Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter Abstracts
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction. The Arab Lefts from the 1950s to the 1970s: Transnational Entanglements and Shifting Legacies
- 1 Unforgettable Radicalism: Al-Ittihad ’s Words in Hebrew Novels
- 2 Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism, Anti-colonialism and Literatures of Coexistence in Palestine/Israel, 1944–60
- 3 Free Elections versus Authoritarian Practices: What Baathists Fought For
- 4 Dealing with Dissent: Khalid Bakdash and the Schisms of Arab Communism
- 5 A Patriotic Internationalism: The Tunisian Communist Party’s Commitment to the Liberation of Peoples
- 6 Internationalist Nationalism: Making Algeria at World Youth Festivals, 1947–62
- 7 Travelling The orist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental
- 8 Marxism or Left-Wing Nationalism? The New Left in Egypt in the 1970s
- 9 Non-Zionists, Anti-Zionists, Revolutionaries: Palestinian Appraisals of the Israeli Left, 1967–73
- 10 ‘Dismount the horse to pick some roses’: Militant Enquiry in Lebanese New Left Experiments, 1968–73
- 11 The ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’: Remembering Khalid Ahmad Zaki’s Revolutionary Struggle in Iraq’s Southern Marshes
- 12 Crisis and Critique: The Transformation of the Arab Radical Tradition between the 1960s and the 1980s
- 13 The Afterlives of Husayn Muruwwa: The Killing of an Intellectual, 1987
- Afterword. The Arab Left: From Rumbling Ocean to Revolutionary Gulf
- Index
2 - Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism, Anti-colonialism and Literatures of Coexistence in Palestine/Israel, 1944–60
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter Abstracts
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction. The Arab Lefts from the 1950s to the 1970s: Transnational Entanglements and Shifting Legacies
- 1 Unforgettable Radicalism: Al-Ittihad ’s Words in Hebrew Novels
- 2 Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism, Anti-colonialism and Literatures of Coexistence in Palestine/Israel, 1944–60
- 3 Free Elections versus Authoritarian Practices: What Baathists Fought For
- 4 Dealing with Dissent: Khalid Bakdash and the Schisms of Arab Communism
- 5 A Patriotic Internationalism: The Tunisian Communist Party’s Commitment to the Liberation of Peoples
- 6 Internationalist Nationalism: Making Algeria at World Youth Festivals, 1947–62
- 7 Travelling The orist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental
- 8 Marxism or Left-Wing Nationalism? The New Left in Egypt in the 1970s
- 9 Non-Zionists, Anti-Zionists, Revolutionaries: Palestinian Appraisals of the Israeli Left, 1967–73
- 10 ‘Dismount the horse to pick some roses’: Militant Enquiry in Lebanese New Left Experiments, 1968–73
- 11 The ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’: Remembering Khalid Ahmad Zaki’s Revolutionary Struggle in Iraq’s Southern Marshes
- 12 Crisis and Critique: The Transformation of the Arab Radical Tradition between the 1960s and the 1980s
- 13 The Afterlives of Husayn Muruwwa: The Killing of an Intellectual, 1987
- Afterword. The Arab Left: From Rumbling Ocean to Revolutionary Gulf
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1953, the Iraqi Jewish writer Sami Michael penned an editorial celebrating al-Ittihad, a Palestinian paper that had greatly influenced the Communist Party intellectuals in Baghdad. The newspaper was founded in 1944 by Palestinian communists Fu‘ad Nassar, Emile Habiby and Emile Tuma, and sought to connect the struggle for Palestinian national independence with antifascism, communist internationalism and anti-colonialism. Michael describes how the paper was smuggled into Iraq and the communist underground, travelling ‘with the youth through Baghdad's neighbourhoods and streets, tree-shaded park benches and busy cafes, its contents illuminated by the glow of an electric lamp inside a comrade's house’. Communist newspapers, Michael notes, were characterised by readers as ‘beating hearts’ (al-qulub al-nabitha), organs that circulated ideas and news between movements in the region. Like many of these newspapers, al-Ittihad circulated to various cities in the Arab world, featuring local news, essays, editorials, short stories and poems, educating readers through translation and publication of key Marxist texts, and reporting on global and regional political struggles. In the following passage Michael reflects upon al-Ittihad's role in the political education of young communists in Baghdad:
We used to rub our eyes and look at the real Baghdad, the barefoot Baghdad that suffers from trachoma and anaemia, the forgotten Baghdad whose geography has not been mapped and whose history is not discussed. The Baghdad that sleeps on the bridge walkways when night comes, where swarms of flies fight over dry breadcrumbs. We did not have to don new glasses to discover this truth. We merely had to destroy the old, fake glasses, the glasses of tradition, fear, selfishness and ignorance. Al-Ittihad, arriving from afar, helped us to destroy these glasses and rid ourselves of the short-sightedness that was imposed on us.
This passage underscores the pedagogical and collective-making power of left newspapers in the heyday of communism and decolonisation, as well as the interconnected visions of Palestinian and Iraqi Jewish Communists as Arab Marxists. It was published on the ninth anniversary of al-Ittihad a few years after Sami Michael joined the newspaper's editorial board when he fled from Baghdad to Palestine/Israel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Arab LeftsHistories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s, pp. 39 - 56Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020