Lufti Mashour

Lutfi Mashour, journalist: born Rame, Palestine 18 January 1947; Editor, A-Sennara 1983-2006; married (two daughters); died Nazareth, Israel 22 June 2006.

Lutfi Mashour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a leading journalist in the Arabic language, was born into a Greek Catholic family in the Galilee a year before the founding of the State of Israel, and the Nakba, "the catastrophe", that has befallen the Palestinian people as a consequence. His life and work were dedicated to an attempt to reconcile his two identities, a citizen of Israel and a Palestinian by nationality.

In 1983 Mashour presented the small Palestinian media community in Israel with a startling enterprise: a privately owned newspaper with a far more commercial orientation than its predecessors, all owned by political parties and representing a party line. A-Sennara offered its readers feature with entertainment value, sports and life-style stories. His wife Vida was an active partner in the newspaper, and his daughter Yara was appointed the editor of a women's magazine called Lilac, also owned and founded by Mashour.

Mashour was often accused of coming to terms with the State of Israel and being lenient on its racist policies towards Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza. Some Jewish Israelis, viewing anybody who dares refer to the national unity of Palestinians in Israel and their solidarity with the rest of the Palestinian people as a threat, treated Mashour as an enemy.

As an Arab Israeli, he sought to reconcile the solidarity he felt with the Palestinians in the occupied territories with his own struggle for citizens' rights in Israel. He represented a generation of Palestinians in Israel who were gradually becoming middle-class, and who aspired for a place in Israel's culture and business community, without having to give up their own national, ethnic and religious identity. His attempt to present his society with an entertaining newspaper which created its own celebrities, cultivated its own life-style gurus and covered football extensively derived partly from the desire to place his community on an equal footing with Israeli Hebrew readers.

Mashour's faith in the political sincerity of liberal Zionists exacted a grave price, not only in the scorn it earned him from many Palestinians inside and outside Israel, but also in the personal disillusionment which he had to face. In the election campaign of 1999 Mashour was Ehud Barak's campaign manager in the Palestinian sector in the Galilee. But, shortly after Barak, the Labour Party leader, was elected prime minister, 13 Palestinians were shot by police forces during demonstrations in the Galilee, in what came to be known as the October 2000 events. Devastated, Mashour turned his back on Barak, but not on the dream of Palestinians' becoming equal citizens in Israel, and a part of its ethos.

In February 2004 Mashour was proud to be invited by the Israeli president Moshe Katsav to join his party for an official visit to Paris - against a background of complaints of rising anti-Semitism in France. But the security system of Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv subjected Mashour to such humiliating checks that he decided to go back to Nazareth.

Later, Mashour wrote on the Hebrew website Y-net:

I shall never forgive the assault on my honour as a human being, as an Arab, as a citizen, but this is no longer about me. This is about the president of the State of Israel. This is not just plain racism anymore; these are seeds of fascism, when security people are taking the law into their own hands, kicking democracy and the rule of law. No external enemy poses as big a threat to Israel as these grains of totalitarianism.

Daphna Baram

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