Youssef Darwish

Youssef Darwish (; 2 October 1910 – 7 June 2006) 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. By the mid-1940s, Darwish had become the legal representer to 67 of Egypt's then 170 labour unions, WCNL later turned to the "Workers and Peasants Communist Party (WPCP)" and then fused with other communist organizations at the time in the "Communist Party of Egypt (CPE)" , which then split into CPE and HADETU.

In 1958, the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser arrested and jailed all known communist activists, including Darwish. He remained in prison for 6 years, during which he was frequently beaten and tortured.

Views on Zionism, Jews in Egypt, and Jewish exodus In 1947, Darwish joined a group called Jews against Zionism. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly two years before his death, he told the reporter, "We denounced the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine but the government closed us down while Zionist organisations continued to function freely". he stated that there was no discrimination against Jews in Egypt prior to 1948. But as the State of Israel was established, many Egyptian Jews began to worry and the Jewish exodus began. He claimed that "sequestration wasn’t a general rule applied to all Jews, but a measure imposed after 1956 primarily on French and British Jews and those who were suspected of having ties to Israel" and that it wasn't until after the 1967 war that the majority of the 10,000 Jews who had stayed behind began to leave.

Personal life The Egyptian actress Basma is Youssef Darwish's granddaughter.