A Man Apart

Curiel was born in Cairo, the younger son of a Spanish Jewish banking family. Educated in a French Jesuit school, he never mastered Arabic. Nonetheless, upon reaching adulthood, he made a characteristically demonstrative political statement by renouncing his family’s Italian citizenship and becoming an Egyptian citizen.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many upper-middle-class and wealthy Egyptians of all faiths and ethnicities received a French education. They readily adopted a cosmopolitan, but nonetheless Eurocentric, cultural style. However, this social-cultural orientation was popularly associated with local non-Muslim minorities — primarily Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Jews. Under the influence of leftist teachers employed by the Mission laïque française, or “French Lay Mission,” several prominent communists, including Curiel and some of his later detractors within the movement, emerged from this milieu.

In the 1930s and the first years of World War II, Curiel participated in several anti-fascist political groups based among Egypt’s minority communities. He resolved to disseminate Marxism beyond this milieu to workers and peasants. His strategy for accomplishing this was “the line of popular and democratic forces.”

In accord with communist orthodoxy of the era, Curiel argued that Egypt’s political priority was an anti-imperialist, national-democratic revolution that would liberate the country from its British occupiers and their local allies among the large cotton growers and the urban business class. Curiel unconventionally proposed that the immediate task of Egyptian Marxists was to build a multiclass national front rather than a working-class party to lead this struggle.

Curiel’s strategy was based on Egypt’s social conditions. In the 1940s, Egypt was an impoverished country with an illiterate peasant majority and a relatively small and emergent urban working class, about one-third of which was employed in several dozen large-scale, modern textile and transportation enterprises.

Trade unions were constrained by undemocratic legislation. Many were led by corporatist patrons from the professional middle classes, or in one case even by a royal prince. The nationalist government that came to power in 1924 crushed and delegitimized independent trade union and political action by workers.

Translating Marxism

Curiel believed that Egypt’s French-educated minorities should deploy their social privileges to translate Marxism into Arabic, propagate it to less-educated Muslim and Christian Egyptians, and train them to lead the movement and eventually form a communist party. Inevitably, they put their cultural imprint on the emergent movement. Curiel and several other Jews led rival preparty Marxist organizations at a time when Jews comprised a tiny proportion of Egypt’s population.

In 1943, after convening a cadre training camp on his father’s estate, Curiel established the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation (EMNL) as the vehicle for implementing his political strategy. The previous year, another francophone Egyptian Jew, Hillel Schwartz, had established the Iskra (Spark) organization, named for Vladimir Lenin’s Russian revolutionary newspaper.

The two organizations engaged in fruitless rivalry until they merged in the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL) in 1947. The DMNL claimed 1,400 members at its founding, about 60 percent of whom were students, intellectuals, and “foreigners” (meaning primarily francophone local minorities), while 28 percent were workers. Most of the workers were former EMNL members whose loyalty Curiel won despite his broken Arabic.

Curiel and Schwartz were the only Jewish members of the DMNL’s first ten-member Central Committee. Curiel led by charisma and the power of personal example, while Schwartz’s Marxism was more bookish.

Iskra recruited hundreds of students and young intellectuals through a combination of intellectual stimulation and mixed-gender socializing that breached the boundaries of Egyptian middle-class propriety. Curiel did not personally approve of Iskra’s approach to Marxism or its social style. Nonetheless, Iskra’s reputation became associated with the entire DMNL and the role of Jews in the movement.

In reaction, the smallest of the Marxist factions, which called itself the (pre-1958) Communist Party of Egypt, refused to admit Jews or women as members. Their leader Fu’ad Mursi regarded Jewish participation in the communist movement as “a symbol of dissolution: sexual dissolution, moral dissolution.”

The Question of Palestine

Within a year, the DMNL split into several factions. The fragmentation was partly driven by the aspirations of brilliant intellectuals from Iskra like Shuhdi ‘Atiyya al-Shafi‘i and Anouar Abdel-Malek to assert their leadership of the movement. In other words, it was a generational and ethnic revolt directed primarily against Curiel.

The question of Palestine was also a factor in the DMNL’s fracturing. Like almost all communist formations worldwide, the DMNL reflexively followed the lead of the Soviet Union in endorsing the November 29, 1947, recommendation of the United Nations General Assembly to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Non-Jewish young intellectuals like al-Shafi‘i and Abdel-Malek were scandalized that in response to this development, the Egyptian government and their political opponents began attacking communism as a form of Zionism.

They believed that Curiel and other Jewish leaders of the movement had endorsed the partition of Palestine because they were Jews rather than because they were Soviet loyalists. They were shocked to hear that while they were imprisoned during the 1948 Palestine war, Curiel had told Jewish communists who did not speak Arabic to emigrate to Israel and join its Communist Party on the grounds that the Israeli working class was stronger and would achieve socialism before the Egyptian working class.

Arguing that the Soviet Union had made a mistake was not an option for Egyptian communists in the era of high Stalinism. Soviet leaders calculated that a Jewish state in which pro-Soviet Zionists would be an important political force and the Communist Party of Israel would be legal was more likely to counter British imperialism in the Middle East than pro-British Arab kings or the Islamists and Arab nationalists who had recently sought to form alliances with the Axis powers. That, too, was not a feasible argument among pro-Soviet Marxists in Egypt.

The late Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a communist leader widely esteemed for his personal integrity, was personally close to many Jewish members and leaders of the movement in the 1940s and early ’50s. He later recalled that al-Shafi‘i and Abdel-Malek adopted an extreme anti-Jewish line — “a violent reaction against the feeling that the whole movement was held and perhaps manipulated by Jews and that their commitment to Marxism was colored by things that might be alien to an authentic Egyptian Marxism.” Subsequently, Sid-Ahmed regretfully noted, “there was an element of antisemitism in the Egyptian communist movement.”

Curiel and his closest followers rejected that judgment and never accepted that the question of Palestine was a factor in the splintering of the DMNL. To do so would have meant acknowledging that their ethnic identities limited their political roles in Egypt.

In 1950, the Egyptian government deported Curiel to Italy as a foreigner, even though he had no other citizenship. He made his way to Paris where several dozen other Egyptian Jewish communist émigrés who became known as “the Rome Group” gathered under his leadership. They remained loyal, active DMNL members, and Curiel retained his seat on the Central Committee.

The most important Marxist currents briefly united in the Communist Party of Egypt on January 8, 1958. However, as a condition of unity, Curiel and the other members of the Rome Group were expelled from the party. Jewish communists who remained in Egypt were banned from membership in its central committee, even if they had converted to Islam.

Making Contact

Curiel and several former Rome Group members then formed the Solidarity organization. They engaged in bold and often illegal solidarity politics with movements in the Third World, as it was becoming known. They provided material aid and logistical support to Algeria’s National Liberation Front, South Africa’s African National Congress, and other anti-imperialist national liberation movements.

They also facilitated contacts between Israelis and leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In principle, Arab communists supported a resolution of the question of Palestine based on recognition of the right to self-determination for both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. However, achieving a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement was much dearer to the hearts of the Rome Group than it was to their comrades in Egypt.

The members of the Rome Group were the only Egyptian communists who spoke out in favor of the initiative that Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched at the May 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states. Nasser formulated the Bandung Conference’s resolution expressing “support of the Arab people of Palestine” and calling for “the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question” — essentially an agreement based on the UN Partition Plan boundaries.

This was the first public Arab expression of willingness to entertain a “peaceful settlement of the Palestine question.” It went nowhere because Israel had resolutely refused since 1949 to discuss conceding territory that it conquered during the 1948 war which lay beyond the UN Partition Plan boundaries.

After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, PLO leaders such as its representative in London, Sa‘id Hammami, and Na’if Hawatma, the head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, began expressing cautious and tentative interest in what became known as “the two-state solution.” Between July 1976 and May 1977, Curiel and the Rome group facilitated several meetings in Paris between PLO leaders including ‘Issam Sartawi, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), Abu Faisal, and Sabri Jiryis on the one hand and members of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace led by Uri Avnery on the other.

The Israelis involved in these meetings reported on them to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. ‘Issam Sartawi and Matti Peled publicly acknowledged the encounters in a press conference in Paris on January 1, 1977. However, the Rabin government opposed negotiating with the PLO and “categorically opposed” the idea of a Palestinian state. The Likud government that came to power in May 1977 was even less interested in negotiating with Palestinians.

The Right Victim

The efforts of Curiel and his comrades to promote contacts between Israel and the PLO were unfruitful because they were divisive within the PLO while the Israeli government was uninterested. Moreover, the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations initiated by Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel in November 1977 appeared to diminish the urgency of contact between Israel and the PLO.

Sa‘id Hammami was assassinated in London on January 4, 1978. ‘Issam Sartawi was assassinated in Portugal on April 10, 1983. The likely culprit (certainly in Sartawi’s case) was the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization, which deployed terrorism against PLO leaders who raised the possibility of a resolution of the Palestine question based on mutual Palestinian-Israeli recognition. Abu Nidal effectively operated as a hired gun for a number of Arab regimes, including the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

For his part, Henri Curiel was assassinated in Paris on May 4, 1978. French authorities did not aggressively investigate the crime, and it remains unsolved. The list of likely perpetrators includes fascist French-Algerian colons, the South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.

Henri Curiel’s political career demonstrates how much an extraordinarily committed individual adept at motivating dedicated and disciplined followers — Muslims, Christians, and Jews — can accomplish. It also exemplifies the limits of voluntarism and forms of politics that privilege personal identities.

While Curiel and his Jewish followers insisted they were patriotic Egyptians, the Egyptian government and political class ultimately rejected them as Zionist foreigners, as did much of the communist movement. Following the line of the Soviet Union, they (like many non-Jewish Egyptian communists) accepted the idea that two peoples inhabited British Mandate Palestine from the river to the sea. However, actively promoting mutual recognition and peaceful relations between those peoples was beyond the pale in the heyday of Nasserist Arab nationalism and Israel’s alliance with French and British imperialism in the Middle East.

The early salience of Curiel and other Jews in the Egyptian communist movement stoked heated polemics throughout its hyper-factionalized history. Those polemics were periodically reignited during the movement’s afterlives, prompted by successive developments: the dissolution of the two communist parties in 1965, the emergence of a student-based New Left in the 1970s, the reestablishment of an orthodox pro-Soviet Communist Party in 1975, and the appearance of a plethora of memoirs and histories of the movement by Egyptian and foreign activists and scholars. The exceptional level of interest in the role of Jews in the Egyptian communist movement reflects the continuing relevance of political questions first raised in the 1940s.

Appraising Curiel’s political career and legacy from the vantage point of the late 1990s, Uri Avnery remarked, “I do not know who decided to murder him. If the aim was to deal a mortal blow to peace and freedom throughout the world, they chose the right victim.”