Notes On Socialism In The Middle East

In no sense do these notes pretend to the blessed adjective “definitive.” They are based on impressions derived from observations, conversations, interviews, meetings, and a little reading during a six weeks’ trip in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel. I went abroad to listen rather than to speak, but before I came home I had spoken and been questioned at public student meetings in the American universities in Cairo and Beirut, at off-record conferences first with Arab and then Jewish students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at a radical “opposition” Arab club in Lebanon and at an informal meeting under Baath—the Socialist Party of Syria presided over by that excellent man, Salah el-Bita...