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Abstract
This article maps the internationalization of the Palestinian cause by studying the participants, groups, and themes at Palestinian solidarity conferences held in 1969–70. Examining such conferences reveals the extent of communication and ideological debate between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and international solidarity activists at an important juncture in the internationalization of the Palestinian liberation movement. The article makes the methodological point that international conferences organized by the PLO and other Palestinian institutions can function as an alternative archive that complements the traditional archives of diplomatic and intellectual history. Read in tandem with extant Palestinian sources, the paper trail left by international conferences mitigates the scattered and precarious status of Palestinian archives.
Endnotes
Notes
1 Chen Jian et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (London: Routledge, 2018).
2 Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (New York: Times Books, 1981), pp. 64–65.
3 Christopher J. Lee, “Return of the Event: Bandung and the Concept of the Conference,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher J. Lee (2010 repr., Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), p. xxv.
4 See Karma Nabulsi and Abdel Razzaq Takriti, “Revolutionary Moments,” Learn the Revolution, The Palestinian Revolution, 2016, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/learn/part/7. See also “May Sayegh: Revolution on the Borders II: The Resistance in Lebanon, 1969–1976,” 28 January 2017, YouTube video, 17:33, posted by Learn Palestine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqf7-cp6AoM&t=8s.
5 Hana Sleiman, “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement,” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (Spring 2016): pp. 42–67.
6 Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference,” Journal of World History 30, nos. 1–2 (June 2019): pp. 157–92, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2019.0016; Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2008).
7 Lee, “Return of the Event,” p. xvi.
8 Carolien Stolte, “The ‘Other’ Bandung,” 25 May 2016, Afro-Asian Visions, Medium, https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/the-other-bandung-6b3dcc8e6762; Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, eds., “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War Era,” special issue, Journal of World History 30, nos. 1–2 (June 2019): pp. 1–19; Manuel Barcia, “‘Locking Horns with the Northern Empire’: Anti-American Imperialism at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): pp. 208–17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794010903069052.
9 Sara Seidman, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 2 (2012), https://doi.org/10.5070/T842015751; Sara J. Seidman, “Angela Davis in Cuba as Symbol and Subject,” Radical History Review 136 (2020): pp. 11–35, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-7857227.
10 Diarmaid Kelliher, “Historicising Geographies of Solidarity,” Geography Compass 12, no. 9 (September 2018): e12399, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12399.
-- This is the conception of solidarity put forward by spatial theorist and activist Stavros Stavrides in Towards the City of Thresholds (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2019).
12 David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012), p. 17.
13 Featherstone, Solidarity, p. 25.
14 Featherstone, Solidarity, p. 10; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 333; Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 12.
15 Sören Brandes, “From Neoliberal Globalism to Neoliberal Nationalism: An Interview with Quinn Slobodian,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 19, no. 3 (2019): pp. 641–49, http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/neoliberal-globalism-neoliberal-nationalism-interview-quinn-slobodian.
16 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 283.
17 See for example Robert Austin Henry, “Global Palestine: International Solidarity and the Cuban Connection,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 18, no. 2 (November 2019): pp. 239–62, http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/hlps.2019.0217; Jessica Stites Mor, “The Question of Palestine in the Argentine Political Imaginary: Anti-imperialist Thought from Cold War to Neoliberal Order,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 20, no. 2 (2014): pp. 183–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/13260219.2014.939125; Zsuzsa László, “Limits of Solidarity: Hungarian Intelligentsia and the Middle East in the Cold War,” Mezosfera, no. 5 (May 2018), http://mezosfera.org/limits-of-solidarity/; Maha Nassar, ‘‘‘My Struggle Embraces Every Struggle’: Palestinians in Israel and Solidarity with Afro-Asian Liberation Movements,’’ Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): pp. 74–101, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24877900; Joseph Ben Prestel, “Heidelberg, Beirut, und die ‘Dritte Welt’: Palästinensische Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1956–1972),” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, no. 3 (2019): pp. 442–66, https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1724; Yoav Di-Capua, “Palestine Comes to Paris: The Global Sixties and the Making of a Universal Cause,” JPS 50, no. 1 (2021): pp. 19–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2020.1861906; Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Dina Matar, “PLO and Cultural Activism: Mediating Liberation Aesthetics in Revolutionary Contexts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 2 (2018): pp. 354–64, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-6982123; Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, eds., Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums in Exile (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2018); Zeina Maasri, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Shahab Ahmad, “The Poetics of Solidarity: Palestine in Modern Urdu Poetry,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 18 (1998): pp. 29–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/521880.
18 Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19 Mark T. Berger, “The End of the ‘Third World?,’” Third World Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1994): pp. 257–75, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436599408420379.
20 Nahed Samour, “Palestine at Bandung: The Longwinded Start of a Reimagined International Law,” in Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, ed. Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 595–615.
21 Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and His Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism (London: C. Knight, 1975).
22 Mjriam Abu Samra and Loubna Qutami, “Alterity across Generations: A Comparative Analysis of the 1950s Jeel al-Thawra and the 2006 Palestinian Youth Movement,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 147 (October 2020): p. 13, https://doi.org/10.4000/remmm.14087.
23 Ido Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance in Palestine: Books, Guns, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 14–18.
24 Nabulsi and Takriti, The Palestinian Revolution. See also Abu Samra and Qutami, “Alterity across Generations,” p. 8.
25 Mjriam Abu Samra, “The Palestinian Student Movement, 1948–1982: A Study of Popular Organization and Transnational Mobilization” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2020). See also Nabil Shaath, Hayati min al-Nakba ila al-Thawra (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2016), pp. 165–205.
26 Abu Samra, “Palestinian Student Movement,” pp. 242–43.
27 Di-Capua, “Palestine Comes to Paris,” pp. 19–50.
28 Abu Samra and Qutami, “Alterity across Generations,” p. 15.
29 Abu Samra and Qutami, “Alterity across Generations,” p. 17.
30 Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, p. 10.
31 Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, p. 10.
32 Stolte, “‘The ‘Other’ Bandung.”
33 Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South, “AAWO The Afro-Asian Women’s Conference” Afro-Asian Networks, Visualisation, accessed 29 October 2021, https://afroasian.mediaplaygrounds.co.uk/; The First Afro-Asian Women’s Conference, Cairo, 14–12 January 1961: Reports, Messages, Speeches, Resolutions (Cairo: Amalgamated Press of Egypt, 1961).
34 Muhammad Abu Mayzar, “Abu Mayzar, Muhammad. Interviewed 2011. Translated by The Palestinian Revolution, 2016,” The Palestinian Revolution, accessed 1 November 2021, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/uploads/sources/58ec897ef13bf.pdf.
35 Yitzhak Oron, ed., Middle East Record, vol. II (Tel Aviv: Israel Program for Scientific Translations for Tel Aviv University, 1961), p. 45.
36 Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, p. 32.
37 See the transcript of Fidel Castro’s speech, “At the Closing Session of the Tricontinental Conference,” Marxist Internet Archive, 16 January 1966, https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1966/01/15.htm; General secretariat of the OSPAAAL, ed., First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, conference booklet (Havana: OSPAAAL, 1966).
38 George Jabbour, “International Opposition to Zionism,” Arab Palestinian Resistance Monthly Magazine, October 1970, p. 24, https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC12_scans/12.arab.palestine.resistance.Oct-1970.pdf.
39 Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, p. 3.
40 The Palestinian Revolution, “Revolutionary Diplomacy,” The Palestinian Revolution, accessed 1 November 2021, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/teach/week/13.
41 Khalaf, My Home, My Land.
42 Abu Mayzar, “Abu Mayzar, Muhammad. Interviewed 2011.”
43 “Fatah Defines Its Political Objective,” Palestinian Journeys, 19 October 1968, https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timeline/overallchronology?&sideid=5464.
44 Abu Mayzar, “Abu Mayzar, Muhammad. Interviewed 2011.”
45 Palestinian National Council, “The Palestinian National Charter. Adopted by the Palestine National Council (PNC), Cairo, 17 July 1968,” trans., The Palestinian Revolution, accessed 1 November 2021, http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/uploads/sources/588c278d92b2e.pdf.
46 Kelliher, “Historicising Geographies of Solidarity.”
47 “Conference Declaration,” January 1969, EUL MS 115/2/8, Richmond Papers, Special Collections Archives, University of Exeter.
48 “Conference Participants,” January 1969, EUL MS 115/2/8, Richmond Papers, Special Collections Archives, University of Exeter.
49 Jabbour, “International Opposition to Zionism,” p. 27.
50 Al-Fatah delegation, “Address by the Al-Fateh Delegation to the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples,” Freedom Archives, January 1969, https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC12_scans/12.address.by.al-fateh.1969.pdf.
51 “Address of the Palestinian Delegation before the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, ‘Palestine: The Dignity of Combatants,’” Tricontinental, no. 12, May–June 1969, p. 60–61.
52 “Conference Appeal,” January 1969, EUL MS 115/2/8, Richmond Papers, Special Collections Archives, University of Exeter.
53 Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad (ISRACA), Information Bulletin, April 1969.
54 ISRACA, Information Bulletin.
55 ISRACA, Information Bulletin.
56 ISRACA, Information Bulletin.
57 Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
58 Abu Mayzar, “Abu Mayzar, Muhammad. Interviewed 2011.”
59 Diane Langford, “The Manchanda Connection: A Political Memoir,” Abhimanyu Manchanda Remembered archive, accessed 1 November 2021, http://abhimanyumanchandaremembered.weebly.com/the-manchanda-connection.html.
60 Diane Langford, in discussion with the authors, 10 November 2020, London.
61 Langford, discussion.
62 Langford, discussion.
63 Mahdi Abdul Hadi, ed., Documents on Palestine Vol. II (1948–73) (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2007), pp. 327–28, http://passia.org/media/filer_public/3f/04/3f04c528-fa5c-40f2-b2be-8eb5cfc08ec7/cd_vol2.pdf.
64 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), FBI Monograph: Fedayeen Impact—Middle East and United States, June 1970, FBI, Record Information/Dissemination Section, Governmentattic.org, 22 January 2009, p. 13, https://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/FBI_Monograph_Fedayeen-Impact_1970.pdf.
65 FBI, FBI Monograph: Fedayeen Impact.
66 Langford, discussion.
67 “Informations,” information letter, 1 September 1970, EUL MS 115/2/18, World Conference of Christians for Palestine Permanent Committee, Richmond Papers, Special Collections Archives, University of Exeter.
68 Reuters, “Lebanon: World Christian Conference for Palestine Opens 1970,” 8 May 1970, https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVA494D3VRRXTYU7879YOC7YZBN2-LEBANON-WORLD-CHRISTIAN-CONFERENCE-FOR-PALESTINE-OPENS/query/Palestine.
69 Agence France-Presse, “L’appel de Beyrouth condamne toutes les formes ‘explicites ou cachées’ de l’antisémitisme” [Beirut appeal condemns all “explicit or hidden” forms of anti-Semitism], Le Monde, 12 May 1970, https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1970/05/12/l-appel-de-beyrouth-condamne-toutes-les-formes-explicites-ou-cachees-de-l-antisemitisme_2667454_1819218.html.
70 “The Beyrouth Conference—Charitable Emotion or Progress of Political Conscience,” 1 September 1970, EUL MS 115/2/18, World Conference of Christians for Palestine Permanent Committee, Richmond Papers, Special Collections Archives, University of Exeter.
71 “Informations,” EUL MS 115/2/18.
72 “The Beyrouth Conference,” EUL MS 115/2/18.
73 Abu Samra, “Palestinian Student Movement,” pp. 242–70; Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, pp. 24–26.
74 Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, p. 57.
75 “GUPS Opens International Summer Work Camp in Jordan,” Fateh (magazine), 21 August 1970, pp. 8–9; Maya Alva, in discussion with the authors, 15 March 2021, London.
76 For more on other conferences organized by GUPS, see Abu Samra, “Palestinian Student Movement,” pp. 251–61.
77 Abu Samra, “Palestinian Student Movement,” p. 243.
78 Quoted in Zelkovitz, Students and Resistance, pp. 59–60.
79 Encyclopedia Palestina, “Filasteen (Nadwa—Al-’alamiyya)” [Palestine (global symposium)], ed. Muhammad Ali al-Farra et al., accessed 11 November 2021, https://www.palestinapedia.net/%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86-%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9.
80 Amin Hindi, “Second World Conference on Palestine Invitation,” undated, CP/CENT/INT, Communist Party of Great Britain, International Department, Peoples History Museum, Manchester.
81 Karen S. Bjerregaard, “Et Undertrykt Folk har Altid Ret: Solidaritet med den 3. Verden I 1960’erne og 1970’ernes Danmark” (PhD diss., Roskilde University, 2010); Jens Rasmussen, Anya Tolstoy, and Mette Iversen, “Palaestina-Solidaritet: En Undersøgelse af Palaestina-Solidaritet på den Danske Venstrefløj fra 1967–1978” (master’s thesis, Roskilde University, 2010); Sigvart Nordhov Fredriksen, “Discovering Palestine: How Norwegian Solidarity with Palestine Emerged in the Global 1960s” (master’s thesis, University of Oslo, 2020); Terje Vågstøl, “Den Norske Solidaritetsrørsla for Palestina, 1967–1986” (master’s thesis, University of Oslo, 2007).
82 Shaath, Hayati, p. 298.
83 Falastin, nos. 5–6 (1970): pp. 41–42.
84 Falastin, nos. 5–6 (1970): p. 42.
85 Finn Sjue’s diary (personal collection) records the following interviews in August–September 1970: Abu Khaled, head of the Fatah Information Office in Amman; Abu Lutuf, Fatah Central Committee; Mujahid, Information Bureau of DFLP, Amman; unnamed spokesman, PFLP, Amman; Abu Fadi, Fatah Central Committee, Amman; Ghazi Saudi, Palestinian Red Cross, Amman.
86 Sjue, diary recording the August–September 1970 meetings, pp. 34–35.
87 Sjue, p. 14.
88 Fritt Palestina, no. 1 (1970): p. 4.
89 Peder Martin Lysestøl, in discussion with the authors, 13 March 2020, Trondheim.
90 Falastin, no. 10 (1971): p. 3.
91 Bjerregaard, “Et Undertrykt Folk har Altid Ret,” pp. 410–11.
92 Shaath, Hayati, p. 298.
93 Shaath, Hayati, p. 298.
94 Shaath, Hayati, p. 299.
95 Shaath, Hayati, p. 300.
96 Linda Tabar, “From Third World Internationalism to ‘the Internationals’: The Transformation of Solidarity with Palestine,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2017): pp. 414–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1142369.
97 Abdel Razzaq Takriti, “Before BDS: Lineages of Boycott in Palestine,” Radical History Review, no. 134 (2019): p. 58, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-7323408.
98 Open Letter, “The Dignity and Hope Manifesto,” 18 May 2021, Mondoweiss, https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/the-manifesto-of-dignity-and-hope/.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sorcha Thomson
Sorcha Thomson is a PhD fellow in international studies and member of the Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left research project at Roskilde University.
Pelle Valentin Olsen
Pelle Valentin Olsen is a cultural and transnational historian of the modern Middle East. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left research project at Roskilde University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2020.
Sune Haugbolle
Sune Haugbolle is a sociologist of the modern Middle East. He is professor of Global and Development Studies at Roskilde University and edits the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.