Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist
By Najati Sidqi, Introduction by Margaret Litvin. In the opening chapter of his posthumously published memoir, the activist and intellectual Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) reminisces about the cultural heterogeneity of his birthplace Jerusalem. In 1924, he became one of its first Arab members of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). The PCP rejected both British imperial rule and Zionism, which they considered “a bourgeois movement that benefited only wealthy Jews. They insisted that their party, which “was for all inhabitants of Palestine,” could “reconcile the interests of the working classes” of Jews and Arabs alike.


