Jabra Nicola

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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 from Elias, and Edward (b. November 12, 1987) and James ( b. June 5, 1990) from Dunia.