Anticolonialism and Postcolonial Nation: Palestine in Egyptian Political Thought

This paper will explore the history of Arab solidarity with Palestine during the age of decolonization. In particular, it will focus on the status of Palestine in different strands of Egyptian political thought in the late 1940s, before the issue became appropriated by independent Arab states in the latter half of the twentieth century. It will examine the ways in which Palestine represented an early expression of anti-colonial affinity rooted in a common struggle against Western imperialism and how it came to shape the political lexicon of the Egyptian postcolonial state in the 1950s and 60s. My analysis will focus on two key texts from the late 1940s: Filasṭīn Bayn Makhālib al-’Ist‘imār [Palestine in the Claws of Imperialism] (1947) by Egyptian Marxist Ahmad Sadiq Sa‘ad and Nasser’s Diaries About the Palestine War (1948-49) by former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The first text was among the earliest to appear in Egypt on the question of Palestine. Born to a Sephardic Jewish family, Sadiq Sa‘ad analyzed Zionism as a settler colonial movement and rejected the partition of Palestine that would be adopted by the United Nations months later. The second text offers an account by the first leader of Egypt’s postcolonial republic of his experience fighting in the 1948 War, which would help precipitate the seizure of power by a group of Egyptian military officers four years later and the transformation of Egypt into an independent republic. Both texts were written in a moment when Arab solidarity with Palestine had not yet taken the form of an officially sanctioned state project. As such, they reveal a series of concerns—which linked anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism, and national liberation—that could be channeled into a variety of political visions and possibilities amidst ongoing struggles that unfolded over the political future of the Arab world.