Abu Nasr: CPs of Palestine and Syria and their respective strategies in the last half of the 1930s. In 1957 Walter Laqueur began his study Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East declaring that the Middle East was in ferment and would remain in ferment because it has �remained a vacuum between the big powers, the passive recipient, not the subject, of historical forces.� It is undeniable, of course, that the members of Communist parties of Middle Eastern colonial territories were not among the great powers that determined the destinies of the world. Insofar as they were in a position to change historical forces in their respective countries, however, they were, in fact, far from passive. Indeed, their activity is demonstrated by the fact that although the Communists in Syria and Lebanon and those in Palestine received the same guidance from the Comintern and sought to carry out the same strategic policy, they developed distinct approaches to their work of contending with, and not passively receiving, the rule of the big powers. Change was in the summer air as 513 delegates from around the world converged on Moscow, capital of the world revolution, for the Seventh Congress of the Communist International. The gathering, that was to last nearly one month, opened ceremoniously in the Kremlin�s Hall of Columns at 8:00 p.m. on 25 July 1935 under the gaze of Iosif Stalin and other leaders of international Communism. As the German Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck addressed the session on the activity of the International since its previous congress in 1928, the delegates of five Arab Communist parties listened. Ridw�n al-Hilw and M. Ashqar from Palestine, and Kh�lid Bakd�sh and Y�suf Khatt�r al-Hilw from the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon, had joined delegates from Egypt, Iraq and North Africa at a meeting which marked a turning point in Communist strategy worldwide. The Sixth Congress, Pieck told his audience, had correctly predicted the continuation of the revolutionary upsurge. Events in China and elsewhere dictated a course of �defending the vital interests of the toiling masses, and �intensifying their ability to fight increasing exploitation and oppression.� �Class against class!� became the slogan and the world Communist movement strove to break up the bloc of the Social Democrats and the bourgeoisie by focusing criticism on the Social-Democratic leadership and its policy of cooperation with the capitalists. Yet Communist Parties around the world had made mistakes in implementing this approach, Pieck told the Congress, and there arose the �distorted idea� that the Comintern line precluded a united front. This had never been the case; and now the struggle against fascism, which had taken power in Germany since the last Congress, required as broad a front as possible, not only in defense of the rights of the working class, but in defense of democratic rights in general. Not �class against class� but �united front against fascism and war� was the new slogan of the Communist International. Although the new watchword marked a radical reversal of the earlier strategy, cautious efforts at building united fronts had already begun to emerge in the local work of Communists around the world as they grew increasingly isolated -- and threatened -- in their worlds of ideological purity. In February 1933 the French, German, and Polish Communist parties had issued a joint appeal to Socialist workers to forge an �invincible united front.� Spanish Communists responded to Socialist calls for unity by joining Socialist Party-sponsored Workers� Alliances in September 1934. In that same year, the Communist Party of China advanced the Chinese People�s Basic Program for Fighting Japan that called for an �alliance with all the forces opposed to the Japanese imperialists.� The Arab Communists, too, arrived in Moscow, with some rudimentary experience in united front work. The delegate to the Seventh Comintern Congress Y�suf Khatt�r al-Hilw recalled in 1988 that the Syrian-Lebanese party towards the end of 1933 had already begun seriously considering introducing changes in their �sectarian� program, particularly by reaching out to intellectuals. These efforts bore their first fruits in the spring of 1934 when Communists convened a Conference of Arab Revolutionary Intellectuals in Zahlah, Lebanon. The meeting marked the beginning of what was to prove one of the most successful Communist united front activities, tapping the vast reserve of enthusiasm on the part of intellectuals of various backgrounds and persuasions for radical social change and opposition to imperialism. The rise of Hitler to power had focused thinking in Moscow, too, where the Soviet Communist Party�s official newspaper, Pravda, on 6 March 1933 published an appeal by the Executive Committee of the Communist International to Communist Parties to establish a �united front with the Social-Democratic working masses by means of Social-Democratic parties.� As the need for the new approach grew clearer, both to Stalin and to rank-and-file Communists around the world, new faces began to appear in meetings of the Comintern leadership. >From the opening of the Seventh Congress it was rumored that the Dmitriy Manuil�sky, then General Secretary of the Comintern�s Executive Committee, was to be replaced by the Bulgarian hero of the Reichstag fire trials, Georgi Dimitrov -- the first time a non-Soviet would occupy that position. Dimitrov�s advocacy of a united front was beyond doubt, least of all by Stalin, who was in regular correspondence with the Bulgarian. Rather than taking the united front �exclusively as a maneuver to unmask social democracy� Dimitrov had written in a letter, �we must change it into an efficient factor in the unfolding of mass struggle against the fascist offensive.� Dimitrov, who as expected was elected General Secretary of the ECCI, delivered the long main report to the Congress on 2 August 1935. He stressed the need for the Communist parties to investigate their local conditions and come up with the most effective ways of combating fascism in accordance with their specific situations. Irreconcilable opponents of all forms of bourgeois nationalism, Communists are not, he insisted, supporters of �national nihilism� and should never act as such. �National forms� of the proletarian class struggle are in no contradiction with proletarian internationalism, they are in fact the guarantors of its success. Highlighting the importance of national specifics meant that the job of Communists in dependent nations was to show the people �in practice� that the Communists were struggling for the liberation of their nation from the alien yoke. Dimitrov accorded so much attention to the need to understand local conditions that when he turned to the situation in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, he referred not to an anti-fascist united front, but to an anti-imperialist united front. �It is necessary above all,� he stressed in this connection, �to recognize the variety of conditions� in which the anti-imperialist struggle takes place in different countries. Syria�s Kh�lid Bakd�sh took the podium on 9 August as spokesman for the Arab delegations and responded to Dimitrov�s report. He affirmed the importance of the national liberation stage of the struggle of the Arab peoples, saying that the ultimate aim of socialism would not be reached until the stage of anti-imperialist struggle had been completed. He emphasized that the masses must decide from their own experience that the Communists are the firmest defenders of their national and economic interests. Bakd�sh fully supported Dimitrov�s slogan of a united front against imperialism that would bring together �revolutionary nationalists� and �reformist nationalists,� and he called on Communists to take a �correct� stance on the role of revolutionary intellectuals and the urban petty bourgeois. He also called for Communist participation in those reformist national bourgeois parties that enjoyed mass support. After the close of the Congress on 20 August 1935, delegates gradually went home, many by circuitous routes. Bakd�sh, however, who had been living in Moscow studying Marxism-Leninism before the meeting, only left the Soviet Union in 1936, whereupon he headed for Paris. Twenty-three years old when he addressed the World Congress of the Comintern, Bakd�sh had already edited an illegal Syrian Communist newspaper, helped organize several strikes, translated the Communist Manifesto into Arabic (from French), and done time in prison on political charges. Unlike the founders his party, who were all Lebanese Christians, Bakd�sh was a Muslim, an Arab of Kurdish background. His father, an artillery officer, had survived the legendary battle of Maysal�n where Syrian forces mounted a hopeless resistance to the French army in 1920, and then opted for work as an office clerk rather than serve the colonial authorities. With his energy, experience in the Communist movement, and a background firmly rooted in Syrian national soil, the young Bakd�sh must have appeared to the leadership of the Communist International like a man with considerable leadership potential. A solid Arab Communist leader was something the leadership of the world movement desperately needed at the time. Both the Communist Party of Palestine, founded by Zionist Jews in 1919, and the Communist Party of Syria-Lebanon, founded by four Lebanese Christians with considerable help from Armenian Marxists in 1924, had long existed on the peripheries of the predominantly Arab Muslim society in which they were supposed to be working. Indeed the Syrian-Lebanese party had even remained administratively under the predominantly Jewish Palestine Communist party until after 1928. The predominantly Jewish Palestine Communist Party had been under unrelenting Comintern pressure to Arabize throughout the 1920s, and some modest success had been achieved on paper. When an Arab uprising swept the British Mandated territory in 1929, however, the Palestine Communist party took an unequivocally hostile stand to the Arab movement, contrary to the Comintern�s line, and in October 1930, the Executive Committee of the Communist International directed an open letter to Party which described the struggle in Palestine as one of Arab national emancipation, and in such a battle, �Jewish Communists could in no way take the role of leaders.� The Communist International took the unprecedented step of directly appointing a new Central Committee for the Palestine Communist Party, consisting of three Arabs and two Jews. Boosted by this intervention, the Communist movement in the Arab East, by 1935, had made significant progress in its work among the Arab population. After the political reorientation of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, a new era of Communist activity seemed to be at hand. It was also to be an era of serious new challenges. When French authorities closed an office of the National Bloc of Syrian political parties, on 20 January 1936, and arrested a group of nationalist leaders, shops throughout the city closed and students from the university and secondary schools took to the streets. Demonstrations quickly turned into violent confrontations in the Syrian capital and spread to the other major cities in the country and there were many deaths. After a fifty-day general strike and protracted negotiations between the Bloc politicians and the Mandate authorities, a National Bloc leader announced on 2 March that representatives of the Bloc would be departing for Paris to hold talks with the French authorities on a treaty granting Syria its independence. On 26 April, France went to the polls and elected in a Popular Front government led by Socialist L�on Blum. This development provided the Syrian delegation with new opportunities, and one of the delegates dropped in on Bakd�sh in his office at the French Communist Party newspaper, l�Humanit�, to invite the Syrian Communist to join the Syrian National Bloc negotiating team. The Bloc reasoned that with the French Communists so close to power, it could only help the Syrians, to have a fellow Syrian who happened to be Communist on their side. >From the standpoint of the Syrian Communists, the united front for which Dimitrov had called seemed suddenly much closer. For the first time, Communist activities could now come out into the open in Syria. The Party�s right to semi-legal activity was recognized shortly after the Popular Front came to power in Paris, and the release of thirty-one long-incarcerated party activists, including Central Committee members, shortly thereafter, became the occasion for massive Communist-led street demonstrations in support of the French Popular Front. Negotiations on a Franco-Syrian treaty proceeded smoothly. The new French negotiators made concessions that their predecessors had rejected, and by mid-September the treaty was ready. Modeled after the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1932, the document provided for a type of �independence� which left Syria bound to France by an alliance under the terms of which French troops would remain in the country, and harbor, air, and land transportation facilities would be provided for them. Despite the restrictions on Syrian freedom, the agreement was welcomed in Damascus, where a new National Bloc government took power. Ties between the Syrian and French Communist Parties also became very close in 1936 when the French Party Central Committee set up a permanent liaison office, staffed by a member of the Syrian Party Central Committee, to coordinate activities on a daily basis. The Franco-Syrian treaty, though signed, had not been ratified by the French parliament, and one of the tasks of the liaison office was to coordinate the propaganda battle against the intense criticism the agreement received from the French right wing. Developments in Palestine took a rather different turn fromt those in Syria. Upon their return from the Seventh Comintern Congress, Arab Palestinian Communists set about building their anti-imperialist united front, the strategy laid down in broad terms by Dimitrov. For the Palestinian Arabs, however, this meant specifically a united front against imperialism and Zionism. In October 1935, Ridw�n al-Hilw told a Party meeting in Tel Aviv that a popular front with Arab nationalist parties was a vital necessity, the basis for which was not the Communist social program but the struggle against Zionism and British imperialism. Activity among Jews was to be restricted to the formation of anti-Zionist blocs within the Zionist trade union federation, the Histadrut. That same month, when an illegal shipment of arms for the Jews was discovered in the port of Jaffa, the Communist Party sent a message of support to the Supreme Arab Council, and its head, the Muft� of Jerusalem, Am�n al-Husayn�. The Communists condemned the Zionists for their activity, expressed their support for the Council, and called on it to arm and organize the Arab population for the looming struggle against Jewish immigration and the Mandate. As Musa Budeiri has noted in his study of the period, the Communists, by writing to the Muft� in these terms, were tacitly recognizing that for the moment they could not lead the national movement. The Palestinian Communist leadership was, however, taking the lead in portraying the British authorities and the Zionists together as a single hostile front -- a more irreconcilably anti-British position than that of the Arab nationalist leaders at the time, but closer to sentiments brewing in the streets. The spontaneous outbreak of the rebellion and general strike on 19 April 1936 took the Party by surprise, but the Communists immediately announced their support. The objective of the rebellion was two-fold: independence from Britain, and the end of Zionist colonization. The means to these ends included sabotage and partisan attacks. It was during the period of the revolt that Arab membership in the Party began to expand significantly. The few Arabs who had become members in the 1920s or before 1936 had seen the Party merely as a vehicle of their day-to-day economic struggle, and had little interest in the national dimension of the conflict. With the outbreak of the rebellion, intellectuals who had sympathized with Marxism but had refrained from participation, began to join, motivated by the Party�s clear stance on the national and anti-imperialist struggle. After the most violent battles of the rebellion in September and October 1936, and after the intervention of Arab heads of state, the Supreme Arab Council issued an appeal to call off the strike on 11 October 1936. Later, in January 1937, the Council further agreed to cooperate with the British Commission of Inquiry, and an uneasy calm settled over Palestine for about seven months. Early in 1937 Kh�lid Bakd�sh returned home to Syria from his sojourns abroad. Almost immediately the Party Central Committee met, chose a new Party leadership, and formally elected Bakd�sh to the post he would hold until his death in 1994 -- General Secretary -- �after taking note of the opinion of the Comintern.� On 5 May the first issue of the Party newspaper, Sawt al-Sha�b (The People�s Voice), hit the streets. Starting as a weekly with a print run of 10,000 copies, Sawt al-Sha�b would soon become semiweekly and finally a daily with a print run of 25,000. With the treaty of 9 September 1936 still pending, colonial reality came home to Syrians once again, however, as the fate of Alexandretta was decided in Paris. The port city near the Turkish border had been incorporated into Syria after the breakup of the Ottoman empire on the basis of its majority Arabic-speaking majority, but in late 1936 the Turkish government began asserting claims to the city. During discussions of the matter with the French Communist leadership, Raf�q Rid�, then the Syrian Communist liaison man with the French Party in Paris, learned that neither the French government nor the British wanted to irritate Turkey over the issue for fear of pushing Ankara closer to the Rome-Berlin Axis. The French Communists told him that they were in a particularly delicate situation, because if they took a position different from that of their government they would be threatening the Popular Front as a whole, and, such a risk could not be taken. Through negotiations with France, and by way of a 1937 decision of the League of Nations that stripped Alexandretta of all but nominal Syrian identity, the final cession of Alexandretta to Turkey was effected by a Franco-Turkish accord signed on 23 June 1939. The Syrian Communist Party�s role in the Alexandretta affair has been a matter of some dispute over the years. Interviewers raised the issue with Bakd�sh repeatedly even in the last years of his life, and he insisted that the Communist Party had opposed the transfer of Alexandretta to Turkey. The Party expressed its opposition to the transfer by joining three other groups -- the League for National Action, the Arab Club, and the National Block�s youth organization -- in founding the Committee for Defense of the Alexandretta Region. Sawt al-Sha�b frequently expressed its opposition to the Turkish annexation of the Syrian region. Bakd�sh visited the city twice during the period, and on 1 June 1937, published an article about his trips in al-Insh� newspaper. �It is too bad,� he wrote in the article, �that the French authorities here or in France� did not refute the demoralizing and frequently published Turkish boasts about Turkish military strength in the region. Formally, the Syrian Communists were indeed opposed to the Alexandretta deal. In practice, however, they were not inclined to press the point too hard. When the Syrian flag was taken down in the region on 29 November 1937, protests came from many quarters, but not from Kh�lid Bakd�sh. It is difficult to say for certain that the somewhat lethargic Communist stand on Alexandretta was due solely to the influence of France and the Comintern. After Alexandretta gained autonomy, Syrian Communists in the city founded the Alexandretta Communist Party, ostensibly a branch of the Syrian party. Alexandretta had traditionally been the port for the north Syrian hinterland, and Turkish annexation, by cutting the city off from its markets, resulted in an economic depression in the region. As a result, the Communist influence grew dramatically among students, workers and even among the Turkish inhabitants there for several years. In similar fashion, the Syrian Communist Party�s friendly relations with the National Bloc, not only conformed to Dimitrov�s call for a national united front, but they also benefitted the Syrian Party, which made use of its freedom to vastly expand its membership and extend influence to the remotest regions of the country and among the influential intelligentsia. Internationally, National Bloc politicians went through periods of warmer and cooler relations with Paris as they waited from one year to the next for France to ratify the 1936 treaty. Strategically, however, they were cooperating with the French in a peaceful gradual process aimed eventually, it was hoped, at a form of independence that preserved a special relationship with France. This moderate orientation suited Bakd�sh just fine. For him, the struggle against fascism outweighed narrow national considerations. Close relations with France served the interests of the anti-fascist struggle, and, therefore, ultimately of Syria and the Arabs. Bakd�sh was in the audience in Arles on 26 December 1937 when the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, delivered his report to the Ninth Congress of his party entitled �The Mission of France in the World.� In discussing the struggle against fascism the French Communist leader stated: Regarding the colonial peoples, the basic slogan of our Communist party remains the right to self determination, the right to independence. Recalling what Lenin said on this issue we have already told our Tunisian comrades, and they have agreed with us, that the right to divorce does not mean the obligation to divorce. At the present moment the decisive question is the victorious fight against fascism. For this reason the interest of the colonial peoples lies in their unity with the people of France, and not in an attitude that could favor the enterprises of fascism -- possibly placing, for example, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco under the yoke of Mussolini or Hitler or making Indochina a base of operations for militaristic Japan. To create the conditions for a trusting, fraternal, free union of the colonial peoples with our people, is it not there that France will carry out its mission in the international arena?" Bakd�sh fully supported Thorez�s view, even after the fall of the Popular Front government in October 1938. In the middle of April 1939 the Syrian Communist Party published a book of articles by Stalin concerned with the national question. Bakd�sh contributed an introduction to the work. He wrote of the need for the patriotic movement in the colonial countries to forge a union with the working-class movement in the west. But the issue is not restricted to unity with the working class or with popular movements in the west. The interests of our independence struggle demand that we work for a alliance with some strong state. If we look at the world at the present time, for example, we see, as we have said above, that the source of the basic danger to the national existence of us Arabs is fascist Italy and Germany which are working to reach out and expand and are carrying out fierce colonial aggression, whose primary target is the Near East and the Arab countries -- Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine in particular. Is an alliance of our country with another Arab country -- such as Iraq, the Saudi Kingdom, Yemen, etc., -- enough for us to defend our young national existence, particularly when they are as weak as they are, and are shoved around by the plots and maneuvers of the different colonial centers? No! It is not enough! Our national interest demands that we establish firm bonds of alliance with one of the big democratic states. For us Syrians and Lebanese, this state can be none other than democratic France. For that reason the Communists in Syria and Lebanon and all conscious patriots put the issue of a French-Lebanese-Syrian alliance at the head of the nationalist demands for which our country is struggling. This Francophile position of the Syrian party was not particularly popular within Arab nationalist circles, however, as is evident from Syrian Communists� foray into Palestinian politics in the autumn of 1937. In July of that year the Peel Commission issued the results of its findings regarding Palestine and recommended that the territory be partitioned into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a permanent British mandate. To try to drum up popular support for the Palestinian rejection of this partition plan, Am�n al-Husayn� called a conference Arab individuals and organizations which opened on 8 September 1937 at the summer mountain resort of Bul�d�n in Syria. Planning to attend the meeting, the Syrian Communist Party drew up a draft position paper, which it later published in Sawt al-Sha�b, calling for a halt to Zionist immigration, a ban on the sale of Palestinian land, and the establishment of a constitutional, democratic r�gime which would guarantee the spread of peace and tranquillity in the country. The organizing committee of the conference refused to seat the Syrian Communists. Two representatives of the Palestine Communist Party did take part in the meeting, however. The Palestinian Communists issued a statement at the conference calling for the continuation of the rebellion in Palestine and endorsing the conference�s call for national independence. The political resolutions of the conference were also much more radical than the Syrian Communist position. These stipulated that Palestine was an inseparable part of the Arab homeland, that the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state in it must be rejected, and that the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration must be abrogated and replaced by an Anglo-Palestinian treaty which recognized the independence and sovereignty of Palestine under a constitutional government that grants minorities the same rights accorded to the majority. In 1937 the Palestine Communist Party set up a separate Jewish section to handle work among the Jewish community. Although the majority of the Party membership was still Jewish, the main thrust of the Party�s work consisted in support for and participation in the anti-Zionist rebellion. The Syrian-Lebanese party had a separate Armenian section, so the division on national lines was not without precedent. Still it highlighted growing division within the Palestinian party along national lines, and soon the Jewish section was to strike out on an independent course of establishing contacts with �progressive� Zionist elements -- a course that ran counter to the Central Committee line, hardened the differences between the sections, and finally led to severance of ties between the two organizations in 1938. Parallel with the emergence of differences within the Palestinian party, the policy of the Communist International on Palestine began to take a new tack. The old line was still in force when, in November 1937, The Communist International published an article by the British Communist member of Parliament, William Gallacher entitled, �Against the British Plan to Divide Palestine.� Gallacher stressed that Palestine was an Arab state and that immigrant Jews had an opportunity loyally to contribute to that state�s progress. But if they followed the Zionist course of �carrying through an occupation of Palestine� at the expense of the Arabs, they would inevitably face an Arab revolt. �Despicable propaganda� had asserted that the Arab revolt was due to �foreign incitement� or �the �fanatical� Mufti.� �But it does not require �foreign incitement,� or Muftis, to arouse a people threatened as the Arabs are.� As the rebellion in Palestine again gathered momentum, the French Communist daily l�Humanit� gave regular coverage to the dramatic events. �Great Britain is openly at war with the immense majority of the population of Palestine,� Gabriel P�ri wrote, noting that the Italy of Mussolini was closely watching events there. The �anti-Arab policy of the British government� was disturbing the tranquillity of the Mediterranean, including French North Africa. France had every reason, P�ri stated, to satisfy the just demands of the local populations, since this course would deny Mussolini any pretext for intervention. P�ri highlighted the use fascism could make of the Palestine conflict, but never suggested that the rebellion was in any sense the work of the Italian dictator. The Comintern changed its position on this issue in 1938 in response to a perceived rise of Italian and German interest in the Middle East. The reorientation was so severe that the International Communist organization actually severed its links with the Palestine Communist Party that year. Late in 1938 and throughout 1939 The Communist International carried articles that stressed fascist influence in the Arab world. The unsigned article entitled �The Fighting in Palestine� in January 1939 noted that the fighting was intensifying, and then told readers that �the hand of German fascism� was �in the game.� Goebbels�s propaganda was �dramatically parceling out the fights,� while German agents were �active on the spot.� The Arabs, the article stressed, were mere �pawns in the Germans� game.� The Germans had spies everywhere in the region, many of them engaged in smuggling weapons, and Germany and Italy were pouring arms into Palestine, the magazine claimed. �The chief culprit for the bloodshed in Palestine,� the Comintern�s official journal told readers, is German and Italian fascism.� In June, another article in the same periodical blamed the �Mohammedan department� of Joseph Goebbels for the �sharpening of relations� between Arabs and Jews and the resultant bloody struggle in Palestine. Palestine�s Arab and Jewish Communists were to some extent reconciled after London�s withdrawal of its partition proposal in 1938, and the publication of a White Paper 1939 which coincided with curtailment of Jewish immigration. The Arab Communists hailed the withdrawal of the partition plan as a victory and initially opposed further armed activity. But as the Second World War loomed ever closer, the energy behind the rebellion dissipated as all sides waited for momentous events in Europe. After the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was signed in August 1939, Palestinian Communists responded easily to the Comintern position on the �imperialist� character of both sides in the war. �The Communists know full well that this war is not their war,� declared a Palestine Communist Party publication. �Side by side with the Arab masses, they will fight Britain and its Zionist lackeys.� In March 1941 the same newspaper acknowledged that the German and Italian Armies were �at the gates,� but, it noted, �it is also true that Churchill�s armies are inside the country. Our first obligation is to fight the enemy within.� In practice, however, there was little Communist activity at the time. The four years of rebellion had exhausted the Arab population, the Party was still illegal, and British military presence was very large. Communist activity would remain limited until the Soviet entry into the war changed the political equation. As the rebellion flickered out in Palestine, crisis was building in Syria in December 1938. After the fall of the Popular Front government in France, and after fruitless last-ditch efforts and numerous concessions by the Syrian National Bloc leader, the French Parliament on 14 December 1938 put off indefinitely the vote on the ratification of the September 1936 treaty on Syrian independence. Syria�s hopes for negotiated freedom from France were dead. On his arrival in Damascus in January 1939, Gabriel Puaux, the new hard-line High Commissioner, was greeted by massive anti-French demonstrations. As demonstrations and strikes continued, the French authorities arrested more and more of the nationalist leaders, which in turn, led to more disturbances. On 8 July, Puaux suspended the Syrian constitution, and an enforced calm began to settle in as events in Europe took center stage. After the Soviet-German non-aggression treaty was announced, Sawt al-Sha�b reminded readers that it had repeatedly called for rapid conclusion of a Soviet-British-French agreement which would be �a bulwark of peace against the expansionist plans of Hitler and Mussolini.� The Soviet Union was absolutely not responsible for the delay in the signing of the treaty, the paper said. Britain and France repeatedly created difficulties and threw up such obstacles which violated the principles of equality in rights and obligations between treaty signatories. After the outbreak of war, General Weygand, Commander in Chief of French military forces in the Eastern Mediterranean declared a state of siege to be in effect as of 2 September 1939. In contrast to the French Communist Party which quickly announced its opposition to the �imperialist war,� the Syrian and Lebanese Communist Parties (acting separately, perhaps out of deference to the French-imposed division of the country) sent telegrams to the High Commissioner (texts of which notes were published in Sawt al-Sha�b on 11 September 1939) proclaiming their support of his country and asserting their readiness to fight in the same trench with France. Similar cables were sent to Party branches calling on them to volunteer for the French army in defense of democracy. This loyalty notwithstanding, the High Commissioner declared the Communist Party in Syria and Lebanon dissolved in a decree dated 28 September. It prohibited all Communist activity and stipulated fines and three years imprisonment for any violation of the ban. Sawt al-Sha�b suspended publication with the ban on the Party, but, as the violently anti-Communist Catholic newspaper al-Bash�r complained on 16 November, the Communist leaders continued to meet undisturbed and were even hoping to get permission to begin publishing a new newspaper. This underground freedom of activity did not last long, however. In December 1939, Bakd�sh, Raf�q Rid�, other prominent leaders and some 200 members of the party were arrested. Those Communists remaining free carried on their activities, including, for example, issuing a statement on 22 August 1940 which followed the Comintern line of condemning the �imperialist war� and calling for a campaign against �warmongers.� In general, however, Party activity was minimal until the Communists were released in August 1941, after the British occupation of Syria and the German invasion of the Soviet Union had transformed the political landscape once again. At its 1935 Congress, the Comintern laid down a line of united front activity. Communists in colonial countries were to break out of their past sectarianism, join with bourgeois nationalists and form the broadest possible fronts to struggle against imperialism. The leaders of the Syrian and Palestinian parties were both newly installed and both had the specific endorsement of the Comintern leadership. After the congress, they went home to neighboring Arab countries, where in both lands, large-scale popular revolution broke out within months, offering new challenges and opportunities for broad Communist activity. For the Syrians, the rise to power of the French Popular Front provided an unexpected opportunity to secure independence through peaceful cooperation with the Syrian bourgeoisie and with �progressives� in the mother country. The Syrian Communist leader developed a new approach to nationalism, according to which the long-term interests of democracy outweighed narrow national considerations. An alliance with France, even a France led by �bourgeois parties,� was the surest way for Syria to fulfill its ambition of national independence. For Palestinian Arabs, the origins of their party among an immigrant Jewish community on a collision course with their own ethnic group seemed an insuperable obstacle to the construction of a united front. The rebellion, however, offered them the opportunity to develop a mass base among the Arab Palestinian population, and they made energetic use of this chance. For them, the united front entailed support for and participation in a mass, anti-imperialist armed struggle. As war loomed in Europe in 1938 and 1939, the Comintern came increasingly to accent the struggle against fascism, even in the colonies, where �anti-imperialism� had previously been the watchword. The Palestinians� success in developing a united front among the majority population now became a failure in the eyes of the Soviets, and a revolt which only a year earlier had been hailed and supported, was now portrayed as a fascist plot. Yet despite being cut off from the International, the Palestinian party persevered in its course at least until the threat of partition seemed to disappear. For its part, the Syrian party clung to its strategy of alliance with France after the fall of the Popular Front, the death of the 1936 independence treaty, and the conclusion of the Soviet German non-aggression pact. In the late 1930s the Syrian and the Palestinian Communist Parties developed widely divergent approaches to building anti-imperialist united fronts. Far from being a passive response to a big power, their divergent party lines attested to their independence and activism. Primary Sources Books Bakd�sh, Kh�lid. Kh�lid Bakd�sh: kalim�t, ah�d�th, maq�l�t, 1984-1994. 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