Nate George
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow
Academic Year 2020-21
Nate George will be working on his first book project, A Third World War: The Palestinian Revolution, the Lebanese National Movement, and the Struggle for Popular Sovereignty in the Arab East, 1967–1982. As the US attempted to construct an Arab-Israeli settlement in the 1970s that would pacify a volatile Middle East, Lebanon became a key site of international and popular political contention. A Third World War writes Palestine back into the history of the Lebanese civil war by challenging depictions of the struggle as an internal sectarian conflict or a proxy “war of others.” Instead, it understands this conflict as an important setting in an international civil war over the direction of decolonization and the shape of political representation in the Eastern Mediterranean. It traces the emergence of a revolutionary, internationalist, anti-sectarian subjectivity that united Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees into a coalition against what they called “imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reaction.” This prompted their opponents to mobilize their own counterrevolution anchored by visions of sectarian and national purity to combat what they referred to as an “international leftist conspiracy.” The question of Palestine lay at the heart of this struggle, which was the pivot of revolutionary mobilization, counterrevolutionary sectarianization, and imperial pacification. Drawing on American, Palestinian, Lebanese, and British archives and original interviews in Arabic, English, and French, the book tracks linkages between people, materiel, and ideas across sites of conflict, contributing to the rethinking of the Cold War as an international civil war often driven by events in the so-called periphery.
Nate George holds a PhD in History from Rice University and an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University of Beirut. His chapter “Travelling Theorist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-Colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental,” will be published in The Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s (Edinburgh University Press, August 2020). His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Hoover Institution, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.