Perhaps the most militant and active AWC [Arab Women's Committee] branch was located in Haifa, Palestine's most industrialized city and home to the largest concentration of Arab workers. Several reports describe women (including AWC members), accompanied by children and "street Arabs," or shabab (young men), forcing shopkeepers in the Haifa suq to observe commercial strikes declared by the rebel movement. On occasion female strike enforcers were arrested and charged with "intimidating" merchants and smashing shop windows. The leading AWC figure in Haifa was Sadij Nassar, wife of the editor-owner of the newspaper al-Karmil, Najib Nassar, and a professional journalist in her own right. Sadij Nassar's name crops up frequently in the British archival record, as organizer and participant in street demonstrations and as a strike monitor. Nassar was also involved in the AWC's extensive welfare projects with families of prisoners and victims of the disturbances. In 1939 the mandate government placed her under administrative detention (without formal charges or trial) for nine months; she was the only Palestinian woman to be so interned during the revolt. The authorities reportedly had come to regard Nassar's newspaper articles as "incendiary" and the marches she organized as "more virulent and dangerous."
