Joel Beinin (born 1948) is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as director of Middle East studies and professor of history at the American University in Cairo.
Beinin was raised as a Zionist in a secular American Jewish family. [1] On graduating from high school, he spent six months working on a kibbutz, where he met his future wife. He studied Arabic at university, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1970. He spent the summer of 1969 studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo. Intending to move to Israel permanently, he joined other members of Hashomer Hatzair in living and working at Kibbutz Lahav. There, on encountering attitudes that struck him as being contemptuous of Palestinians, [2] he gradually became disenchanted with his early ideals, and declared himself to no longer be a Zionist. [3] He returned to the United States in 1973, and took his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and, after working in auto plants in Detroit, [3] obtained his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982, respectively. [4] He has also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [5]
Beinin's research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East. Though initially interested in the rise of an Arab Working class in Mandatory Palestine, under his thesis supervisor's advice, he changed the topic of his doctoral thesis to a history of the Egyptian labor movement since 1936. The reason for this was that his thesis supervisor believed if he wrote about Israel or Palestine he would be less likely to get an academic job post-graduation. [6] Beinin's Ph.D. thesis ended up being combined with one covering an earlier period of Egyptian labor history by his friend and colleague Zachary Lockman and resulted in the publication of Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (1989). [7] Among his later work is a study of the Jewish communities of modern Egypt which led to his major historical study, The Dispersion Of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, And The Formation Of A Modern Diaspora (1998), which examines the diversity of Egyptian Jewish identities in Egypt and in the diaspora. He has engaged in fieldwork to collect oral reports among many Egyptian Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world after the Suez War of 1956, among them the Karaites of San Francisco.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Beinin was placed on a list of individuals deemed to be "negligent in defending civilization" (together with 39 other faculty members at U.S. universities) by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative non-profit group devoted to curbing liberal tendencies in academia. This was because of a statement he had made, declaring that Osama bin Laden should be tried by an international tribunal. [8]
In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. [9] He served as director of graduate studies in the history department at Stanford University in 2002–2004 and again in 2005–06, but then took a leave of absence from that institution in order to take up a position as director of Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo. [10] [ better source needed ]
Beinin has written four books and co-edited three others and published many scholarly articles.
He is also active as a commentator on issues regarding Israel, Palestine, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. He has been a contributing editor to Middle East Report [11] and has published articles in, among others, The Nation and Le Monde diplomatique . He is a member of Academia for Equality, an organization working to promote democratization, equality and access to higher education for all communities living in Israel.
In 2006 Beinin sued conservative writer David Horowitz for copyright infringement after Horowitz used Beinin's image on the cover of a booklet entitled "Campus Support for Terrorism." [12] In 2008, the case ended in an out of court settlement in which Horowitz donated $27,500 to charity but admitted no liability. [13]
As mentioned in a Stanford Daily article, Beinin described the harm caused by the 2023 October 7 attacks by Hamas as both the loss of lives and the exclusion of the group from future international peace discussions. He stated, “They undertook this action in which they committed serious atrocities, violations of international law and war crimes,” adding that the events of October 7 have de facto barred Hamas from participating in any international efforts to resolve the Palestinian question. [14]
The Lavon affair was a failed Israeli covert operation, codenamed Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the summer of 1954. As part of a false flag operation, a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside Egyptian-, American-, and British-owned civilian targets: cinemas, libraries, and American educational centers. The bombs were timed to detonate several hours after closing time. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian communists, "unspecified malcontents", or "local nationalists" with the aim of creating a climate of sufficient violence and instability to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in Egypt's Suez Canal zone. The operation caused no casualties among the population, but resulted in the deaths of four operatives. The overseer of the operation allegedly informed the Egyptians, after which 11 suspected operatives were arrested. Two died by suicide after being captured, two were executed by the Egyptian authorities, two of them were acquitted at trial, and the remaining five received prison terms ranging from 7 years to life in prison.
The First Intifada, also known as the First Palestinian Intifada, was a sustained series of protests, acts of civil disobedience and riots carried out by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. It was motivated by collective Palestinian frustration over Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as it approached a twenty-year mark, having begun in the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. The uprising lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference of 1991, though some date its conclusion to 1993, the year the Oslo Accords were signed.
Trade unions in Egypt first emerged at the start of the 20th century, although organised collective action in the form of strikes undertaken by workers was recorded as early as 1882. The Manual Trade Workers Union was founded in 1908 under the leadership of the Egyptian Nationalist Party in 1908.
Fu'ad Nassar, was a Palestinian communist leader. Nassar became associated with the anti-colonial struggle in 1929. He joined the Palestinian Communist Party and was in charge of the military activities of the party during the 1936-1939 insurgency. He led the Nazareth branch of the Palestinian Arab Workers Society.
The Democratic Movement for National Liberation was a communist organization in Egypt from 1947 to 1955. HADITU was led by Henri Curiel. The movement followed the line of the National Democratic Revolution.
The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising is a coalition of the local Palestinian leadership. During the First Intifada it played an important role in mobilizing grassroots support for the uprising. In 1987, the Intifada caught the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) by surprise, the leadership abroad could only indirectly influence the events. A new local leadership emerged, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), comprising many leading Palestinian factions. The disturbances, initially spontaneous, soon came under local leadership from groups and organizations loyal to the PLO that operated within the West Bank and Gaza Strip; Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the Palestine Communist Party. The UNLU was the focus of the social cohesion that sustained the persistent disturbances. After King Hussein of Jordan proclaimed the administrative and legal separation of the West Bank from Jordan in 1988, the UNLU organised to fill the political vacuum.
Youssef Darwish was an Egyptian labour lawyer, communist and activist. During his years of political activism, he was frequently accused of communist subversion and imprisoned, spending around 10 years of his life in jail. Of Jewish background, he converted to Islam in 1947. He was one of the few from the Karaite Jewish community to remain in Egypt after the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Semitic Action was a small Israeli political group of the 1950s and 1960s which sought the creation of a regional federation encompassing Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Salvator Cicurel was an Egyptian Olympic foil and epee fencer, and later the president of Cairo's Sephardic Jewish Community Council from 1946 until 1957.
Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, also known as Azzam Pasha, was an Egyptian diplomat and politician. He was the first Secretary-General of the Arab League, from 22 March 1945 to September 1952.
The Balfour Day riots, took place between 2 and 3 November 1945. The riots began as anti-Jewish demonstrations on the 28th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Rallies were organised by the right-wing Young Egypt Party and Hassan al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Unified Egyptian Communist Party was a political party in Egypt. The party was founded in February 1955 through the merger of the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (HADITU) and six splinter organizations. The talks regarding the merger were held without the HADITU leader Henri Curiel being aware of them. Once the merger was finalized Curiel and HADITU leader Kamal Abd al-Halim were excluded from membership in the new party. Curiel and Abd al-Halim were allowed to enter the party in 1956, and after the 1956 war Curiel was included in its Central Committee.
The 1948 bombings in Cairo, which targeted Jewish areas, took place during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, between June and September, and killed 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200. Riots claimed many more lives.
Jonathan Cook, born circa 1965, is a British writer and a freelance journalist formerly based in Nazareth, Israel, who writes about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He writes a regular column for The National of Abu Dhabi and Middle East Eye.
Al-Ittihad is an Arabic language daily newspaper in Israel. Based in Haifa, it was established in 1944 and is owned by the Israeli Communist Party. It is the oldest Arabic media outlet in Israel and considered the most important. The newspaper is currently edited by Aida Touma-Suleiman.
Al-Malayin was a weekly newspaper published from Cairo, Egypt.
The Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party of Palestine was a Marxist-Zionist political party in the British Mandate of Palestine, connected to the Hashomer Hatzair movement.
The Cicurels were a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Egypt throughout the first half of the 20th century, best known for the elite department store chain bearing their family name. Moreno Cicurel, the family patriarch, emigrated from Turkey in the latter half of the 19th century. Other members of the family remained in Smyrne until the beginning of 20th century and then migrated to the USA and to France. Moreno Cicurel established Les Grands Magasins Cicurel at the turn of the century. His three sons helped grow the business to prosperity and acclaim following his death.
The Egyptian Communist Party, often referred to as the Raya group after its publication ar-Rayat ash-Sha'ab, was a communist party in Egypt founded in late 1949.
Saad (Yaakov) Malki was an Egyptian Jewish educator, journalist, and Zionist.
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