The interwar period saw greater flexibility in the way communism was debated, understood, and allowed to co-exist with other ideas and currents among Arab communists, just like the rest of the colonized world. However, this flexibility faced its limits by the late-1930s and the eruption of WWII. This paper shows that as the atmosphere of the interwar world changed globally into more neatly drawn political and ideological lines by the mid-1930s, this leniency started becoming impossible to accept in political discourse of certain locales. I trace the hardening of lines and introduction of stricter dogma among Lebanese communists throughout WWII, culminating with the consolidation of power in the hands of a Stalinist group of communists in the party, and the end of this internationalist period of fluid ideas and currents. This paper identifies the reactions of Lebanese communists to the growing threat of fascism in Europe, and how they saw that in relation to their own identities. I trace how they defined fascism, and argue that by defining it as colonial and undemocratic, they were capable of combining their anti-fascist struggle with their anti-colonial struggle and intensifying their calls for more a democratic political system in Lebanon and the region. Their activism against fascism, however, forced them to confront two major issues locally that they struggled to justify: alliance with their colonizers – the French but also the British for other Arab countries – against fascism, and Zionism and its relationship to fascism. For the Lebanese communists, much like other parts of the world, their internationalism was integral to the process of polarization that characterized the WWII period. The fact that they saw themselves as part of that world, invested in its fate, and their fates intertwined with it, prompted them to act in the direction they saw best fit to preserve that world. However, as I show in this paper, they also found a way for the symbiosis of the national with the international, by redefining their nationalism according to internationalist principles of a universal anti-imperial struggle.