The Partisans of Peace in Lebanon and Syria

The leaders of the LPP and SPP movements were experienced organizers who had participated in the anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and 1940s, including in the Popular Front coalition that supported the rights of women, workers, and youth. The Partisans’ leading regional publication was the Beirut-based, leftist, political-literary journal al-Tariq, a 100–150-page monthly journal was started in 1941 by the Anti-Fascist League of Syria and Lebanon founder, Antun Thabit (1907–64).Footnote ¹⁶ Thabit, a communist and the chair of the Lebanese Society of Friends of the USSR between 1946 and 1948, continued to edit al-Tariq through the 1940s and 1950s.

Thabit led the Lebanese delegation of the Partisans of Peace to the 1949 Peace Congress in Paris, where he had previously studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, he committed al-Tariq to upholding the resolutions of the Congress, to opposing the nuclear catastrophe “being prepared for humanity by the colonizers and arms dealers,” and to advocating for freedom, justice, and democracy.Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, the journal continued to engage with questions of culture, including the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture, the politics of realism and other literary genres, and the relationship of nationalism, Arabism, and cultural heritage (turāth). It also continued to publish on other literary and philosophical topics, including through translations of Russian authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Maxim Gorky; Soviet writers such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Fadeyev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Konstantin Simonov; and Soviet academic specialists such as the orientalist Vladimir Lutsky and agronomist Trofim Lysenko. These works often appeared alongside translations of Mao Zedong, Mark Twain, Johannes Steele, Nazim Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda. These writings about politics—and, implicitly, the politics of culture, beauty, the family, sexuality, biology, and rights—pick up the various conversations animating the Left in the 1930s and 1940s, while also expanding the set of available intellectual references and analytical tools.

Like Thabit, many of the Partisans’ leaders in Lebanon and Syria were simultaneously involved in organized communism and had multiple ways to access Soviet material support.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, Lebanese and Syrian peace representatives who traveled to international peace congresses did so mostly for free. Such delegations included communist and sympathetic writers, poets, and artists; people from the educational sector, such as professors and students; white-collar professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, and journalists; and several religious officials, such as the Syrian shaykhs Muhammad al-Ashmar and Salah al-Za‘im.Footnote ¹⁹ The movement had also established peace committees in Lebanon and Syria's main cities, which helped distribute brochures and run petition campaigns––with the support of unions, women's groups, and students––to publicize the movement's platform (Fig. 1).Footnote ²⁰

Figure 1.

Members of the Syrian delegation to the Peace Congress in Warsaw, November 1950.

From left: Shaykh Muhammad al-Ashmar, Ibrahim al-Hamzawi, Falak Tarazi, `Abd al-Salam Haydar, the worker Yassin al-Shawa, the farmer Ahmed Abaza. On the other side of the table are the painter Sa`id Tahsin and Josef Mawsilli. Source: al-Tariq 1 (1951), 76.

While obscuring its proximity to organized communism in the region, the peace movement also invigorated it. The Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, under the leadership of Khalid Bakdash, had struggled through the ideological upheavals of the 1940s, including the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which communists supported in 1939–41, reversing their anti-fascist position of the late 1930s and then reverting back after the Soviet Union entered the war. As Lebanese and Syrian independence movements gathered strength during the war, Bakdash split the party in 1943, staying on as chairman in Syria and assigning Faraj Allah al-Hilu as the party's chairman in Lebanon. In practice, Bakdash continued to wield power over both, reflected in his ability to replace al-Hilu with Nikola Shawi in 1946 and suppress al-Hilu and other prominent communists’ opposition to the party's contentious decision to support the partition of Palestine in 1947.Footnote ²¹ On the eve of partition, the party's headquarters in Damascus were attacked and burned, its newspaper in Syria banned, and many party leaders and activists imprisoned. The persecution of communists in Syria continued under al-Za`im and his successor, Colonel Adib al-Shishakli, forcing the party further underground. Bakdash went into exile in Beirut and did not return to Syria until Shukri al-Quwatli became president in 1954. In Lebanon during this period, communists and Peace Partisans also experienced political pressure, but the repression was less severe and al-Tariq could publish without interruption.Footnote ²²

Throughout the political repression and changes of the early 1950s, the Partisans helped accomplish what Bakdash called for in 1951 from Beirut: that communists should transform the party in Syria and Lebanon into “a party of the masses.” This transformation could be achieved, he suggested, through the direction and control of social organizations such as “trade unions, peasant committees, the peace movement, and women's organizations,” even if “our views and positions on every question are the same as those of the Partisans of Peace.”Footnote ²³

It helped the Partisans’ cause that, unlike communists, they were not a party but instead a movement (ḥaraka) united around a subset of the communist agenda related primarily to international affairs.Footnote ²⁴ The Partisans opposed nuclear war, Anglo-American imperialism, and the pressure put on Lebanon and Syria to join regional pro-Western military blocs and host foreign military bases; and they advocated solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world.Footnote ²⁵ This platform overlapped with Soviet foreign policy interests and those of regional communists, allowing the Partisans to use communist pamphlets to promote their message. This international focus made it easier to speak in terms of shared Syrian-Lebanese interests.Footnote ²⁶ Even in coverage of national congresses or events, such as the imprisonment of Syrian peace activists, al-Tariq described how “public opinion in Syria and Lebanon erupted in indignation” and that “a large number of Syrian and Lebanese lawyers volunteered” to defend the Syrian activists.Footnote ²⁷ Soviet diplomatic reports on Syria also tended to include passages about Lebanon, and vice versa, especially in the context of the movement's success among lower-level workers and peasants.Footnote ²⁸

The Partisans’ reach was greater than that of local communists in part because the stakes of their campaigns were lighter. For instance, one of the Partisans’ most effective initiatives involved gathering signatures for the Stockholm Appeal, launched in March 1950 by the French Communist physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, which called for a ban on all atomic weapons and the establishment of an international control agency to monitor compliance. This campaign reportedly yielded 150,000 signatures in Syria and, by some estimates, as many as 300,000 in Syria and Lebanon combined.Footnote ²⁹ As Rami Ginat asserts, most signatories “knew about the political and ideological connection between the World Movement for Peace and the Soviet Union” but signed anyway, “because, for them, the choice was between the East and the West, or neutralism and because Western denunciations of the Appeal and attempts to expose it as Soviet propaganda were regarded by these Syrians as hypocritical.”Footnote ³⁰ Significantly, signatories included those who were neither communists nor sympathizers, such as the Lebanese parliamentarian Hamid Franjiyya and leader of the right-wing Kataeb Party Pierre Gemayyel, indicating an ability to reach across political divides never possessed by communists (Fig. 2).Footnote ³¹

Figure 2.

Partisans of Peace Display at the Bikfayya Flower Festival, 1955. Source: al-Tariq 8–9 (1955), 110.

Fellow-Travelling and Historical Erasure

One reason the Partisans of Peace in Syria and Lebanon have been neglected by scholarship on nationalism and the Arab Left, alongside scholarship on decolonization and postcolonialism, is the ideological closeness among the postwar generation of Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals, between those whom Yoav Di-Capua describes as having “‘graduated’ from Paris's Left Bank cafes and Moscow's communist seminars.”Footnote ³² For European intellectuals, this proximity also posed problems. From 1952–56, Sartre aligned himself with the French Communist Party and the Partisans of Peace movement, a decision that prompted the famed contemporary philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to dismiss Sartre's work from this period as “ultra Bolshevism.” David Lethbridge recently described this term, “ultra Bolshevism,” as an “ambiguous category that meant nothing” but which nevertheless functioned within the Cold War context to suppress Sartre's writings from this period. As a result, Lethbridge argues, scholars miss that the themes of Sartre's speeches delivered at Partisans congresses were consonant with the political and intellectual projects he had been developing since the mid-1930s.Footnote ³³

The apparent rupture between anti-colonial and anti-fascist activism of the 1930s and 1940s, and the later 1950s Afro-Asian, non-aligned, and nationalist Left, was the effect of a similar erasure of the Partisans of Peace in Syria and Lebanon. The emphasis on 1956 as a point of rupture in the historiography of the “global” Left and postcolonial studies reflects a particular Eurocentrism of chronologies and geographies in the dominant scholarship. For many prominent European leftists, such as Sartre and Aimé Césaire, 1956 marked a rupture with communism following Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's “secret speech” at the 20^th Party Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Disillusionment after 1956 made such authors’ later work more acceptable to scholars in European and American academies.

For peace activists and other leftists in Syria and Lebanon, however, Soviet military action in Europe mattered less than regional events, such as: multiple regime changes in Syria; the 1952 Egyptian Revolution that ended the British occupation of Egypt and brought Egypt and Lebanon closer together; the 1953 coup in Iran that consolidated the Shah's authoritarian regime and exposed the Soviet Union's reluctance to intervene in support of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq or protect the Left; the birth of the Afro-Asian movement at Bandung in 1955, with follow-up conferences in Cairo and Beirut that spurred the emergence of Afro-Asian and non-aligned communities; the Algerian War (1954–62) that invigorated the regional anti-colonial struggle; and, of course, the 1956 Suez Crisis that gave Arabs an experience of victory against a colonialist military challenge thanks, in part, to support from the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. The absence of rupture with the Soviet Union in 1956 and, in many cases, a deepening of political commitment to leftist politics and ideas has rendered these ideas less visible to scholars working on decolonization within European and North American area studies paradigms.

Despite these erasures, the Lebanese and Syrian Partisans of Peace received significant international recognition from their contemporaries. At the 1950 World Peace Council meeting in Warsaw, al-Tariq was awarded the Gold Medal of Peace, the highest honor given by the Council. In receiving this prize, the editors shared the podium with major European, North and South American, and Asian cultural icons such as the French film director Louis Daquin, Czechoslovak composer Václav Dobiaš, Italian painter Renato Guttuso, and Brazilian painter Candido Portinari. That same year, Pablo Picasso, writers Nazim Hikmet and Pablo Neruda, and the singer Paul Robeson also received International Peace Prizes. Al-Tariq featured its Gold Medal of Peace on its cover for three years—throughout 1951, 1952, and through September 1953 (Figs. 3, 4).

Figures 3 and 4.

Covers of al-Tariq for issue 5–6 (1951) and issue 1 (1952).

For the Lebanese and Syrian Partisans’ leaders, acknowledgment of their work and achievements seemed deeply meaningful, as it allowed them to rebuild connections with members of the international Left forged in the 1930s and 1940s, revisit earlier conversations about colonialism, and participate in collective intellectual conversations about its meanings. At the 1949 Paris Peace Congress, Antun Thabit presented the movement in Lebanon as a “logical continuation” of the “wartime work of ‘Umar Fakhuri,” the Lebanese literary critic who advocated literary realism and co-founded the Anti-Fascist League and al-Tariq.Footnote ³⁴ In the new context of postwar independence and international connection, opposition to new blocs—the “Eastern Bloc” (al-kutla al-sharqiyya), the “Fertile Crescent,” and “Greater Syria” blocs—was recast as a continuation of earlier colonial patterns of boundary making. Another Lebanese delegate to the Paris Congress, the Moscow-trained communist and president of the Federation of Trade Unions in Lebanon, Mustafa al-‘Aris, stressed the continuity of colonial dynamics in the economic sphere and the persistent struggle against them.Footnote ³⁵ In his speech reprinted in al-Tariq, al-‘Aris presented the Marshall Plan as a cover for the expansion of US military bases and a plan to increase pressure on the working classes of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. He also cast the arrest of Syrian trade union fighter Ibrahim Bakri, the head of the Homs Hotel Users Syndicate, Jamil Anan, and the Damascus student Ahmad Murad for distributing pro-Soviet pamphlets and crackdowns on workers attempting to unionize at British and American oil companies as examples of the work of “colonial agents.”Footnote ³⁶ This framing suggested that, despite formal independence, colonial economic patterns remained in place and, by opposing them, the Partisans of Peace were building anti-colonial solidarity.

The themes of peace and colonial violence could also be linked to other historical struggles in the region. Speaking before some 500 Muslim and Christian women “writers, workers, students, and housewives” gathered for an International Women's Day celebration in Beirut in 1949, the feminist peace activist Imile Faris Ibrahim condemned efforts of the “Anglo-American camp… to turn the world into a powder keg and set it on fire that will undoubtedly repeat for our dear Lebanon and our sisterly Arab countries the tragedy of 1914–18.”Footnote ³⁷ Like other activists in Lebanon and Syria, Ibrahim referenced World War I rather than the destruction of World War II, which was more immediately felt in Europe and Asia. She also framed opposition to “the war blocs and treaties of the owners of investment companies” as a feminist act, concluding that if anyone believed that “in Lebanon and Arab countries we have no land but to equip their [Western colonial] armies, […] and nothing to do but raise families and children to become fuel for their pyre,” they were mistaken.Footnote ³⁸ Channeling this anger, Ibrahim called on the women gathered to pledge solidarity with the Intellectuals for Peace. As an anonymous contributor to al-Tariq suggested, such solidarity illustrated that “Arab women, especially Lebanese women, do not remain isolated from this progressive wave that moves the masses of the world.”Footnote ³⁹ Such efforts by Peace Partisans to generate mass support among women marked a departure from the more male-dominated Popular Front, anti-fascist, communist, and anti-colonial nationalist activism of the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁰

The public acknowledgment of Lebanese and Syrian activists’ cultural achievements produced a powerful sense of inclusion in this alternative international order. The Lebanese illustrator and poet Radwan al-Shaghal described to al-Tariq readers the visibility of Arab flags in the colorful convergence of peoples from the five continents fathered for the Peace Congress in Warsaw:

For Husayn Muruwwa, the sense of inclusion was reinforced by connections with the intellectual stars of the emerging global front against imperialism, such as Sartre, whom he met at the Peace Congress in Berlin in 1954. Muruwwa wrote, “I saw myself as part of a vast movement that takes on an enormous cause. I felt I grew to represent all these delegations of peoples and nations inside me.”Footnote ⁴² A year later, he attended the Second Soviet Writers Congress, where he continued to be inspired by socialist realism as a philosophy for life.Footnote ⁴³ After that, Muruwwa and Sartre's relationship with the peace movement diverged. As Sartre was leaving the communist party over his dismay at the Soviets’ crushing of the Hungarian uprising, Muruwwa's commitments to socialist realism and the Soviet Union were deepening.Footnote ⁴⁴ For Dr. Jurj Hanna, the Berlin Congress exemplified the failure of American propaganda to “paint the war in Indochina with an abstract communist color.” In Berlin it seemed like “the whole world now realizes that it is a war of liberation,” that the “international balance had shifted,” and that it was possible to be understood on one's own terms.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Congress's banquet conversations made him further appreciate Soviet cultural efforts to bring peoples closer together by translating into Russian the works of Arab authors such as `Umar Fakhuri, Mahmud Taymur, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Amin al-Rihani, Gibran Khalil Gibran, Taha Hussayn, Dhu-l-Nun Ayyub, and Hanna's own writings.Footnote ⁴⁶

This recognition also strengthened Partisan leaders’ claims to represent “Arab media” and “Arab culture” to their Arabic-speaking audiences. At the award ceremony in Warsaw, Antun Thabit claimed triumphantly to “truly represent the public opinion in our country and speak on behalf of the more than three hundred thousand citizens… who had signed the Stockholm Appeal.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Hanna described his sense of pride in representing Lebanon, “a small country on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean” with a distinguished ancient history that “makes every Lebanese proud of his Lebaneseness (bi-Lubnāniyyatihī).”Footnote ⁴⁸ For Hanna, this Lebaneseness was embedded in the historical struggles of the WWI famine and epidemic, which “killed more than a quarter of the population,” and WWII, when “the masses fell prey to the greed of the dominating monopolistic few.”Footnote ⁴⁹ These statements from the congresses were interspersed with congratulatory notes from Soviet political and literary authorities. One such letter from the Soviet Orientalist Ignatii Krachkovskii described how Soviet Arabists read al-Tariq to get “a correct idea of the present life of the Arab people, their struggle for freedom, democracy, and peace.” Significantly, Krachkovskii also thanked al-Tariq on behalf of Soviet Arabists for acquainting Arabs with Soviet culture, Russian literature and art, and the Soviet struggle for peace, signaling the two-directional nature of this relationship.Footnote ⁵⁰

This recognition of al-Tariq, and its editors’ interpretation of it as an achievement of Arab culture reinvigorated by decolonization, sits awkwardly with histories of the peace movement that rely primarily on European, US, and Soviet sources and tend to reflect Western and the late Stalinist state's Eurocentric approach to international security and foreign policy. Stalin's postwar preoccupation with Europe and its status quo was undoubtedly reflected in the Cominform, and the absence in it of any non-European communist parties (unlike in the earlier Comintern). It was also reflected in Stalin's efforts to maintain and consolidate the Eastern and Western blocs and his competition with US-based initiatives such as US President Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace and Food for Peace programs. Yet the expansion of the Partisans of Peace movement in Syria and Lebanon, and elsewhere in the decolonizing world, was more than a “Soviet response” to its failure to hinder West Germany's integration into Western Europe.Footnote ⁵¹ Rejected invitations from Syria and Lebanon asking Soviet Peace Committee representatives to attend their national meetings attest to the agency and initiatives of local branches.Footnote ⁵² The intellectual approaches of the movement's leaders suggest that their ways of thinking about politics—including about violence, colonial histories, and national identity—were sometimes supported by Soviet resources, but also more concerned with rethinking older questions about culture and colonialism in solidarity with others.

Broadening the Conversation about Peace

The Partisans’ ability to reach hundreds of thousands in Syria and Lebanon involved more than clever mobilizations of colonial history. The Arabic translation of the Stockholm Appeal called on “every honest person—of whatever political, religious, or social view” to join “the voices of millions struggling for peace.”Footnote ⁵³ The work of conveying this message of peace across political and social divides, in ways that went beyond anything previously attempted by communist activists, was accomplished partly with the help of religious officials. In Lebanon, the Maronite Patriarch Antun Butrus al-‘Arida and the Metropolitan Archbishop Ilia (sometimes spelled Elijah or Ilya) Karam drew on religious imagery to rearticulate the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons.Footnote ⁵⁴ Biblical references (e.g., “All who draw the sword will die by the sword” from Matthew 26:52) seemed appropriate when thinking about the problem of evil on such a scale. Karam's statement of support sounded like a sermon:

This prophetic tone of admonishment helped attract new audiences and forge transregional solidarities.Footnote ⁵⁶ Following similar lines, in his report to the Cominform Congress of November 1949, Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti instructed: “In the struggle for working-class unity, particular attention should be devoted to the mass of Catholic workers, working people in general, and their organizations.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The appeal to Catholic solidarity received the greatest boost when Pope John XXIII supported the movement. Other religious linkages connecting Eurasia with the Arab world revived different solidarities that cut across regional and religious lines.Footnote ⁵⁸

The unprecedented threat of nuclear war managed to bring religious and atheist thinkers together under a common umbrella. For instance, the 1950 conference in Warsaw was attended by the Syrian shaykh–mujahid Muhammad al-Ashmar, a former commander in the anti-colonial Syrian revolt of 1925, volunteer in the Arab revolt in Palestine of 1936–39, and member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order.Footnote ⁵⁹ There, he claimed to have experienced a shift in attitude toward Europe:

After his return to Syria, al-Ashmar maintained involvement with the peace movement, which took him to China and the Soviet Union, where he was again moved by meetings with Soviet religious officials about the wellbeing of Soviet Muslims and other propaganda of SADUM, the official body overseeing Islamic activities in the five Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁶¹ Later, in Damascus, his conservative support base in his Midan neighborhood of Damascus gave the communists a breakthrough on the eve of the 1954 parliamentary elections, which brought him closer to Khalid Bakdash and the leadership of the Syrian Communist Party.Footnote ⁶² Bakdash liked to tell a story about how al-Ashmar had tried to persuade him to join for Friday prayer at the Damascene Ummayad Mosque, which Bakdash refused, thinking that going to pray only on the eve of the election would make him look like a hypocrite.Footnote ⁶³ The two remained allies and, in 1955, al-Ashmar received the Stalin Peace Prize in a ceremony at the Damascus al-Firdaws Cinema attended by the Soviet Muslim theologian Shaykh Ziya al-Din Burkan, the writer Nikolai Tikhonov, and the Arabist and head of Oriental Studies at Tbilisi University Georgi Tsereteli.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like the Partisans movement, the award ceremony united religious and atheist authorities around shared commitments to protecting humanity from nuclear destruction.Footnote ⁶⁵

A more deliberate effort to resolve contradictions between materialist-dialectical thought and religious spirituality was Jurj Hanna's comparison of Marxism and religion:

Hanna's appeal was grounded in rational enlightenment principles. His point was that Marxism rejected only unreasonably supernatural phenomena, and only in the name of science, and that this was the main foundation of Marxist ideology. Therefore, it was not Marxist ideology that opposed “fanaticism” but “science and the search for knowledge and truth.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Since Marxist ideology, unlike bourgeois philosophies, was not judgmental but evolutionary and creative, Hanna professed a faith he believed to be capable of overcoming the marginal difficulties experienced under socialism.Footnote ⁶⁸

Building a Regional Network, 1951–53

Although the movement managed to build solidarities across religious and social divides, efforts to organize a transregional network remained vulnerable to political pressures. Since US efforts to draw Arab countries into a North Atlantic alliance signaled expectations of greater proximity to Israel, Turkey, and Greece, the World Peace Council sought to oppose them in 1951 by asking delegates from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Cyprus to set up a regional working group. This group was to have a permanent committee based in Cairo and be comprised of five member delegates: one from North Africa, one from Syria/Lebanon, one from Iran, and two from Egypt.Footnote ⁶⁹

At the time, Cairo seemed like a natural base. In mid-1951, the Syrian government had taken a more aggressive stand on communist and SPP activity.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Lebanese government also banned the Partisans, and Antun Thabit spent a few months under arrest.Footnote ⁷¹ In the same period, the Egyptian Partisans of Peace (Harakat Ansar al-Salam, HAS) were flourishing. HAS had formed in 1950 out of a coalition of communists, members of al-Tali`a al-Wafdiyya (the more progressive youth wing of the Wafd), the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmad Husayn's Socialist Party. It focused its advocacy on abrogating the 1936 treaty that allowed 10,000 British military personnel to remain stationed in the Suez Canal zone and establishing friendlier relations with the Soviet Union. Support for HAS's platform among the Egyptian press and members of the political establishment was acknowledged by the Wafdist foreign minister Muhammad Salah al-Din, who assured Soviet diplomats visiting in August 1951 to determine if Egypt might lead the peace offensive in the Middle East that “he was also a partisan of peace.”Footnote ⁷² In the aftermath of this visit, HAS received greater support from Moscow.Footnote ⁷³

The leaders of the peace movement in Lebanon, however, were still creatively resisting the North Atlantic alliance by reimagining their region. Antun Thabit described the space as inhabited by people living under a hodgepodge of colonial conditions: areas under colonial influence, “such as Marrakesh and Libya”; states under direct colonial rule, “with the dissolution of all national characteristics (such as Algeria)”; areas where Arabic was officially considered a foreign language, “and where there is protection and occupation (such as in Tunisia and Libya)”; regions controlled by “colonial treaties… (such as Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan)”; places compelled to host military “land, air, and sea bases (such as Turkey and Israel)”; and regions of protected “oil interests (such as in Saudi Arabia, with similar designs set for Syria, Lebanon, and Iran).”Footnote ⁷⁴ As this convoluted list suggests, solidarity across such disparate areas was awkward in theory and practice, but this did not mean they should stop trying.

Iran had been included in the regional plans due to the strength of its peace movement, growing popular support for oil nationalization since 1951, and Western counterpropaganda presenting it as a “threat to world peace” and “another [potential] Korea.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet stretching regional space beyond the cultural “Arab world” raised questions about language, religion, and the limits of integration. As Thabit reported to Moscow two years later, many participants from Arab nationalist parties preferred the Cairo conference planned for 1953 to be limited to Arab peoples only:

Despite such difficulities in communication, Iran remained on the regional Peace activists' agenda, especially after Italian socialist Mario Berlinguer's successful courtship of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, who supported nationalizing the oil industry at the time, but later turned against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. While Berlinguer was in Iran on behalf of the Italian Peace Committee, Thabit was expected to remain flexible and solve any problems that arose if the Ayatollah agreed to sign a version of the Stockholm Appeal that in any way departed from the original.Footnote ⁷⁷

In Iraq, the difficulties experienced by the Partisans were also shaped by their distinct contexts. There, the movement also started in 1950 and worked closely with the communist party under the leadership of ‘Abd al-Wahhab Mahmud, the president of the Lawyers’ Association and future ambassador to the Soviet Union under `Abd al-Karim Qasim. Yet Iraqi Partisans were facing other pressures. For instance, Hanna Batatu describes how Taha al-Hashim, head of the postwar United Popular Front of anti-government forces, worried that including the Partisans in the Front coalition in 1952 ran the risk of them taking it over politically. Indeed, in November 1952, they “supplanted [the others] in the leadership of the crowds.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Their success was met with another wave of repressions, with hundreds of communist and peace activists jailed in 1952 and 1953, making organization at the local and regional levels difficult.

Lebanese and Syrian activists also had to contend with local impediments. For instance, the Lebanese government refused to issue visas to its nationals hoping to travel to a Partisans’ congress in Cairo.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Syrian government of Husni al-Za`im detained peace activists and ignored letter campaigns seeking their release. Accounts of the torture of imprisoned workers, peasants, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, students, and merchants from nationalist, trade unionist, and communist backgrounds were published in al-Tariq.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Soviet Mission in Lebanon and Syria monitored police harassment, imprisonment, and protests against the movement and reported this information back to Moscow, citing such as evidence of a growing regional “struggle for national liberation,” but no diplomatic pressure from Moscow was ever applied.Footnote ⁸¹

The 1953 coup in Iran dealt a profound blow to the regional organization, resulting in the arrest of thousands of National Front and Tudeh party supporters (including many peace activists), the suppression of the National Resistance Movement, and the imposition of draconian press censorship.Footnote ⁸² The consolidation of the new Iranian regime––with massive assistance from the United States––also proved devastating for some Arab activists, such as Iraqi poet and activist Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, who witnessed the repression while in exile in Iran. The Kremlin's refusal to support Iranian communists and stage a countercoup led al-Sayyab to break with the peace movement and communism. Instead, he become more oriented towards qawmī Iraqi nationalism, an orientation that favored Arab culture, history, and language as key markers of national identity.Footnote ⁸³

In Egypt, the period of neutralism and easy relations with the Soviet bloc also ended with the dismissal of the Wafd government in January 1952.Footnote ⁸⁴ The July 1952 revolution brought new political uncertainty. The Kafr al-Dawwar labor strike at the Misr Fine Spinning and Weaving Company, which was violently suppressed in August 1952, turned many in the communist movement against the new revolutionary regime.Footnote ⁸⁵ In January 1953, the Free Officers issued a decree to abolish all political parties. Soon after, they ordered the arrest of the head of the Egyptian Peace Committee, Yusuf Hilmi, for attending a meeting about forming a united front of Wafdists, communists, and others opposed to the Nagib regime.Footnote ⁸⁶ It would take years for the peace movement to be reconstituted under the leadership of the former Egyptian Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Muhammad Kamil al-Bandari, and writer `Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi.Footnote ⁸⁷ Despite these setbacks to the movement, individual intellectuals––such as Egyptian philosopher ‘Uthman Amin and former Minister Ibrahim Rashad––could still travel to Beirut and attend regional conferences with peace activists “In Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of the Middle East” (Fig. 5).Footnote ⁸⁸

Figure 5.

Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of the Middle East Conference, December 19, 1953. Seated (from right): Dr. Ibrahim Rashad (Egypt), Dr. Jurj Hanna (Lebanon), and member of the World Peace Council Antun Thabit (Lebanon). Standing (from right): Maurice al-Salibi (Syria), Husayn Arafa ‘Uthman Amin, Muhammad Abu al-Khayr, ‘Abd al-Aziz Bayumi Radwan, and Hilmi Labib (all from. Egypt). Source: al-Tariq 1 (1954), 38.

Peace in the Age of Suez, Afro-Asianism, and Non-Alignment

The Soviet Union's unwillingness to support activists in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon undermined transregional and local grassroots organization on a mass scale. It also repeatedly pointed to the lack of ideological clarity within the peace movement on matters of political violence. At the 1949 Paris Congress, it had become clear that civil wars would not be condemned, such as the communist success in China and the guerilla campaign in Greece, and that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans could sign the 1950 Stockholm Appeal and then invade South Korea.Footnote ⁸⁹ Regionally too, the theme came up when, for instance, the Syrian Socialist National Party (al-Hizb al-Qawmi al-Suri al-Ijtima`i) attacked the Peace Partisans by saying that advocating peace during a state of war was “certainly a betrayal of the interest of the nation and can be termed as high treason.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Ultimately, clarity was not the objective and the violent targeting of communists and peace activists by the newly independent Arab states fell mainly outside the scope of the movement's mandate.

Sartre partly addressed the ambivalence toward violence at the heart of the peace movement, and at the heart of other anti-colonial politics, during his period of fellow-traveling with the communists. To him, the ethical contradictions of political commitment seemed inescapable:

Some of Sartre's ambivalent thoughts on violence and peace were translated into Arabic and published in al-Tariq. Footnote ⁹² In “The Hydrogen Bomb: Weapon Against History” (1954), about the new form of atomic warfare that characterized the Cold War, Sartre opined that atomic power was so concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy men and their mercenaries that the masses no longer could restrain them, making the hydrogen bomb a “weapon against history.” By contrast, people's armies, such as those that had come to the fore in China and Indo-China, could still conduct “a people's war” against an aggressor, an occupying or colonial power, without the nation “losing its character.” Sartre then concluded that the task incumbent on the world was to “unite against the bomb,” “impose peace,” and “fight against atomic terror.”Footnote ⁹³ Although Sartre broke with the peace campaign in 1956, this differentiated approach to the colonizer and colonized grew out of his earlier political and intellectual projects and continued to develop as a theme after 1956.

Conversely, for the peace activists in Syria and Lebanon, 1956 brought a sense of greater moral clarity rather than disappointment. In the first issue of al-Tariq published after the Tripartite Aggression and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Antun Thabit stressed Egypt's triumph over England, France, and Israel's efforts “to eliminate the independence and sovereignty of Egypt and… all Arab peoples,” and to “bring the world to the brink of a third world war.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Suez was a “victory for the cause of peace in this part of the world,” even if colonial plots and agents in the region continued to “exploit the incidents in Hungary which were an attempt to overthrow its regime and hand it over to a group of fascists and arms dealers.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Similar uses of the Suez Crisis to downplay the violence in Hungary or frame Hungary as one in a string of “failed imperialist adventures” echoed at other Partisans of Peace meetings in Europe.Footnote ⁹⁶ Hungarian peace activists reinforced such connections in their petitions to the UN General Assembly aimed at “end[ing] the provocative aggressive encirclement of Syria and liquidate the tense situation in the Arab East.”Footnote ⁹⁷ But they resonated more powerfully in Lebanon and Syria. There, the Soviet Union's support for Egypt in the 1956 war mitigated some of the ethical contradictions stemming from the Soviet Union's initial support for the partition of Palestine and its repeated reluctance to intervene on behalf of imprisoned comrades.Footnote ⁹⁸ By 1956, Soviet support for Arab interests vis-à-vis Israel was definitive, allowing Hungary to be recast as part of the global colonial effort that “created [Israel as] an artificial state (al-dawla al- muṣṭana`a)” and was attempting to seize the Lebanese market to “eliminate our emerging industry and agriculture,” transforming Lebanon into “into a market for Israeli industrial production.”Footnote ⁹⁹

This new moral clarity made it easier for peace activists to promote Soviet interpretations of international affairs. For instance, Jurj Hanna stressed the productive potential of Nikita Khrushchev's “peaceful coexistence” slogan adopted at the 20^th Party Congress and the possibility that “a human culture (al-thaqāfa al-insāniyya)” might create “a virtuous world… in India, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the farthest islands of the ocean” bringing “peaceful coexistence among peoples.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Al-Tariq also published a version of Khrushchev's speech delivered at the 1958 Conference of Agricultural Workers of the Belorussian Republic on “Aspects of the International Situation.” There, Khrushchev spoke of an improvement in the international situation since the “mistakes committed by the former Hungarian leadership” when “counter-revolutionary elements … attempted… to restore the capitalist, fascist system.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Beyond featuring Khrushchev's position, al-Tariq also covered such cultural diplomacy initiatives as a visit of a Port Said delegation to Stalingrad to bond over their supposedly shared experiences of being attacked and “struggling for peace.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Expanding Afro-Asian solidarity platforms after the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Cairo Conference of 1957, and more culturally-oriented conferences in Asia and Africa provided new challenges for the peace movement.Footnote ¹⁰³ Afro-Asian solidarity was about helping countries position themselves outside the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. It also made it more likely that calls to end nuclear testing might include critiques of the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To address these arguments, regional activists stressed the Soviet Union's alleged willingness to stop nuclear experiments. They fell back on earlier themes of Soviet support for the independence movements in the “Arab East” (al-sharq al-‘Arabī). As Khalid Bakdash reminded readers of al-Tariq and Pravda:

Bakdash's comrade, Yusuf Khattar Hilu, focused more on the growth of a global socialist market, the role of socialist economic opportunities for national industrialization, and escape from “the trap of dependency” set by Western aid.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Within the USSR, the Soviet Afro-Asian Committee increasingly collaborated with the Peace Committee, and both organizations expressed their support for Afro-Asian economic and writers conferences and sent messages of greeting to their constituents in the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Some activists emphasized overlaps in the peace and Afro-Asian platforms. For instance, Thabit characterized French plans for nuclear tests in North Africa in 1959 as an “obvious attempt to terrorize African peoples,” “extinguish the flames of the national liberation movement of the Algerian people, which over 500,000 regular French forces could not accomplish, and to pressure other African peoples.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hanna stressed how colonial legacies were an easily recognizable source of daily stress.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Similar connections between the problems of peace, economic stability, and social equilibrium had been made by representatives of other decolonizing countries in the United States.Footnote ¹¹¹

By the late 1950s, however, peace activists in Syria and Lebanon focused on other questions and challenges. Syria's relative ideological tolerance for communists and leftists ended in 1958, when the formation of the United Arab Republic brought new waves of repression and revived earlier concerns about the cost of political commitment. Lebanon had retained a broadly pro-Western orientation under President Camille Chamoun, who, in 1958, refused to allow Lebanon to join the UAR, leading to civil unrest. This unrest, he claimed, was supported by communists and Syrian arms. The situation escalated into the Lebanon crisis when Chamoun and Charles Malik asked for US military intervention under the terms of the Eisenhower Doctrine, a request that resulted in a few months of military occupation.Footnote ¹¹² Despite these political shifts, however, peace activists still commemorated the tenth anniversary of their movement, called for solidarity with national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and covered other international issues such as Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States.Footnote ¹¹³ They also continued to creatively channel their energies into other pan-Arabist and more local forms of nationalism.

The intellectual trajectory of Jurj Hanna, who received a Peace Medal at a session of the World Peace Council in May 1959, illustrates how peace activists’ concerns in the post-1956 era continued the tradition of intellectual experimentation of the leftist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s, picking up many of the same key themes. It also illustrates the continuity of these ideas through the early 1950s and into the later 1950s and 1960s engagements with pan-Arabism, nationalism, and non-alignment. His intellectual eclecticism further highlights the array of sources available as a result of translations published by al-Tariq in the early 1950s.

Hanna's 1958 return to the problem of colonial legacies in Lebanon involved diagnosing the problems of nationalism. He first focused on “commercialized sectarianism” (al- ṭa'ifiyya al-tijariyya), which he argued had grown out of the imperial competition between Great Britain (supporting the Druze), France (supporting the Maronites), Austria (supporting the Catholics), and Russia (supporting the Orthodox). These conflicts remained unresolved after independence, enshrined in the 1943 independence charter, leaving Lebanon vulnerable to foreign intervention and straining its relationship with the rest of the Arab world.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He proposed eliminating sectarianism from the state structure and private and public schools, to be replaced by a new secular national charter and curriculum to foster a unified national culture. Compulsory military service could further help break down divisive sectarian, social, class, and regional animosities.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This national project would be Arabist, anti-confessional, anti-American, and anti-capitalist. Then, like other intellectuals inspired by the formation of the UAR, he revisited the theme of Arab nationalism (al-qawmiyya al-`Arabiyya) in another book tracing the “transformation of the Arab, from his individual and tribal existence to a collective national existence.” The Arabic language, he argued, served as the “most important common denominator,” as it enabled Arab nationalism to depart “from its religious and racist content… and to be placed in the ranks of nationalities that are viable, durable, progressive and free.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This freedom, Hanna concluded, necessitated the embrace of the UAR and Egypt as a vital part of this “Arab” project.

Hanna's work did not reflect compliance with Soviet or communist directives; it was more an intellectual exploration of culture—including nationalist culture, but also a common “world culture” and “the unity of human society”—that drew on European and Soviet sources. Hanna, educated in France, had previously engaged with British historian Arnold J. Toynbee's approach to world history as a composite of conceptually isolated civilizations. Yet his framing of Arabism as potentially contributing to a new “progressive human civilization” in which no one is deprived of respect as a human being, no matter the color of one's skin, place of residence, birth, or workplace, suggested a familiarity with the Soviet approach to human development, which took shape as the idea of the original and permanent unity of mankind.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Labeling Soviet frameworks as “non-European” helped Hanna develop a critique of “Western civilization” as a category of European thought that had “for too long denied the existence of human values to other civilizations and did not interact with them.” In this critique, Soviet culture had several functions. First, it served as another useful East. As Hanna claimed, Western elites presented their heritage as common to all humanity but were “stingy” (tabkhal) with other parts of the world, “the lands that gave birth to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gorky, Tagore, Gandhi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd, and others.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such Eurocentrism, Hanna concluded, contributed to intellectual chaos, opportunism, and fear among the colonized, which could be exploited by Western propaganda to mask Western man's exploitation of his fellow man in the name of democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This approach to the Soviet Union as an alternative developed, progressive, and modern East echoed the approaches of interwar Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals.Footnote ¹²⁰ Second, Soviet culture served as a compelling model for how a state might show respect for “culture” by eliminating illiteracy, raising the status of the arts, eradicating epidemics, and achieving scientific, technical, and material excellence.Footnote ¹²¹ These achievements happened in non-capitalist conditions. As Hanna explained in al-Tariq:

In these ways, concepts of peace, justice, nationalism, and the new Arab person continued to be rethought with reference to the Soviet model, including its critiques of capitalism, but were not defined by them.

Similar critiques, with references to Soviet intellectual frameworks, were made by others attracted to the peace movement. For instance, in a letter to the Soviet Peace Committee, a Sudanese student of history at Cairo University who visited Moscow in 1957 for the Festival of Youth and Students described his desire to return to Moscow to study history there.

His letter illustrates the potency of Soviet science and chemistry as metaphors for articulating his dreams and the intersection of individual, national, and civilizational potential.

Similar constellations of ideas continued to shape the search for a stable nationalism, decolonized culture, and postwar peace even after support for the pan-Arabist state cooled. For Hanna, this cooling meant a return to “Lebaneseness,” a theme he had spoken about at the 1950 congress in Warsaw, which became a book-length study in 1966. In al-Lubnaniyyun (The Lebanese), he described the Lebanese as sharing “one umma (community nation), one geography, one history, one interest, one destiny, and one psychological makeup (takwīnuha al-nafsī).” This umma was still Arab “in face and tongue,” but had “an independent personality since it descended from the ancient Phoenicians.”Footnote ¹²⁴ This approach to nationalism remained eclectic. Its stress on psychology was consistent with the European approaches with which Hanna had previously engaged, especially Toynbee's definition of nationalism as “a subjective feeling in a living people” and the Austro-Hungarian US-based historian Hans Kohn's as “first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet it also drew on Stalin's definition of a nation as a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed based on a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Arabism seemed to function more as this nationalism's form and Lebaneseness as its content.

This range of sources—which included but was not limited to Marxist-Leninist ideas about nationalism, capitalism, and Soviet development models—allowed leftist intellectuals who joined the peace movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s to continue conversations ongoing since the 1930s and 1940s and reconnect with members of the global Left. Their conversations continued to revolve around the problems of colonialism and the international order; of nationalism, culture, and political commitment; of violence, security, and prospects of peace for Lebanese and Syrians as individuals, citizens, and Arabs. Such thematic continuities in the concerns of the interwar and wartime eras, alongside the more politically fractured context of the early Cold War, calls for a reframing of the intellectual history of decolonization in the region that takes the early 1950s more seriously.

More broadly, the reconfiguration of the eclectic interwar and wartime anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and communist Left in Syria and Lebanon into a movement that engaged peasants, women, and religious officials illuminates how the lingering shadows of the Cold War and its politics of knowledge have made it difficult to appreciate the agency of the Arab Left.Footnote ¹²⁷ It shows how the overlooked experiences of decolonizing people can challenge the chronologies, spatial frames, and logics of the histories of the global Left, including leftist trajectories of disillusionment with communism and the Soviet Union. Unlike European leftists and fellow travelers, 1956 did not constitute the same break with communism or Soviet ideas for contemporaries in Syria and Lebanon. Instead, peace activists continued to receive intellectual and material support from the Soviet Union. Hanna and Thabit continued to attend peace conferences, and Thabit was awarded the 1961 International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Nations.Footnote ¹²⁸ This continued support may have made some ethical ambiguities of political commitment easier to bear, but so did the absence of a lasting postwar peace.