“The Taste of Death in the Spring”
On the evening of April 6, 1973, as he was returning to his Paris hotel, Dr. Basil Kubaisi–Iraqi historian, Arab nationalist, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary–was assassinated by two men who approached him in broad daylight and fired nine bullets into him, five in his body and four in his head. As The New York Times reported the news the next day, the assassination was “carried out with a dexterity and precision that one can only call professional.” The Iraqi embassy in Paris wasted no time pointing to the obvious culprit–Kubaisi had lived his life as “a revolutionary avant‐garde intellectual known for his anti‐Zionist positions,” and thus surely was the victim of “a terrorist act by Israeli secret agents.” The media of the Palestinian feda’i movement then headquartered in Beirut proudly claimed Kubaisi as one of their own, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who had been “on a mission” in Paris at the time of his death.
By the time they reached Kubaisi, the Israeli Mossad had already been embarking on a killing spree across Lebanon and Western Europe. On July 8, 1972, a Mossad-planted car bomb slaughtered writer and PFLP Ghassan Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece Lamees Najim in Beirut. On October 16 of that same year, two Mossad agents had shot down Palestinian writer and translator Wael Zwaiter in the lobby of his Roman apartment building. On December 8, a Mossad agent pretending to be an Italian journalist contacted Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative Mahmoud Hamshari for a faux interview, the pretext under which agents entered his home to place a bomb underneath the telephone. More Mossad assassinations followed after Basil’s as well when, on April 9 and 10 of 1973, Israeli Special Forces operatives assassinated PLO representatives Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Kemal Nasser in Lebanon.
The Zionists gave the name “Wrath of God” to their assassination campaign, which became mythologized in Western media as a technically masterful reprisal against the Black September Organization (BSO) for its operation taking Israeli athletes captive at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. But an examination of the biographies of the Palestinians targeted reveals a very different kind of motive on the part of the Zionists. Kanafani and Kubaisi did not even belong to Fateh, the organization out of which the BSO emerged as an offshoot under the leadership of Abu Daoud (who evaded the Israelis for the rest of his life until his 2010 death by kidney failure in Damascus). A conspicuous number of those targeted after Munich were not combatants or commanders per se, but rather writers and artists. Kanafani, in addition to being a great journalist and political theorist in the itinerant tradition of Marx, was an accomplished novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. One of the 13 bullets fired into Zwaiter’s body shot through the spine of the copy of One Thousand and One Nights he held in his pocket; he had been translating it from Arabic into Italian at the time. Kemal Nasser was a celebrated poet and editor of the PLO magazine Filastin Al-Thawra. Kubaisi was not a novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, or strictly speaking, a journalist. His preferred genre of creative writerly expression was another canonical category of literature, History. He was rare among historians in that he really did combine thought with action, capable of brandishing either the pen or the rifle as the occasion demanded, willing throughout his life to cross back and forth over the barrier dividing the intellectual from the commando.
If Israel’s “Wrath of God” can now be understood for what it actually was–not as a reactive retribution against Palestinian commandos, but rather as the proactive slaughter of Palestinian artists, intellectuals, and political leaders–then it follows that the operation never really ended. The Zionist military continues to place a premium on the elimination of Palestinian visionaries who broadcast their dreams across Palestinian society as a repudiation of despair and defeatism. The poet and literature professor Refaat Al-Areer, when discussing the arrest of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, reminded us why the Zionist entity goes out of its way to target artists and intellectuals; Al-Areer’s words would presage his own fate, when, in December of 2023, the Israeli Occupation Force fired a missile into his family apartment, murdering him, his brother, sister, and four of her children as part of its war of extermination in Gaza (2023-present):
“Of course, we always fall into this trap of saying, ‘She [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!’ We do this a lot, even us believers in literature … [we say], ‘Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?’ So, we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say, ‘She just wrote a poem!’ We shouldn’t be saying that.”
So the power of Poetry changes lives as a means of resistance; what about the power of History? Kubaisi certainly changed lives in the Palestinian resistance movement, as a number of obituaries and retrospectives published in the revolutionary press attested. Then PFLP member Bassam Abu Sharif lamented the pens of his loved ones going dry: Kanafani’s, Mohammad Al-Aswad’s (the “Guevara of Gaza”), and Kubaisi’s, all wielded for “the Arab revolution and its Palestinian faction.”[1] (Note this particular phrasing, which, as we will see, was illustrative of how Kubaisi conceptualized the Palestinian struggle, as a component part of a wider Arab revolution in which he was engaged.) A “final message” to Kubaisi, published almost one year after his death in the PFLP’s main periodical Al-Hadaf, likened him to a knight (faris) returning from Hattin, the battle site near Lake Tiberias where the soldiers of Salah Al-Din crushed the European Crusaders in July of 1187.[2] Kubaisi was also like a martyr “carried by the hands of the victory (ansar) from Dhi Qar,” the location of the Arab victory over the Sasanian Empire in 7th century Iraq. His assassination marked his “majestic ascent to Golgotha,” where Jesus Christ of Palestine was crucified. Above all, he was honored as a “Pan Arab and internationalist fighter,” a man who “crossed the seas for a tormented refugee, a soldier who died of thirst in the Sinai, a child torn apart by bombs in the Suez, and a farmer who left his land in the Arqoub [mountain in Yemen] or the Golan [in Syria].” At his funeral in Baghdad, attended by mourners from Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, and Palestine, the people chanted for Arab unity, for which they pledged to sacrifice their blood, as Kubaisi had done for both Palestine and his native Iraq.
As a historian, Kubaisi’s writings preserved for future generations the revolutionary history he had lived and helped to shape. His most important work, his dissertation titled “The Arab Nationalist Movement, 1951-1971: From Pressure Group to Socialist Party,” delivered lessons from his generation of strugglers, who engaged primarily in the project to create a single unified Arab state, to the generation after him, which he had mentored and helped to usher into existence, and whose emergent vision sought to combine the old dream of Arab unity with proletarian class struggle and socialist construction. Kubaisi’s dissertation, which works as both a compelling historical study and an insider primary document, contains clues as to why his comrades revered him and why the Zionists thought it necessary to eliminate him. Upon a close reading, the thesis reveals him to be more than “just” a historian; for Kubaisi, history was not something merely to be recorded, but something to be lived and intervened upon, which he very much did in a rare union between theory and practice that doubtless made him a special threat to the US-Zionist order. He continues to provide an example to anyone seriously attempting to write for the cause of revolution, for his dissertation left behind a guidebook for how to draw rational hope from the sorrows of history–a manual capable of addressing the revolutionary inside the historian, and the historian inside the revolutionary.
Made in Iraq[3]
“My homeland, my homeland,
The youth shall not tire, their goal is thine independence
Or they die, or they die.
We shall drink from death, and shall not be to our enemies
Like slaves.”
–English translation of Mawtini (“My Homeland”)
Basil Al-Kubaisi was born into relative privilege and strong Arab nationalist consciousness. He was the grandson of Mohammed Said, the head of the Sunni Muslim Kubaisi clan, upon which the socio-economic foundations of the Iraqi village of Kubaisa were built in the late 19th century. Basil’s father, Raouf Al-Kubaisi, was the fifth of seven sons. His brothers (Basil’s uncles) formed the top of the social-economic pyramid in Kubaisa and acted as strict guardians of the family’s tribal history, promoting a strong sense of ancestral pride, while Raouf became the ardent nationalist of the family. Raouf was born in Baghdad in 1886; his city location allowed him to bridge a “tribal-commercial” branch of the Kubaisi clan to an “urban-functional” branch, a connection which secured the family’s position and stabilized their geographic location, sparing them the transience typical to tribal life.
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, in which a republican movement forced the Ottoman sultan to implement constitutional reforms, indicated to a young Raouf that Ottoman imperial power was waning and the future lay in the Arab nation. He was thereby moved to join the Young Arab Group–one of many Arab cultural associations popping up across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire–after graduating from the Military College in Istanbul in 1911. After fighting the invading British forces in 1917, Raouf took refuge in Syria and joined the Arab government to work for King Faisal as commander of the Aleppo Gendarmerie, building on his previous experience as part of the Baghdad Gendarmerie. When he returned with King Faisal to Iraq in 1921, he was appointed governor of Basra, a position from which he was later ousted for his public comments attacking Britain, accusing it of milking Iraq like a cash cow. (He made these remarks in public at the 1929 opening ceremony for the Port of Basra, in the presence of none other than Abdullah Faisal I and Colonel Ward, the British Director of Ports.) Raouf was at that point sent back to Baghdad, where he was appointed General Director of its prisons. Politically, he had become a prominent supporter of Yasin Al-Hashimi, the Iraqi Prime Minister with the nickname of “the Arab Bismarck” on account of his opposition to any treaty that would bind Iraq to foreign powers.
Against this backdrop and amid these influences, Basil Raouf Al-Kubaisi was born in February 1933, the youngest of three sisters and two brothers. While his personal circumstances were very comfortable, Iraq was on the cusp of a maelstrom, a long period of nationalist-republican face-offs against British imperialism. On September 8, 1933, King Faisal, the founding monarch of the Iraqi state, died and his only son Ghazi, who hoped to limit Britain’s outsize influence in Iraq, ascended to the throne. In October of 1936, General Bakr Sidqi carried out a coup against Prime Minister Al-Hashimi, going so far as to assassinate his Minister of Defense Ja’far Al-Askari, to establish the “Party of National Brotherhood” government and effectively assert military control over the state. The coup occasioned an interregnum in which a variety of liberal and leftist reformers, from the nascent Iraqi Communist Party to labor associations, demanded land reforms, curtailment of the privileges of the landlord class, and the annulment of laws against peasants and trade unions. In response to such rapid popular pressure from the left, Sidqi and his Prime Minister and main enforcer, Hikmat Suleiman–who, as an advocate of an “Iraq First” policy, was not favorably predisposed to Pan Arabism–rapidly suppressed labor strikes and the left-nationalist press. In 1937, Sidqi was assassinated by an Arab nationalist officer corps who deemed him guilty of neglecting his duties to the Arabs of Khuzestan (in Iran) and Palestine. In 1939, the year Basil began his primary education at the Mamouniya Government School, King Ghazi was assassinated and World War Two broke out.
Young Basil was thus being raised in the heat of a nationalist fire. Competing factions–Communist, Conservative, Pan Arabists–battled in the streets. In his classrooms, under the futuwwa educational system which inculcated nationalist values in Iraqi youth, Basil wore traditional robes and sang Arab nationalist anthems such as “My Homeland, O My Homeland,” penned by the Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan. The overlaps of oppression between Palestine and Iraq were layered and multifaceted. In the early 1900s, the Zionist movement had temporarily proposed the Jazira region of Iraq as one of several alternative homelands to Palestine; if not for a few historical tweaks and accidents, the Zionists might have razed Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad instead of Lydda, Haifa, and Acre. After World War One, the British seized Palestine and Iraq as part of a single plan articulated through imperial negotiations over the spoils of the former Ottoman Empire, the secret talks which history eventually summarized as “the Sykes-Picot Agreement.” For the British negotiators who sliced up and then reassembled the Arab region in their image, Palestine was worthless if they could not also possess Iraq, and vice versa. In Palestine, Britain claimed the ports of Haifa and Acre, two cities as essential to Mediterranean trade supremacy in the 20th century as they had been during the Crusades. Britain then claimed the right to build a railway line from Haifa to Iraq, the path through which Iraqi oil would power Western Europe. For these reasons and more, the people of Iraq closely followed, and in many instances participated in, the momentous events in Palestine, where from 1936 to 1939 the peasants waged “national jihad” against British occupation. The 1936-1939 Great Palestinian Anti-Colonial War served as a training ground for the Iraqi nationalists who carried out the 1941 coup d’état by which Rashid Ali al-Gaylani overthrew the Hashemite Crown Prince AbdulIah and his pro-British Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, a revolt to which the British responded with invasion and occupation. The first demonstration in which a young Basil Al-Kubaisi, then in second grade, participated, was in support of that coup. So began an Iraqi nationalist’s long journey towards the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
How to Commit Class Suicide
“…in order to truly fulfill the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong. This alternative — to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class — constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle.” –Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” 1966
After finishing primary school, Basil moved to Alexandria, Egypt, in 1945 to continue his education at Victoria College. It was there that he began to struggle with, and ask probing questions about, his class privilege. In the formulation of Asad Abdelrahman, Basil’s upper class position began to feel like a spider web woven around him: he yearned to be closer to the people, to live among them and struggle alongside them, but his class position acted as a cobweb obscuring his view of the masses and obstructing his ability to approach them. In short, he felt alienated, estranged from the nationalist uprising in his home country and trapped inside the sterile libraries and stuffy halls of a British institution. How was Basil to spend his life? Would he pursue his studies secluded at private schools whose purpose was to reproduce the elite? Would he surrender his mind to Western colonial education? Would he become a foreigner among his own people? Anguished by these questions, he would spend the rest of his life severing, thread-by-thread, the spider web into which he was born, gradually defecting from his class of origin in order to join the revolution. A pragmatic question arose from his personal angst: what can a petty bourgeois do to serve the cause of revolution?
He severed his first thread when he made the decision to attend government schools instead of colonial private schools. He commenced study at Baghdad College in 1946, the year his father Raouf died at the age of 60. The political atmosphere was one of liberalization, fostered by the government of Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, who allowed for political parties to form and organize in the open. When Arshad Al-Umara came into power in June of 1946 and tried to crush the upswell of popular action, he not only failed, but actually added momentum to it. January 1948 saw the outbreak of the Al-Wathbah uprising, a wave of intense protests erupted at the “Portsmouth Agreement,” the monarchy’s decision to extend the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty by which the British empire exercised power over Iraq’s military, foreign relations, and oil resources. As the rebellion raged in the streets, Basil had to withdraw from school to go to the hospital to visit his brother as he recovered from a bullet wound through his liver. Young Basil was still reeling from the death of his father at the time; and now he had another nationalist example among his kin, a brother who shed blood for the cause, and whose lead he would soon enough follow.
A major turning point in Basil’s life came when he moved to Lebanon to study Political Science at the American University of Beirut, where national parties flourished in defiant response to the 1948 Zionist conquest of Palestine. It was in Beirut where Basil met a righteously driven Palestinian, a medical student from Lydda named George Habash. With Habash’s encouragement, Basil rose among the ranks as a student leader. With courage and discipline, Kubaisi led demonstrations in the streets of Beirut until, in 1952, a police officer badly battered his head while hauling him off to Al-Roumieh prison. During summer vacation of that year, AUB took the decision to expel Basil and two other students before they could complete their degree–the first group of students to be expelled since the school’s founding. Basil’s academic career temporarily floundered due to an academic blockade against him, but he eventually completed his Bachelor’s degree at Adams State College in Colorado. Upon his graduation and return to Iraq, he was once again faced with the decision, whether to retreat into comfort or re-enter revolutionary life. As always, he chose revolution. He severed another spider thread by founding the Iraqi branch of the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), the Pan Arab organization dedicated to achieving Arab unification that George Habash founded at AUB along with the Syrian Hani Al-Hindi, the Kuwaiti Ahmed Al-Khatib, and the Palestinian Wadi’ Haddad.
Through MAN, Kubaisi adopted the life of a professional revolutionary, sacrificing any semblance of a private life to take up a tireless existence defined by extreme secrecy. He did not hesitate to undertake dangerous clandestine missions. For example, after Egypt and Syria came together to form the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958, Iraq and Jordan attempted to establish a “counter-unity” state to stem the Nasserist tide. During a visit of the Jordanian delegation to Iraq in March of 1958, Basil’s car exploded in the courtyard of Az-Zuhur Palace, the residence of the Iraqi monarchy. Basil himself had prepared the bombs and, by virtue of his day job in the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, smuggled them into the palace, intending for them to accompany the Jordanian and Iraqi delegations on their plane traveling to Amman the same day. The eyes of the Iraqi regime, in particular those of Nuri Al-Said, turned with suspicion towards Basil, who found himself hounded by interrogators and followed everywhere by mukhabarat agents. It was on him, Basil, to remain cool and maintain composure; he successfully protected his MAN network by feigning ignorance about explosives and disguising his everyday movements, such as frequenting bars and night clubs, the kinds of locales where he would not otherwise have spent his time.
After the 14 July Revolution in 1958, when Iraqi Free Officers led by Abdel Karim Qasim and Abdel Salam Arif overthrew King Faisal II, Basil was dismissed from his job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and arrested as part of a campaign of repression targeting Nasser-aligned Pan Arab nationalists (as Qasim pursued a narrower Iraqi nationalism). Following this period of imprisonment, lasting from January of 1959 until April of 1960, Basil grew MAN’s Iraq chapter considerably, especially its military cells inside the Iraqi military, where he developed profound comradery with a number of nationalist officers. He also joined the National Front and Gathering, an alliance of all nationalist forces, including MAN and the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, dedicated to overthrowing Qasim, who was then preventing Iraq from joining with Egypt as part of a United Arab Republic. Basil played a significant role in encouraging other members of the National Gathering to participate in the UAR movement, thus contributing to the alliance’s victory over Qasim’s forces in the battle at the Ministry of Defense on February 9, 1963, the“Ramadan Revolution” which established a Ba’athist government. At this time, tensions that had been developing for a while internally within the National Gathering movement began to intensify and break out in the open. In May of 1963, while Basil was in Cairo for his honeymoon after having just married his old comrade Nadera Al-Khudairi, National Alliance elements aligned with MAN attempted a coup to overthrow Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr’s Ba’athist government. The coup’s failure of course implicated Basil, who had recently become the editor-in-chief of Al-Wahda (Unity), the newspaper of MAN in Iraq. As a result, the Iraqi government subjected the Kubaisi family–which Basil had largely recruited to serve the MAN line–to harsh conditions, seizing most of their property. Basil effectively lived in exile until November of 1963, when a pro-Nasser coup overthrew the Ba’ath Party (at least for the next five years).
Basil lamented the Arab nationalist infighting that continued to accelerate, including in his own organization. He made the decision to continue his academic work–which he had halted for eight years to pursue nationalist activity–in North America, where he obtained a Masters Degree from Howard University in 1966 on the strength of his thesis, “The Algerian Front de Liberation (F.L.N.), 1954-1964: From Liberation Movement to Political Party.” He did not, however, halt political activities during this period, as he worked to build the Organization of Arab Students in both the United States and Canada. The urgency of the June War of 1967 called him back to the region, compelling him to leave his doctoral program without finishing. He took part in the agonizing series of discussions and debates that transformed a faction of the MAN into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As we will see, his role in guiding this exciting and challenging new direction went above and beyond participation in line struggle; he soon made this political metamorphosis, from nationalism to Marxism-Leninism, the subject of his academic study when he re-entered a doctoral program. After teaching for a few years in the United States and Canada (1969-1970), he completed his doctorate at AUB in 1971.
During the final years he spent in North America, Basil–by now wholly convinced of the tenets of scientific socialism–carried out external work for the PFLP. At no point, not even during his writing and research sojourns, did he ever truly cease revolutionary activity. Everywhere he went, he had a duty to perform, and every time he made a decision to perform a task for his comrades, he cut loose another thread on the web which trapped him. His subjectivity was not that of the felahin condemned to camp life, forced to take up arms to defend his life along with those of his loved ones. He was, rather, a petty bourgeois who had to overcome the twin barriers of fear and complacency–to expel those temptations from his heart–in order to serve the falahin and the toilers of the camps. As Asad Abdelrahman put it, “When the toiler chooses the path of revolution–primarily under the influence of economic and political oppression–he has nothing to lose but his chains. But when the son of the bourgeoisie chooses the same path–primarily under the influence of human responsibility and idealistic impulse–he has much to lose.” Basil chose, Asad writes, to exchange a silk pillow for a stone one. By taking this decision, he upheld a personal sense of responsibility, and more than that, an existential one. He exhibited Jean-Paul Sartre’s words that a “man in possession of himself as he is… places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.” In other words, a man responsible for himself, for his own actions and commitments, accepts that he is not only responsible for himself as an individual, but is also responsible “for all men.” Kubaisi’s choices and deeds could serve as an example for all the Arab nation–to cower and retreat into comfortable and narcotized quietism, or to fight back?
In choosing to fight, Basil wrestled with how to turn his personal anguish into a serious political commitment; he yearned to dissolve his individual ego and become one with the people. This became the oblique preoccupation of his dissertation, the question lurking underneath his pointed analysis of a secretive revolutionary history he knew first-hand.
Ruthless Criticisms, from the Movement to the Popular Front
“Youth today has a natural and deep urge to work for the realization of national unity. This is indeed a fine ideal. But unity cannot be truly and finally achieved by texts, or constitutions, or doctrines, or programs, or political and economic systems alone. Such means are powerless unless, underlying them all, there is honest mutual understanding, the ability to cooperate, the readiness to give up part of one’s interest and claim for the sake of a greater ideal.” –Constaine Zureiq, “Freedom, Strength, Unity,” 1955
Rarely is the dissertation format taken seriously for literary merits. Indeed, the bourgeois university’s institutional strictures are designed to discourage personal flair and encourage dispassion. Dissertations are often condemned to the virtual graveyard of university depositories, remembered by few and actually read by even fewer. They are generally viewed as mere stepping ladders to published books: meager clay to a book’s finalized sculpture. Unto itself, the dissertation is often treated as a pseudo-book, a would-be book, or a book-to-be. Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi’s “The Arab Nationalist Movement, 1951-1971: From Pressure Group to Socialist Party” deserves to be taken more seriously: as a history recorded for posterity; as an exercise in political line struggle; and as a deeply personal statement and reflection. Above all, Kubaisi used the dissertation format, and the support and resources afforded by the modern bourgeois university, to serve a higher cause beyond an individual career.
Kubaisi’s immediate goal was to research and analyze the history of the Movement of Arab Nationalists, an organization that he helped to define from the ground-up in Iraq. From the opening pages, Kubaisi makes clear through his methodology that he was very much affected by the Marxist-Leninist current that had long since surged through MAN and its successor organizations. Unlike the first generation of Ba’athist intellectuals such as Michel Aflaq and Zaki Al-Arsuzi, who cultivated a metaphysics of the Arab nation as an eternal phenomenon, Kubaisi’s chronicled Arab nationalism as a historically contingent ideology, produced by the unique confluence of the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, the triumph of Balkan nationalisms to the west, and the expansion of Western colonialism. The French occupation of Egypt in 1789, the spread of the Cairo printing press, and the establishment of numerous universities founded by European and American Christian missionaries, all played a role in the dissemination of nationalist ideas.
The first generation of Arab nationalists, excited by the perceived modernism contained within European nationalisms, emphasized three cardinal principles of nationalism in the Arab context. One, the importance of reviving, maintaining, and refining the Arabic language, a task taken up by various literary clubs and secret societies in the late 19th century. Two, anti-sectarianism, largely a response to the 1860 Christian-Druze war, which inspired a desire to propagate secularism and repudiate traditionalist feudal elements. And three, anti-Ottomanism, which, it should not be forgotten, preceded even anti-Zionism as an ethic of the Arab nationalist project, considering that nationalist associations confronted relentless Ottoman repression against the Arab identity. At every stage of gestation for Arab nationalism, Syria occupied a particularly important position geographically and culturally. When, after World War One, the Arab national movement fragmented into iqlimiyah–wherein “a number of political organizations each preoccupied in its struggle towards the independence of that particular state in which the organization was established”–the call for Syrian unity became a “first practical step” towards reviving the “ultimate national objective of creating a single national Arab state.”[4] The League of National Action, which organized branches in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon in the 1930s, refused to recognize the colonial borders of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, and thus paved the way for the most important Pan Arab currents of the 1950s and 60s: the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, the Nasserists, and the Movement of Arab Nationalists. In fact, Ali Naser al-Din, one of the original leaders of the League of National Action, became a personal mentor to the founding members of MAN.
Kubaisi observes that at the beginning of World War Two “national thought entered a new stage of its development–the stage of comprehensive nationalism,” exemplified primarily by two thinkers, Suti’ Al-Husry and Constantine Zureiq, both Syrians.[5] Al-Husry, sometimes reputed to be the “philosopher of Arab nationalism,” “advocated the fusion of the individual into the nation to the extent of sacrificing the individual’s freedom” and broadened the concept of the Arab nation beyond the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula to include North Africa. Zureiq spent his youth involved in practical activities in the 1930s, having served on the Leadership Council of Tantheem Al-Siri (The Secret Organization), which agitated for Pan Arab unity and participated in the Palestinian anti-Zionist struggle in 1936 as well as the Iraqi movement to overthrow Nuri Said and King Faisal in 1941. Zureiq spent much of the latter part of his life teaching and writing at AUB, where he propounded on “the fundamental tasks of nation-building,” first and foremost urging Arabs “to adopt the institutions characteristic of the West as the first step in meeting the challenge of the modern age.”[6] At AUB, Zureiq became a valued mentor to the youth who founded MAN; but, as Kubaisi notes, the founding generation of MAN ultimately rejected Zureiq’s ideas as derivative of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, identifying his political program with “the ill-fated constitutional order introduced by the mandatory powers between the two World Wars.”[7]
The Palestinian Nakba irreversibly altered the worldviews of Habash, Hindi, Al-Khatib, Haddad, and the rest of the founders of MAN, all of whom were in their early 20s when they began to organize together at AUB. Hindi was raised by Liet. Col. Mahmoud Al-Hindi, a staunch Arab nationalist from Syria who had served in the Iraqi Army, and who passed on to Hani his knowledge acquired in the battle fields against the British military and the Iraqi monarchists. Habash, a native of Lydda who joined the irregular Palestinian army to resist Zionist militias in 1948, personally witnessed ethnic cleansing, recalling:
“I was humiliated by the events of 1948. The Israelis came to Lydda and forced us to flee. It is a picture that haunts me and that I’ll never forget. Thirty thousand human beings walking, weeping… screaming in horror… Once you have seen this, your heart and your brains are transformed…One must change the world, do something, kill if necessary, kill even at the risk of becoming inhuman in our turn.”[8]
Before founding MAN, this cadre created a secretive organization: Kitaib Al-Fida’ Al-’Arabi, roughly meaning the Arab Self-Sacrifice Brigades. They took their ideas and overall spirit from 19th century Italian republican nationalists, likening their self-assigned task of reuniting the fragmented Arab nation to that of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Red Shirts,” as well as Giuseppe Mazzini and the Carbonari. Kitaib’s manner was austere, disciplined, committed; their goal was to form a “pressure group” that would force Arab leaders, by violence and intimidation if necessary, to confront the newly created Zionist state. Violence thus predominated Kataib’s activities as they targeted imperial officials and Arab leaders deemed complicit in the Nakba. After a series of spectacular operations, including several failed assassination attempts against Arab leaders, MAN leadership had to reckon with their absence of a political program and lack of success connecting with the Arab masses. Kubaisi quotes Hani Al-Hindi’s recollection on the matter: “We were naive to believe that it takes only a few bullets in the heads of King Abdullah and other traitors to engender a revolutionary situation. However, the group was ready to make use of any weapon which might serve to develop to a greater degree the spirit of defiance on the part of our people.”[9]
After dissolving Kitaib in 1950, Habash assumed leadership of the student association Al-Urwa Al-Wuthqa (The Firmest Bonds) at AUB, in which capacity the Arab nationalists organized a number of large demonstrations and hunger strikes, in support of Egypt when it abrogated the terms of its 1936 treaty with Britain, and against a number of US-led initiatives intended to normalize Arab states’ relationship with Israel. As Al-Urwa Al-Wuthqa evolved into MAN, the main cadres prioritized propaganda and political education. They regularly published an eight-page bulletin called Al-Tha’er (Revenge) that, in clear accessible language, detailed and analyzed US-led schemes to liquidate Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland. They distributed the publication in the Palestinian refugee camps, where Habash and Haddad, both of whom were doctors-in-training, healed the sick, “but more importantly they held political discussions through the night” with refugees, from among whose ranks they recruited and trained new leaders.[10] MAN set up mass groups such as the Organization for Resisting Peace with Israel; they enmeshed themselves in the refugee camps of Lebanon; and they dispatched trusted Palestinians to the camps in Syria and Jordan to set up a clandestine network of cells coordinating activity among various Arab spheres.
With the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, MAN–which regarded Nasser’s July 23, 1952 overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy as the “Mother Revolution”–channeled its resources and energy towards the realization of a United Arab Republic. From 1955 to 1958, MAN organized and led demonstrations against the Hashemite monarchy and British presence in Jordan, efforts which culminated in an attempt to establish a nationalist republic led by Nasser ally Suleiman Al-Nabulsi. After King Hussein dismissed Suleiman’s government in April of 1957, MAN engaged in a protracted underground confrontation with monarchist forces, braving an extremist police state crackdown on the Nasserist elements in Jordanian society. In 1958, MAN redirected their activities and strategy to Lebanon, which faced a tripartite threat of constitutional crisis, civil war, and US military invasion. There, MAN again fought on behalf of Nasser’s notion of a United Arab Republic, aiming to draw Jordan and Lebanon into a single federated state with Egypt and Syria. They gained valuable military experience, having been trained and equipped in Syria by Colonel Abdul Hamid Al-Sarraj before sending their own militias to the Jordanian and Lebanese fields.[11] MAN continued to battle for the cause of the UAR in Iraq in 1963, confronting Abdel Karim Qasim for his opposition to joining a united state with Egypt, a campaign in which Kubaisi figured centrally.
Two events brought ideological tensions within MAN to the fore: the September, 1961, secessionist coup that brought the Egyptian-Syrian UAR to an ignominious end; and the June 1967 Naksa in which the Israeli Air Force rapidly destroyed Egypt’s air capabilities. These developments induced a painful and prolonged period of self-examination. As Kubaisi explains, Arab socialism, unlike communism, did not “profess the inevitability of class struggle”; but 1961 and 1967 provided a two-wave reality check.[12] MAN had underestimated the Arab bourgeoisie’s resistance to change; the big owners and capitalists had amassed their power in the first place by “linking their interests with the financial centers of the colonial powers,” rendering it impossible for “these classes to play the role that was played by their counterpart in Europe in the last century, i.e., to be nationalist in character.”[13] Of his own accord and experience as part of the Arab national liberation struggle, Kubaisi reached the same conclusion Amilcar Cabral did in the course of the Guinea-Bissau struggle, that in the “concrete conditions of the present-day world economy,” the “local pseudo-bourgeoisie” of a colonized nation is too structurally dependent to rule as an actual national bourgeoisie. The Carbonari and the romantic nationalists of 19th century Italy could not serve as a model for the Arab world after all. Furthermore, the “petty bourgeois regimes,” a trend of which Nasserist and Ba’athist states were in Kubaisi’s view emblematic, had no interest in governing democratically, for democracy would threaten the new privileges they had acquired, rendering “the petty bourgeois regimes incapable of carrying the fight against Israel to its ultimate end.”[14] MAN cadres had to face the fact that their organization never proved capable of becoming more than an adjunctive to Nasser’s and the UAR’s objectives in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Despite its enormous shortcomings, MAN did, however, contribute ideas that, in the annals of the Arab liberation struggle, outlived the organization itself. They took the lead in opposing the role of the United States regionally, launching vituperous attacks against US-led resettlement projects and subjecting Nasser to exhaustive critique for his early closeness with the US. Their special interest in the Palestinian cause went beyond that of Nasser and the mainstream of the Ba’ath Party, and they consequently took the lead in insisting on the right of return as a thawabit (constant) whenever it came under assault. And finally, a slogan from Wadi’ Haddad became a reference point for linking the problem of Arab feudalism and capitalism to the Zionist enemy: “The way to Tel Aviv is through Damascus, Baghdad, Amman, and Cairo.”[15] Having summarized MAN’s failures and achievements, Kubaisi attempts in the final section of his dissertation to turn past defeats into future successes by dealing with MAN’s next stage of evolution into the PFLP. It is in this section that his deeper purpose fully reveals itself.
The Meaning of Revolutionary Optimism
“If all this generation, my generation, can do is to move from here to here, let’s do that perfectly. Let’s lay a perfect foundation so that the children who come after us will be able to carry on the struggle that much further… We’re fighting a struggle that has been taking place for 500 years, and even way beyond that. We’re just a small part of that struggle, a very small part, and we cannot see ourselves as the most important part. Our generation is no more important than my father’s generation, which is no more important than my grandfather’s generation… Anytime people get real smart and say we’re not going anywhere, I say, hey, man, think about your grandfather: he was a slave. White boy was whooping him every day. Now look where you are… Don’t get upset. Let’s just take our time, take our patience and understand we have to find what our mission is, what the mission of this generation is, and do that, and do it perfect, properly, correctly, thoroughly, and completely. And the others are going to take care of the rest. Let’s leave some for the children.” –Kwame Ture
The dominant register of Kubaisi’s finale in “The Arab Nationalist Movement” is one of criticism: criticism of of the Arab bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and even peasantry; criticism of the Arab communist parties; criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood; criticism of the Movement of Arab Nationalists; and criticism of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Kubaisi actualizes a phrase of Marx’s, issuing a “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” This might seem exhausting by the sound of it, but in this context “criticism” does not mean to attack per se. Here, the oft-leftout second part of Marx’s sentence proves just as worthy of quotation: “ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” Kubaisi needed to disassemble the conditions of past errors not for the sake of condemnation, but for the sake of reassembling a positive theory of change for the generations who will carry the struggle for Arab liberation after his death, which he very well knew could arrive prematurely.
MAN studied the Arab communist and Islamic parties and were thus able to correct some of their errors. The Communists failed to accept the fact that Arab society was by and large religious; they too narrowly revolted against tradition, and they overall failed to apply Marxist theory creatively to the Arab context. At the same time, the religious Muslim Brotherhood could not provide an adequate explanation for Arab backwardness: “If nations were to have their salvation by religion, then Christianity would be superior to Islam since the powerful West is Christian.”[16] MAN therefore had to study the West, its history and intellectual genealogies (e.g., the French Revolution), in order to understand it philosophically. From there, MAN had to meet the Arab masses’ religiosity in order to gain the understanding and trust of workers and peasants; but they also had to challenge the masses to open themselves up to methods of scientific inquiry. In Kubaisi’s words, “An ideology answers people’s questions, but these answers should raise new questions.”[17] A vanguard must learn both how to listen and teach.
But MAN was stymied by a major shortcoming: its petty bourgeois character. In the final section, Kubaisi launches into a long criticism of the petty bourgeoisie as a class prone to intellectual and political incoherence. Capitalism appeared in West Asia later than it did in Europe, and was still in the process of forming and spreading in the 20th century; as a consequence, the class structure of Arab society was not neatly calcified. In those transitional circumstances, the petty bourgeoisie assumed an increasingly important political role. The Arab petty bourgeoisie, seized by strong national feelings, distrusted the growing capitalist sector due to “psychological jealousy and patriotic fear that capitalism tends, in general, to link the national economy with the capitalist monopolies in the advanced countries.”[18] But the petty bourgeoisie did not project warm and tender feelings unto the growing working classes either, and associated communist ideas with a foreign plot to sever the Arab nation from its proud history. Ultimately, the petty bourgeoisie tended towards individualism, allergic to the kind of class solidarity that came naturally to the capitalists and proletariat on either side of them. As he elaborates on this point, Kubaisi goes for the petty bourgeois jugular, accusing representatives of this class of forging a politics “half real and half imaginary.”[19] This Arab petty bourgeois was excited by the West but also fearful and contemptuous of it. They dreamed of acquiring the power of the West, but rejected its philosophies. Bereft of any actual principles or ideas, the petty bourgeois was simply attracted to a fantasy of power, hence why it was not uncommon for a representative of this class to praise the United States and the Soviet Union, and to be influenced by Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin, all at the same time. In a petty bourgeois consciousness left to its own devices, absurdity reigns supreme; this is not the stuff successful revolutions are made of.
Early MAN, a petty bourgeois organization par excellence, was hopelessly romantic, anti-materialist, and idealist; in short, bourgeois nationalist. The organization identified its external enemy, but could not figure out exactly what kind of society it was fighting for outside of vague slogans. It lacked a holistic critique and a consistent theory of change. The PFLP was established to overcome these limitations, calling upon militants to ingratiate themselves among the proletariat and peasantry. But Kubaisi did not content himself with any pat assurances that the PFLP had found the golden key to liberation. Rather, he raised the concern that the PFLP had transcended its class outlook in theory, but not in practice; more than the correct theory, the party needed to develop sufficient organizational tools to lead the Palestinian masses. Additionally, he warned that, without consistent rigorous inquiry and self-criticism, the transition from bourgeois nationalism to Marxism-Leninism could very well end up substituting one dogma for another. As far as Kubaisi was concerned in the year 1971, the PFLP had not yet earned the title of vanguard party, sincerely dedicated to that aspiration though they were.
Kubaisi criticized the role of the Arab peasantry and proletariat, but his point was purely technical: in the mid-20th century, those classes had not yet gained the literacy and level of organization required to lead the revolution. If Kubaisi’s criticism of the petty bourgeoisie seems extra pointed by comparison, it is because he was criticizing himself. He had returned to the personal question that had dogged him throughout his political life: how can the petty bourgeois serve the revolution? But the implicit self-criticism Kubaisi made was not self-flagellation or penance, intended to assuage personal guilt or shake off an Original Sin. The central role of the petty bourgeoisie had come to play in Arab revolutionary politics was after all an inherited structural condition. Thus, on this earth and in this lifetime, in lieu of divine grace and salvation, only revolution and socialist construction could bridge the canyon of pain separating the suffering masses from the petty bourgeois idealists.
Kubaisi’s dissertation was partially an attempt to sort out the relationship of MAN’s ideas to their material reality and to do so using the university resources to which he had privileged access. In fact, on some counts Kubaisi’s dissertation only minimally meets the standards of the bourgeois university’s criteria; how important, really, is an overview of the “state of the field” in Western universities for an aspiring vanguard party prosecuting an armed struggle in occupied Palestine? Reading Kubaisi, one gets the impression of a scholar ticking the bureaucratic boxes needed to pass and attain a degree, but whose attention really lies elsewhere. The average Western academic of today–especially since the overthrow of the Soviet Union, when an entire global system of alternative knowledge production evaporated–is writing either for the academic job market or for the university itself, which, owing to the virtually uncontested power of boards of regents following several rounds of neoliberal onslaught, essentially functions as a corporation. As a result, rarely does the professional academic produce critical theory so much as its grotesque changeling: making use of certain liberatory phrases, name-dropping this or that vaunted theorist, but not directing the totality of the work towards the needs of a concrete struggle. By contrast, Kubaisi was using the university as a vessel through which to report back to a Marxist-Leninist party moored in a Third World liberation struggle.
Kubaisi wrote with two certainties in mind. First, the generation after him would continue the struggle after his death, and he therefore had to play his role as a historian and teacher as Constantine Zurayk and Ali Nasser Al-Din had done for his generation, for each generation accrues its own lessons in need of synthesizing. Second, death was not only certain, but near, possibly lurking around any corner or behind any door. For years, Al-Kubaisi’s final days, the nature of that mission he was pursuing in Paris, was shrouded in mystery, known only to a few informed members of the PFLP. A possible new bombshell emerged only a few years ago through the posthumously published memoirs of Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and onetime President of Iraq.[20] Talabani claimed to have been involved with the PFLP in his youth, opting to work with them out of shared political convictions and admiration for their revolutionary fervor. One of the tasks to which he was allegedly assigned was to collaborate with Basil Al-Kubaisi on a plan to hijack an Israeli plane from the Roman airport. According to his story, four individuals had been recruited in Geneva, who then traveled first to Spain and next to Italy using forged Iranian passports. Once they reached Rome, they contacted a comrade working under the name “Abu Al-Fida’,” who, with Talalbani, assisted them with smuggling weapons into the airport through another Kurdish Iraqi, Taha Muhyiddin Maarouf, then Iraqi ambassador to Rome who enjoyed diplomatic immunity. (Talabani’s testimony offers a vital connection: as Louis Allday and Samar Al-Saleh document, “Abu Al-Fida’” was the nom de guerre of none other than Faris Glubb, the revolutionary son of the famous British imperial officer Glubb Pasha.) Talabani then went to Paris, where he tore up his passport and reported them lost to the French police before going to the Iraqi embassy for a new one. Afterwards, he spent the next few days with Al-Kubaisi, the head of the Popular Front’s foreign relations, and together they changed hotels every other night to avoid being followed. Both men planned to travel, Talabani to Vienna and Al-Kubaisi to Morocco, where he was to visit his brother-in-law, Abdul-Ghani al-Dali, a former Minister of Agriculture in Iraq. Only Talabani made it out of Paris alive. Instead of leaving for Morocco, Al-Kubaisi returned to the same hotel he had been staying for several nights previous, a decision that baffled Talabani, as it went against their previous discussions regarding sound security protocol. Talabani put forth two possible reasons for Al-Kubaisi’s decision: one involving an Iraqi man with ties to the Ba’athist government who contacted the Iraqi embassy in Paris; another involving a Moroccan woman who worked with Al-Kubaisi and turned out to be an Israeli spy responsible for delaying his departure.
Whatever the circumstances of Al-Kubaisi’s death, he was apparently in high spirits when the moment arrived. Asad Abdelrahman noted that as Kubaisi’s comrades were assassinated around him–Kanafani, Zwaiter, Hamshari–he had only become more hopeful and confident; and that when it became his turn to die, he had severed the last thread of that old cobweb. He had committed class suicide in the form of revolutionary suicide, returned to the earth with his head proudly laid upon his pillow of stone. To ask why Kubaisi grew more hopeful as death approached is to consider in microcosm why the Soviet Red Army and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did not surrender in the face of holocausts. Revolutionaries must sooner rather than later reconcile themselves to the fact that history moves like the earth’s crust–seismic, but excruciatingly slow, advancing across the centuries only under pressure from untold millions of people. This is the good news, a cause for humility. Once this point is grasped, the petty bourgeois’s worst character flaw–an oversized ego–appears as frivolous as it is, as if to say, Take a breath and relax, professor: people listen when you speak, but you still are only as good as your comrades.
The generation that has come of age in the era of the Al-Aqsa Flood must overcome the effects of severe whiplash to synthesize their own lessons and experiences. In two breathless and exhausting years, we have witnessed triumphs and calamities pile atop each other. The Al Aqsa Flood Operation established the limits of imperial control, proving besieged refugees with almost nothing in their possession can outwit the most formidable surveillance matrix all the highest science of 21st century state-corporate power has been able to conceive. The subsequent Al Aqsa Flood Battle demonstrated that, even on coastal flatlands and without favorable natural terrain, a guerrilla peasant army can survive against bunker buster bombs and AI-powered, algorithm-dominated kill chains. But the psychological shocks have also been serious. Fathers, mothers, siblings, sons, and daughters have been exterminated on a livestreamed genocide. The imperialists dropped a 2,000 pound bomb on one of the most important anti-colonial leaders of the 21st century, Hassan Nasrallah. In December of 2024, as a supplementary capstone to the assassination and mutilation campaign launched against Hezbollah, obscurantist sectarian forces stormed Damascus to shatter the last vestiges of sovereignty in the historic national stronghold of Arab nationalism, Syria. Taken collectively, the genocidal counterrevolution has been a lot–too much, it sometimes seems–for any single intellect to contemplate. On some days, the machine we are up against–the sophistication of its propaganda and the total arsenal of chemical and biological weaponry, now even including thermobaric bombs–truly boggles the mind.
Times have changed since Al-Kubaisi’s death. The United States empire is violently restructuring the world order to try and stave off the decline of its hegemony. Official Zionist history is largely discredited, even among sizable sections of the national population most desperately propagandized by Zionist institutions, Americans. More than that, the Arab diaspora has become more numerous and organized in Western societies, and, in many areas of the West, form an organic part of the working class. This provides a potential asset on which MAN and Al-Kubaisi could not rely. Despite these advances, the costs of liberation indeed remain difficult to comprehend, as new Nakbas abound in West Asia, scattering the working classes and confusing ideological cohesion in the Arab homeland. Al-Kubaisi preserved the history of MAN to make sure that he and his comrades did not commit errors in vain. What makes the current counterrevolutionary campaign underway so dangerous–the genocide in Gaza, the destruction of military capacity and nationalist memory in Syria–is that it threatens to sever such generational continuity. A history unknown is a compendium of errors made in vain. Perhaps this is why Hassan Nasrallah said the region would enter into a dark age if Syria fell to imperialism. The fall has since occurred, and it is time to cast some light. The revolutionary historians of our time–the heirs to Al-Kubaisi–have much work ahead.
Patrick Higgins is a historian, co-editor of Liberated Texts, and founding member of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC). He has written previously for Liberated Texts on “Imperialism and the Deep State: Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America.”
For more from the author on the same subject matter, see his essays “The Firmest Bonds: Arab Nationalism and the Left, Part 1” and “Applied Internationalism: Arab Nationalism and the Left, Part 2.”
[1] Bassam Abu Sharif, “‘Ajl, faqad hawlat dawlan ‘ila shardhama.. ‘Asaba,” Al-Hadaf, Issue 222, October 6, 1973.
[2] Al-Hadaf, “Rasala Akheera li Basil Al-Kubaisi,” Issue 246, March 30, 1974.
[3] Most of the biographical details about Basil Al-Kubaisi in this piece are drawn from the pamphlet “Al Shahid Basil Al-Kubaisi” (Union Publication #3), by Asad Abdelrahman of the General Union for Palestinian Writers and Journalists.
[4] Basil Raouf Al-Kubaisi, “The Nationalists Movement, 1951-1971: From Pressure Group to Socialist Party,” PhD diss., American University, pg. 23.
[5] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 25.
[6] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 26.
[7] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 26.
[8] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 32.
[9] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 37.
[10] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 69.
[11] For an assessment of the wins and losses of the battle for Lebanon in 1958, see: Chapter 3 of Patrick Donovan Higgins, “Palestinian Revolution and World Imperialism in the ‘American Century,’ 1945-1972,” titled “Internationalism on the Regional Scale: Palestine within Pan Arab Strategic Depth, 1957-1964.”
[12] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 138.
[13] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 138.
[14] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 142.
[15] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 69.
[16] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 129.
[17] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 128.
[18] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 130.
[19] Al-Kubaisi, pg. 131.
[20] With thanks to Dr. Aziz Shaibani for bringing Talabani’s memoirs to my attention.
