ABSTRACT
If one starts by drawing up a balance-sheet of Communist activity in the region in 1954,1 it looks decidedly deficient. There were only 5000 Communists in the official party in Israel; in the ‘unofficial’ Syrian party less than 10,000; 1000 to 1500 adherents to the (particularly active) Communist Party of the Sudan, and 10,000 in the Lebanon, where the Communist Party was somnolent. Everywhere
else the situation looked hopeless. In Iraq and Jordan (1000 to 1500), Egypt and Turkey (3000 ‘progressives’), the parties appeared to be paralysed by the vigilance of the authorities. These figures, it is true, must be seen in context: no political party in the Middle East can claim more than 10,000 adherents; and all, excepting the Communist Parties, are primarily the personal following of local politicians. One must add, moreover, that the Communist Parties of the region infiltrate, and are the real directors of, a number of ‘parallel’ organizations, such as the important ‘Partisans of Peace’, which reinforce or relieve them at need. But taking these factors into account, the condition of Middle Eastern Communism in 1954 was far from flourishing. What could the U.S.S.R. expect from such scattered forces? What reliance could it place upon Communist Parties that were generally crippled by repression; some of which, like the Tudeh in Persia, had more than once bungled a revolution2; parties which, after all, were everywhere made up of minorities of little importance in the national life3? Moreover, these Communist Parties were mostly groups of intellectuals from the petit bourgeoisie whose precarious situation made them susceptible to Marxist solicitation, but who had no working-class connections. (In the Middle East, instead of a proletariat there is only the lumpen-proletariat, which is hardly organizable.) All in all, these Communists aroused no great response in the minds of the faithful Muslims, whom their clergy had always kept well on guard against a purely materialist ideology. The revolutionary future of such parties in such conditions must have seemed highly problematic.
