Introduction

Khalid Bakdash (1921–85), as the long-time leader of the Syrian and Lebanese Communist Parties, was a towering figure in Arab communism. Most of the scant existing academic literature sees him as the embodiment of the way in which the Soviet global communist movement, in Tareq Ismael's words, ‘dominated’ and ‘controlled’ Arab Communism. This dominance, so the literature claims, often led to uncritical acceptance of the canons of Soviet Marxism and a concomitant failure to formulate independent social analysis of the specific conditions of Arab societies. The assessment of Bakdash as ‘implanted’, inserted and coerced from the outside, is symptomatic of a broader tendency to place non-Western communists on the fringe of local knowledge production, if not completely dismiss them. While many Communist leaders certainly did respond directly to Moscow, it is a reductive reading, which allows theoretical, methodological and sometimes ideological leanings to skew the evaluation of Arab Communism and Arab Left histories.

More than anything, it forecloses inquiry into their role in intellectual and political developments in the region.

Recent work by intellectual historians has redressed this tendency somewhat, although primarily in relation to writers and thinkers of the Arab New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. In this chapter, I attempt to surmise what the social history of Arab communism can tell us about the nuances of internal dissent and debate in the movement. In doing so, I rely on biographies of Bakdash, and particularly on the way he, and the Syrian Communist Party (until 1964 the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party) that he directed, reacted to the partition of Palestine. I narrate the period leading up to 1948 and the reactions that followed his decision to support the Soviet line. By analysing this crucial question, I turn the gaze towards Khalid Bakdash in his local context rather than Bakdash as Moscow's man. I hope to suggest ways in which we can produce histories of Arab communism that concern themselves with more than political strategy, but also speak to the broad agenda of the intellectual and social history of the Arab Left in its longue duree, exemplified by the present book.