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Abstract
In the early 1960s, Israeli diplomats based in Paris noted that student life there had become political in new ways that threatened to undermine Israel’s image and standing in the public mind. In an effort to understand the growing international student body and its nine thousand well-integrated Arab students, the embassy asked Israeli students to spy on their colleagues and submit detailed reports about their political associations, thoughts, opinions, connections, whereabouts, and much else. Using the reports and other auxiliary material that the Israeli diplomats collected, this article examines the formation process of a unique, student-led intellectual and political ecosystem. Specifically, it shows how, in tandem with the rise of the New Arab Left and other transnational student collaborations, the Palestinian question grew from a marginal and marginalized issue to a major cause that was deeply entwined with other contemporaneous causes of universal resonance, such as those of South Africa, Rhodesia, and Algeria.
Notes
1 Yona Maroz to Shlomo Argov, 26 March 1967, Israel State Archive (ISA), Foreign Office (FO), Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
2 For estimated student numbers, see the above appendix.
3 The literature on decolonization and French metropolitan realities is massive. For a recent contribution that takes into consideration the central role of students, see Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France c. 1950–1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
4 Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
5 See an undated report by Ya’acov Meiron, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
6 It is most likely that the reason behind the termination of the program was a relationship between
Ya’acov Meiron, president of the Israeli Student Union in Paris, and Egyptian student Shafiq Ayyub. Ayyub suggested that he was connected to Egyptian prime minister Khalid Muhieddine and offered a direct line to him, whatever that meant. Meiron bragged about this connection to Israeli diplomats and apparently acted on his own as a state agent. Embassy records reveal the profound dissatisfaction of the professionals with such amateur conduct. Meiron also approached a Lebanese diplomat. See intensive “Top Secret” correspondence from 19 May; 21 June; 25 and 28 September; and 3, 14, and 16 October 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
7 See Remco Raben’s contribution, “Ambiguities of Reading and Writing,” in Frances Gouda et al., “Ann Laura Stoler: Along the Archival Grain; Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165, no. 4 (2009): pp. 556–59, https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003632.
8 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
9 Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs,” Haaretz, 5 July 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsion-of-arabs-1.7435103. See also: Seth Anziska, “The Erasure of the Nakba in Israel’s Archives,” JPS 49, no. 1 (Autumn 2019): pp. 64–76, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.49.1.64; and Ilan Pappé, “An Indicative Archive: Salvaging Nakba Documents,” JPS 49, no. 3 (Spring 2020): pp. 22–40, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2020.49.3.22.
10 On this problem, see: Lila Abu-Lughod, “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (May 2018): pp. 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4389919; Sherene Seikaly, “How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (May 2018): pp. 6–20, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4389931; Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, “Edward Said, the AAUG, and Arab American Archival Methods,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (May 2018): pp. 21–29, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4389943; Mezna Qato, “Forms of Retrieval: Social Scale, Citation, and the Archive on the Palestinian Left,” International Journal Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (May 2019): pp. 312–15, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743819000096; Samera Esmeir, “Memories of Conquest: Witnessing Death in Tantura” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 229–52. For alternative archives, see: The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) at the American University of Beirut, https://libraries.aub.edu.lb/poha/; the website of the online learning resource The Palestinian Revolution, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/; and “Archives of the Disappeared: Discipline and Method Amidst Ruin [2019–21],” a program of Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities,
11 Omnia El Shakry, “‘History without ‘Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): pp. 920–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.920; Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
12 The German literature on this subject seems quite extensive. For an English language sample, see:
Timothy Garton Ash, “Preface,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): pp. 234–35, https://doi.org/10.1179/007871909x475535; Karen Leeder, “Introduction,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): pp. 236–41, https://doi.org/10.1179/007871909x475544; Paul Maddrell and Anthony Glees, “Debate: The Stasi Files,” Intelligence and National Security 19, no. 3 (2004): pp. 553–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/0268452042000316287.
13 Where I do explore in depth the thoughts or actions of an individual, I have relied on additional material, including an interview which I cite below.
14 Activist report, 13 April 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
15 In recent years, the New Arab Left, and the Arab Left more generally, has become the subject of much scholarly attention. For an excellent panorama of this subfield, see, Laure Guirguis, ed., The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
16 Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018) and The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
17 Nancy L. Green, The Limits of Transnationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). For the
debate around the present and future of transnationalism and global history, see: Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (March 2018): pp. 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000262, including responses by David Bell and Jeremy Adelman, “Replies to Richard Drayton and David Motadel” in the same article, pp. 18–21.
18 For a selective assortment of recent research along these lines in Middle East studies, see: Naghmeh Sohrabi, “Remembering the Palestine Group: Friendship, Global Activism, and the Iranian Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): pp. 281–300, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743819000059; Burleigh Hendrickson, “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris,” in “Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era,” special issue, International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 4 (November 2012): pp. 755–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743812000852; Burleigh Hendrickson, “Finding Tunisia in the Global 1960s,” Monde(s): Histoire, espaces, relations 11, no. 1 (2017): pp. 61–78, https://doi.org/10.3917/mond1.171.0061; Sune Haugbolle, “Entanglement, Global History, and the Arab Left,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): pp. 301–4, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743819000060; Sune Haugbolle, “The New Arab Left and 1967,” in “The Six-Day War: 50 Years On,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 4 (2017): pp. 497–512, https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2017.1360008; Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Notable contributions from outside the field include: Matthew Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
19 On this, see: Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), chaps. 1, 8, and 9.
20 Aly El-Samman, Egypt: From One Revolution to Another; Memoir of a Committed Citizen under Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak (London: Gilgamesh Publishing, 2012). For more context, see also El-Samman’s autobiography, Awraq ‘umri: Min al-malik ila ‘Abd al-Nasir wa-l-Sadat (Cairo: al-Maktab al-Misri al-Hadith, 2005).
21 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 43.
22 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 41.
23 El-Samman, Egypt, pp. 41–2.
24 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 43.
25 In 2012, Rageb was head of the Arab Lawyers Union. See El-Samman, Egypt, p. 44.
26 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 45.
27 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 45.
28 El-Samman, Egypt, p. 54.
29 17 August 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
30 See report from 16 October 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
31 Report by Moni Bachar, 14 December 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
32 Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, p. 67.
33 Aly El-Samman, interview with the author by phone, 18 April 2016.
34 A report from 14 November 1967, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
35 6 March 1967, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
36 This list was assembled from various documents that appear in ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
37 See report of 20 April 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
38 Coined in 1989 in a strictly legal context by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the sociological concept of intersectionality has a rather long pedigree which can be traced back to the radical Black and women of color feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s; for example, Frances Beal’s “double jeopardy” (being black and a woman) and later, concepts of triple and multiple jeopardy. On the recent history of the term, see: Merrill Pearlman, “The Origin of the Term ‘Intersectionality,’” Columbia Journalism Review, 3 October 2018, https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/intersectionality.php. I thank Sherene Seikaly for pointing out to me this complex and long conceptual history.
39 8 August 1967, ISA, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
40 See: Manifeste sur le problème Palestinien, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
41 Manifeste, ISA, Hetz-1708/8.
42 Manifeste, ISA, Hetz-1708/8.
43 Israël ou Palestine?, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
44 Étudiants de la R.A.U, Israel - ou l’agression Permanente, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
45 Manifeste, ISA, Hetz-708/8.
46 See, for instance, a report by Ya’acov Meron, n.d. [late 1966], pp. 1–6, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
47 Jérôme Bourdon, “The Export of Zionism? Global Images of Israel in the 1960s,” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga Pieper Mooney (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 236–53.
48 See the appendix as well as a report by Moni Bachar on Rodinson’s lecture, 14 December 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
49 Di-Capua, No Exit, chap. 9.
50 For the shared activism of Tunisians and West Africans, see Burleigh Hendrickson, “The Politics of Colonial History: Bourguiba, Senghor, and the Student Movements of the Global 1960s,” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga Pieper Mooney (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–32.
51 Knowing all too well that each raised hand in the UN General Assembly counted, starting in the late 1950s, Israel invested heavily in trying to win over the votes of recently decolonized nations in Africa. For the collaboration between the CIA and Israel, I am drawing here on a personal communication by Hava Giz, who worked in the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel during the late 1950s and early 1960s and handled the money that arrived from the CIA to finance the African effort: interview with Hava Giz, 16 January 2018, Jerusalem. For Israel and Africa, see Samuel Decalo, Israel and Africa: Forty Years, 1956–1996 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998); Zach Levey, “The Rise and Decline of a Special Relationship: Israel and Ghana, 1957–1966,” African Studies Review 46, no. 1 (April 2003): pp. 155–77, https://doi.org/10.2307/1514985; Zach Levey, “Israel’s Entry to Africa, 1956–1961,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 12, no. 3 (September 2001): pp. 87–114, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592290108406215; Zach Levey, “Israel’s Strategy in Africa, 1961–1967,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 1 (February 2004): pp. 71–87, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3880138. See also relevant correspondence from 15 January 1967, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
52 On this shift, see, Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
53 See two reports on public events at which Ben Yahmad was challenged by his peers: 18 July 1966 and 17 April 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
54 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2007); Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, IL: University Press of Chicago, 2002); Camille Robcis, “May ‘68 and the Ethical Turn in French Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 1 (2014): pp. 267–77, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244313000437.
55 The model for such information-gathering and sharing was pioneered by Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, which routinely exposed the silenced and suppressed aspects of the war in Algeria. Though coverage of the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict was admittedly very weak, over the years it did publish an enormous number of testimonies and ad hoc reports on various other conflicts around the world.
56 Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, pp. 188–281.
57 Yossef Hadas (Paris) to Bar Hayim (Jerusalem), “Relations with Arab Students: Top Secret,” 30 December 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
58 Interview with Rafi Eitan in Inside the Mossad, directed by Duki Dror, 2017.
59 Quoted in Geula Elimelekh, “Freedom and Dissidence in the Arabic Prison Novels of ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif,” Die Welt des Islams 52, no. 2 (2012): p. 174, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41721988.
60 Yossef Hadas to Bar Hayim, “Activity among Arab Students,” 19 May 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
61 10 January 1967, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
62 Report by Yehoshu’a Kreizman, 21 June 1967, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
63 Ido Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance in Palestine: Books, Guns, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2015).
64 The student effort to quantify the political divisions among the 143 delegates is quite convoluted and does not make much sense. Most likely, he witnessed a struggle between the partisans of Yasir Arafat, on one side, and those of Ahmad Shuqeiri and his Arab-League and Egyptian backers, on the other. 9 February 1966, ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
65 On this, see Rashid Khalidi, “The 1967 War and the Demise of Arab Nationalism: Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” in The June 1967 War: Origins and Consequences, ed. Wm. Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 264–84.
66 On this, see Ahmad Agbaria, “The return of the Turath: The Arab Rationalist Association, 1959–2000,” (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2018).
67 Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). Historian Adey Almohsen is currently completing a dissertation on the formation of Palestinian critical thinking. Tentatively titled “On Modernism’s Edge: An Intellectual History of Palestinians after 1948,” it promises to shed new light on the contribution of Palestinian thinkers and cultural institutions to pre-1967 Arab thought.
68 For the acculturation of the political category of race in Arab political discourse, see Di-Capua, No Exit, chap. 6.
69 On this episode, see Di-Capua, No Exit, chap. 7.
70 For some reflections on this shift, see Yoav Di-Capua, “The Slow Revolution: May 1968 in the Arab World,” American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (2018): pp. 733–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.3.733. For an early call to launch a New Arab Left, see Muhammad Kashabi, “Nahwa Yasar ‘Arabi Jadid,” al-Huriyya, 9 March 1964, pp. 1–2. And for the revolutionary experience of the first generation of the New Arab Left, see Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
71 With that, they have rejected the linear, hierarchical, and even Darwinian logic of thinking about being and knowledge (philosophy) as well as the notion of the well-contained unitary self (psychoanalysis).
72 There are, however, some notable exceptions to this observation.
73 On worthy and unworthy causes, see Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
74 For the vicissitudes in public opinion on the Palestinian question, see Amy Kaplan, Our American
Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); and Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020).
75 Husayn Bin Hamza, “Ilyas Sanbar: Nidal al-mu’arrikh min ajl Filastin,” al-Akhbar, 16 January 2010, https://al-akhbar.com/Archive_People/101951.
76 The interview was originally published as “Les indiens de Palestine” in Libération, 8–9 May 1982. It was later translated as: Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar, “The Indians of Palestine,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 20, no. 2 (Fall 1998): pp. 25–29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40067516. The French original is reproduced in Gilles Deleuze, Deux regimes de fous (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003), pp. 179–84.
77 Deleuze and Sanbar, “The Indians of Palestine,” pp. 26. Italics for emphasis.
78 See Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Information, “About” [in Hebrew], Prime Minister’s Office, https://www.gov.il/he/Departments/Units/ministry_of_strategic_affairs_and_public_diplomacy.
79 Yael Patir, “Who Needs the Strategic Affairs Ministry?,” Haaretz, 20 October 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-who-needs-the-strategic-affairs-ministry-1.8009618.
80 ISA, FO, Jerusalem, Hetz-1708/8.
81 This document has been superficially edited to conform to JPS style and spelling standards.
82 Author’s note: It is possible that the journal to which the report refers, Filastinuna, is not an original publication of the students in Austria but the official organ of Fatah.
83 Author’s note: This reported political division does not make much sense as the political objectives of the two organizations were quite different.
84 The event was held in commemoration of UN Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 calling for the partition of Mandate Palestine into an Israeli and a Palestinian state.
85 Of whom 4,848 were men and 422 were women.
86 Author’s note: GUPS was founded in 1959 and not in 1961.
87 Author’s note: recent scholarship on GUPS does not support this reading of the political divisions within the organization.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yoav Di-Capua
Yoav Di-Capua teaches modern Arab intellectual history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and of No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book about political theology and the 1960s generation.