4. “Fighting Other People’s War”: Arab Palestinian Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

Omri Elmaleh

“I am an Arab volunteer, I have come to defend freedom in Madrid, to defend Damascus in Wadi al-Ḥijara [Guadalajara], Jerusalem in Cordoba, Baghdad in Toledo, Cairo in Cadiz and Tetouan in Burgos!”[1]

These are the words of Muhammad Najati Sidqi, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian journalist, literary critic, and former secretary of the Palestine Communist Party who voluntarily traveled to Spain in August 1936 to band together with Republicans to fght against fascism and for freedom.

Much has been written about the role of the International Brigades (hereafter IB) in the Spanish Civil War. Very little attention, though, has been given to Arab volunteers who fought alongside the Republicans in a demonstration of international solidarity. Arabs were drawn from across the Middle East to fght a war far away from home. But while the actions of the international volunteers were recognized and commemorated in most of the countries from which they came, Arab volunteers have remained widely unacknowledged in academic writing and national discourse. Given the gradually accumulating historiography on Jewish participation in the IB, historians have also called attention to the question of Arab Palestinian volunteers. But the question is still highly murky, with incorrect information circulating.

This chapter is devoted to the virtually unexplored histories of Arab Palestinians who joined the struggle against the nationalist forces. Despite their willingness to fght and die for their ideals in “other people’s war,” they were confronted both by the racism and distrust of some of their Republican and communist brothers in arms and by the incomprehension and rejection of conservative and nationalistic Arab Palestinian culture. This extends to their marginalization in Palestinian historical memory even today.

Historiographical Debate and Existing Literature

When talking about the participation of Arabs in the Spanish Civil War, in both popular and scholarly spheres, our existing knowledge is largely confned to the mobilization of colonized Moroccan troops into Spain to fght alongside Franco’s forces against the Republicans. With over 80,000 welltrained troops—whether forcibly or willingly recruited—these Moroccan soldiers would prove to be a decisive factor in the outcome of the war.[2] This topic was covered extensively in both international and Spanish press during and after the war and has received substantial scholarly attention.[3] Moreover, in recent decades, there have been ongoing debates among Moroccans and Spaniards over whether to consider these combatants victims of Franco or accomplices to his war crimes.[4]

While the participation of Moroccan troops alongside the rebels has been examined and re-examined, the participation of Arabs on the side of the Republic has been largely ignored, with only scarce and imprecise references.[5] For Adnan Mechbal, there is a “clear historiographical amnesia” regarding the involvement of Arabs in the Spanish Civil War, in which they have been “curiously forgotten by an oddly selective historical writing and memory.”[6] Regarding this amnesia, the pioneering work of Tunisian sociologist Abd alLatif bin Salam in the late 1980s was the frst rigorous paper on this topic. It also inspired additional publications on Arabs who took up arms and joined the IB.[7] Estimates vary from a few hundred to more than 1,000 Arab volunteers in the ranks of the IB.[8] Disparity in fgures resulted from irregular record keeping among the Republican forces as well as mistranslations and misspelling of Arab names.

In the 1970s, the Catalan historian Andreu Castells recorded the names of 716 volunteers from Arab countries. Roughly, half of them were Algerians, over 200 Moroccans, and the rest from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Tangier.[9] But it is clear that there were more volunteers from these and other Arab lands, such as Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and also Palestine, as documented, for example, in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow.[10]

Discussing, analyzing, and reconsidering the trajectories of Arab volunteers from Palestine should be placed in historical context and utilize appropriate terminology of Palestine under the British mandate in the 1930s. Mandatory Palestine was a geopolitical and administrative entity established between 1920 and 1948 in what is today Israel and the State of Palestine. All inhabitants of this region under British rule, be they Jews, Muslims, or Christian, were formally and administratively Palestinians. Hereafter, and for the sake of the reader, I will use Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians when addressing volunteers from Mandatory Palestine.

The number of Palestinian volunteers did not exceed 145–160. Most of them were Ashkenazi Jews who departed Mandatory Palestine to fght in Spain after July 18, 1936, chiefy members of the Palestine Communist Party (hereafter PCP) or other social activists.[11] Recent historiography has given more attention to Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War, including Jewish Palestinian volunteers.[12] Jewish volunteers have also gained some national recognition, while their Arab comrades have remained in the scholarly and national shadow. As with Jewish volunteers, it cannot be determined exactly how many Arabs left for Spain. In existing literature, seven individuals frequently appear: Najati Sidqi, Ali Abd al-Khalek, Fawzi Sabri Nabulsi, Jorge Jaroufe, Nagib Yussef, Mahmoud al-Atrash al-Maghrabi, and Malih al-Jarouf. I contend that this list should be reduced to the frst three names, as there is frm evidence of their presence in Spain.

Mahmoud al-Maghribi was a Palestinian communist who reportedly fought in Spain.[13] Al-Maghribi was one of the most powerful leaders of the PCP in the early 1930s and a robust social activist until he passed away in the 1970s. However, in reading his edited biography that narrates his lifetime achievements, the absence of one chapter is striking—that of his mission to Spain. The reason for that is quite simple: he was never in Spain. Why and when al-Maghrabi was introduced as a brigadista is an open question. The same question applies to Nagib Yussuf, one of the prominent leaders of AntiFascist Committee of Palestine.[14] Yussef raised awareness and funds among Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine and around the world about the Spanish Civil War, but he did not physically aid the Republican forces.[15]

Dr. George or Jorge Jarufe is depicted as an Arab Palestinian doctor from Jerusalem who took part in a sanitary mission from Palestine.[16] While there is no doubt about Jarufe’s eminent mission as a militiaman-doctor on several battle fronts during the war, he did not depart Palestine and was not a Palestinian by nationality or identifcation. Jarufe was a descendant of Arab Palestinians who immigrated to Peru. After the war, Jarufe came back to his homeland, where he was deeply involved in Peruvian politics and the health sector. He also campaigned intensely in favor of Republicans in Spain and spoke with admiration about his Peruvian countrymen—rather than Palestinians or other Arabs—who had fought for the future of Spain.[17] As for the Jafa-born Malih al-Jarouf, I have not found any evidence that might place him in Spain.[18] The enlistment of Maghrabi and Yussef and the appropriation of Jarufe as Palestinian volunteers may have been innocent mistakes, but they were more likely an attempt to “thicken” the short list of Arab Palestinian brigadistas. By contrast, Sidqi, al-Khalek, and Nabulsi’s time in Spain is indisputable, as it is grounded in oral and written evidence.

Najati Sidqi: Fighting for the Freedom of Palestine in Spain

Muhammad Najati Sidqi al-Amini (1905–79) was raised into a middle class family and began working in the Post and Telegraph Department in Jerusalem in 1924, where Jewish fellow workers helped acquaint him with communist thought. He was one of the frst Arab members to join the mostly Jewish PCP. Sidqi and Mahmoud al-Maghrabi were the frst Arab members to be sent to Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East.[19] The two returned to Palestine in 1929 and led the Comintern’s policy of Arabizing the Communist Party in Palestine. Soon thereafter, Sidqi became the head of the party’s newly founded central committee, in which al-Maghrabi was a prominent member. This rise to power, alongside fervent communist activity, eventually led to their incarceration in 1931 by the British authorities. They were sentenced to two years in prison, after which they were deported from the country and started operating from Paris. Based in France in early September 1933, Sidqi (under the pseudonym Mustafa al-Omari) published and edited an underground monthly newspaper called Al-Sharq al-Arabi. Upon the suspension of the newspaper by the French authorities in early summer of 1936, Sidqi was summoned by the Comintern to Moscow.[20]

A few days before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Sidqi was asked by Dimitry Manuilski, the secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, to travel to Spain and collaborate with the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España, hereafter PCE). His mission was to organize propaganda activities among the Moroccan recruits and mercenaries in Franco’s ranks, with the objective of mobilizing mass desertion to the Republican army.[21] In general, Arab volunteers who fought for the Republic were in one of three groups: troops, military cadres, and propagandists.[22] Sidqi falls into the third category, as he did not take up arms but rather a pen and megaphone. Indeed, Sidqi was not a brigadista and had no afliation to the IB. He was a communist journalist sent by Comintern and collaborated with the Republican side.

His intellectual abilities and writing skills framed his memories from his fve-month stay in Spain (August–December 1936). It was frst published on May 15, 1937, in the frst issue of the Sot a-Sha’ab (People’s voice), the bulletin of the Syrian Communist party, and in June 1938 in the Beirut-based magazine Al-Tali’ah (The vanguard) under the title “Five Months in Republican Spain: The Memoirs of an Arab Fighter in the International Brigades.”[23] Later on, still in Syria, Sidqi published the book An Arab Who Fought in Spain under the name of Khalid Bakdash, the leader of the Syrian Communist Party.[24] These graphic accounts of his time in Spain were all incorporated into Sidqi’s autobiography.

Sidqi refrained from publishing details related to his personal life or his political activity and intellectual thoughts from the twenties and the thirties. His clandestine and militant lifestyle led him to disguise these two turbulent decades of his life until the mid-seventies. Only then did he fnish writing his memoirs under pressure from his family members, as he himself testifed. Published postmortem, Muzacarat Najati Sidqi (Memoirs of Najati Sidqi, 1905–79), is an animated account that not only thoroughly depicts his time in Spain but also sheds light on the unique journey of an Arab Palestinian communist.[25] These memories are also incorporated in the documentary movie You Come from Far Away, which portrays his lifelong diaspora.[26]

As insightful as they are, these memoirs should be read with a critical eye. Sidqi was far away from the events he was writing about. But more than any other chapter, his mission in Spain is in desperate need of supporting references. While his presence and pre-defned assignment in Spain are documented elsewhere, there is little independent evidence to support Sidqi’s detailed narrative. Since memoirs cannot stand alone as rigorous historical evidence, even one of the most well-known Arab volunteers’ biographical accounts might still be considered a “missing chapter” in this developing scholarly niche.

Sidqi notes that he arrived in France on August 10, 1936.[27] Nachman List, a veteran of the PCP and the representative of the Anti-Imperialist League in France, stated that at the beginning of the civil war, he was invited to Andre Marty’s residence.[28] There, List met “Sa’adi and Mara” (the codenames of Sidqi and Al-Maghrabi). The three formulated an appeal to the anti-imperialist sentiments of Franco’s Muslim soldiers.[29]

Soon thereafter, Sidqi secretly crossed the French–Spanish border at Portbou on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. After a short stay in Barcelona, he arrived in Madrid where he met the leaders of PCE, who entrusted Sidqi “to remove the veil from the eyes of the Moroccan soldiers, in the feld, or in captivity.”[30] Stationed in the PCE headquarters, he composed leafets and pamphlets in Arabic for Moroccan soldiers and published articles in Spanish in Madrid’s leftist and centrist newspapers (such as El Sol, El Mundo Obrero, Claridad, Informaciones, Heraldo de Madrid, and Política).[31]

Sidqi’s clandestine and partisan way of life required taking safety measures; adopting codenames was one of them. In his time in the Soviet Union and Paris, he adopted the pseudonym of Mustafa Sa’adi and Mustafa alOmari, respectively. In Spain, he worked and wrote under Mustafa ibnu Jala since “it was more appealing to Moroccans.”[32] Mikhail Koltsov, correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda, wrote in his memoirs that the leafets drafted and disseminated by Ibnu Jala were found in the pockets of Moorish prisoners or corpses.[33] Although they were written in Moroccan dialect, these proclamations failed to generate mass desertion, perhaps due to the high rates of illiteracy among Franco’s mostly rural recruits.

His activity went beyond writing. Sidqi was called to head south to the Córdoba front line to speak to the Moroccan soldiers and invite them to join the ranks of the Republicans using loudspeakers and propaganda leafets. On September 25, 1936, Sidqi reached the battle trenches from where he could clearly see a group of turbaned Moroccan regulars preparing for combat. With a loudspeaker in hand, he reportedly said:

Listen, brothers. . . . I am an Arab like you. I came from faraway Arab countries. I urge you, brothers, to fee from the ranks of your generals who oppress you in your own land. Come to us, we will welcome and honor you, we will pay each of you a daily allowance and whoever does not wish to fght will be returned to his family, his land, and his work. Long live the Popular Front! Long live republic! Long live President Azaña! Long live Morocco.[34]

After his return from the southern front to Madrid, Sidqi met the Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who covered early war events. Koltsov “wrote down everything I told him,” according to Sidqi.[35] In an article published in Pravda in September 1936 and in his memoirs, Kolstov pointed out that attempts were being made to form a battalion of Moroccan prisoners and deserters, “a task that is being handled by a young antifascist Arab named Mustafa ibn Jala.”[36] On October 7, the Madrid-based El Sol announced the creation of a Spanish-Moroccan Anti-Fascist Association (Asociación Hispano-Marroquí), with the mission, among other objectives, “to set up a Moroccan Militia battalion, attached to the ffth regiment, to fght alongside the Republican forces against the traitorous fascist rebels.”[37] This association, formed by Sidqi and a group of Republican Spanish youth, propagated the notion that Moroccans had been deceived or lured into fghting because of their misery and poor living conditions resulting from Spanish colonialism. It was a short-lived initiative due to a lack of support from the Spanish left, and the PCE in particular. Sidqi recalled that he carried out this project with great interest, but when the news reached the newspapers, his Spanish comrades “expressed their concerns about the objectives of such an association.”[38]

Sidqi’s mission did not end well. In a subtle manner, he lamented in his memoirs the increasing lack of confdence, mistrust, and constant suspicion his activities aroused among his Spanish comrades, both leaders of the PCE, such as Vicente Uribe, and Spanish soldiers on the front lines. There was very little willingness to initiate a dialogue with any Moroccan friend or enemy. At a certain point, Sidqi realized that he could not guarantee a “warm reception” to the Moroccan deserters, who were instead imprisoned, mistreated, sent back to the front against their will, or executed. Against this backdrop, Sidqi concluded, “I knew deep in my heart that my mission in Spain was failing.”[39]

Frustrated, Sidiqi decided to leave Spain but nonetheless continue his eforts to fnd more productive ways to reach the hearts of Moroccan soldiers. At the end of 1936, the PCE sent him to Algeria to establish a secret radio station that would broadcast anti-Franco propaganda in classical Arabic and Moroccan tribal dialects throughout North Africa.[40] For “technical” reasons, according to a Spanish ofcial of the PCE, this endeavor did not come to fruition, after which Sidqi’s fght for Spain formally ended.

Al-Khalek and Nabulsi: Left in the Footnotes of History Books

Upon the dissolution of the IB, a declarative letter addressed to “the Jewish and Arab working masses of Palestine” was published by a group of international volunteers from Palestine.[41] The statement afrmed that Jewish, Arab, and Armenian workers of Palestine were fghting against criminal fascism and for the liberty of Spain, Palestine, and the world. This group was part of the Naftali Botwin Jewish Company formed in December 1937 within the José Palafox Battalion of the 13th Dabrowski Brigade. The company was made up of mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews, primarily from Poland but also from Spain, France, Belgium, and Palestine.[42] Al-Khalek and Nabulsi were the only two Arabs in a company of volunteers with an overwhelming Jewish majority.[43]

Although other Arabs’ names also appear in the lists of the Botwin Company, they are the result of the duplication of names, indicating poor research or a misunderstanding of the Arabic language or Arabic naming tradition and culture. For example, one source states that among the Palestinians volunteers were “Ali Abdul-Khaleq, Ali al-Jibawi and Ali alTayouni [sic]—all killed in battle.”[44] These were not three diferent individuals; they were all Ali Abd al-Khalek. The latter surname al-Tayouni indicates al-Khalek’s ancestors’ village of Tayoun in South Lebanon, while al-Jibawi suggests his birthplace—the Palestinian village of al-Jib in the area surrounding of Jerusalem. The same is true for Fawzi Sabri Nabulsi, who was born in Jafa, but his family originated from Nablus, as his surname suggests. Other sources include individuals under the name of “Ali al-Arab” or “Fawzi al-Arab,” which should simply be translated as “Ali/ Fawzi the Arab,” with “al-Arab” being an adjective or perhaps a nickname rather than another individual.[45]

Beyond their origin, the very little we know about al-Khalek and Nabulsi comes predominantly from the Hebrew press, Israeli Archives, and memoirs of their Jewish comrades. While Sidqi left an autobiography covering most of his life, Nabulsi and al-Khalek did not leave any written trace behind. Nonetheless, while Sidqi’s meticulous account of his time in Spain lacks cross references, Nabulsi and especially al-Khalek are repeatedly documented, albeit briefy, in the biographies and memoirs of their Jewish comrades.

Nothing is known about Nabulsi before 1936, except that he was “a lightskinned Arab and a short man with red hair and a freckled face”.[46] According to the testimonies of PCP and Botwin members, al-Khalek was a baker in Jerusalem working in bakeries owned by Jews in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, where he learned Yiddish and Hebrew and where he gained socialist maturity.[47] After becoming a member of the PCP, he was sent to Moscow in 1927 together with other Arab party members. Upon his return, he was elected to the central committee of the party.[48] Later, as an “intelligent and capable militant and a persuasive speaker,” he was part of a vanguard of Jewish and Arab workers who “fearlessly fought against the British Mandate and against both Arab and Jewish chauvinism”.[49] Al-Khalek spent many years in prison for tirelessly spreading communist propaganda; there he “sat alone on a prolonged hunger strike and walked naked in the winter, refusing to wear the uniform of prisoners in Acre prison.”[50] Notably, while al-Khalek was, for his Jewish comrades, “bound body and soul to the brotherhood between Jews and Arabs of Palestine,” Sidqi settled for a mild and short description of al-Khalek as an enthusiastic, illiterate person who was sent to Spain “because he was causing trouble in Palestine as a result of his aggression.”[51]

In a short paragraph published in the Haaretz Zionist newspaper in June 1936, al-Khalek is critically depicted as standing in Hassan Bek Street in Jafa, surrounded by a large crowd, delivering a sermon of reproach and incitement against the Jews. The unknown author noted that al-Khalek was

a well-known Arab communist, who received his education at a designated propaganda school in Russia and that it would be nice if the police would be more interested in the Arab communists, who walk freely in Jafa and are not detained.[52]

Shortly thereafter, al-Khalek was arrested by British police.

Al-Khalek and Nabulsi were deported from Palestine when the Arab Revolt (1936–39) against the British mandate and Zionist establishment broke out. While suppressing the rebellion, the British police also persecuted communists in an attempt to clamp down on the subversive PCP. During the frst months of the uprising, more than 200 communists—mostly Jewish— were arrested, out of whom at least twenty ended up in Spain; one of them was al-Khalek.[53] Like for many of al-Khalek and Nabulsi’s Jewish comrades, going to Spain was an ideological choice, a ticket out of prison, or both.[54]

On October 17, 1936, a group of Jewish volunteers from the “Land of Israel” crossed the French–Spanish border near Perpignan.[55] Once in Spain, they went to the headquarters of the IB in Albacete. Casas-Ibáñez was one of the training bases of the IB outside of the city, where volunteers underwent intense military training before being sent to the front. In Casas-Ibáñez, among the many Jewish Palestinians, the two Arab comrades caught the attention of Michal Bron (Misha Brunstein), who would become the political commissar of the Botwin Company.

Bron, a Polish Jew, was curious about al-Khalek and Nabulsi. Having spent long days in the battlefeld trenches with the two, as he learned about their undeniable support of international solidarity, Bron realized why al-Khalek and Nabulsi were adamant to be included along with their Jewish Palestinian friends in the Botwin Company.[56] Indeed, as soon as they arrived in Spain, the two asked to be incorporated into this company.[57] Bron vividly noted:

Fawzi was young, lively and full of life while comrade Ali was a tall, middle-aged man with a deep political consciousness beftting a communist leader. . . . Ali’s radiant personality, smiling face, and pleasant voice gathered many around him as he used to sing Arabic, Yiddish and Russian songs.[58]

The Jafa-born Nabulsi was a machine gunner in the lines of the Botwin Company. In March 1938, Nabulsi was reported to have fought and died in the Battle of Lérida (March 27–April 3).[59] Later testimonies reveal that Nabulsi was indeed injured but was still alive when the war was over. Israel Centner, the ofcial chronicler of the Palestinian volunteers of the PCP, noted that Nabulsi stayed in Gurs internment camp in southern France, which housed most IB members after the war.[60]

Nabulsi’s postwar fate remained unknown for many years until a newspaper article appeared in August 1986 in the Dvar Hashavua Israeli weekly magazine. The author, Yeshayahu Sakli, positioned Nabulsi in a training camp in southern France in the fall of 1939. Sakli recalled that “Fawzi was about 25 years old, a quiet and lonely guy,” when he pulled out a knife, intending to stab one of his Zionist camp companions as they were arguing about the situation in Palestine. A few months after this incident, Nabulsi was sent to the nearby hospital in Perpignan, where an X-ray revealed a bullet in his body from his time in Spain. Sakli happened to lie in a bed next to Nabulsi for an entire month, and they became friends. This frsthand testimony reveals that Nabulsi was injured in Spain, arrived in France in 1938, and spent his recovery time in Paris before arriving to Perpignan. According to Sakli, Nabulsi thought he could live with the bullet in his body, but he eventually died of infection in the Perpignan hospital and was buried in France in a Catholic funeral. Before passing away, Nabulsi asked Sakli to pay a visit to his family house in Jafa and to tell them how he died. Two years later, Sakli arrived in Israel, but before going to Jafa, he discovered that Nabulsi was a “fundamentalist terrorist who was sentenced to death for murdering many Jews throughout 1936–1938”—hence the ambivalent article titled “My Friend the Terrorist.”[61]

Sakli’s testimony is the only source in which “Nabulsi’s voice is heard” and one that sheds light on his last days. Illuminating as it is, this testimony should be carefully analyzed as a single memory that cannot be verifed without other supporting materials. Amos Levin, one of Nabulsi’s Botwin comrades, vehemently opposed Sakli’s accusation, saying Nabulsi was no terrorist but rather an antifascist hero who fought in Spain and then under the French anti-Nazi resistance until he died of tuberculosis in 1948.[62] Levin probably based his claim on personal acquaintance with Sarah Schnitzer, Nabulsi’s partner. Apparently, Sarah and Nabulsi were in a relationship before the war, after which they reunited in Paris, where their only daughter was born in 1941.[63] Moreover, in two articles published in the PCP bulletin Kol Ha’am, only al-Khalek’s name appears in the lists of fallen “Eretz Israel volunteers” in Spain.[64] This strengthens Levin’s testimony that Nabulsi’s death was not caused by a battle wound.

Ten years prior to Nabulsi’s death, Efraim Wuzek, a Polish Jew and a member of the PCP, reported that on February 5, 1938, the Botwin Company embarked with the entire Palafox Battalion to Belalcázar, where a group of ffty-three Jewish volunteers coming from Casa Ibañez teamed up with them. According to Wuzek, this group included al-Khalek and Nabulsi, among others who came from Palestine.[65] Ten days later, on the evening of February 15, they arrived in Peraleda Camp (near the village of Peraleda del Zaucejo in southern Extremadura). In the early hours of February 16, the company, under the command of Karol Gutman, embarked on a two-kilometer walk to the foothills of the Sierra Quemada mountains. At a certain moment, Wuzek chronicled that they encountered heavy fre from which several volunteers were mortally wounded by “a rain of bullets,” including al-Khalek, who was among the frst to attack the fascists while shouting “Long live the Communist Party!”[66] AlKhalek was evacuated to the IB hospital Gota de Leche in Albacete. However, two days after, as stated by both Israel Centner and Michal Bron, he died in the hands of Hana Srulovici (Israeli), a Jewish volunteer nurse from Palestine. He was reportedly buried in a military ceremony in the IB cemetery of Albacete.[67]

Hussein Yassin: An Accountant in the Service of Sectorial History

Salman Salzman, a Jewish Palestinian international volunteer, spent time, efort, and resources to fnd the burial places of his fellow comrades from “Eretz Israel” who fell in Spain. In Albacete, he found four graves, one of them of an Arab.[68] This indication and others might have led Hussein Yassin, a Palestinian journalist and novelist, to commence a journey to locate al-Khalek’s resting place. As a former communist and a social activist, Yassin turned to Arab literature and history and found no mention of any Arabs in the ranks of the Republicans. For most of his life, Hussein was an accountant living between the Galilee and Ramallah. When he retired in 2012, he decided it was time to “mend history.”[69]

Yassin arrived at the Municipality of Albacete using his own funds, and after several futile attempts, he obtained the following document that identifes al-Khalek’s grave plot. The next day Yassin searched the large Albacete cemetery until he discovered the tomb mark, which was nothing more than a niche in the ground. Yassin informed me that he could not bear knowing that the grave site of this Palestinian activist-volunteer was not only unknown to anyone but also unmarked, abandoned, and neglected. During the same trip to Spain, Yassin paid for the construction of a marble monument with the inscription “Ali, the Story of an Honest Man,” as seen in Figure 4.1.[70]

Upon returning home, Yassin dedicated himself to a fve-year project of writing a fctional narrative about al-Khalek’s life. Ali, the Story of an Honorable Man is a fascinating piece of literature, fantasy, and romance that chronicles with poetic language al-Khalek’s lifetime from childhood in rural Palestine until death in Iberia.[71] Although Yassin relied on some historical anchors, this is a fctional tale. In Yassin own words: “For fve years, I chased him in the books of Arab literature and history, and in the archives of the Palestinian Communist Party . . . Nothing! . . . so I had to narrate it.”[72] Due to the passage of time and the substantial lack of written and oral sources, the model of a historical novel may be the only way to bring these forgotten Arab Palestinians’ stories to the fore and out of a narrow circle of former communists and scholars.

Fighting Together, Remembered Apart

Unlike the World War veterans who were celebrated and decorated as war heroes, both nationally and internationally in Western societies, it took several decades for the IB veterans to get proper acknowledgment. It is true that they were worshiped as idols in communist societies, but the Cold War delayed their historical recognition in Western countries.[73]

According to historian Raanan Rein, it was a long and winding road for Jewish veterans of the Spanish War, but from the 1970s onward, they were gradually embraced by the Zionist establishment and narrative. For Rein,

by creating a chain of events linking the Jews fghting Fascism in Spain to the anti-Nazi resistance, and then to Israel’s wars against the Arabs, the way was paved for the inclusion of the Spanish Civil War brigadistas in the hegemonic Zionist narrative and thus in the Israeli pantheon of heroes as well.[74]

In the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish–Arab solidarity in Mandatory Palestine and the ideas of universalism promoted by the PCP were perceived as an act of treason to the national interests of both Arabs and Jews.[75] From this nationalist perspective, both Arab and Jewish Palestinians “abandoned” their homelands in a crucial moment for the national struggle of each group.[76] Decades later, though, their shared vision of universalism has taken diferent paths within the Israeli and Palestinian contested narratives. Unlike the Jewish Palestinian volunteers, who were gradually presented as early Jewish fghters against fascism and Nazism, Arab Palestinian participation in the civil war remained an obscure and untold event at the far margins of the Palestinian national and historical narrative.

Even today, Najati Sidqi is almost forgotten in the annals of the Palestinian national movement, and Al-Khalek’s and Nabulsi’s antifascist struggle in Spain is nowhere to be found in Palestinian history books or even remembered in their own family clans.[77] The obvious question is: Why was a joint group of Arab and Jewish antifascist volunteers from Mandatory Palestine separated in historical memory? Four key insights emerged from this study.

Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Fascism, Nazism, and National Interests

“Are we not also demanding freedom and democracy?” Sidqi asked rhetorically in his memoirs. For Sidqi and fellow Arab antifascists such as Algerian Rabah Oussidhoum, Tangerian Hachmi Hassani, and Iraqi Nuri Anwar Rufail, the downfall of European fascism and Nazism would propel the liberation of Arab peoples.[78] This aspiration, though, was not the leading mindset in the Arabic-speaking world, where more pro-Nazi and pro-fascist sentiments prevailed based on shared interests and common enemies.[79] Mainstream Arab Palestinian leaders, for example, hoped that fascist support might facilitate Italian and German sympathy for the Palestinian struggle.[80] During the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian intellectuals, journalists, and local elites showed different levels of support and sympathy for the Fascist and Nazi movements in Europe, mostly because of their hostility to imperialist France and Britain, to the Soviet Union, and to both communism and Zionism.[81]

Pro-fascist tendencies were expressed in the Palestinian press coverage of the frst stages of the war, while no word was mentioned of Arab participation in either camp.[82] For historian Mustafa Kabha, antagonism toward the colonial oppression of Britain and France coupled with extremely hostile views of communism and the Soviet Union as banners of heresy, atheism, and cruelty strengthened Palestinian public opinion and identifcation with the Spanish rebels.[83] Indeed, while Franco’s fascist revolt was termed thawra (“revolution” or “national revolt” in Arabic), government forces were described as heretic communists.[84]

Kabha also shows the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish sentiment, as communism was attributed to Jews’ “crimes and plots” targeting Palestinian Arabs. Jews were seen as a destructive element that brought bolshevism and even fomented the war in Spain.[85] The very notion that Arab Palestinians were willingly fghting alongside the Arabs’ enemies—all united in the Republican ranks—was a repugnant and sinful act. In a sense, they were double sinners, as they were sent by an infdel authority, the Comintern, and fought alongside British, French, and Zionist “colonialists.”

Arab Palestinians’ sacrifce was not lost on their Jewish companions. The Israeli leftist daily Al-Hamishmar stressed that, given the unreserved sympathy for Franco in the Palestinian press, it required exceptional daring for an Arab to volunteer in Spain.[86] Furthermore, in Arno Lustiger’s book, Ali al-Khalek was depicted as “constantly concerned with casting an anti-fascist light, which was not easy for an Arab in clerical, fascist Palestine, under the control of infuential agents of Hitler and Mussolini.”[87]

The timing of departure to Spain was also a matter of tension. The years 1936–39 are remembered traumatically not only by the Spanish people but also in the Palestinian collective memory. These years coincided with the Arab Revolt, a nationalist uprising by Palestinians against the British Mandate and its stated goal of establishing a Jewish national home. In this broader context, both Jewish and Arab Palestinian communists and other radical left-wing activists were politically and socially marginalized by their respective national mainstream. The departure of Arab Palestinians to fght alongside “Bolshevik Jews” in other people’s war received very little, if any, understanding or sympathy outside of PCP circles.

Few Against Many

In the Arab world, Arab volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic are mostly ignored.[88] Jewish Palestinians were also ignored for decades, but they at the same time produced a substantial body of literature commemorating some 150 individuals, with varying levels of detail.[89] The more modest literary production of about three Palestinian Arab volunteers consists of Hussein Yassin’s self-funded novel on Al-Khalek (2017), Sidqi’s memoirs published in Beirut (1976), and the award-winning flm You Came from Far Away (2012) that narrates Sidiqi’s life, directed and funded by a Spanish flmmaker. Ironically, al-Khalek and Nabulsi are almost exclusively documented and remembered in “Jewish” historiography, where they are presented as “heroes who have shown exemplary courage on the Spanish battlefeld, as implied by their heroic struggle in their own country.”[90] Even Sidqi’s valuable literary production has not received proper recognition, as “his [literary] status seems less important than that of people less talented.”[91] All three have received limited recognition in Palestinian society and the Palestinian national narrative, mostly due to the mainstream refusal to include Arab volunteers in the Palestinian pantheon of heroes, as was done with their peers in Israel decades before.

Solidarity With “Zionist” Jews

The ethnic tensions and rising violence between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s were no more than an introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian confict following the 1948 War of Independence/ Nakba. Then and now, solidarity and egalitarian discourse between Jews and Arabs have been limited to the margins of both societies in confict. Within these margins, al-Khalek and Nabulsi frequently visited the house of their comrade Yossef Schnitzer (who also died in Spain), even in the most turbulent times of conficts between Jews and Arabs.[92] Moreover, Jewish and Arab Palestinian communists saw each other not only as equal party members and brothers in arms but also as life partners. The senior male Arab leaders of the PCP, for example, were in relationships with Jewish communist women.

While in Moscow, Sidqi married Ludka (Bat Sheva) Luberboim, a communist Polish Jew originally from Lvov (now in Ukraine).[93] In the Jewish press, she was mocked as a face scarf—covering European woman who went from the Jewish ghetto in Poland to the home of a Muslim in the Holy Land. Together “the two lovers were passionate followers of the Muscovite ‘Rabbi’ Lenin.”[94] As Siti Khadijah, as she was mostly known among Arabs (after the name of the frst wife and the frst follower of Muhammad), Ludka acted on behalf of the PCP among the women and men of the Arab villages around Jerusalem with the aim of “turning Arab Fallahs into communists.”[95]

It was reported that while in internment camp in Southern France, Nabulsi had two Jewish Palestinian female friends, both named Sarah. They sent him packages of sweets, cigarettes, and personal souvenirs, and he in turn used to write them love letters.[96] There were most likely not two women named Sarah but rather one: comrade Yossef Schnizer’s sister, who was Nabulsi’s wife, as previously mentioned. Raduwan al-Hilu, the PCP secretary from 1934 to 1943, was in a relationship with Yemenite Jew Simha Zabari, the most dominant female fgure in the party.[97] Zabari is also a supporting character in Hussein Yassin’s novel. She is presented as a notable and heroic woman, but, more importantly, Yassin writes extensively about an impassioned, fctional love afair between Zabari and al-Khalek, which also includes a vivid description of sexual intercourses. Unleashed from historical constraints, Yassin substituted al-Khalek for Radwan al-Hilu, since he sought to emphasize the alliance between Jews and Arabs that went beyond male brotherhood.

Romantic partnership between Arab men and Jewish women in the 1920s and 1930s had not been publicly discussed in Arab writing until Yassin’s novel appeared. Yassin is indeed a pioneer in this respect, but it came with a price. His novel was listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, but he never won the award—due, according to Yassin, to this very controversial love afair. “The narrow-mindedness of many parts of Palestinian society today,” said Yassin, “simply cannot endorse the notion that there were also Jews who were not Zionists, and who moreover fought against Zionism.”[98] In Mandatory Palestine, Arabs’ afliations with Jews, whether friendly, collegiate, or romantic, have been considered one or two steps too far. In today’s reality, where daily encounters between Israelis and Palestinians are limited to the military arena or construction sites, attempts to discuss the Jewish–Arab socialist brotherhood of the 1920s and 1930s, not to mention intermarriages, are still uncommon.[99]

Promoting Progressive Ideas in a Patriarchic Society

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rigid structure of patriarchal Arab Palestinian tribal society and its predominantly Islamic culture left very little room and tolerance for promoting liberalism, socialism, secularism, and gender equality. The antireligious element of communism, as embedded in MarxistLeninist “scientifc atheism,” was particularly targeted as a threat to the fabric of traditional societies and Islam. While Soviet communism was not very far from the mainstream socialist views of the Yishuv, it was utterly alien to the conservative social system of Arab Palestine.

Fighting in Spain alongside “godless forces” was perceived as going against Islam and the Arab people, while the fascist rebels and their “Moros” were soldiers of God who took the banner of religious war for the sake of faithful people.[100] Hence, within mainstream Arab historical discourse, Sidqi, al-Khalek, and Nabulsi, who came from pious Muslim families, not only left Palestine when it needed them badly but also stood up against Islam.

Their progressive views on gender equality were another source of tension with tradition. In his memoirs, Sidqi notes how captivated he was by

a scene that sends a shiver through the heart, a shiver of pleasure and of zeal: a Spanish girl wearing a militia uniform, holding a rife on her shoulder, girdled with a belt of bullets, going out with the Spanish boys to defend sacred freedom.[101]

He contrasted this new female model of Spanish womanhood with the refned Iberian lady fgure of Carmen that characterized the old Spain. These progressive gender visions and anti-religious sentiments may have been common in the ranks of the Republican camp, but they were certainly tabooed in Palestinian tribal society of the 1930s, as they are today.

Welcomed Neither Here Nor There: Facing Dual Marginality

“Look! An Arab young man from Arab countries came to convey the news of the civil war in Spain . . . isn’t this surprising?!”[102]

Anti-Islamic rhetoric prevailed in the Republican camp’s politics, press, and literature, grounded in the widespread cliché of the Moro cortacabeza (headcutting Moor), a widely propagated depiction of the cruel, vicious, and bloodthirsty Moor.[103] Dolores Ibaruri, the famed Pasionaria (one of the mythic leaders of the PCE), alluded to the “wild Moorish, drunk with sensuality, which pours itself into horrendous violations of our men, our women.”[104] Even fascist high ofcers claimed that atrocities, looting, and rape were not the fault of Franco’s Spanish troops but “things of wild Moors, Africans… we cannot deal with them.”[105]

It is true that the Moroccans were the primary targets of Republican antiMuslim propaganda, but Arab Muslims were also the objects of racism, mistrust, and deep suspicion in Republican Spain. Paul Nothomb, a Belgian aviator in the IB, wrote in his memoirs that Arabs who had joined the IB were treated by the Republican ofcers with a condescension clearly tinged with contempt.[106] These negative views were clearly manifested by Sidqi’s frst encounter with Republican militia men, in which he was greeted with incredulity. The militia ofcer asked him: “Are you really an Arab? You are a ‘Moro’—a Moroccan? That’s impossible, the Moroccans are marching with the fascist thugs, attacking our cities, killing, plundering us, and raping our women.”[107] Sidqi entered Spain optimistic and enthusiastic, but he left pessimistic and disappointed. Sidqi blamed his Spanish brothers in arms who were unwilling to collaborate with “el Moro,” whoever he was. Sidqi was not a Moro, but the “Moors were his friends,” and these Moors are now at the gates of Madrid, as a PCE ofcial once told him.[108]

The marginality of Arab Palestinian volunteers was not confned to the Iberian Peninsula. In April 1937, Sidqi was sent by the Comintern to Damascus and Beirut, where he took part in the local communist parties’ activities.[109] During this period, Sidqi described Nazism and Islam as inimical doctrines. He professed that “every educated Arab who has studied the holy Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth, must become a ferce opponent of the Nazis’ principles and their barbaric customs.”[110] In 1940, Sidqi published a book on the topic to mobilize everyday Muslim believers to refute pagan Nazism out of religious obligation anchored in Islamic texts.[111] Ironically, and as happened in Spain, Sidqi’s attempt to mobilize Muslims against Nazism not only failed to do so but also heavily criticized in the Communist Party. According to Sidqi, his reliance on Islamic texts in confronting Nazism stirred up his secular party colleagues, eventually leading to his expulsion from the party’s ranks.[112] The post-Nakba/War of Independence world of Israel/Palestine was also hostile and uncertain for Sidqi, as “he lived in a world that did not belong to him, and died in a far place.”[113]

Conclusions

This chapter has focused on the unexamined trajectories of a handful of Arab Palestinians who left to fght in Spain, some of whom never returned. It has examined this question rigorously for the frst time, reducing the number of known Arab Palestinian volunteers to three by assembling all existing evidence about them. They were politically active Arab Muslims who cultivated a universalist social struggle that was antithetical to a mostly tribal and Muslim society and to the perceived national interests of Arab Palestine. The promotion of these progressive notions was only possible within the Jewishdominated circles of the PCP. Due to their radical anti-authoritarian social views, communist Jews and Arabs left for Spain to combat tyranny. Both the Zionist and Palestinian movements expressed little patience for young Jews and Arabs fghting other people’s war at a time when their homeland needed them the most. This episode was pushed to the fringes of national memory for decades in both Israel and Palestine. Nevertheless, a small circle of Jewish volunteers maintained these memories through written documents and oral histories, which came into use decades later when they eventually entered the Israeli Zionist narrative. Ironically, this “Jewish” historiography, coupled with Sidqi’s memoirs, is probably the only documentation of the non-Jewish Palestinian volunteers in Spain. The recovery of this history is important in itself, but the Arab Palestinian volunteers’ ideology of universal brotherhood also has a powerful and tragic resonance today. Sidqi’s, al-Khalek’s, and Nabulsi’s exceptional trajectories are still a matter of taboo within Palestinian society, and this study hopes to contribute to a better understanding of a chapter of the Spanish Civil War that is still missing.

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