Obituary: The struggle for justice (1910-2006) Labour lawyer , a founding member of the communist movement in Egypt, passed away in Cairo peacefully on Wednesday, 7 June. In his mid-90s, he had long been an iconic figure for the nation's progressive forces. Over the past year I was privileged to meet Youssef on a weekly basis, interviewing him about his political work that spanned more than six decades of the most turbulent years of Egypt's modern history. The son of Moussa Youssef Farag Darwish, a jeweller of the Jewish Karaite faith, who worked as a modest artisan for many years before becoming a successful wholesale trader, Youssef's childhood and early youth were anything but privileged, a working class background that informed his early passion for social justice. Moussa Youssef Farag Darwish, like his son, remained committed to the working class throughout his life, even after becoming a successful businessman. Youssef recalled that his father remained close to his old neighbours in Harat Al-Yahoud (the Jewish Alley, situated in the downtown area of Al-Ataba) where he had lived and worked as a young man. The alley, with its artisans and workers, would always remain his home. Youssef spurned any suggestion that his later politics had been somehow forged by the experience of being a minority Jew in a predominantly Muslim country -- such an interpretation, he insisted, was "facile" and "uninformed". "My quest for social justice has nothing to do with being Jewish," he said. "I was first exposed to Marxist literature when I studied law and commerce in Toulouse and Aix-en- Provence. It is through my readings that I became a communist." The 1919 Revolution, he said, had played a far more significant role in his political formation: he early became an ardent nationalist and Wafdist, adopting as his own the revolutionary slogan "religion is for God and the homeland for all". In the secular Egypt of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there was no room, Youssef maintained, for racism. "When I went to high school my best friends were Hamed Sultan and Yehia Hassan, both Muslims. During those years there was no division between the communities, Muslims and Jews were neighbours and friends." This was especially true of the Karaite Jews, whose presence in Egypt dated back to the seventh century. Native speakers of Arabic, the Karaites were one of the oldest and most assimilated of Jewish communities in the Middle East. It was only with the spread of Zionism after World War II, and the UN plan to partition Palestine, that things began to change. Still, the Karaite Jews never became Zionists and Israel, said Youssef, was never their promised land. They regarded Egypt as their country. Yet they were eventually driven to leave. Among the events that contributed to create a climate of fear in the community was the pogrom that took place in Harat Al-Yahoud in 1947. Erased from Egyptian history books, and hence from the collective memory, the massacre was the work of the Muslim Brothers who went on a bloody rampage in Harat Al-Yahoud, burning down the neighbourhood and killing people in their path. It was this massacre, in addition to the hysteria that prevailed prior to, and during, the creation of the state of Israel that ultimately drove the Karaites out of Egypt, Youssef explained. He was one of the few who remained. "He was an Egyptian in the true sense of the word," says trade unionist Attia El-Serafy, an old friend and comrade. "He was Egyptian not by default, like millions of others, but because he chose to be." Upon his return from France in 1934 Youssef went to work as an attorney and began his career as a political organiser. In the early 1940s he was regarded as one of Egypt's most effective labour lawyers and by the mid-1940s had become legal counsel to 67 of Egypt's 170 trade unions. Among his most militant clients was the General Union of Mechanised Textile Workers in Shubra Al-Kheima, led by its charismatic general secretary Mahmoud El-Askary and its president Taha Saad Othman. They, along with Youssef El-Mudarrik, a trade unionist with a Marxist background, were to become the backbone of communist labour activism in Shubra Al-Kheima, working closely with . In 1946 Youssef, Raymond Douek and Sadek Saad, two other young Jewish intellectuals, co- founded the Workers Vanguard for National Liberation, the first formal Marxist organisation in Egypt. As membership grew the group decided in 1957 to turn the Vanguard into a fully- fledged party, the Workers and Peasants Communist Party (WPCP). Like many communist cadres, Youssef paid dearly for his politics. He was regularly jailed for daring to be a communist in Egypt, spending some 10 years of his life behind bars, and it was while serving his first sentence for "communist subversion and sabotage" in 1949 that his daughter, Nawla, was born. Youssef never repented. "I am still a communist and I'm proud of it," he repeated in innumerable interviews. "Marxism will survive as long as there are the exploiters and the exploited." In 1958 the three main tendencies of the communist movement fused to form the Communist Party of Egypt (CPE). But it was the WPCP that brought the largest number of workers into the nascent party, says Egyptian labour historian Joel Beinin. Yet the leaders of Al-Raya, the smallest and most Stalinist of the groups, demanded that the party leadership be purged of all cadres with Jewish origins, arguing that the Nasser regime was hostile to the movement because it equated Jews and Zionism with communism. They specifically targeted , Raymond Douek and Sadek Saad. Never mind that the three had earlier converted to Islam. They agreed for the sake of unity, and joined the rank and file after having spent decades of their lives building the movement. Unity, however, was not to be. In July 1958, six months after its creation the CPE split into two factions. Then, in 1964, while Youssef was serving five years out of a ten-year sentence, the communist leadership held secret negotiations with Nasser's regime to dissolve the party. The CPE and the CPE- HADETU ( Al-Haraka Al-Dimoqratiya li'l Tahrir Al-Watani ) formally disbanded. "I was totally opposed to the decision," recalled Youssef. "Several of us tried to organise again but some of our own people threatened to inform." Yet Youssef remained indomitable, and was arrested once again in 1973 following efforts to revive the party. Released from jail for lack of evidence, he left with his wife, Marxist activist and political organiser Iqbal Hacine, for Algeria, where Youssef served as a consultant to the Algerian government until 1980. The CPE resurfaced in 1975, and Youssef served as its representative to the Cominform in Prague from 1980 to 1986. Eventually he broke with the party because of the leadership's top-down approach and their imposition of party programmes on the rank and file. Back in Egypt Youssef became a founding member of the Helwan-based Centre for Workers and Trade Union Services, a labour advocacy NGO that provides free legal services to workers. "When somebody you love dies, the hardest thing is to know that you'll never hear their voice again," said my husband. He is right; it is the way I feel about Youssef, knowing that I will never again answer the phone and hear his slightly breathless, yet remarkably youthful, voice with its tone of urgency. Though he wasted few words, was always to the point, Youssef's warmth and charisma were conveyed through these calls which invariably made my day. Though Youssef is gone, his legacy lives on for his work, as Beinin points out, was based on a life-long understanding that democracy and social justice are not granted by elites but must be won through popular struggle. By Faiza Rady
