Kohl and Peres examine the state of the Middle East peace process and chances for closer cooperation between Israel and the European Community.

Kohl and Rabin discuss the situation in the Near and Middle East and the changed in Syria's position toward Israel after the demise of the Soviet Union. Rabin expresses concern about the continued arms race in the region and Syria's purchases of Scud missiles from Russia and Slovakia. He also reiterates Iraq's continued capability to go nuclear within 5 to 6 years despite international arms control inspections. Last but not least, Kohl and Rabin discuss the situation in Iran and Kohl's contacts with President Rafsandjani.

The text printed here is the resolution to the Conference for Combatting Fascism held in May 1939 held in Beirut, originally printed in Arabic in an issue of the Beirut-based leftist journal Tali‘a.

Led by leftists, including communists, the conference was a well-publicized and well-attended call for action against Nazism and Fascism. It affirmed an alliance, against Nazi Germany (and Fascist Italy) with France, the Mandate occupier of Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, it insisted on the pressing need for political progress. Most important was the ratification by the French parliament, of the 1936 Franco-Syrian and Franco-Lebanese agreements that, like the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Agreement, would have ended the Mandate and granted Lebanon and Syria far-reaching sovereignty while preserving key French strategic interests. (Ratification never occurred.) In August 1939, the Soviet-German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced communists to adjust their language also in the French Mandates. Here and in other Arab countries like Palestine and Egypt, a majority of people whose written records we possess and perhaps also many other inhabitants, felt caution if not aversion towards Nazi Germany and Fascism Italy. They disliked how those two states organized their societies; were concerned about those states’ territorial ends in the Middle East (which, however, were in the late 1930s actual only in Italy’s case); and feared especially Nazi racism for potentially targeting them, like the Jews, as “Semites,” as Israel Gershoni’s edited volume Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (2014) and Götz Nordbruch’s Nazism in Syria and Lebanon (2009) show.

At the same time, a considerable minority drew open inspiration from Nazi (and other European extreme rightwing) authoritarianism: its cult of a strong leaders, its emphasis on youth as national(ist) revivers, and its style and organizational forms, including salutes, uniforms, marches, and street brawls. Moreover, a small minority from the later 1930s sought to create a political-military alliance with Germany. Until 1939, Germany prevaricated, loath to provoke Britain, the principal power in the interwar Middle East. Thereafter, it did work with colonized nationalists who, as David Motadel’s “The Global Authoritarian Moment” (2019) has shown, were willing to work with Berlin to become independent. Among them were some Arabs like Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), an exiled Palestinian leader whose wartime deeds and open anti-Semitism soon was, in the eyes of many, proof that Arabs in general had supported the Nazis.

The text printed here is the editor’s preface in Arabic in an issue of the Beirut-based leftist journal Tali‘a that was dedicated to the Conference for Combatting Fascism held in May 1939 in Beirut.

Led by leftists, including communists, the conference was a well-publicized and well-attended call for action against Nazism and Fascism. It affirmed an alliance, against Nazi Germany (and Fascist Italy) with France, the Mandate occupier of Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, it insisted on the pressing need for political progress. Most important was the ratification by the French parliament, of the 1936 Franco-Syrian and Franco-Lebanese agreements that, like the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Agreement, would have ended the Mandate and granted Lebanon and Syria far-reaching sovereignty while preserving key French strategic interests. (Ratification never occurred.) In August 1939, the Soviet-German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced communists to adjust their language also in the French Mandates. Here and in other Arab countries like Palestine and Egypt, a majority of people whose written records we possess and perhaps also many other inhabitants, felt caution if not aversion towards Nazi Germany and Fascism Italy. They disliked how those two states organized their societies; were concerned about those states’ territorial ends in the Middle East (which, however, were in the late 1930s actual only in Italy’s case); and feared especially Nazi racism for potentially targeting them, like the Jews, as “Semites,” as Israel Gershoni’s edited volume Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (2014) and Götz Nordbruch’s Nazism in Syria and Lebanon (2009) show.

At the same time, a considerable minority drew open inspiration from Nazi (and other European extreme rightwing) authoritarianism: its cult of a strong leaders, its emphasis on youth as national(ist) revivers, and its style and organizational forms, including salutes, uniforms, marches, and street brawls. Moreover, a small minority from the later 1930s sought to create a political-military alliance with Germany. Until 1939, Germany prevaricated, loath to provoke Britain, the principal power in the interwar Middle East. Thereafter, it did work with colonized nationalists who, as David Motadel’s “The Global Authoritarian Moment” (2019) has shown, were willing to work with Berlin to become independent. Among them were some Arabs like Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), an exiled Palestinian leader whose wartime deeds and open anti-Semitism soon was, in the eyes of many, proof that Arabs in general had supported the Nazis.

Developed by British officer Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941) in 1907, scouting was first introduced into the Middle East in 1912, a history analyzed in Jennifer Dueck’s The Claims of Culture at Empire End (2010). It became more known after World War I, with the largest groups first forming in Damascus and Beirut. In the latter, a Sunni, Muhyi al-Din Nusuli, in 1920 founded al-Kashshaf al-Muslim, which in 1922 was recognized by the International Scout Federation (ISF) as the Muslim Scouts of Syria. Earliest recruits were at the school of the American University of Beirut, though most enrolled at the Islamic College (Kulliya Islamiyya) and the schools of the Maqasid Islamic charity organization. During the 1925-1927 anticolonial Syrian Revolt, the French Mandate authorities disbanded the scouting groups, though they soon recovered. In 1927, too, the pro-French Catholic Scouts de France were founded, and small secular French and Jewish units came to life as well. Moreover, scouting picked up speed also outside the French Mandate, e.g. in Egypt and Palestine, as Arnon Degani’s “They were prepared: the Palestinian Arab Scout Movement 1920-1948” (2014) shows.

Back in the French Mandate, the Muslim Scouts of Syria and Lebanon joined ranks in 1931. In 1933, there were 45 troops involving 3,000 members. But in 1934 the French authorities clamped down on them, concerned about support for Syro-Lebanese unity. Lebanese and Syrian scouts split. If in the 1930s especially Muslim scouts formed part of a widening organizational involvement of youth in anticolonial nationalist politics, they had seen themselves as nation-building pioneers already in the 1920s. As the below text shows, in their eyes scouting allowed (male) youngsters to develop physical strength, be outdoors and get to know “their” nation’s natural habitat, and hone self-help, leadership skills, and team spirit, among other desirable traits. In this sense the below text, which was printed without a byline in the Beiruti journal al-Kashshaf (The Scout), was complex, not unlike Baden-Powell’s beliefs as expressed in his seminal Scouting for Boys (1908). It meant to strengthen individuals’ self-reliance while simultaneously serving a collective end, in Baden-Powell’s case the British Empire, here the Lebanese-Syrian nationalist cause.

In the last two years of World War I, British Empire troops based in Egypt succeeded in occupying Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria, roughly present-day Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan), which had been Ottoman from 1516/17. They were accompanied by the militarily weak but politically important Sherifian (also Arab or Hejazi) Army, troops loyal to the Hashemite rulers of Mecca and Medina. That dynasty, in place since the tenth century, had risen against Ottoman rule in 1916; Britain had made promises about a postwar Arab Kingdom, which were contradicted by the secret 1916 Franco-British Sykes-Picot Agreement, however. In October 1918, the Sherifian Army entered Damascus, followed by the British army. A Hashemite, Faisal (1885-1933), effectively became King of Syria with the consent of Britain and the support of Arab nationalists from all classes, including Ottoman-educated officials and officers, as Michael Provence’s The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2017) shows.

From January to May 1919, Faisal attended the Paris Peace Conference. Neither then nor during a second stay, later in 1919,  did he succeed in convincing France to recognize his rule and abandon its claim to Syria. Moreover, he lost the backing of Britain, which in September 1919, following an agreement with France, withdrew its troops from Syria. The way was now open—though still winding—to France’s eventual occupation of Syria, in July-August 1920. This move contrasted the (exceedingly vague) Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, with which the war’s victors had sought to reassure postwar Middle Easterners about their intentions; and it contravened the wishes of the Syrian General Congress (also known as the Syrian National Congress).

Convened from May 1919 to July 1920, the Syrian General Congress functioned as a parliament with representatives from across Greater Syria and interfaced with bottom-up national demands, as James Gelvin’s Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (1999) showed. Led by nationalists, it inter alia declared the independent Arab Kingdom of Syria, headed by Faisal, in March 1920. And in July 1919, as the below text shows, it published clear recommendations to the King-Crane Commission (also the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey; in the text referred to as the American Section of the International Commission). Created by the Allies but soon feared to contravene their wishes and led only by US-Americans, that commission canvassed public political opinion in parts of Anatolia and Greater Syria in June-July 1919. Despite the demands issued in the text below, its final recommendation, which the Allies allowed to become public only in 1922, were for a Mandate.

From the 1880s to 1914, about half a million Ottoman citizens from Bilad al-Sham (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) emigrated, principally for economic reasons. A majority were Christians. Most hailed from what after World War I became Lebanon and Syria; some were from Palestine. While some travelled to Africa—a story analyzed in Andrew Arsan’s Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (2014)—a large majority headed to the Americas, where they worked mostly in lower-class professions, soon launched newspapers, and founded numerous local but interlinked migrant societies. Although only few returned permanently, equally few renounced their Ottoman citizenship. Moreover, a good number of emigrants stayed in touch with their place of origin: socially, e.g. through letter exchanges, marriages, and the occasional visit; economically and financially, e.g. through remittances; and politically.

As Stacy Fahrenthold has shown in Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925, political involvement grew after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, Ottoman freedom of expression improved for a few years; for another, the Young Turk regime hoped to politically recruit migrants for the Ottoman cause, though had little success. Migrants’ own political involvement increased in World War I. A clear majority turned against the Ottoman Empire. This was reflected also in numerous South- and North-American-Syrian journals.

One was the New York-based al-Fatat, whose founder in 1916, Shukri al-Bakhkhash, wrote the below text; he was born in 1889 in Zahle, present-day Lebanon, and arrived in the United States in the early 1910s. Moreover, thousands sought to, and did, join the war as volunteers on the Allied side, organized by Syrian American recruiters across the Western hemisphere. From 1914-17, migrants enlisted in the French and British armed forces and from 1917 also in the US military, fighting in Europe and the Middle East. (Al-Bakhkhash himself enlisted in the US army in 1918.) This was a political act that they and their communities hoped would further Syria’s liberation from Ottoman rule and give Syrians a voice in the postwar world, though they did not quite agree how post-Ottoman Syria would or should look like and whether a (and if yes, which) foreign country—principally, France or the United States—should play a role in it.

The CIA's National Intelligence Daily for 14 January 1989 covers developments in Afghanistan, France, Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, the Soviet Union, and China. Certain portions of the document are redacted due to b(1) and b(3) exemptions.

This record of a meeting with the secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Boris Ponomarev, and with the secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Konstantin Katushev, addresses the anti-Soviet course adopted by Beijing. The discussion specifically refers to relations between China and the Communist parties of Albania, Romania, Australia, France, Italy, and New Zealand. The document also assesses the situation in Anwar el-Sadat's Egypt, in Hafez al-Assad's Syria, in Iraq, and in Yemen, the main idea being that the Socialist countries should support the development of progressive Arabic states.

Description of the reaction to the Asian-African Conference in both participating countries and capitalist ruled countries.