In the fourth article of our new blog series “The ‘1979 Moment’ in the Middle East”, Jihane Sfeir shows how two activists in Lebanon in the late 1970s dissappointedly turned away from the revolutionary liberationist struggle in favor of political Islam.
Wed 06 Jun 2018
New at TRAFO: “The Disenchantment of the Left: Two Memories of the Palestinian Struggle”
“Islamist leaders are often former liberationist or nationalist ideologues who after being disappointed by the failure of nationalism or Marxism, turn to Islam as a mobilizing force. More than a few sympathizers and members of the Lebanese Hezbollah were also former communists or belonged to Palestinian parties. One cannot ignore the ideological shift that happened in 1979, from leftist parties to groups motivated by political Islam. In order to consider this ideological transformation, in the following pages, I examine how the Lebanese Civil War impacted the transformation of two former Shiite Lebanese, pro-Palestinian fighters, Bassel and Nizar, and the nature of their political and military commitment to the Palestinian cause.”
Continue reading at our TRAFO blog.
Image: Palestinian Fatah fighters in Beirut in 1979, Image: Tiamat/Jaakobou, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
