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CHAPTER 1
The Visit
In 1965, at the height of his popularity in the Middle East, Sartre finally decided to weigh in on the Arab-Israeli conflict, visit the region, and see for himself. It was expected that following the tour he would, characteristically, publish his opinion on the conflict and perhaps even take sides and name names. But, before that, Sartre wanted the quarreling parties to collaborate and contribute their respective impressions of each other to a special issue of his journal. Since both Arabs and Israelis were reluctant to cooperate, more than two years would pass before Sartre, Beauvoir, and Lanzmann would finally board an airplane bound to Cairo. This chapter registers the many political maneuvers it took to produce this visit. Outwardly, this might look like a classic case study of Sartre's famed global politics of engagement leading to a clear ethical statement and a solid political commitment to a venerable cause. But would it be the same this time around?
It would not. The irony of that noble effort lies in the fact that in the case of the Middle East, and particularly in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the question of Palestine — in other words, in this case where Sartre's philosophical convictions should have provided the greatest clarity — his otherwise powerful ethics of engagement seemed inapplicable to the realities of the Middle East. All of Sartre's international engagements were framed by a sharp postcolonial perspective, a committed text, and an unambiguous set of principles. But here, in his dealings with Arabs and Israelis, he uncharacteristically resisted taking sides, refused to pass moral judgment, and found himself unable to craft a convincing text. Even his body language betrayed confusion.
Consistently evasive and facing the dilemma of how to establish ethical hierarchy between survivors of the Holocaust and Palestinian victims of the Nakba, the philosopher repeatedly failed to produce clear language. Consequently, clear-cut dichotomies that had become a staple of decolonization, such as those between colonizer and colonized, perpetrators and victims, masters and "others," did not result in an organized ethical framework that would point toward a just solution. This uncharacteristic position left heads of state, politicians, activists, journalists, commentators, and, later, scholars second-guessing Sartre's politics. In the absence of a logical explanation for the politics of ambiguity, many Arabs subscribed to the idea that Sartre's ambiguity was no ambiguity at all and that the celebrated philosopher had been a staunch supporter of Israel all along.
Though many decades have elapsed since Sartre's visit, this conclusion has become only more firmly entrenched. In 2000, Edward Said wrote that "For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming anti-Semitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel's injustice, or for some other reason, I shall never know." Most commentators were far blunter. 'Aida al-Sharif, Al-Adab's special correspondent who covered Sartre's tour in Egypt, wrote that Sartre "came to visit Egypt, met who he met, visited the Gaza Strip, spoke to its inhabitants and to the refugees, but everything he heard and saw did not influence him even one iota. ... That is because Zionism was smarter and more focused than us in navigating him toward its goals." But was it really so?
Al-Sharif, Suhayl Idris, and others placed much of the blame on the person who had produced the Middle East tour, Sartre's close associate Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann, the famed managing editor of Les Temps Modernes, was a bold journalist, a filmmaker, a former resistance fighter and, yes, a pro-Zionist French Jew. Did he have to be there? Did he really have to be part of this project? Absolutely yes, said Sartre plainly, "I cannot move without Lanzmann." But his presence, as we shall see, was hard to swallow. According to al-Sharif, Lanzmann sabotaged the visit by conspiring and manipulating Simone de Beauvoir, who in turn influenced Sartre to distance himself from the Arabs. "Haven't we been naive that we agreed to the presence of Lanzmann as a guarantee for the neutrality of the visit? Why didn't we stipulate that a pro-Arab individual accompany Sartre to Israel?" asked 'Aida. She placed the blame squarely on the naïveté of the Egyptian hosts for not realizing the true interpersonal nature of the triangular relationship between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Lanzmann, which made such a betrayal inevitable.
But why had this triangular relationship remained unknown to an Arab audience that "read everything"? After all, in her memoir La force des choses, Beauvoir was quite forthright about her long romantic relationship with Claude Lanzmann. Their life together during the 1950s was never a secret. Yet, in 1964, when Quwwat al-ashya, the Arabic translation of Beauvoir's memoir, appeared in print, there was no trace of her relationship with Lanzmann there. As it turned out, Suhayl Idris had intentionally removed these passages from his wife's translation of the memoir. Could it be that such crippling practices of willful not-knowing prevented Sartre's Arab interlocutors from understanding the true nature of his thought and thus prevented them from politically maneuvering their case? Could it be that a simple romantic entanglement prevented Sartre's enrollment on behalf of the Palestinian cause?
The story of Sartre's visit is a dramatic one, a key development of the European intellectual response to the Arab-Israeli conflict and especially to the question of Palestine. Over the years, and as recently as 2016, numerous scholars, observers, and politically interested parties have felt compelled to comment, analyze, and reflect on Sartre's overall failure to "figure out" the conflict and its many complexities. Explanations for this failure vary considerably and range from an exploration of his genuine ethical difficulties to deterministic arguments about his inherent pro-Zionism. Drawing on Sartre's few public declarations, several French-Algerian and Moroccan scholars registered his ambiguity and concluded, rather inaccurately, that Sartre was and remained pro-Zionist. Much of this work falls under the category of engaged intellectual commentary and does not represent systematic historical study. As we shall see in chapter 8, an exception to this type of history writing is the work of Jonathan Judaken and Paige Arthur, who engaged the topic through a very close reading of Sartre's texts.
However, though Judaken and Arthur's work certainly strikes a chord, Sartre's words fall short of exposing the real stakes behind this drama and, in fact, obscure far more than they reveal. As a result, they fail to account for the historical process by which Sartre arrived at his understanding, and they remain silent on the intellectual milieu with which he interacted so intensely. Obviously, for an inherently committed intellectual such as Sartre, adopting an uncommitted position did not come naturally. Furthermore, the long process of arriving at this position had a serious impact on his engagements elsewhere in the world, as well as — in this particular case — on the two sides of the conflict, who were eager to persuade Sartre that they were the ultimate model for true revolutionary socialism. The process by which Sartre came to an ambiguous and uncommitted position needs to be spelled out. Thus, although Sartre's role in the conflict has been considered, it has been so far only from the position of Sartre as the exclusive subject, meaning that everything around him has, until now, received little attention. The operating mode of Les Temps Modernes and the small circle of people in Paris and the Middle East who worked tirelessly for two long years in order to produce Sartre's visit have not yet been studied. His Arab interlocutors are largely unknown to scholarship and, overall, the visit that initiated the total collapse of Sartre's Arab legacy remains a moral, political, and historical enigma.
To understand what happened during and after Sartre's visit to the Middle East, a new perspective is needed: one that turns away from the exclusive focus on Sartre and instead situates this episode as a drama with multiple actors on both sides of the Mediterranean. Hopelessly entangled in everything that came to pass between Jews, Arabs, Zionists, and Europeans, Sartre's engagement with the Middle East suggests a level of historical complexity that has thus far escaped our attention. Who initiated Sartre's foray into the politics of the Middle East? What was the goal of this engagement, and what were the politics behind it? Why was the visit to the region necessary to begin with? Did Arabs and Israelis have an impact on the visit's agenda, and, if so, what were their expectations? Were the Israeli and Arab camps united in their respective oppositional positions toward each other? If not, what were the allegiances or divisions, and how did they play out politically? What was the role of the French government in facilitating this visit? This multitude of questions will here be the subject of a straightforward narrative, one that shifts the analytical strategy from Sartre's broken words to a careful reconstruction of the effort to engage the conflict. We will return to the two final acts of this story, Sartre's travel in the region and its aftermath, in the last two chapters of the book.
The Interlocutor
Sometime in 1958, a patriotic Egyptian student by the name of 'Ali al-Samman arrived in Paris. He held a law degree from the University of Alexandria and had just graduated with an advanced degree in law and political science from the University of Grenoble. Revolutionary Egypt was thirsty for young talent, but al-Samman did not want to go home. He wanted to live in Paris. Hopelessly poor, he took a low-paying job as a porter in the busy wholesale marketplace of Les Halles. He also enrolled in a PhD program in political science. But his real business was neither that of Les Halles nor that of academia. It was people. Equipped with sharp social skills, an endearing personality, and a talent for self-promotion, he also happened to have rented a room in Boulevard Raspail. A few years later, after the bombing of Sartre's house in rue Bonaparte by supporters of French Algeria, he would move there as well. They became neighbors. Like many other young students in those years, al-Samman too headed for the cafés, where he quickly found his true métier.
In the late 1950s, there were dozens of Arab students in the cafés of the Latin Quarter, and though these were the days of high nationalist fever and growing enthusiasm for Arab unity, Arab students were in an obvious state of disunity. Iraqi communists occupied one café, Syrian Ba'thists another, Egyptian Nasserists yet another, and others with an obvious dislike for politics found their own corner. Interaction between these ideological circles was minimal. Realizing the untapped social and political potential of this scene, al-Samman, along with his Lebanese friend Faruq al-Muqaddam, set out to break down these divisions and bring the community together. Moving from one café to the next, they gradually formed an informal circle of patriotic students who shared the same diaspora experience. Al-Samman showed his friends that what they shared in common was stronger than what divided them, and, as part of that project, he pushed for the establishment of the Association des Étudiants Arabes en France (Arab Students Association of France, Ittihad al-Tulab al-'Arab fi Faransa). Being the first Arab organization of its kind, it was a political startup that would assist al-Samman in representing what he now called "the Arab cause in France" and, also, in making a name for himself.
And a name for himself he made. At the height of the Algerian war of liberation, metropolitan France took increasing interest in the collective affairs of the Arabs. Surprisingly, there were very few articulateArab voices to represent these affairs and forcefully argue on their behalf. As a recognized leader of students in France, al-Samman would gradually emerge as the face, voice, and pen of the Arab Cause.
He started small. In late 1958, al-Samman was asked to publicly rebut an Israeli official in a discussion about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was the first proposed public debate of its kind, and his fellow students were divided on how to approach it. Most members called for a boycott of the event, but al-Samman thought otherwise and, despite harsh opposition and a stream of telegrams of protest sent directly to Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser and the Egyptian security service, al-Samman attended the debate and delivered an eloquent speech about Zionism and racism. It made a serious impact, and from that point things happened quickly for al-Samman.
French diplomat Pierre Rosso introduced him to André Ulman, editor of the foreign affairs journal Les Tribune de Nations. Ulman was impressed and, according to al-Samman, "proceeded to teach me the art of political journalism." Working with André Ulman, a Jew and a former resistance fighter who survived the Nazi extermination camp of Mauthausen, al-Samman developed a set of sensitivities that most of his fellow compatriots did not. And, thus, when it came to critiquing Israel, al-Samman understood very well the post-Holocaust French and European sensitivities. "We oppose Israel," he is reported to have said on one occasion, "because of politics, not because of anti-Semitism!" The head of the Middle East desk at Le Monde, Egyptian Jew Eric Rouleau, also noted al-Samman's sophisticated take on Zionism. Impressed, he invited him to contribute periodically to Le Monde. His moment had arrived.
Under al-Samman, the activities of Arab students gained so much traction and publicity that they soon drew the attention of the Egyptian security service, which was displeased with the students' independence and which made public its decision to monitor their activities. The French government was also spying on them. While this attention was quite expected, little did al-Samman and his friends realize that the Israelis were watching, too. In a classified Israeli file, al-Samman is described as the highly competent head of Association des Étudiants Arabes en France and its network of at least ten other satellite Arabstudent groups all over France. Al-Samman was now an up-and-coming leader and writer who no longer needed to lift heavy things for a living. With the value of his work acknowledged, he regularly met Egyptian intellectuals who visited Paris, such as Luwis 'Awad, Husayn Fawzi, and Lutfi al-Khuli. Of equal importance, he had also made friends in French intellectual circles. Raymond Aron was one such friend. They meet frequently and found common ground in their deep skepticism toward communism or, as Aron famously called it, "the opium of the intellectuals." With more writing and connections under his belt, greater opportunities presented themselves, and al-Samman soon became a busy Parisian journalist with the Cairo-based Middle East News Agency.
Recognizing his value, the Egyptian embassy stopped spying on al-Samman, included him in the official visit of Egypt's chief of staff, 'Abd al-Hakim 'Amr, and sought his advice on matters of public opinion and even policy. And so, quite rapidly over the course of the early 1960s, al-Samman emerged as a dynamic journalist, a self-appointed spokesman, and a one-person public-relations firm, all in the cause of Egypt and the Arabs. Apparently, during the French negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) at Évian, he was even asked to carry a personal message from Charles de Gaulle to Nasser, asking him to tone down the anti-French propaganda of Voice of the Arabs, Cairo's international radio station.
It was hard to ignore al-Samman, and, one day, his neighbor's secretary called and said that Jean-Paul Sartre would like to meet him. It was early 1965. Sartre called on al-Samman because he was interested in his position on "fighting racism" in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As we shall see, since the late 1940s, Sartre had spearheaded postcolonial thought about race (through négritude), otherness (through the Jewish experience), alienation from the self, and these theories' relationship to neocolonialism more broadly. Yet, Sartre had never written anything about Zionism as a racist system. Though 1965 was nine years before the United Nations passed a resolution that equated Zionism with racism, the idea was already circulating, albeit in a rather crude fashion. Over the course of their conversations, al-Samman explained to Sartre that the Arabs experienced Zionism as a system of racial differentiation. It was a viewpoint about which Sartre knew close to nothing at that point, as until then he had been mainly focused on Algeria. In fact, not since 1948 had Sartre paid any intellectual attention to Palestine. Indeed, one could say that, when it came to the issue of Palestine and the Eastern Arab lands, Sartre was quite ignorant. But he was a fast learner.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "No Exit"
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