The Death of Jabra Nicola

The Death of Jabra Nicola

Jabra Nicola, a former leader of the Palestine Communist party (PCP), a long-time member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, and more recently a leading theoretical contributor to the Israeli Socialist Organization, died in London on Saturday, December 28. For over three decades comrade Nicola, better known to many as Abu Said, held high the banner of revolutionary Marxism in the Middle East. In such a total bastion of reaction os Zionist Israel, this was no mean achievement. His death comes as a grievous loss to the Arab working class movement and to the Fourth International. An assessment of this loss must take as its point of departure the historical context that produced and was in turn croduced by Abu Said. The PCP was born in 1922 out of a split within the Lionist Workers Party. Following the split it affiliated to the Third International. A significant layer of this early revolutionary leadership was deported to Russia in the late 1 us and 1930s by the Sritish Mandate authorities who then governed the area. With the degeneration of the Third International, they all fell victims to Stalin's purges. A new generation of working class leaders, more firmly in tune with Stalinism, then picked up the reins of the PCP. A similar process unfolded in other parts of the Arab world. Abu Said was the sort of exception that did more than just prove the rule. For in him was concentrated not only the voice of political opposition to the equivocations of the PCP between Zionism and Arab nationalism, but also the living spirit of what once was a revolutionary International. In the 1940% he was removed from any leadership position within the PCP. His evolution toward Trotskyism and the Fourth Inter-