THAWRA

The first episode of our series establishes the development of European imperialism in the Arab world from the late 18th through early 20th centuries, the rise of constitutionalist movements that challenged monarchical absolutism, and the emergence of early labor and land reform movements. These processes shaped all political thought and action, affecting revolutionaries as well as restorationists across the region.

This episode lays out a key genealogy of 20th century anti-colonialism, forged through the “Great Revolts” in Iraqi, Syria, and Palestine, and the parallel birth of a range of ideological colorations: Arab nationalism, Islamic resistance, Ba’athism, and communism.

A comprehensive overview of the Middle Eastern Arab state system that crystallized with the end of British and French colonial rule.

Laying out the politics surrounding the Zionist settler colonial destruction of Palestine, and the ground-shifting event that followed in its wake: Nasser’s 1952 Egyptian Free Officers Movement coup, which would set the tone for two decades of revolutionary nationalism across the region.

We trace an arc from the fight for independence, to the first (CIA-backed) coup of 1949, and the rise of the Ba’ath and Communist movements, detailing how the dye for a martial expression of politics was cast by Western subterfuge.

Laying out the intensification of the Cold War across the Middle East–specifically Nasser’s mass political campaign against the Baghdad pact, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the military and political responses it provoked.

We begin with the US’s Eisenhower Doctrine, which in 1957 inaugurated a new era of imperialism in the Middle East, including the deployment of American combat operations in the region; and end with a local political response: the Ba’ath Party driving Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, a superstate under Nasser’s rule, in 1958.

This is a compact introduction to the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which in the 1950s built a presence that stretched across the region, from Beirut and Jordan to Cairo and the Gulf—becoming a truly powerful force in Kuwait. Led in significant part by Palestinians, its early history offers a ground-level look at the organizational and theoretical currents shaping radical Arab politics.

“Palestine on the Road to Revolution” covers the creation of a Palestinian national liberation movement throughout the 1950s by a people dispersed by the Nakba: organizations, alliances, and theories of change assembled in the universities, cities, and refugee camps surrounding Palestine. We end with the 1958/59 foundation of Fateh, an organization that eventually became the largest in the Palestinian political system, primarily focusing on the idea of launching an armed revolution as the pathway to liberating Palestine. This is the story of the beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement as we have come to know it today.

We learn the story of Iraq’s 1958 July Revolution: a Free Officers’ coup overthrew the imperialist-aligned Hashemite monarchy and brought nationalist Abdul-Karim Qasim to power alongside a surging Communist Party. Revolutionary currents soon turned against one another, however, as did Qasim and Nasser.

This episode recounts the destruction of the two giant revolutionary projects of 1958: the union of Egypt and Syria under Nasser’s United Arab Republic and Iraq’s July Revolution that brought Qasim alongside communist allies to power. The rival radical projects of pan-Arabism and communism suffered huge blows. The Ba’ath also transform in this period, from an ideological movement to a party dominated by military men who want to turn the organization into an instrument of raw domination.

Abdel and Dan anatomize Saudi Arabia, a country whose reactionary, US-aligned trajectory was throughout the 1950s and 60s challenged by labor strikes, dissident currents, rebellious princes, and an anticolonial oil minister. But, eventually, Saudi royal conservatism won out, and was exported across the region.

“Revolutionary Arabia” chronicles the armed left-wing revolutionary movements that challenged British imperial power across Southern Arabia, from the National Liberation front seizing power in South Yemen to the Dhufari revolutionaries in Oman waging a liberation war against the British and the sultan. While today’s alliance of reactionary Gulf monarchies seems inevitable, here we see they were made by colonial power–and that they were seriously contested by revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

We cover the rise of the Palestinian Revolution and then its explosion after the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 with the Israeli colonial state. Fateh, the Popular Front for Liberation and Palestine, and other factions launched an armed guerilla struggle, engaging the Palestinian people in a full-scale mobilization for their liberation. Also: Ba’athists Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq, as did Muammar Gaddafi’s Free Officers in Libya.

We address the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan–leading up to the 1970 conflict that the national movement had with the Jordanian state and the violent expulsion of PLO guerillas that followed during Black September. Then, Egypt and Syria checked Israel’s power in the October War of 1973–only for Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, to lead Egypt into Kissinger’s plan to pacify the Arab revolution.

This final episode of the main series traces a massive defeat of the Palestinian Revolution: Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the brutal siege of Beirut. Under severe pressure and isolated in the wake of Egypt’s normalization with Israel, the PLO evacuated its headquarters in Lebanon. What followed was an unthinkable large massacre of Palestinian civilians and an end to the decades-long era of Arab revolutionary politics that Thawra was dedicated to chronicling.

In Palestine and across the region, the sort of secular left wing and nationalist parties, whose stories we have dedicated Thawra to telling, were being eclipsed by conservative Islamic religious parties. That includes Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Muslim Brotherhood across the region. We end this episode by discussing the PLO's move toward the Oslo Accords.

How did the Oslo Accords play out through the rest of the 1990s and the years waiting up to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000? And what did the Second Intifada, these years of enormous militant mass uprising, what did that movement expose about the reality of the Zionist project and indigenous resistance to that project in post-Oslo Palestine?

This episode takes us from Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, through the siege on Gaza, to October 7, the Gaza genocide, the Axis of Resistance, and Israel’s attempt to draw Iran into a massive regional war with the US.