ABSTRACT
Recent revisionist histories on Arab responses to fascism and Nazism have altered the earlier historiographic narrative that had emphasised the appeal of these ideas to Arab intellectuals and activists. This chapter adds the voices of Arab leftists who opposed Nazism and fascism during the 1930s and 1940s to these revisionist histories, examining how they organised against, debated, and rejected fascism and Nazism. Leftist debates about fascism and the nature of opposition to it intensified by the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, reaching a climax by the end of the war in 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War, with the establishment of the League Against Nazism and Fascism in Syria and Lebanon. This chapter addresses the foundation of this League, and the significance of its journal al-Tariq in creating a platform for debates on the future of Lebanon, the region, and the world. It argues that the threat of fascism pushed leftists to re-examine the meaning of the ‘national’ and to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Leftists who framed anti-fascism as an active form of the national liberation struggle saw the opposition to fascism as a natural product of a long Arab tradition of freedom, and as a protector to that tradition from all kinds of oppression.
