Hesham Youssef is an Egyptian diplomat. He served on the Egyptian team, working on the Steering Committee and in three working groups (REDWG, water, and the environment).

Yezid Sayigh is a former Palestinian diplomat. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to ACRS. 

Bishara Bahbah is a Palestinian professor. He was the associate director of Harvard’s Middle East Institute and served as a member of the Palestinian delegation to the Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) talks following the Oslo Accords.

For decades, African Americans’ still unfinished fights for equality were in varied organizational and ideological ways intertwined with decolonization struggles abroad and linked to the question of US power in the world; an early analysis of this history was Penny von Eschen’s Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (1997).

The case of Arab Americans somewhat differed. As Salim Yacub’s Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s (2016) has argued, they fully developed political demands about U.S.-Arab relations only after the 1967 Six-Day-War, in groups like the Association of Arab American University Graduates; previously founded bodies like the Organisation of Arab Students became political in the later 1960s, too. Earlier, such demands were quieter, except lobbying for Arab Palestine in the 1940s. Yet earlier, it was Arab migrants’ acceptance within the US racial order that required political (and especially legal and social) activity, as Sarah Gualtieri’s Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (2009) has shown—and this activity manifested a wish to be counted as white more than solidarity with African Americans. Again different was the case of nationalist Arabs living in the early postcolonial Arab world. As Alex Lubin’s Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (2014) shows, they saw African American struggles and decolonization struggles as linked, like many African Americans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who were critical of the United States and its role in the postwar world.

The text printed here is a case in point. It is a series of excerpts, in English translation, from an Arabic-language book written around 1961 by Lam‘i al-Muti‘i (1927-2003), an Egyptian author, translator, and travel writer. He also published texts on African decolonization movements, e.g. in Rhodesia, in the same Cairo publishing house and series as this book. Here, he did not talk about “African Americans,” a term that became popular in the 1980s. Rather, he spoke of zunuj fi Amrikā, zunuj (sg.: zanj or zinj) being Arabic for Negros as per the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. In the below translation, I use the term Negros (in America—fi Amrikā) in order to distinguish zunuj from ifriqi (African) in al-Muti‘i’s book, and because many African Americans used the term at the time al-Muti‘i wrote his book, though some, like Malcolm X, already objected to its use, associating it with oppression.

In June 1938 Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), a Indian National Congress (INC) leader, one of the earliest INC members calling for full independence in 1927, and the main responsible for INC’s foreign relations, took a ship to Europe. This trip was not a first for India’s inaugural prime minister (1947-1964) to be. Already in 1905 he had left India to enroll at the elite British boarding school of Harrow, going on to study at Cambridge and work as a lawyer in London before returning home in 1912. And the last time he had sailed was in 1935, staying until 1936 as the INC representative in meetings with fellow Asian and increasingly also African anti-imperialists in Britain and Europe. Sure, by then the League against Imperialism (LAI), whose Comintern-organized foundational conference Nehru had attended in 1927, was defunct. (For the LAI see the 1927 document on Messali Hadj in this collection.) Even so, Nehru continued to see his secularist Indian nation-statist goals within an international leftist-anti-imperialist and now anti-fascist framework and web, as Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020) argues.

Hence, when on the ship en route to Europe in 1938 he received an invitation from Egypt’s leading nationalist wafd party and agreed to meet their leaders. Having been in contact with Egyptian nationalists before, a story told in Noor Khan’s Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), and having detailed their anti-imperialism in Glimpses of World History (1934), he saw the wafd as INC’s appropriately leading anti-imperialist counterpart in Egypt. Sure, in confidential INC memoranda, he criticized the wafd’sinsufficient attention to the masses, especially the peasants, which cost them an election in early 1938, he thought; indeed, the wafdistswere liberal nationalists whereas Nehru was a leftist nationalist. Nonetheless, sitting down with the wafd and exchanging views about world politics and anti-imperialist strategies was called for, in his and the wafd’s view,at a time when fascism was rising and Britain continued to rule India and be very present in Egypt. Reproduced in the massive compilation Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, this text is a letter by Nehru sent from London to Nahas Pasha (1879-1965), a leading wafd politician.

Romanian consul in Alexandria reports on shipments to the PLO and conversations members of the PLO have had with other Eastern BLOC countries including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

A synopsis of discussions between Moscow and PLO Leader Yasser Arafat that had occurred on October 29, 1978. The Russians expressed concern that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat has participated in peace agreements with Israel and the U.S. The Russians framed this as anti-Arab and assured Arafat that they supported Arafat and his "progressive" policies. The Soviet Union aligns itself firmly with the PLO and those in the Arab world that reject cooperation with the U.S. and Israel. Due to these discussions, the first joint Soviet-PLO communique was issued, which pleased the Palestinians.

Notes on a meeting in Moscow from March 6-10 between Yasser Arafat & the PLO Delegation and the Soviet government. Arafat was met by Brezhnev, Boris Ponomarev and Andrei Gromyko. Among the issues discussed were the situation in the Middle East, the Soviets desire for Palestine to counter Egypt's "capitulation" to Israel and the U.S. (which Arafat affirmed), tensions in Southern Lebanon and the PLO's increasing desire to further cooperation with Syria and non-Christian Lebanese groups.

The conversation is mainly concerned with the situation in the Middle East, but there are also some remarks about Poland, Afghanistan, and French-Israeli relations. Honecker emphasizes that only the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state can solve the Middle East conflict. He underlines the continuing support of the GDR for the PLO, for example, through military aid and the opening of an official PLO embassy in Berlin. Arafat points to the West German support for Israel and asks for further military aid.

The two leaders discuss the situation in the Middle East, and the role of the superpowers - the US and the Soviet Union.