Abstract
Abstract: This essay explores Palestinian Arab knowledge production on Zionism. It focuses on the life of Ribhi Kamal (1912–79), a Palestinian scholar of Semitic languages who grew up in Jerusalem and excelled in modern Hebrew. During the 1948 War, Kamal was exiled to Damascus, where he repurposed his expertise in the service of the Syrian state. Kamal became the host of Radio Damascus’s Hebrew-language broadcast, a propaganda program that called on Jewish Israelis to resist Zionism and return to their “true” home countries. Kamal’s biography and work on Radio Damascus raise several broader questions. What led Arab intellectuals to study Hebrew in the early twentieth century? How did Palestinians employ their pre-1948 knowledge of Hebrew and Zionism in the service of post-1948 Arab governments? And how did Arab governments use radio as a tool of anticolonial propaganda?