Palestinians and the solidarity with Afro-Asian liberation movements
“MY STRUGGLE EMBRACES EVERY STRUGGLE”
By Maha Nassar • University of Arizona, School of Middle Eastern & North African Studies (MENAS)
Studies Journal, 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 74–101
Before he was an internationally acclaimed poet, Mahmoud Darwish spent his twenties as an editor and columnist for al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, the Arabic-language publications of the Israeli Communist Party. In February 1962 he reported on the second Afro-Asian Writers Association Conference in Cairo, where writers from sixty countries gathered to discuss how they could forge a sense of solidarity based on their geographical and historical ties. Darwish articulated the impetus for the conference by noting that in the years immediately preceding it, “The East has stood on its feet and unleashed its energy, which has changed the face of humanity’s history and cleansed it of imperialism’s filth . . . . In this solidarity the writers of Asia and Africa have found a path towards unifying their shared forces.” While Darwish’s account vividly conveyed his excitement about the conference, one thing was missing: Darwish himself. As a Palestinian living in Israel, Darwish could not attend the conference, due both to Israel’s ban on travel to Arab countries and to the Arab boycott of Israel. Nonetheless, Darwish’s enthusiasm for the conference clearly reflected a broader, yet frequently overlooked, aspect of Palestinian discourse in Israel. Despite their physical and geographical isolation, Palestinian activists and intellectuals repeatedly sought to affirm their solidarity with global decolonizing movements and liberation struggles. In doing so, they subtly contested elements of the Zionist narrative that portrayed Israel itself as part of the decolonizing world.
Until recently, much of the scholarship on the pre-1967 Palestinian minority in Israel has characterized it as politically quiescent and isolated, in contrast to the more robust political assertiveness of later generations of activists. More recent studies have challenged this picture of quiescence, highlighting early acts of resistance despite the dominance of the Israeli military regime. Additional work has also shed new light on what Ghassan Kanafani in 1966 termed the “resistance literature in occupied Palestine,” showing how poetry festivals and Arabic literary journals provided important outlets for poetic expressions of nationalist sentiment and opposition to Israeli policies during the pre-1967 period. These studies, however, focus primarily on state-minority interactions and tend to locate the Palestinian community squarely within the confines of the nation-state. A few scholars have noted the consumption of Arab media by Palestinians in Israel as well as Palestinian activists’ pan-Arab orientation. Yet there has been less attention to how Palestinian cultural producers in Israel situated themselves within the broader context of Afro-Asian decolonization movements and their concomitant global solidarity programs. As a result, the Palestinian minority has yet to be fully integrated into broader studies of Arab intellectual and cultural history, particularly during the pre-1967 period when scholars assumed they were cut off from the wider region.
This article addresses this gap by examining how Palestinian activists and intellectuals in Israel articulated their solidarity with Afro-Asian liberation struggles. Because of numerous political and ideological constraints that hindered their ability to organize sustained, large-scale and contentious collective action, they relied upon cultural production to express their solidarity with these movements. Through a content analysis of two of the most popular and influential Arabic-language publications in Israel during this period — the semi-weekly newspaper al-Ittihad (The Union) and the monthly cultural journal al-Jadid (The New) — I argue that between 1960 (the Year of Africa) and 1967 (the June War), Palestinian contributors to these publications utilized three overlapping solidarity discourses. These discourses aimed to connect Palestinians in Israel to the major anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles that animated the Afro-Asian world during this period, most notably those of Algeria, Congo, and Vietnam.
The first was a political solidarity discourse that circulated global discourses of anticolonial camaraderie to a local audience. Proponents of this political discourse also organized (to the extent possible) protests of support that mirrored those taking place around the world. The second was a poetic solidarity discourse that sought to develop what political leaders and Négritude co-founders Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor termed “horizontal solidarity” with colonized people around the world. Poets and critics exhibited such sentiments by translating and reprinting global resistance literature and composing works that expressed their connections with those struggling for freedom. The third was an intellectual solidarity discourse that examined how indigenous peoples in other parts of the world — especially in Algeria — utilized cultural production to resist settler colonial regimes’ attempts to erase them. These complementary discursive approaches reflected the overlapping identities of those who produced them. As was common during this period, a single individual often served in multiple capacities, including journalist, political activist, intellectual, and cultural producer. Darwish, for example, composed poems, essays, and reports, served as literary editor for al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, and also participated in demonstrations. Thus, examining these discourses together gives us a fuller picture of the intellectual trajectories of their authors.
By introducing the concept of solidarity discourses, I hope to show how Palestinian cultural producers deployed these narratives as part of a larger struggle over what Edward Said has called “competing conceptions of geography,” whereby nationalist leaders and intellectuals reimagine the geographies imposed on them by outside forces. In this case, solidarity discourses aimed not only to demonstrate Palestinian support for these global movements, but also to disrupt Zionist narratives of Israeli exceptionalism. As Gabriel Piterberg notes, the “uniqueness of each settler nation” is one of the “fundamentals of hegemonic settler narratives.” By drawing parallels between their circumstances inside Israel and those of other colonized peoples, Palestinians in Israel actively subverted Israel’s own settler narrative.
Focusing on the pre-1967 period is important for two reasons. First, it helps us understand more fully why, after the sting of the June 1967 defeat, the Arab world so enthusiastically welcomed the “resistance poets,” particularly Darwish and his colleague, Samih al-Qasim. Before that watershed event, most Arab intellectuals had ignored the Palestinians in Israel, dismissed them as collaborators, or viewed them as passive victims of Israeli policies. Immediately after the war, as Arabs looked for new models of resistance, they took a renewed interest in the Palestinians in Israel, seeking them out at international conferences and festivals. Through these solidarity discourses, Palestinians in Israel articulated a transnational consciousness that had parallels in the Arab world, much to the (pleasant) surprise of their Arab interlocutors. Second, focusing on this period helps us broaden our understanding of Palestinian global alliance building beyond the realm of revolutionary armed struggle. As Paul Chamberlin has recently demonstrated, in the wake of the June War, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) launched a “global offensive” in which it drew parallels between the Palestinian struggle and those of other anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements, focusing on armed struggle as the most effective means of achieving national liberation goals. Examining these earlier discourses demonstrates that Palestinian expressions of global solidarity extended beyond a shared belief in armed struggle and also included active engagement on cultural and intellectual planes.
Investigating how these Palestinians utilized cultural production to establish solidarity with a larger Afro-Asian world helps us deprovincialize the Palestinians in Israel and locate them within a transnational, comparative framework of anticolonial cultural resistance. At the same time, it writes this community back into the histories of Arab and Palestinian alliance building. Thus, this study contributes to the nascent field of Palestinian cultural history. It also speaks to the newly emergent historical work on Arab-Afro-Asian relations that seeks to move beyond center-periphery paradigms in order “to locate firmly an intercontinental geography of historical agency and meaning,” and to elucidate further the contours of “an Afro-Arab political imaginary.”
Conclusion
Recently, critically engaged scholars have called for studies of Zionism and Israeli state apparatuses to be grounded more firmly in an analytical framework of comparative settler colonialism. They have shed light on how Palestinian are building solidarity networks with other indigenous groups around the world. Global solidarity with the Palestinian people goes at least as far back as Bandung, where “the Asian-African Conference declared its support of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine.” There has been little attention, however, to Palestinians’ articulations of solidarity with other liberation movements and how they placed their own struggle within a comparative, transnational anticolonial framework.
This article begins to fill this lacuna by examining how one group of Palestinians — those living under Israeli military rule prior to 1967 — utilized the Arabic publications of the Israeli Communist Party to articulate three solidarity discourses with Afro-Asian liberation struggles in the face of numerous political and ideological constraints. The first was a political solidarity discourse, in which party activists and leaders circulated global discourses of anticolonial solidarity and organized (to the extent possible) solidarity protests that mirrored those taking place around the world. The second was a poetic solidarity discourse, in which Palestinian cultural producers in Israel sought to develop horizontal solidarity with colonized people around the world by circulating global resistance literature and composing works that expressed their sense of connection with those struggling for freedom. The third was an intellectual solidarity discourse that examined in depth the ways in which indigenous peoples around the world, particularly in Algeria, resisted their attempted erasure by settler colonial regimes through literary and cultural means.
By utilizing these overlapping solidarity discourses, Palestinian activists and intellectuals sought to reimagine their geographical location as one positioned firmly within the bonds of third world solidarity, despite their physical and political isolation during the pre-1967 period. In addition, the circulation of these discourses, which also had parallels in the Arab world, reveals the shared, transnational vision of decolonization that existed among Palestinians in Israel and their fellow Palestinians and Arabs outside the Green Line. This shared vision helps us account for the positive reception that Palestinian resistance poets from Israel received in the Arab world when they were reunited with them following the June War, after years in which they were either dismissed as collaborators or viewed as passive victims of circumstance. Moreover, while the PLO formulated a program of global solidarity after 1967 that focused primarily on the idea of armed resistance, the discourses elucidated above show that Palestinian articulations of global solidarity extended beyond revolutionary struggle into the cultural and intellectual realms.
Investigating how local Palestinian discourses of solidarity were connected to global narratives of resistance challenges common analytical frameworks that center on their positionality in Israel and locates them instead within broader Palestinian, Arab, and global comparative frameworks. Deprovincializing the Palestinian minority in this manner also sheds light on the historical context in which more recent modes of Palestinian cultural resistance and solidarity can be understood.
