During World War I Turkish authorities suspected Malul of anti-Ottoman activities he was expelled to Damascus. From there he escaped to Egypt where he remained until the end of the war, serving as an officer of the Hebrew Battalion and a translator for the British. He returned to Palestine under the British Mandate. There, with funding from the Zionist Organization, Malul founded two Arabic newspapers, al-Akhbār and al-Salām. From 1922 to 1925 he was a member of the Zionist National Committee, and later he published in Ittiḥād al-ʿUmmāl, a Zionist-supported Arabic workers’ newspaper that attempted to raise class consciousness among Arab workers. From 1927 to 1929 he left Palestine for Iraq with his wife, Aliza, where he taught Arabic and Hebrew in a Jewish elementary school in Hila, Baghdad supported by the Anglo-Jewish Association.
