by JOEL BELNIN
Assassinated in 1978, Henri Curiel was a Jewish Egyptian Marxist whose likely killers include fascist French-Algerian colons, the apartheid South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.
Born in Egypt, Henri Curiel spent much of his active political life in France, where he was the guiding force behind the Solidarity organization, a group that provided assistance to revolutionary movements in countries like Algeria and South Africa. This role earned Curiel many enemies: in 1976, the French right-wing magazine Le Point denounced him as “the boss of the terrorist support networks.”
Two decades after Curiel’s assassination in 1978, the late Israeli journalist Uri Avnery recalled his impressions of the Egyptian activist:
A thin, rather ascetic man, his eyes hidden behind thick glasses, unassuming, quite unobtrusive, he looked more like a professor of literature than a professional revolutionary. A casual observer would never have suspected that here was a man involved in a dozen struggles of liberation, hated and threatened by a dozen secret services.
Avnery first encountered Curiel during the Algerian struggle for independence from France of the late 1950s—a cause both men supported. Curiel subsequently worked with Avnery and others to arrange the first meetings between Israeli peace activists and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The Paris years for which Curiel became best known followed a period of intense activity in the nascent Egyptian communist movement between the 1930s and his expulsion from Egypt in 1950. Curiel inspired passionate loyalty from his followers and intense loathing from his political rivals. His tactical flexibility and personal eccentricities tested the ideological constraints and stodgy style of orthodox, pro-Soviet communism. But he never deviated from the profound solidarity with immiserated Egyptians that he adopted during his youth.
Curiel was born in Cairo, the younger son of a Spanish-Jewish banking family. Educated in a French Jesuit school, he never mastered Arabic. Nonetheless, upon reaching adulthood, he made a characteristically demonstrative political statement by renouncing his family’s Italian citizenship and becoming an Egyptian citizen.
In the first half of the twentieth century, many upper-middle-class and wealthy Egyptians of all faiths and ethnicities received a French education. They readily adopted a cosmopolitan, but nonetheless Eurocentric, cultural style. However, this social-cultural orientation was popularly associated with local non-Muslim minorities—primarily Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Jews. Under the influence of leftist teachers employed by the Mission laïque française, or “French Lay Mission,” several prominent communists, including Curiel and some of his later detractors within the movement, emerged from this milieu.
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