Summary
HADETU (al-Haraka al-Dimuqratiyya li’l-Tahrir al-Watani, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation), formed in May 1947 by the union of Henri Curiel’s HAMETU and Hillel Schwartz’s Iskra, Egypt’s most influential communist organization for most of the two decades after 1943, whose Jewish leadership, endorsement of partition and successive splits Chapters 5 and 6 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry trace in detail (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2607-2651).
Details
- Curiel founded HAMETU, the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation, in 1943 on a strategy of Egyptianizing the communist movement by giving priority to the national struggle against British imperialism, “the line of popular and democratic forces”; in May 1947 HAMETU united with Iskra to form HADETU, three of whose fifteen first Central Committee members — Curiel, Schwartz and Aimée Setton — were Jews (Chapter 6, note 3) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2607-2624).
- HADETU followed the Soviet Union in endorsing the November 29, 1947 UN partition decision; its unity lasted less than a year, and the first challenge to Curiel’s leadership — by Shuhdi ‘Atiyya al-Shafi’i and Anouar Abdel-Malek, who formed the Revolutionary Bloc — occurred during the partition debate, the struggle against the Jewish leadership fusing with opposition to partition. Curiel and his supporters never agreed the Palestine question was an issue in the split, since that would admit their Jewishness limited their roles, and there is, the chapter states, no evidence they had secret Zionist sympathies (Chapter 6, note 13) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2625-2651).
- After martial law was proclaimed on May 15, 1948, hundreds of communists including Curiel were arrested; roughly as many Jewish communists as Zionists were detained at Huckstep, Abu Qir and al-Tur. Released by January 1950, HADETU reorganized with considerable success; Curiel was arrested again on July 25, 1950 and deported “as a foreigner dangerous to public security” despite holding Egyptian citizenship for fifteen years. The Paris exiles maintained a HADETU branch, the Rome Group, for most of the 1950s (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2640-2651).
- Alone among Egypt’s communist tendencies, HADETU supported the July 23, 1952 Free Officers coup as an expression of the “national democratic movement” (Chapter 6, note 22), though this did not exempt its members from arrest and torture in Abdel Nasser’s prisons for much of the next twelve years; it split again in mid-1953 over its attitude to the regime and changed its line in late 1953 to attack it. In February 1955 HADETU and six organizations that had split from it fused to form the Unified Egyptian Communist Party, on the partners’ condition that Curiel’s membership be suspended; his membership was restored in July 1956 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2676-2704).
- In the 1948-54 underground in Egypt, HADETU members were among the detainees alongside Zionists and Muslim Brothers; Beinin’s earlier chapters record the movement’s Mansura members standing guard before a Jewish-owned store during the November 1945 riots, at the cost of letting police inventory their membership (Chapter 3, note 9) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1150-1172).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Henri Curiel, Rome Group