ABSTRACT
On the brink of the 21st century, few would contest the assertion that, over the past decades, Arabs have had inflicted upon them political, military and territorial damage on a massive scale. The left, and those who have supported change in Syria and Palestine over the past 50 years, now find themselves in a historical impasse, confronted with absolutist regimes and the failure of the Palestinian revolution, in particular its inability to establish a just peace. In the early 1970s, when the author started to write, the main Arab literary currents could be identified as Marxist-Leninist and the revolutionary national left, both strongly inspired by the spirit of change. The concept of commitment has become a major theme in the cultural life of Syria and Palestine, due firstly to the approach adopted by Marxism and socialist realism, and secondly to the ideas propagated by existentialism, which had become prominent in Europe after World War II.
