variety of ways in which influ-
ential Zionists of Late Ottoman palestine sought to understand how
they were perceived by their arab neighbors and to influence those
perceptions. We found that the Zionists were particularly interested in
the arabic press, viewing it as both a gauge and a generator of arab
public opinion. Moreover, we noted the multiple roles of translation in
this encounter— in defending against anti- Zionism and in promoting

(^177) ha- Shiloaḥ 31 (July– December 1914), 446.
(^178) Ibid.