Between the National and the International: Arab Communists from the Mashreq to the Maghreb in the 1940s and 1950s
Panel 113, 2017 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 20 at 8:00 am
Panel Description
During the interwar period and up until the beginning of the Cold War, communists constituted a major component of a global internationalist moment that brought together anti-imperialist, as well as anti-war and anti-fascist movements. At the same time, communists in the colonies reconciled their internationalism with their nationalism and their liberation struggles. This panel places Arab communists within this framework and examines how they negotiated their positions vis-à-vis their political and social milieus within their local and global contexts. It approaches Arab communists as mediators between the national and the international, as they worked to reconcile contradictions of competing political, religious, ethnic, and social identities. The papers draw on experiences of communists in Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel in the 1940s and 1950s to address the role communism played in shaping modern Middle Eastern nation-states at a critical juncture of their formation. This panel complicates the relationship between communists, their parties, and the Soviet Union, showing the fluidity of the concepts of the national and the international in these Arab communists’ political imaginations, and what that meant for the region and world they lived in. It also specifically traces the impact of colonialism, fascism, and WWII on the way Arabs defined and experienced communism.
Paper 1 critically engages the history of the Palestinian communists and their mobilization in the early years of the Israeli state by examining how communists reconciled the contradictions they faced, and arguing that circumventing the resistance/collaboration dichotomy highlights the role they played in shaping Palestinian politics in Israel. Paper 2 argues that the interwar period was one of vast political efflorescence for Moroccan Jews with a transnational genesis, and traces the narrowing of these options following WWII and the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime in Morocco. Paper 3 examines how Lebanese communists defined fascism, arguing that by framing it as colonial and undemocratic, they combined their anti-fascist struggle with their anti-colonial struggle and intensified their calls for more a democratic political system in Lebanon. Paper 4 focuses on the impact of the Vichy legislations and the German occupation of Tunisia on Tunisian Jews’ involvement in the communist movement, arguing that WWII and the anti-Nazi propaganda of the Communist Party of Tunisia increased the involvement of Tunisian Jews in the communist movement.
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.
Stories of the Rif war (1920-1926), the industrialization of colonial Morocco, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the Communist International and interwar Moroccan Jewish political engagement intertwine in a knot of institutional, political and social histories. Communist and broadly leftist ideas in Morocco stemmed not only from France but reformulated and reinterpreted themselves among Spanish, Italian and local Moroccan (both Jewish and Muslim) workers. The story is not one of the French Communist Party (PCF) simply implanting itself in Morocco as a foreign, colonial agent, but rather one of an active Moroccan reception amid a dynamic, constantly recalibrating urban civic society. This paper shows that the PCF enacted its own form of mission civilisatrice (“civilizing mission”) in Morocco and embraced aspects of the prevailing colonial, protectorate discourse. However, the party was quickly “domesticated” for the needs of Moroccan Jewish and Muslim revolutionaries. I argue that the interwar period was one of vast political efflorescence for Moroccan Jews with a transnational genesis. Following the Second World War and the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime in Morocco, these options would narrow and become increasingly mutually exclusive. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, Moroccan Jews were participants in a dynamic, constantly recombining political sphere of ideas and ideologies, all of which held both conflicting and complementary visions for the future of Moroccan Jewry.
The creation in 1878 of a school of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Tunis and the establishment of the French Protectorate in Tunisia in 1881 deepened the exposure of the Jewish communities in the country to the influences of Modern Europe. These influences brought about profound changes in the institutions, culture, and religious practices of these communities, gradually leading many of their members to complete assimilation and identification with the French colonizers. The Second World War represented a shock to these communities. The defeat of France, the occupation of Tunisia by the Germans and the racial laws, applied in the country from November 30, 1940 to June 10, 1943, destroyed the image of an egalitarian France previously regarded as the emancipator of the Jews and the guarantor of their liberties. The upheavals engendered by the war had deep repercussions on the community’s institutions, ideologies and political affiliations. These repercussions were mainly reflected in the community members’ political redistribution. Two main changes occurred following the end of the war: the decline of the old current of francization, and the increased involvement in other types of political engagement: Tunisian nationalism, communism and Zionism. This paper focuses on the impact of the Vichy legislations and the German occupation of Tunisia on Tunisian Jews’ involvement in the communist movement. In order to trace the developments of this impact, this paper relies on issues of the newspaper L’Avenir Social (the organ of the Parti Communiste Tunisien (PCT)) and on autobiographies of Tunisian Jews who were active in the communist movement during and after the interwar period. It argues that the Vichy legislations and the German occupation of Tunisia increased the involvement of Tunisian Jews in the communist movement. Before the Second World War, the Tunisian communist movement, which was rather weak, had few Tunisian Jews mostly employees, who were very involved in union action, or students. War and discrimination led a large number of young Tunisian Jews, attracted by the anti-Nazi propaganda of the PCT, to join the then clandestine party and play a major role in the Resistance.
