Journal of World History

Abstract:

In the years preceding and during the Second World War, the Lebanese left founded and spearheaded a vibrant antifascist struggle in the Lebanese and wider Arab public sphere. Examining how Arab leftists organized against, debated, and rejected fascism and Nazism challenges the narrative of Arab cooperation with fascism. It also takes issue with viewing antifascism as simply reactive to fascism. Rather, this article shows that antifascists drew upon pre-war and interwar intellectual frameworks of nationalism and anticolonialism to create counterhegemonic discourses against fascism. It argues that those who opposed fascism were operating within a terrain of interconnected and overlapping structures of oppression that they saw facing their societies, specifically the nexus between colonialism and fascism, and their relation to Zionism. Lebanese antifascists built east-east networks of activism to create linkages between the Arab liberation struggle and other oppressed nations, thus converging their nationalist and internationalist projects.