Yusuf Yazbek

Yazbek worked as a secretary-interpreter in the Department of Emigration at the Beirut port.^[5][6] In the period between 1922 and 1924, he was one of the editors of a semi-weekly labor newspaper entitled Al-Ṣaḥafi al-Taʼih (Arabic: The Wandering Journalist) based in Zahlé, Lebanon.^[5] He published his articles using the pseudonym the Weeping Ghost.^[5] He also wrote for a journal entitled Al Marad.^[5] In October 1924, he and Fuad Shimali, a Lebanese tobacco worker, established the Lebanese People’s Party which would be renamed as Lebanese Communist Party^[7] in the 1940s.^[8] It was approved by the authorities as a legal political party on 30 April 1925.^[5] Yazbek was elected as its secretary general^[1] and resigned from his job at the port.^[5] He and others in the central committee of the party launched a weekly newspaper entitled Al-Insaniyyah (Arabic: Humanity) which was one of the early communist publications in Lebanon.^[5][6] Yazbek was named as its editor-in-chief.^[6] However, the paper was closed by the French authorities after publishing five issues on 17 June 1925.^[5][6] In the aftermath of this incident Yazbek left Lebanon for France in July 1925^[6] and began to work for L'Humanité newspaper in Paris.^[5]

Yazbek was removed from the Communist Party in 1926, and Shimali succeeded him as the secretary general.^[1] Yazbek returned to the country in December 1926.^[6] He was among the founders of the Syrian Lebanese Communist Party^[9] which was established by the split groups from the Lebanese People’s Party and the Spartacus Group, an Armenian Bolshevik party.^[8] He and Artin Madoyan were both arrested by the French mandatory forces in the late 1926 and imprisoned on the island of Arwad until 1928.^[5]

Yazbek cofounded an organization named the League Against Nazism and Fascism in Syria and Lebanon in May 1939.^[10] He was also instrumental in the establishment of the organization's magazine entitled Al Tariq in 1941.^[11] He was one of the leftist figures who gave lectures in Beirut's Cénacle Hall in the late 1940s.^[12] He died in 1982.^[2][3]

Yazbek was the author of the book entitled Hikayat awwal nuwwar fi al-'alam fi lubnan (Arabic: The Story of May Day in the World and in Lebanon) which was published in Beirut in 1974.^[1][7] He also published another book, The Conference of Martyrs, in 1955.^[3]