Arabism With and Beyond Defeat. Joseph Samaha:
The Social Trajectory of a Left-Wing Intellectual
from Beirut

L'arabisme avec et par-delà les défaites. Joseph Samaha : trajectoire sociale d'un
intellectuel de la gauche beyrouthine

El arabismo con y más allá de las derrotas. Joseph Samaha: trayectoria social de
un intelectual de la izquierda beirutí

Arabismus mit und über Niederlagen hinweg. Joseph Samaha: Der soziale
Werdegang eines Intellektuellen der Beiruter Linken

Aya Khalil

Traducteur : Katharine Throssell

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OpenEdition
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Édition électronique

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/bssg/5527

DOI : 10.4000/13ky2

ISSN : 2490-9424

Cet article est une traduction de :

L'arabisme avec et par-delà les défaites. Joseph Samaha : trajectoire sociale d'un intellectuel de la gauche beyrouthine - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/bssg/5659 [fr]

Éditeur

Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre

Référence électronique

Aya Khalil, « Arabism With and Beyond Defeat. Joseph Samaha: The Social Trajectory of a Left-Wing Intellectual from Beirut », *Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods* [En ligne], 15 | 2024, mis en ligne le 14 mars 2025, consulté le 28 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bssg/5527 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13ky2

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 mars 2025.

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# Arabism With and Beyond Defeat.
Joseph Samaha: The Social
Trajectory of a Left-Wing
Intellectual from Beirut

L'arabisme avec et par-delà les défaites. Joseph Samaha : trajectoire sociale d'un
intellectuel de la gauche beyrouthine

El arabismo con y más allá de las derrotas. Joseph Samaha: trayectoria social de
un intelectual de la izquierda beirutí

Arabismus mit und über Niederlagen hinweg. Joseph Samaha: Der soziale
Werdegang eines Intellektuellen der Beiruter Linken

Aya Khalil

Traduction : Katharine Throssell

We are a generation who were born during the Nakba¹ of 1948, who moved into politics after the 1967 defeat, and who became radical with the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Black September massacres. We were part of the two-years war,² our heads full of ambition and aspiration. We stood against the Israelis alone, under the imperturbable eyes of the Arab world. And we said our goodbyes yesterday to the first contingent of Palestinian soldiers [...] We feel a deep inner failing at this final scene in the first stage of our political life, but it is a provocative failing: it marks a new beginning that must be taken seriously by all. (Joseph Samaha, *al-Safir*, 22 August 1982)³
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1</figcaption></figure>

Portrait of Joseph Samaha.

Talal Salman's blog, former chief editor of the al-Safir⁴ newspaper, 2017.

1. Joseph Samaha (1949–2007) was thirty-three years old, and a journalist with *al-Safir*, one of the main newspapers in Beirut, when he wrote those lines, on 22 August 1982. It was the day after the first contingent of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO⁵) fighters left Beirut by boat, ending the Israeli siege of the city. On 30 August 1982 the final contingent weighed anchor, taking Yasser Arafat with them. The latter paid homage to Beirut, describing it as the “honorary capital of the Arab nation.”⁶ By accepting to capitulate, the PLO enacted defeat—not only their own but also more broadly that of the “Arab national movement”⁷ which had defended a more effective convergence between Arab nationalism and Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.

2. Arabism⁸ (*al-ʻurūba*) reflects a feeling of belonging to an Arab “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) with a shared destiny, and constitutes an embryonic form of nationalism, or “protonationalism” (Khalidi 1991a: 51). In this respect it precedes Arab nationalism (*al-qawmīya al-ʻarabīya*) as a project for the creation of an Arab state, but also forms its ideological substrate and transcends it, being both diffuse and malleable (Dakhli 2009a). Its roots can be found in the transformations of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century, and it developed alongside the rise of the press and the emergence of the figure of the Arab intellectual (Dakhli 2009b; Hourani 1983), taking shape in a movement advocating increased rights for Arab-speaking populations within the Ottoman Empire. The collapse of that empire in 1918 was followed by the development of Arab nationalism, as an expression of anticolonial nationalism in the face of the territorial partition of geographic Syria,⁹ and the mandates laid down by the San Remo Conference in 1920 (Choueiri 2000; Picaudou 2017). In the wake of the *Nakba* in 1948, Palestine became the main signifier of Arabism, its reservoir of affect, because the anticolonial struggle that played out there mobilized both Palestinian identity and Arab identity. But it was above all with
Gamal Abdel Nasser's (1918–1970) rise to power that Arab nationalism entered its hegemonic phase, becoming the state ideology in Egypt, and thus benefiting from powerful channels of communication (Dawisha 2005). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with the progress of the socialist camp and in spite of the conflict between communists and nationalists, the overlap between Arab nationalism and socialism increased¹⁰ (Rodinson 1982: 76-124). With the *Naksa*,¹¹ then Nasser's death in 1970s, and in light of the PLO's position in Lebanon,¹² the centre of the “Arab national movement” progressively shifted from Cairo to Beirut.

3

Indeed, although the *Naksa* entailed a clear “power of separation” (Bensa & Fassin 2002) in that it shifted regional political balances and generated a transformation of frameworks of political and intellectual socialization, it did not constitute a clean slate for Arabism (Abu-Rabi 2004: 10-11). The period of effervescence that it gave rise to, in Lebanon in particular (Agbaria 2020; Bardawil 2020; Traboulsi 1997), and that I refer to here as the “years 1967-1968,”¹³ in fact reflects the stability of the Arab nationalist hopes. I therefore suggest that it was the year 1982 that concluded the cycle of political power struggles begun in the early twentieth century and shaped by the quest for Arab unity. More specifically, the defeat of 1982, was added to those of 1967 and 1948, and to a certain extent completed them. This defeat sealed a historical turning point in that it was associated with the decline of “Arab socialism”¹⁴ and of the political left, and with economic liberalization in Arab countries (Hanieh 2013). Although Arab nationalist memory was marked by repeated defeats, as was the memory of the left (Traverso 2021), with which it partly overlaps, the Arab national imaginary did not disappear from the intellectual field after 1982. It continued to make headway, was subject to various periods of (re)shaping, and put under pressure by the rise of Islamist movements, which appropriated the themes of national liberation and anti-imperialism from the 1980s onward (Dot-Pouillard 2009). From 1982, the idea that the “Arabs are a people linked by special bonds of language and history [...], and that their political organization should in some way reflect this reality” (Khalidi 1991a: VII) was disconnected from any significant political dynamic. In this article it will be considered withing the ideological framework of “Arabism,” which is both broader and less rigid, and which encapsulates and extends beyond Arab nationalism and its political incarnations of the twentieth century.

4

Although largely unrecognized, this persistence of Arabism in post-1982 Arab intellectual spaces calls for a new area of research. Following the work of Rashid Khalidi (1991b), Youssef Choueiri (2000, 2020), and Leyla Dakhli (2009a), this article intends to contribute to a social “micro-history” (Charle 1993) of post-1982 Arabism, through the biography of Joseph Samaha, an intellectual¹⁵ and major figure in the Beirut press between the 1970s-2000s. His trajectory is seen as shedding light on the social factors that structure the historical continuity of Arabism (Harris & McQuade 2015; Piketty 1999). Considered here as the unique product of structural socializing experiences and contexts, what Lahire (2013) calls “the folds of the social,” the trajectory of Joseph Samaha provides a prime perspective on the trajectories of the Arab nationalist generation and the left-wing intellectuals of the “1967-1968 years” in Lebanon. Far from reflecting a process of “disenchantment” (Bardawil 2020) with regards to the socialist-inspired project of Arab unity, this trajectory was characterized by various shifts and turns that reflect both a relative stability of his Arabist perspective, and “conversions” in the sense of “transformations affecting ways of being and thinking” induced by movements in the social space (Tissot 2005: 15). Given this,
and in spite of the political and structural transformations, and numerous fluctuations, how did Samaha achieve a form of ideological “constancy” (Gaïti 2001) with Arab nationalism? By studying his trajectory as a “series of successively occupied positions [...] in a space which itself is constantly evolving and which is subject to incessant transformations” (Bourdieu 2000a: 304) this article seeks to shed light on the social and historical logics behind Samaha’s positions, as well as though contributing to his continued support for Arabism.

Drawing on research that combines the socio-history of political ideas with the sociology of intellectuals (Bourdieu 1985; Gaboriaux & Skornicki 2017; Hayat & Weisbein 2020), my analysis combines several kinds of sources. Firstly, Samaha's own writings¹⁶, that were published posthumously in four collections, bringing together his articles from *al-Safir*, *al-Yawm al-sābī’, *al-Hayāt* and *al-Akhbār*, along with the online archives¹⁷ of the newspapers *al-Safir* and *al-Akhbār*. Secondly, it draws on semi-directive interviews with twelve of his colleagues, friends, and family members, in order to reconstruct his trajectory, and thirdly, it draws on texts about Joseph Samaha. The overall reflection on Arabism is embedded in research marked by several study trips to Lebanon between 2019 and 2022, during which interviews were conducted with 41 intellectuals and activists. The methodology of this research consists in combining the analysis of Samaha’s writing with that of his social trajectory, structured by the Beirut intellectual field and his transnational movements, and the political conjuncture of the period between the 1980s and 2000s.

# 1. Arab Nationalism at the Heart of a Generation of Beirut Intellectuals

Samaha's family and secondary socialization, as well as the social and historical circumstances that were the backdrop to them, are presented here because they were the first matrixes of his affective and political dispositions—not through the “conscious transmission of the representations most directly linked to the sphere of the political” (Bourdieu 2013: 548), but rather because they constituted the world of which he was a part, and which he incorporated (Bourdieu 2000b). Samaha was born in 1949 in Khenchara, a village in the region of Metn, to a relatively privileged Greek Catholic family. When he was four years old, his father, a renowned architect, died prematurely. As a result, his mother, Cécilia Sarkis, found herself raising her two sons alone, with very few resources, living on a minimal sporadic income, spending winters in a dilapidated house in Beirut's Achrafieh district and summers in Baynou, the village his family originated from, perched in the Akkar mountains.¹⁸ From this tangible knowledge of social inequality, both Cécilia Sarkis and her son developed a keen sense of “class consciousness,”¹⁹ a process encouraged by Arab nationalist and left-wing radio and press at the time. They identified with Nasser, the tanned Egyptian *za’im* (leader) whom they saw as the voice of the Arab people, where Camille Chamoun (President of Lebanon from 1952 to 1958), seemed to be more the voice of the Francophile bourgeoisie of Achrafieh (Joris 1999). Arab nationalism was thus present in his Samaha’s home—particularly through the figure of Nasser, whose portrait hung on one of the walls—and was closely intertwined with the issue of social justice.

The *Naksa* of June 1967 was a sudden rent in social reality for Arabs, galvanized as they were by recent anticolonial victories, particularly that in Algeria (Rahal 2022:
Chapter 20). But even though it was a shock, this defeat did not lead to despondency; revolutionary action took priority over “messianic hope” (Traverso 2021: 31). The *Naksa* gave rise to a new political trajectory in Mashriq, which in Lebanon meant a restructuring of the political and intellectual field among Arab left-wing nationalists (Kazziha 1975; Sayigh 1997). It was a “foundational event” in the sense of Gérard Mauger (2015) in that it provoked a political crisis that shook the social order, modified frames of socialization, and sparked a revolutionary process in Lebanon— which ultimately failed. Several cohorts of activists, among them Samaha, took part in the revolutionary dynamic in Beirut in the “1967-1968 years,” marked by the driving presence of the PLO/Fatah.²⁰ They were “caught up” in it (Pascal 1995 [1669]), and also became agents of the frames of political and intellectual socialization of post-*Naksa* Beirut. In this they represent an intellectual “generation unit” (Mannheim 1952), that is, a generational group characterized by a “specific mode of experience and thought” (ibid.: 68), in this case dominated by the ideas of Palestine liberation, Arab unity, and revolutionary socialism. At the beginning of this intellectual generation there was not only a founding event but also the conjunction between the memory of the 1967 defeat and lasting exposure to the same sociopolitical environment (Catier & Spire 2011) formed by the political and intellectual spaces of the left, Arab nationalists, and Palestinians then flourishing in Beirut.

With anticolonialism and Arabism as their common denominator, the parties that emerged after the *Naksa* expressed serious criticism of Nasser's regime (without, however, disavowing Nasser), and demanded a radicalization on the left, echoing the revolutionary wave of the *Global Sixties* (Klimke & Nolan 2018). For the “New Left” inspired by Che Guevara and the Vietnamese resistance (Guirguis 2018), and for the renewed Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), the only reliable revolutionary method for this was a people's war simultaneously aimed at Arab national liberation and socialist revolution, with Palestinian resistance as the keystone. Moreover, in the context of this political dynamic and with the arrival of numerous Syrian, Iraqi, and Egyptian intellectuals fleeing censure, the publishing and press sectors in Lebanon expanded significantly during the 1960s and 1970s (Mermier 2005; Raymond 2021). The latter were characterized by the increased presence of intellectuals from the working and middle classes, resulting from the democratization of access to education in post-independent Arab states including in Lebanon where the only public university in the country, the Lebanese University (LU), was founded in 1951 (Favier 2004; Yapp 2021).

It was at the heart of this “political volcano”²¹ marked by a striking permeability between the intellectual and political fields that Samaha gained his first experiences of politics. For a short time he was close to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) of Antoun Saadé, that was particularly active in rural areas in the North of Lebanon, where Baynou is, before moving closer to Yassine Al-Hafez and Elias Murqos,²² two theorists of Marxist-inspired Arab nationalism. While he was a student at LU, Samaha joined the Arab Revolutionary Workers' Party, then newly founded by Yassine Al-Hafez, before leaving it because it was too marginal in the political landscape. In 1972 he turned toward the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL),²³ a party that was recent and dynamic in universities where its intellectual effervescence attracted students (Favier 2004). As a recent philosophy graduate, he began working as a journalist in 1972 for the magazine *al-Hurriyya*, which was created in 1960 under the auspices of the Arab Nationalists' Movement (ANM) and later shared between the OCAL and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). This magazine was a
place for developing critical thinking at the intersection between Marxism and Arab nationalism, as well as a tribune for debates anchored in militant practice, and was distributed to the four corners of the Arab world “from Morocco to Oman.”²⁴ The OCAL, of which Samaha became a member of the central committee, and *al-Hurriyya*, were important contexts for his socialization. He forged lasting friendships there, with Zuhair Rahal (1948-), a leading figure in the OCAL, Fawwaz Traboulsi (1941-), a former Baath Party activist and co-founder of the OCAL, and Bilal Al-Hassan (1939-2024), a member of the PLO executive committee. At the time, Samaha was not yet 30 years old; his socialization and political experiences in Beirut had shaped his Arab nationalist and Marxist intellectual dispositions, and maintained and reinforced those acquired earlier during childhood and adolescence.

10 In March 1974, the daily newspaper *al-Safir* was founded, and Joseph Samaha joined it from the outset, along with his friends Bilal Al-Hassan and Hazem Saghieh (1951-). This paper caused an upheaval in the Lebanese press. Founded by Talal Salman (1938-2023), a seasoned journalist with an extensive network in Arab political and press circles, *al-Safir* established itself as a major space for left-wing and Arab nationalist ideological production, a context where Sadat's Egypt, Syria, or Iraq did not provide the conditions for such a platform. The paper had two slogans, “the voice of the voiceless” and “newspaper of Lebanon in the Arab nation, newspaper of the Arab nation in Lebanon,” and quotations from Nasser covered its pages from the very first issue right up to the last one, published four decades later.

11 The plurality of viewpoints it represented and the strong symbolic capital of some of its contributors earned *al-Safir* the reputation of a high-quality newspaper, and in just a few years it became a close competitor to *al-Nahār*, its centre-right rival, in terms of circulation. Samaha quickly established himself as one of the paper's most prominent writers. His mastery of the French language meant he could provide analyses of national, regional, and international current affairs, and the positions he expressed were genuine political statements. In this respect, Samaha represents the figure of an intellectual associated with a political movement in action—one formed by the alliance of the Lebanese left with Palestinian organizations—who was committed to thinking about the world in order to transform it, who expressed his views through a periodical with a broad readership, at the crossroads between the worlds of intellectualism and activism.

12 In 1977, aged 26, Samaha left *al-Safir* to become editor-in-chief of *al-Watan*, the mouthpiece of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), which brought together the progressive forces allied with the PLO during some of the Civil War (1975-1982), as a way of putting his intellectual activity more directly at the service of his political convictions. However, he resigned a few months later, dissatisfied with the paucity of this journalistic experience,²⁵ but also because of political differences.

13 Indeed, after 1979, in a Lebanon torn by civil war, Joseph Samaha accused the LNM of pandering to sectarian pressure,²⁶ and distanced himself from the OCAL. He decided to continue his studies in Paris, where he obtained a post-graduate diploma (DEA) in political science, before returning to his position at *al-Safir* in Beirut. Following the departure of the PLO in late summer 1982, the Lebanese capital was invaded by the Israeli army, and in September, members of the Phalangist militia carried out a massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. In the wake of this event, Samaha went through a period of indecision, a sense of failure mingled with his
despondency. Running counter to the position of the Lebanese left, which had embarked upon resistance to the Israeli occupation,²⁷ he wrote a series of articles that revealed his doubts and ambivalence. In them, he argued in favor of dialogue and moderate opposition to Amine Gemayel,²⁸ President of Lebanon and leader of the right-wing Christian Phalangist party (Kataeb Party), out of “realism” and a concern to save “the unity of the country”.²⁹ Finally, like many militants of the Beirut intellectual generation of the “1967–1968 years,” he resigned himself to migration. Bilal Al-Hassan suggested he come to Paris for a new editorial project, following in the footsteps of the exiled PLO. He left Lebanon in 1984.

## 2. From One Defeat to Another: Arabism in the Wake of the Exiled PLO

14 The more radical political options to bring about the liberation of Palestine, Arab unity, and socialism, incarnated by the left-wing Arab movements of the 1960s and 1970s, also ended in defeat. Unlike previous defeats, this one did not lead—either immediately or in the medium term—to an organized political alternative based on Arab nationalist ideology, able to take up the torch. In this respect, the year 1982 is a pivotal date closing a historical cycle and confirming a political dynamic whose main episodes took place in the year 1979: the signing of the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty by Sadat's Egypt, the advent of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Although these three events were not connected to each other, together they contributed to the decline of the Arab socialist and nationalist movement, the rise of Islamism, and the strengthening of sectarian logics, correlated to the advance of neoliberalism in the 1980s (Hanieh 2013) and the waning of the left around the world (Keucheyan 2013).

15 Yet Arabism has not disappeared. The Arab “imagined community” continued to take shape, particularly though exiles living in Paris, although its conditions of production and circulation were altered. Indeed, from 1982 onwards, a community of Beirut intellectuals formed in the French capital, brought together not by age, but by the founding event of the *Naksa* and a shared experience of the PLO/Fatah (Ihl 2002; Mauger 2011, 2015). They came together around the publication of Arabic-language periodicals, of which there were more than thirty in the early 1980s, thanks to a political climate favorable to the Arab press (Abdulkarim 1993). In this space of possibilities, the magazine *al-Yawm al-sābiʾ* emerged, at the instigation of Yasser Arafat who was exiled in Tunis, but entirely conceived by Bilal Al-Hassan and Joseph Samaha, who immediately joined the project. Financed by the PLO and distributed in the Maghreb and Mashriq, the forty-seven-page weekly contained a political section and a cultural one, with articles on current political affairs, as well as film, poetry, and book reviews (Khalil 2022). It corresponds in every respect to a “political-cultural journal” (Raymond 2021), typical of Beirut periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s, in that it was anchored in the political issues of the moment, while also including reflections from academics concerned with the longer term.

16 Now freed from the constraints of urgency, Samaha's thinking expanded and he was able to engage in abundant reading.³⁰ He had space to express it more fully in *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ*, as his column *Bilā dafāf* (Shoreless) covered a full page of the weekly. With his dense, argumentative writing style, Samaha devoted most of his texts to analysing the
Arab regional situation, seen as a whole and intertwined with the Palestinian question. He also had a detailed knowledge of the Israeli political scene, to which he devoted several articles. This was the time for him to take stock. Continuing a line of thought he had begun in the pages of *al-Safir*, Samaha deplored the fact that the groups of the “New Left” (in particular the OCAL) had broken away from the Nasserist experience, on the basis of a critique that he considered “superficial.”³¹ The Arabist language he used not only provided his interpretation, but also worded as a plea for the contemporary revival of the Arab nationalist project.³² Other texts focused on providing a commentary on political and intellectual life in the west and took the form of a “counter-ideological activity” (Garo 2009: 66), when he denounced the “conservative revolution”³³ in France for example, which aimed to discredit third-worldism.

Because of its closeness to the exiled PLO, which had widespread popular sympathy as a representative of the Palestinian cause, but also because of the significant symbolic capital of its contributors, *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* was quite prestigious among the cultivated Arab middle and upper classes. So much so that in the 1980s, publishing in *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* became a key way for intellectuals to gain recognition. Described as a “place which marks out and consecrates” (Boschetti 1988: 139), the weekly thus imposed its vision of the world and its divisions, and in so doing helped to ensure the continuity of Arabist ideas centred around the Palestinian question. In this sense, the magazine fostered “the work of loyalty to the past and filiation with oneself” (Collovald 2001). For Samaha it provided extensive symbolic gratification, and genuine consecration for intellectual work requiring nothing less than the revival of his embodied intellectual dispositions.

However, all of this required reshaping. In the pages of *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ*, Samaha in fact followed Yasser Arafat’s strategy. Against a backdrop of division within the Palestinian national movement, with supporters of Arafat’s negotiations with Israel on one side, and on the other, dissidents in favor of continuing the armed struggle supported by Hafez Al-Assad, who was seeking to force his control over the Palestinian situation, Yasser Arafat succeeded in maintaining unity within the ranks of the PLO. In this respect, the magazine *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* was an important tool for popularizing his strategy within the PLO and on the Arab scene. By supporting Yasser Arafat’s plan to establish a Palestinian state, which meant renouncing the idea of a democratic state over the whole of Palestine (Ravenel 2007), Samaha was in fact revising his political positions. Moreover, the uncertainty surrounding the negotiations and the legitimacy of the PLO guaranteed the latter support from a broad intellectual base that saw the organization as the only credible option to promote the Palestinian cause, which was seen as both an intermediary stage and as the culmination of the Arab nationalist project.³⁴ As a result, for several years the network of Arab intellectuals around *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* benefited from the financial support of the PLO and contributed to keeping a liberatory Arab national vision alive.

In 1987, the first *intifada* revived the idea of national liberation. Samaha saw it as a breach in the leaden shroud that weighed on the regional political landscape.

> It is not surprising that the children of this generation look at the national *intifada* in the occupied land, identify with the second generation that shaped it, and consider that their first clear victory. This is the victory of a people, not a regime, nor a religious group, and it is directly a part of a national Arab movement as a whole. ³⁵

In the above passage, the *intifada* heralds the return to a history that was suddenly suspended in 1982, through the “occupied land.” It is perceived in relation to the
dynamics of Arab politics, which it is capable of redirecting towards a better future, anticipated in the use of the word “victory.” Moreover, the euphoria generated by the declaration of an independent Palestinian state, proclaimed in Algiers on 15 November 1988,³⁶ even though it meant making concessions that Samaha points out in his writings,³⁷ seemed to dull the pain of earlier failures. However, the joy was short-lived. In 1991, two historical events, occurring almost simultaneously, marked a radical break in a social temporality that they in many respects enclose (Hobsbawm 1994): the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War. These episodes produce synchronized effects, that can be seen in the Madrid conference, which aimed to promote a so-called Middle East peace process under the aegis of the United States (Laurens 2005). When certain Arab countries joined the allied coalition against Iraq, breaking the agreement within the Arab League, where only Iraq, Libya, and the PLO spoke out against the war, the utopia of Arab unity and the advent of socialism seemed further away than ever. If we consider Arabism as it was embodied in the 1960s and 1970s as the local manifestation of a worldwide revolutionary movement (Mandel 1979), the defeat of socialism in 1991 encompasses and confirms the defeat of 1982.

### 3. Rethinking Arab Unity in a Changed World

21

Without financial resources from the Arab peninsula, due to its support for Iraq, the PLO/Fatah decided to put an end to *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ*, while increasing its diplomatic negotiations. To a certain extent the political purpose of the paper had come to an end. In 1993, the Oslo Accords established the principle of mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel and laid the foundations for future negotiations based on an autonomous regime over 22% of historic Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) in exchange for Israeli withdrawal and a freeze on new settlements. At this time, Joseph Samaha accepted a proposal from his friend Hazem Saghieh to join him in London as editor of the daily paper *al-Hayāt*, a Lebanese-origin newspaper now owned by Saudi prince Khalid Ben Sultan. From the 1990s onwards, the hegemony of the London-based Saudi-owned press increased, gradually transforming the Arab media space (Brisson 2016: 819–821; Mermier 2002) and contributing to the retreat of Arab nationalism and the development of liberal discourse. However, it was not simply an instrument of propaganda (Bendahan & Nader 2022). With the goal of becoming a key player in the Arab press, it gave plenty of leeway to the Beirut intellectuals it coveted for their journalistic expertise. So much so that in *al-Hayāt*, a newspaper distributed in London and New York as well as in the Arab capitals,³⁸ Samaha was able to clearly express his opposition to the Oslo Accords.³⁹ This allowed him to clarify his thinking now that he was no longer professionally linked to the PLO/Fatah, which resulted in a radicalization of his positions.

22

In 1993, he published *Salām ʿabir. Nahū ḫal ʿarabī li-al-mass’ala al-yahūdīya* (*A Passing peace. Towards an Arab solution to the “Jewish question,”* Dār al-Nahār, Beirut), which opens with the observation that “the nation is defeated,” (Samaha 1993: 9) and in which he set out to dismantle the liberal discursive edifice consecrated by the end of the Cold War and ordered around the signifier “peace.” After noting his intellectual filiations with Yassine Al-Hafez and Elias Murqos in the preamble, Samaha argues that the Arab *umma* (nation) has been grappling for almost a century with Western colonial domination, of which the forms have changed over time, and within which Israel plays a role in
impeding its full political and economic sovereignty (ibid.: 20). In this text he reminds readers that the “Jewish question” is a European antisemitic construct that resulted in “one of the greatest crimes in human history” (ibid.: 26) and evokes the alternative proposals to Zionism that the Bund and the Communist movement elaborated early on. He proposes a way out of the Arab-Israeli conflict that would integrate Jewish citizens into a multi-faith, democratic state. He also insists on the need to reinvent a project for Arab unity, based on a return to the fertile past of Nasserism (ibid.: 137), as the only way to bring about the “aspirations for independence, development, complete liberation, justice, and democracy” (ibid.: 47). He warns against the Islamist alternative which, while it has the benefit of opposing American influence, cannot lead to a “happy ending” because of its erroneous worldview (ibid.: 134). This text was therefore Samaha’s manifesto for rebuilding Arab nationalism, in the face of the US military and political offensive, which he saw as a resurgence of colonialism. For him, this resonated with the historical conditions of the emergence of Arab nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and thus reflected a historical continuity in regional political life. Nevertheless, Joseph Samaha wrote this book between Paris and London, and while it certainly resonated in Lebanon and in the intellectual network he had helped to weave, it was not linked to a political dynamic.

23 For the first time, and as a result of the reconfiguration of the Arab political landscape on the cusp of the 1990s, Samaha no longer has any political ties. On the other hand, his name now was now associated with such symbolic capital that it was sufficient in itself to ground the legitimacy of his positions (Sapiro 2009).

## 4. Return to Lebanon: The Rise of “Nationalist Islamism”⁴⁰

24 In 1995, Joseph Samaha returned to a relatively stable Lebanon, a move that was much commented in Beirut intellectual circles (Kassir 1995), and took up the post of editor in chief at *al-Safir*. Since the Taif Agreement of 1990, the political life of the country, which had been under Syrian tutelage, had progressively returned to normal. Businessman Rafik Hariri was appointed Prime Minister, and a new political and economic era began in Lebanon, characterized by a massive influx of dollars from the Gulf States and an intensification of sectarian logics (Corm 2005). The Lebanese left was excluded from this new national agreement, and therefore from institutional political competition. It was also excluded from the resistance to the Israeli occupation, because of opposition from Syria but also because it lacked resources as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been a precious ally of the PCL. It thus emerged defeated from fifteen years of war.

25 As soon as he returned, Samaha joined in the debates that were raging around the scattered Lebanese left. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, around activist groups that were emerging in the universities but also in the PCL, the Popular Nasserist Organization in Saida, and around the MP Najah Wakim, there were discussions, petitions, and timid mobilizations to reshape the landscape of the left against “Harirism” and the sectarian system. Thus, Samaha accompanied his friends Fawwaz Traboulsi, Zuhair Rahal and other figures from the PCL, OCAL, and various factions on the left, in running the Meeting Club (Nādi al-Liqā’) between 1996 and 1998. This was a place that aimed to create a new, unifying, ideological framework.⁴¹ In this context, he published Qaḍā’, lā
qadar. Fī akhlāq al-jumhūriyya al-thāniyya (A Determination that does not Arise from Fate: on the Creation of the Second Republic, Dār al-Jadid, Beirut) in 1996, a short work in which he drew up an indictment against the liberalism of Rafik Hariri, denounced the imperiousness of the Lebanese state, and called for the left to become the reincarnation of Arabism in the sense of a “civilizational and cultural belonging that participates in a shared destiny,” and suggested they seriously consider taking power (Samaha 1993: 89–90). The book was well received on the left, as it was reorganizing, and was popular particularly among students,⁴² which allowed Samaha to make new connections with young militants. However, having tired of the discussions that always seemed to postpone the perspective of a new political organization, Samaha became convinced that “journalism was his party.”⁴³ In other words it was via journalism that he could most effectively impact the social world.

26

At the same time, his perception of Hezbollah had evolved considerably since he returned to Lebanon. Although in the 1980s the Islamic Resistance of Lebanon (IRL), the armed wing of Hezbollah, had developed according to logics that were sometimes convergent,⁴⁴ sometimes divergent or hostile⁴⁵ to the left, the shared experience of struggling against Israeli occupation in South Lebanon, with the human losses, and time spent in Israeli detention centres in Ansar and Atlit (in the south of Haifa), and then Khiam, created solidarities and founded friendships between activists on both sides (Bechara 2000; Dot-Pouillard 2009). It is also worth noting that certain leaders of Hezbollah began their training in the ranks of Fatah when it was based in Lebanon, while others who represent a marginal portion of the social base of the party were former LCP, OCAL, or Arab Socialist Action Party⁴⁶ (ASAP) activists. These partisan movements at the very least reflect a porosity in the ideological boundaries between these groups, but also what Edward Said (1990: 77) called the “primacy of the geographical.” The question of colonialism and its corollary, national liberation (al-taḥarrur al-waṭanī), has over-determined regional political life since the end of the imperial era, with lasting impact, particularly due to the colonial situation in Palestine, but also because of the belligerent interventions by the USA in the Middle East (Abdel Malek 1984; Abu-Rabi 2004: 63).

27

That this field of “resistance” (muqāwama) facilitated convergence did not detract from the elements of dissension between Islamist factions and the Arabist left. As far as Hezbollah was concerned it was likely the evolution towards ideological maturity in the 1990s, making Islam more a means, a resource to be mobilized in aide of a struggle, rather than an end in itself, that helped attenuate defiance (Burgat & Rey 2022; Daher 2014: 25). In this respect, the newspaper *al-Safir* was both a reflection and an acceleration of the rapprochement between Arabism and this “Islam of resistance” (Daher 2014: 97). Indeed, between 1988 and 1996 the editorials by Talal Salman evolved significantly. From being anti-IRL, which he saw as an extension of the Iranian Revolution, criticized for its excess and religious zealousness,⁴⁷ the editor in chief of the paper came to applaud Hezbollah’s engagement and the fact they “practiced what they preached.”⁴⁸ But it was above all the Israeli operations “Operation Accountability” in 1993 and the “Grapes of Wrath” in 1996 that popularized the Shia party and produced a relative consensus on its action. Thus, in the middle of the military attack, on 14 April 1996, Talal Salman entitled his editorial “We are all Hezbollah.”⁴⁹ In it, he described the fighters as the children of Lebanon who were fighting for their land
against occupation, and argued that this was a “national” movement, even though it
was couched in Islamism.

5. The Social and Political Logics Behind “Conversion”

28 Samaha’s “conversion,” or shift in perspective, while he was still on the editorial committee of *al-Safir*, should be understood in light of the unique role of Palestine in Arab contemporary memory,⁵⁰ the decline of the left, and the collective aspect of the shift toward Hezbollah. Following the war of April 1996 he published his first interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of the party, which contributed to creating a place for Hezbollah in the left-wing Arabist intellectual space.⁵¹ Moreover, this evolution could only grow given the social connections that were behind it; indeed, members of Hezbollah were accessible, they were neighbors and relatives of many left-wing activists in Lebanon. This spatial and social proximity, combined with the shared discourse on the fight against American hegemony (*al-haymana al-amrīkīya*), colonialism-imperialism (*al-istiʿmār*) and occupation (*al-iḥtilāl*), encouraged exchange and political proximity. In this respect the meeting between Joseph Samaha and Ibrahim Al-Amine (1965-), a young journalist at *al-Safir* since 1992 and an activist with the PCL up until 1993, was decisive. Originally from South Lebanon, the son of communist parents from a Shia family in which there were several theologians,⁵² Ibrahim Al-Amine indeed had a network of contacts with Hezbollah that he made available to *al-Safir*, acting as a mediator between these different social spaces.

29 Through repeated meetings with supporters or members of the Shia party, in the context of the struggle against Israeli occupation in South Lebanon and the series of wars between the IRL and Israel during the 1990s, Samaha moved in a social space that was previously relatively unknown, and from that point redefined his political positions. Tactical convergences and alliances were envisaged with political actors from an ideological tradition opposed to his own, on the basis of anticolonial considerations. This was what was responsible for the “conversion” which was not a disillusioned disengagement, nor a rupture with the ideals of his youth, nor the adoption of a new ideological framework—all things this concept is habitually associated with⁵³—but rather a reshaping of his way of seeing and interpreting conjuncture, the result of a subjective work combining loyalty to oneself, that is one’s heritage, intellectual dispositions, and external constraints (Tissot 2005).

30 Thus, this move toward a rapprochement between Arab nationalists and Islamists in the name of shared concerns, which was in no means specific to Lebanon,⁵⁴ was reinforced by the withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon in 2000, after 22 years of occupation. For the first time in the history of the Arab-Israeli war, a political movement managed to liberate occupied territories with nothing in exchange. In Lebanon, this episode was highly emotional, particularly for the populations in the south, but also in left-wing and Arab nationalist circles. Described as the “Day of Victory and Liberation,” in the pages of *al-Safir*,⁵⁵ it resonated with a “collective memory” (Halbwachs 1997) that was marked by numerous defeats, and seen as heralding a future full of hope.⁵⁶ The newspaper *al-Safir* covered the event for several weeks, alternating between dithyrambic editorials by Talal Salman, and numerous other articles and reports.⁵⁷ In this period, Samaha was working as a journalist in London, for the newspaper *al-Hayāt*, that he had joined in 1998 when he had been
invited to run the politics section of the paper. In 2000, *al-Hayāt* opened a new office in Beirut, and Samaha directed it. However, confronted with constraints that were both ideological and professional,⁵⁸ he took the opportunity proffered by Talal Salman to take the reins at *al-Safir* in 2001. Now editor-in-chief, he tried to revive the newspaper, to modernize it, changing its organization and recruiting young writers.⁵⁹ However, his ambitions for change ran up against both the inertia of the newspaper, as well as against the limits laid down by its owner.

31

Between 2001 and 2006, a series of upheavals shook political life in the Arab world, from the second Palestinian *intifada* to the Iraq war in 2003, as well as the murder of Rafik Hariri in 2005, which was followed by substantial demonstrations in Lebanon resulting in the end of Syrian tutelage. In this turbulent context, Samaha was particularly prolific. His intellectual authority meant that his editorials in *al-Safir* were received as statements that had to be read, both for those who shared his views, and those who disagreed.⁶⁰ Faced with the liberal Arab trend that had emerged in the intellectual regional field since the 1970s (Abu-Rabi 2004; Kandil 2011), Samaha had developed a dynamic analysis that sought to shed light on the links between liberal discourse, neoliberal economics, and western interference in the Arab East. Through a didactic presentation of analyses shaped by Arab nationalist intellectual tools, he set out to dissect the function of the term “democracy”⁶¹ in the language of Western diplomacy and the press, and to clarify the meaning of Arabism as a bulwark against US plans to “fragment” the Arab nation.⁶² The Arabism/anticolonialism pairing was redefined in the specific contradictions of the moment, as the US offensive intensified and the “New Middle East” project promoted by the Bush administration took shape.

32

Once again rooted in a political field he intended to influence, Samaha's political interventions in this context aimed to defend the legitimacy of Hezbollah, with which he had formed ties, particularly in the face of calls for its disarmament, whether those were from the United Nations Security Council or from Lebanese political players.⁶³ In so doing, Samaha once again playing the role of the intellectual-companion, as he had previously for the LNM and the PLO, contributing, without being a member of the party, to raising support for Hezbollah in Arabist circles. As he was inscribed in social worlds that are “multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory” (Lahire 2011: 17), he seemed to draw personal coherence from them, providing a left-wing, Arab nationalist intellectual framework to what he considered to be the key resistance movement of the time, whose Islamic references have faded into the background. This rapprochement with Hezbollah was in fact a pragmatic alliance, with no incidence on his categories of perception, and its legacy was at the very least fruitful because it led to the creation of the newspaper *al-Akhbār*.

## 6. *Al-Akhbār*, the Social Construction of a Renewed Arabism

33

Emanating from a political field that was reorganized on the one hand, and by a protest movement of young Arabs seeking democracy on the other, the paper *al-Akhbār* crystallized the meeting between Beirut's left-wing journalists, and a nationalist Islamism. It emerged thanks to the extent of Ibrahim Al-Amine and Joseph Samaha's social resources, the latter being one of the most popular editorialists in the Arab press at the time, with significant political resources with Hezbollah and Michel Aoun's Free
Patriotic Movement (FPM).⁶⁴ He also had financial capital from former Nasserists and Baathists who had moved into business. The mobilization of these different networks generated sufficient financial means to launch the newspaper. Although the *al-Akhbār* project began in 2005, the first issue came out on the day after the 33-day war ended, on 14 August 2006, in a period where time seemed condensed. In his editorial, entitled “The Right Timing,” Samaha presented the editorial line of this new journalistic “gamble”:

> We know it's a gamble, but it's a calculated one. We will undertake this by declaring that, politically, we belong to the camp that rejects hegemony, which stretches from the heart of the United States to the Far East, Africa, South America and Europe. By also declaring that, professionally, we stand for plurality, democracy, objectivity, modernity and creative culture. [...] Lebanon, and the whole region, are at a decisive turning point. [...] Before 12 July, Lebanon was a paralyzed country and a farm that was wrongly called a state. We must prevent the restoration of the farm in order to advance towards the building of a citizen state [...] capable of incorporating this amazing will to triumph over obstacles. A state capable of seeing resistance—any resistance—as a nerve that tightens the national fabric, strengthens its tenacity, defends its Arab identity, and prevents it from slipping into the great ruin borne by the illusion of “neutrality,” which would deprive the Arab nation of Lebanon's valuable contribution.⁶⁵

34

The goal was therefore to open up an intellectual space for the broader public, that would serve as a point of passage and exchange between ideological traditions, in this case between the Arabist left and the “resistance” whose epithet “Islamic” was so secondary that it was not specified in the citation. This was an unprecedented political synthesis, in short, based on “anti-imperialism, Palestine as an existential question, democracy, equality, and social justice as a political model, and a modern culture that is attentive to its heritage.”⁶⁶ This editorial line was different from that of *al-Safir* in that it aspired to overcoming the sectarian divides and reflecting and conquering Lebanese youth, both Muslim and Christian, who were concerned about democratic freedoms, equal rights for women, social issues, and so forth. It also clearly accepted its role as a left-wing supporter of Hezbollah, which benefited from a certain popular support since the tipping points of the liberation of Southern Lebanon in 2000, and the July war in 2006. In this sense *al-Akhbār* is an institution that builds bridges with the militant spheres of its time, while also extending the “legitimate problematic” (Bourdieu 2010: 400) of unity and Arab liberation, as the principle of this worldview, into the threshold of the twenty-fist century.

35

Through *al-Akhbār* Samaha returned to the militant journalism of *al-Ḥurriyya*, just as he repeated the experience of *al-Yawm al-sābī* through the pan-Arab intellectual dynamism that drove the paper, around which a social circle formed, at the crossroads of *al-Safir*, *al-Hayāt*, *al-Yawm al-sābī*, and to a lesser extent *al-Nahār*, and which connected various poles of the Arab world. The remarkable success of the newspaper, whether in terms of audience—it rose to equal *al-Safir* and *al-Nahār*—or intellectual stimulation, demonstrated the relevance of this approach, both politically and journalistically. In this respect *al-Akhbār* was a moment of “re-enchantment” (Collovald 2001; Pagis 2014: 173) for Samaha and his colleagues, who participated in its launch.⁶⁷ Moreover, the journal contributed to creating a new common sense, a form of “neo-Arabism” (Choueiri 2000: 213) reconciled with certain nationalist-Islamist movements and at the same time projecting itself in a socialist-inspired democratic political future, without there being any incompatibilities in that. On the contrary, in
the newspaper's offices in Beirut, the portraits of Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Angela Davis hung alongside those of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat, and those of Abbas Moussaoui, and Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, in apparent harmony.

Samaha and his colleagues used *al-Akhbār* to give substance to a political hypothesis that was absent from the political field, but which was undoubtedly latent, scattered, or at any rate emotionally available, in Lebanese society. The newspaper subsequently acted as a catalyst for a reshaping of Arabism, open to the symbolic universe of Islamism and in tune with the democratic and social concerns of young people. As Maxime Rodinson (1982: 106) observed with regard to Islam and communism, “concordism” seems possible as long as these political families are united behind “shared objectives” relating to national liberation and the anticolonial struggle. *Al-Akhbār* was in fact part of this type of concord which, without leading to ideological syncretism, facilitates transfers and influence between the two political traditions. Nevertheless, this gamble built on the primacy of resistance would reveal its limits with the Syrian uprising of 2011.

***

On 25 February 2007, Joseph Samaha died suddenly from a heart attack during a trip to London where he was visiting his childhood friend Hazem Saghieh.⁶⁸ On his desk at the *al-Akhbār* office there was a framed photo of a smiling Nasser. This figure had followed him since childhood and enriched his writings, as a guardian of the memory of past struggles, it represented the hopes for an Arab world united in socialism and freed from colonialism. Although the defeat of 1982, coupled with regional and international transformations, put an end to the last major political shifts structured by Arabism in Beirut, yet the latter continued to inform political debates in the Arab world. In this respect, Samaha's sinuous trajectory sheds light on the social and historical conditions of the circulation of Arabism from the 1980s to the 2000s, as well as the tensions and reshuffles generated by interactions with a changing society (Ihl 2002).

Thus, the press in the broadest sense—newspapers and magazines—constituted a central vector in the production of the base of Arabist ideas, even after the 1982 defeat, through the financial capital of the PLO in the case of the *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* magazine, of political players such as the LNM or Libya (among others) in the case of *al-Safīr*, and finally of Arab nationalist patrons and those close to Hezbollah and the FPM in the case of *al-Akhbār*. Because these were major intellectual spaces, generating recognition (i.e. symbolic capital), they helped maintain the legitimacy of Arabist categories of thought in the absence of any significant Arab nationalist force in the political field in the region.

But the continued relevance of Arabism was also ensured by the impact of the generation of Beirut intellectuals that was formed in the wake of the *Naksa*, to which Samaha belonged. Although scattered by migration and exile, and weakened by successive defeats, the militant-journalists of this generation, who shared a socialization combined of Marxism and Arab nationalism, worked to disseminate and reshape Arabist perceptions through the editorial offices in which they pursued their careers, and through which they maintained important social ties. As a result, from the 1980s to the 2000s, Arabism continued to represent a trend of contemporary Arab political thought that, although minor, was very much alive and focused on the idea of
an Arab “imagined community” to be rebuilt or rethought, rather than on the project of building an Arab state.

40

From 1982, and over the course of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, in *al-Safir* and *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ*, and in *al-Hayāt* and *al-Akhbār*, which formed intellectual spaces with wide audiences, Joseph Samaha advocated a socialist leaning and democratic Arab nationalism from which would spring the possibility of an Arab renaissance. His ideological “constancy” was thus achieved through the journalistic institutions that enabled him to make his political ideas coincide with his professional career, and through reconfigured but still active networks of social ties that maintained his embodied intellectual dispositions. Moreover, Samaha’s Arabist reading was also nourished by historical circumstances. While the context in which Arabism emerged has changed significantly, the enduring colonial conflict in Palestine, the two Iraq wars and the wars in Lebanon have reinvigorated anti-imperialism and continue to reiterate the motif of Arab unity against colonial dismemberment. As Ibrahim Abu-Rabi (2004: 64) observes, “colonialism and the problematic of the West” are still a fundamental “underlying preoccupation” of post-1967 Arab thought.

41

Although the utopia of Arab unity was a constant feature of Samaha's thinking, this in no way implies that he cultivated it in a world isolated from social reality. On the contrary, his trajectory linked to leading political organizations, indicates a certain adaptation to a changing political field. Whether committed to the OCAL, as a companion of the PLO/Fatah in exile, or in close proximity to Hezbollah, Samaha moved through social universes and political groups in shifting conjunctures, not without readjusting his political positions: he supported negotiations with Israel, then denounced of the Oslo Accords; and was first hostile then open to dialogue with Islamism. It was on this point that his “conversions” took place, the result of political and structural transformations, his movements in social space, and his involvement with alternative social networks. Reflecting a “mixture of inertia and adaptation” (Tissot 2015: 15) characteristic of militant futures, his trajectory was marked both by social and political variations and by a “constancy” with regard to Palestine and the hypothesis of the Arab nation (*al-umma al-‘arabīya*).

42

Although he was associated with various organizations over the course of his career, Samaha was not a party intellectual. Rather, he stood at the intersection between politics and journalism. A man of networks, his intellectual activity was anchored in the newspaper, which he saw as a space for social connection, but also as a “collective organizer” (Gramsci 1992), or as the seed of a party. Finally, Samaha’s trajectory, which unfolded in a temporal sequence reflecting the waning of Arab nationalism and the left, bears witness to a trajectory of the Arabist and left-wing generation of the “1967–1968 years” in Beirut that cannot be approached from the angle of political disenchantment (Bardawil 2020). While a sense of defeat is clear in some of his writings, which are at times realistic and at times pessimistic in tone, his career suggests the persistence of a “part of enchantment” (Collovald 2001), in particular generated by the stimulating dynamics of new editorial projects that offered him far-reaching platforms and that allowed him to sketch and glimpse at new political perspectives around a “neo-Arabism,” which undoubtedly has yet to be invented.
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SAYIGH Yezid (1997). *Armed Struggle and the Search for State. The Palestinian National Movement 1949-1993*. New York, Oxford University Press.

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## Publications by Joseph Samaha

**SAMaha Joseph** (1993). *Salām ‘ābir. Naḥwa ḥall ‘arabī li al-mas’ala al-yahūdiyya* [*Passing Peace: Towards an Arab Solution to the Jewish Question*]. Beirut, Dār al-Nahar.

**SAMaha Joseph** (1996). *Qaadā’, lā qadar. Fī akhlāq al-jumhūriyya al-thāniyya* [*Of Determination, Not Fatality: On the Creation of the Second Republic*]. Beirut, Dār al-Jadid.

**SAMaha Joseph** (2007). *Al’ān Hunā* [*Now, Here*]. Beirut, al-Safīr / Arab Scientific Publishers.

**SAMaha Joseph** (2009). *Al-Yawm al-sābī'. Maqālāt 1984-1990* [*Al-Yawm al-sābī': Articles 1984-1990*]. Beirut, Friends of Joseph Samaha.

## Writings on Joseph Samaha

**BEYDOUN Ahmad** (2007, February 22). “Un espoir amoindri” [*A Diminished Hope*]. Al-Safīr.

**JORIS Lieve** (1999). *La chanteuse de Zanzibar* [*The Singer from Zanzibar*]. Paris, Actes Sud.

**KASSIR Samir** (1995, November). “Le retour du Jedi” [*The Return of the Jedi*]. L’Orient-Express: 60–62.

**SALMAN Talal** (2007, February 22). “Disparition de la ‘plume verte’ du journalisme au Liban: Joseph Samaha” [*The Disappearance of the ‘Green Pen’ of Journalism in Lebanon: Joseph Samaha*]. Al-Safir.

## Other print sources

**BECHARA Souha** (2000). *Résistante*. Paris, JC Lattès.

## ANNEXES

**ANM:** Arab Nationalists' Movement

**ASAP:** Arab Socialist Action Party

**OCAL:** Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon

**OSL:** Organization of Lebanese Socialists

**DFLP:** Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

**FPM:** Free Patriotic Movement

**IRL:** Islamic Resistance of Lebanon

**LCP:** Lebanese Communist Party
LNM: Lebanese National Movement

LNRF: Lebanese National Resistance Front

PFLP: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

PLO: Palestine Liberation Organization

SSNP: Syrian Social Nationalist Party

NOTES

1. In Arabic Nakba means disaster and refers to the sudden loss of Palestine in 1948.

2. The term “two-years war” refers to the years 1975-1976 during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990).

3. All translations from Arabic are by the author.

4. Editor's note: the spelling *al-Safīr* is used in preference to *as-Safīr*, which is also employed, for the purpose of being faithful to the letters and pronunciation in Arabic.

5. Editor's note: all acronyms are listed in the appendix.

6. Yasser Arafat, quoted in *al-Safīr*, 31 August 1982.

7. Anouar Abdel Malek (1984) defines this as “the fight for national liberation, and the work of renaissance that accompanies it and which is the long-term goal of hard-won independence.”

8. Although the word ‘urūba covers both the notions of “Arabism” and “Arabness” (feeling Arab), the translation as “Arabism” emphasizes the political potential of the term.

9. Geographical Syria refers to the region that covers todays Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, also called the “*Levant*” in Francophone literature and “*Bilād al-Shām*” (Country of Damas) in Arabic literature.

10. In the 1930s the Arab communist movement made a theoretical and programmatic connection between the Arab national question and social revolution, see Charif (1981) and Ismael & Ismael (1998).

11. Naksa means “setback” in Arabic and refers to the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the June 1967 war.

12. Following the Black September massacres ordered by King Hussein of Jordan against Palestinian fighters in 1970, the PLO relocated to Lebanon under an agreement concluded between Yasser Arafat and General Emile Bustani, Commander-in-Chief of the Lebanese Army, on 8 November 1969, under the auspices of Nasser.

13. The historical sequence we call the “1967-1968 years” begins with the Arab defeat of 1967 and is marked by the international revolutionary dynamic of the “1968 years” (Dreyfus-Armand et al. 2000). We conclude this period with the summer of 1982, at the end of which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) left Lebanon.

14. On “Arab socialism,” see Takriti & Safieddine (2023). The article notably transcribes the debates surrounding the truly socialist nature of the Arab states that claimed to be so. For example, Anouar Abdel Malek (1981: 4) describes Nasser’s Egypt’s economy as “socialist inspired state capitalism.”
15. We borrow the following definition proposed by Christophe Charle (1996) based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu (1971): an intellectual is a “professional in the manipulation of symbolic goods.” We refer to Charle’s work (1996), which identifies a social and cultural register and a political dimension in the emergence of the intellectual figure in Europe; characteristics that can be found in the emergence of the Arab intellectual (Dakhli 2009b).

16. Editor's note: Joseph Samaha's writing are referenced at the end of the bibliographic section.

17. https://archive.assafir.com for *al-Safir* et https://www.al-akhbar.com/Editions for *al-Akhbār*.

18. Interview with Oumaya Samaha, 13 February 2022.

19. Interview with Hazem Saghieh, 19 February 2022.

20. Fatah, or F.T.H, is the reversed acronym of Ḥarakat taḥrīr Falaṣṭīn (Palestine Liberation Movement). It was founded in secret in 1957 in Kuwait. Fatah gradually became the majority element within the PLO. In 1969, Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, was appointed Secretary-General of the PLO. Here we use the term “PLO/Fatah” as the two entities were closely intertwined at that time.

21. Interview with Mohammad Ballout, 17 March 2022.

22. Yassine Al-Hafez (1930–1978), former leader of the left wing of the Ba’ath Party, founder of the Revolutionary Arab Workers’ Party; Elias Murqos (1927–1991), intellectual and former member of the Syrian Communist Party.

23. Emerging from the post-1967 political reorganizations of the ANM, the OCAL appeared in 1971, formed from the merger of the Organization of Lebanese Socialists (OSL) (1968–1971) and Socialist Lebanon (1964–1970).

24. Interview with Nahla Chahal, 12 October 2022.

25. Editorial by Talal Salman, *al-Safir*, 26 July 2007.

26. *Al-Safir*, 5 December 1980.

27. At the initiative of the LCP and the OCAL, Lebanese left-wing organizations announced the launch of the Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF) against the Israeli occupation on 16 September 1982, joined by other Lebanese political movements.

28. *Al-Safir*, 21 October 1982, and 2 November 1982.

29. *Al-Safir*, 3 September 1982, and 16 September 1982.

30. Interview with Pierre Abi Saab, 26 March 2021. See also Kassir 1995.

31. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 8 June 1987.

32. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 18 June 1984; 24 July 1984; 17 March 1986.

33. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 4 February 1985.

34. Cf. the expression “The liberation of Palestine is the path to Arab unity,” popularized by Fatah from 1967, which reverses the one that prevailed in the Nasser era.

35. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 29 February 1988.

36. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 21 November 1988.

37. *Al-Yawm al-sābīʿ*, 29 February 1988.
38. According to the Carnegie Endowment NGO, in 2004 the newspaper was printed at approximately 170,000 copies per day. Source: Carnegie Endowment NGO website, accessed on 3 March 2023.

39. *al-Hayāt*, 2 November 1993, and 28 January 1994.

40. On this concept, see the dissertation by Nicolas Dot-Pouillard (2009).

41. Interview with Fawwaz Traboulsi, 21 July 2021; interview with Zuhair Rahal, 13 February 2023.

42. Interview with Khaled Saghieh, 8 April 2021.

43. Interview with Pierre Abi Saab, 26 March 2021.

44. The IRL initially operated within the framework of the Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF), coordinated by the LCP and OCAL (Daher 2014: chapter 2).

45. Several LCP leaders were assassinated between 1985 and 1987, among them Hussein Mroué (1910–1987) and Mahdi Amel (1936–1987), by groups linked to Amal and Hezbollah. Amal (Arabic acronym for Lebanese Resistance Regiments) is a Shia militia that came into being in 1975. Following the death of Imam Musa Sadr (1928-1978), Amal also became a political movement.

46. The ASAP was established in Lebanon in 1969. Close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) led by Georges Habash, it emerged from the post-1967 reorganizations of the ANM.

47. Editorial by Talal Salman, *al-Safir*, 4 January 1989.

48. Editorial by Talal Salman, *al-Safir*, 24 February 1992.

49. Editorial by Talal Salman, *al-Safir*, 14 April 1996.

50. In both the Maghreb and Mashriq, Palestine has a unique place in collective memories. This is also the case in Lebanon, however, from the time of the Nakba, the predominantly Sunni Muslim Palestinian presence has been viewed with hostility by a minor part of society, particularly by Lebanese Christian factions/movements that consider it a problem for the balance between religious communities and a burden on the Lebanese economy (Sfeir 2008: 102).

51. *Al-Safir*, 30 April 1996.

52. Interview with Ibrahim Al-Amine, 1 March 2022.

53. On the “conversions” related to this type of phenomenon (disengagement, rupture, and/or adoption of a new ideological framework) in the Lebanese intellectual milieu, see the works of Sana Atoui (2013), Fadi Bardawil (2020), and the dissertation by Nicolas Dot-Pouillard (2009).

54. In Egypt, for example, this type of rapprochement can be seen from the early 2000s; see the works of Maha Abdelrahman (2015) and Youssef El Chazli (2020).

55. *Al-Safir*, 25 May 2000, p. 11.

56. Talal Salman, editorial, *al-Safir*, 25 May 2000.

57. See notably the reports by Doha Chams from 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, and 29 May, and from 1, 3, and 5 June 2000, in *al-Safir*.

58. Interview with Pierre Abi-Saab, 26 March 2021.

59. Interview with Ziad Majed, 3 January 2022.

60. Interview with Hazem Saghieh, 23 February 2022.
61. *Al-Safir*, 10 November 2001; 11 March 2003; 11 June 2004; 3 February 2006.

62. *Al-Safir*, 12 November 2004.

63. On 2 September 2004, the United Nations Security Council voted on Resolution 1559, which, among other things, required the disarmament of armed militias in Lebanon. It was confirmed by Resolution 1636 on 31 October 2005. In Lebanon, most actors of the “March 14 Alliance,” aligned with the United States and Saudi Arabia, sought the disarmament of Hezbollah. The Lebanese left was divided between a faction supporting Hezbollah's armed action in the name of resistance against the Israeli army, considering that the Lebanese army has never been in a position to do so—It is Joseph Samaha’s position—and another faction advocating for the disarmament of Hezbollah, considering that it is the state’s responsibility to guarantee Lebanon’s territorial sovereignty.

64. In the wake of the post-2005 political realignments, the LCP and Hezbollah sealed their alliance on 6 February 2006, during a conference organized at the Mar Mikhael Church in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

65. *Al-Akhbār*, 14 August 2006.

66. Interview with Pierre Abi-Saab, 26 March 2021.

67. Interview with Pierre Abi-Saab, 26 March 2021.

68. Hazem Saghieh, *al-Akhbār*, 25 February 2008.

## RÉSUMÉS

Journaliste au quotidien *al-Safir* pendant près de deux décennies, co-fondateur de la revue parisienne *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* en 1984 puis du journal *al-Akhbār* en 2006, Joseph Samaha (1949-2007) est une figure incontournable de la presse beyrouthine et arabe. Dans le contexte d'agitation politique au Liban qui suit la défaite à la guerre israélo-arabe de juin 1967, il s'initie au militantisme en même temps qu'il entame sa carrière intellectuelle. Sa trajectoire sociale et ses nombreux écrits des années 1970 à sa disparition forment un matériau riche qui éclaire ce qui socialement organise une continuité de l'arabisme – protonationalisme arabe – dans le champ intellectuel arabe, en dépit des transformations globales caractérisées par le reflux de la gauche et du nationalisme arabe d'une part et l'essor de l'islamisme d'autre part. Cet article croise l'analyse des productions écrites de Joseph Samaha dans des périodiques de premier plan, à celle de son parcours biographique, structuré par l'espace beyrouthin et les circulations transnationales, et de la conjoncture politique, cet article. Issue d'une recherche qui combine la sociohistoire des idées politiques à la sociologie des intellectuels, cette contribution entend examiner les conditions sociales de production et de circulation de l'arabisme, mais aussi les recompositions et variations du socle idéologique arabiste advenues après la défaite de 1982.

Joseph Samaha (1949-2007) was a central figure in Arab media, particularly in Beirut. He was a journalist with the *al-Safir* daily newspaper for nearly two decades, co-founder of the Parisian journal *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* in 1984, and then co-founder of the daily paper *al-Akhbār* in 2006. He had his first experiences with activism just as he was beginning his intellectual career, in the context
of the political upheaval in Lebanon following the June 1967 defeat in the Arab-Israel war. His social trajectory and his writings—dating from the 1970s up until his death—form a rich material that sheds light on the social foundations for a continuity of Arabism—Arab protonationalism—in the Arab intellectual space, despite the overall transformations characterized by the decline of the left and Arab nationalism on one hand, and the rise of Islamism on the other. This article combines an analysis of Samaha’s writings in major periodicals with that of his biographical trajectory, structured by both Beirut as an intellectual space and by transnational movements, and an analysis of the political conjuncture. In so doing, this article, drawing on socio-history of political ideas and the sociology of intellectuals, seeks to examine the social conditions for the production and circulation of Arabism, but also the shifting makeup of its ideological foundation after the defeat of 1982.

Periodista del diario *al-Safir* durante casi dos décadas, cofundador de la revista parisina *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* en 1984 y del periódico *al-Akhbār* en 2006, Joseph Samaha (1949-2007) es una figura esencial de la prensa beirutí y árabe. En el contexto de agitación política en el Líbano, producida por la derrota en la guerra árabe-israelí de junio de 1967, comienza a militar al mismo tiempo que inicia su carrera intelectual. Su trayectoria social y sus numerosos escritos, desde los años 70 hasta su muerte, forman un abundante material que permite esclarecer aquello que organiza socialmente una continuidad del arabismo –protonacionalismo árabe– en el campo intelectual árabe, a pesar de las transformaciones globales caracterizadas por el retroceso de la izquierda y el nacionalismo árabe, por una parte, y el auge del islamismo, por otra. Este artículo, nacido de una investigación que combina la sociohistoria de las ideas políticas con la sociología de los intelectuales, pretende examinar las condiciones sociales de producción y circulación del arabismo, así como las recomposiciones y variaciones de la base ideológica arabista ocurridas tras la derrota de 1982. Para lograr este objetivo, cruza el análisis de los escritos de Joseph Samaha publicados en periódicos prominentes con el análisis de su trayectoria biográfica, estructurada por el espacio intelectual beirutí y las circulaciones transnacionales, y la coyuntura política.

Joseph Samaha (1949-2007) war fast zwei Jahrzehnte lang Journalist der Tageszeitung *al-Safir*, 1984 Mitbegründer der Pariser Zeitschrift *al-Yawm al-sābiʿ* und 2006 der Zeitung *al-Akhbār*. Er ist eine unumgängliche Figur in der Beiruter und arabischen Presse. Im Kontext der politischen Unruhen im Libanon nach der Niederlage im israelisch-arabischen Krieg vom Juni 1967 wurde er in den Aktivismus eingeführt, während er gleichzeitig seine intellektuelle Karriere begann. Sein sozialer Werdegang und seine zahlreichen Schriften von den 1970er Jahren bis zu seinem Tod bilden ein reiches Material, das beleuchtet, was gesellschaftlich eine Kontinuität des Arabismus – arabischen Protonationalismus – im arabischen intellektuellen Feld organisiert, trotz der globalen Transformationen, die durch den Rückgang der Linken und des arabischen Nationalismus einerseits und den Aufstieg des Islamismus andererseits gekennzeichnet sind. Dieser Artikel, der aus einem Forschungsprojekt hervorgegangen ist, das die Soziohistorik der politischen Ideen mit der Soziologie der Intellektuellen verbindet, will die sozialen Bedingungen der Produktion und Zirkulation des Arabismus sowie die Neuformierungen und Variationen der arabistischen ideologischen Basis nach der Niederlage von 1982 untersuchen. Zu diesem Zweck kombiniert er die Analyse von Joseph Samahas schriftlichen Produktionen in führenden Zeitschriften mit der Analyse seines biografischen Werdegangs, der durch den intellektuellen Raum in Beirut und die transnationale Zirkulation sowie durch die politische Konjunktur strukturiert wird.
# INDEX

**Palabras claves** : arabismo, Beirut, izquierdas árabes, izquierda libanesa, intelectuales, nacionalismo, nacionalismo árabe, Palestina, prensa

**Mots-clés** : arabisme, Beyrouth, gauches arabes, gauche libanaise, intellectuels, nationalisme, nationalisme arabe, Palestine, presse

**Keywords** : Arabism, Arab left, Arab nationalism, Beirut, intellectuals, Lebanese left, press, nationalism, Palestine

**Schlüsselwörter** : Arabismus, Arabische Linke, Arabischer Nationalismus, Beirut, Intellektuelle, Libanesische Linke, Nationalismus, Palästina, Presse

# AUTEURS

## AYA KHALIL

PhD candidate in political science Université Paris 8, Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris – Laboratoire des Théories du politique (Cresppa-LabTop, UMR 7217), Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo). ayakhalil.p8@pm.me