The Arab region was central to the foundation of the League Against Imperialism (LAI). Yet, accounts of the League have overwhelmingly dismissed Arab participation within the LAI as well as internationalist circles of the interwar period. This in turn has obscured the contributions and—often controversial—issues that Arab intellectuals and activists brought into an international organization such as the League. It has also silenced Arab voices that rose against imperialism. This chapter amplifies these voices and contextualizes them within a longer Arab anti-imperialist tradition that, much like the one this volume highlights within the LAI, was diverse, complex, and, most importantly, very threatening to colonial authorities.

Yusuf Yazbik, a leftist intellectual and activist and one of the main founders of the Lebanese People's Party—the precursor to the Communist Parties of Lebanon and Syria—was walking home from a clandestine meeting in Beirut in January 1926 when he was arrested by the police. Yazbik had just arrived from Paris and was meeting with Artin Madoyan, an Armenian communist, and Ali Nasser al-Din, an Arab nationalist. Yazbik had letters and information from Marcel Cachin and Shakib Arslan that Nasser al-Din was to relay to Sultan al-Atrash, the leader of the anticolonial Syrian revolt against the French Mandate (1925–1927). At the police station where he was held Yazbik shared a cell with Nasser al-Din and Madoyan, whom the French authorities had also managed to arrest that same night, as well as prominent communist activists. At the special criminal court headed by a French judge, they were accused of agitating for armed revolt and of enticing people to rebel and the army to disobey its superiors. Awaiting their trial, some of those arrested managed to make contact with the outside world, particularly with the Palestinian as well as the French Communist Parties. The latter sent a French lawyer, Jacques Sadoul, to defend the accused, and the CP newspaper, l’Humanité, launched a campaign on its pages protesting their arrest. Prisons in Syria and Lebanon were also filled with rebels and nationalist militants who were fighting against French colonialism in these two newly established countries. Messages on the walls of Beirut's prison read “workers of the world unite” and “Long Live Syrian Independence.”