The Mexican-US border has some resemblance with the Palestinian-Israeli Separation Wall. While the logic of territorial annexation underlines the histories of both barriers, the emergence of militarized surveillance is a shared tactic that the US and Israel openly and jointly exercise. The collaboration of the US Border Patrol with Israeli security firms, such as Elta North America, and president Trump’s invocation of Israel’s “wall as a model” for the barrier he has vowed to build along the US-Mexico border exemplify this tactic. Designed to control the movement of Mexicans and Palestinians in their respective lands, these walls also construct them as dangerous racialized Others. With an attempt to dismantle these walls, this paper aims at building a bridge between Mexico and Palestine by exploring similarities and differences between forms of resistance to colonial borders and neocolonial barriers. While the US-Mexico stretches along the Southwest, I will focus on the perspective from Tijuana, a border-city that embodies the old history of borderlands and the recent reality of walls. Questions that I will address include: What does it mean to see Palestine from Tijuana? What do the hybridity and in-betweenness that characterize Tijuana tell us about everyday resistance in border cities? How does the human geography of border-crossing undermine colonial territorial separation? How can we identify Palestinian sister-cities of Tijuana? To answer these questions, I will examine recent ethnography about border-crossing in Tijuana alongside maps and geopolitical analysis of the Wall between Tijuana and California. I will also engage with Palestinian research on the Separation Wall in order to illuminate my analysis of the difference between borders and walls. Through a comparative critical analysis of the border/wall my goal is to offer some critical remarks on the trajectories of crossings and resistance in Mexican and Palestinian border-cities sealed by walls.

Latinx/Palestinian solidarities have been subject to increased conversation throughout the United States as activists began constructing joint mock border walls to represent the US-Mexico and Israel-Palestine Walls across cities and universities. Highlighting US-Israeli collaborative border construction and policing tactics led to increased international scrutiny on the longer legacy of coordinated racial war-making between Israel and Latin America throughout the Cold War. While recent scholarship and organizing has focused on border walls and international solidarities, less attention has been paid to how agriculture and militarization link Latin America and Palestine. This emphasis on border militarization has led to Latinx/Palestinian solidarities to de-emphasize the current struggle of farmworkers throughout the United States. I trace the racialized genealogies of US-Israeli-Central American militarization, agriculture, and surveillance coordination in the 1980s. The first half of the paper situates the construction of model villages throughout Guatemala in a longer history of settler imperialism and racial capitalism. By beginning our narrative of Palestine from the Americas, I aim to shift the temporal and spatial terrain of Palestinian decolonization. Employing the rhetoric of the Green Revolution, Israeli “agricultural experts” coordinated with Guatemalan coffee growers and US agricultural companies to develop rural counterinsurgent strategies for Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt’s “scorched earth” policy. Employing pesticides and fertilizers, these security and agricultural “experts” sought to reshape and reimagine the counterinsurgent environment. These transnational networks of security expertise were both destructive and sinisterly productive, fashioning what I call “racial security laboratories”, where tactics of militarizing the environment became key sites of racial projects and counterrevolutionary imaginaries. Drawing from USAID papers, Israeli memos, and Guatemalan Police archives, The second half of the paper reveals how Israeli/Guatemalan rural counterinsurgent tactics shaped racial security regimes and militarized environmentalism across the United States, Israel, and Central America. The paper concludes by discussing how we practically cross our own mental barricades that has historically estranged Latin America and Palestine from one another. What possibilities are opened up when we stand from our grounded solidarities and commit to refuse exceptionalist narratives and single-issue organizing, particularly in our shared commitments to more effectively combat the ongoing practices of war-making and imperial violence?

Whether by force or through legal mechanisms, dispossession has been key to capital accumulation and practiced both internally and externally.  This period of one hundred seventy years has seen the world go through various phases of capitalist production and various phases of dispossession and settler colonialism. U.S. imperialism, following both a territorial and economic logic, began back in the 19th century with the dispossession, removal and extermination of indigenous populations.  In 1848 the U.S. took over more than a third of Mexican lands through war and later, through various land acts and commissions, dispossessed Mexican colonists, who themselves earlier had dispossessed the indigenous populations in the Southwest.  In 1887 the U.S. further dispossessed indigenous populations that had already been  removed from their eastern and southeastern lands through privatization instituted through the Dawes Act.  In 1898 the U.S., eager to take possession of Cuba and other Caribbean islands, found a way to enter the Cuban War for independence in order to take control of these islands, especially of Puerto Rico, still a U.S. colony today.  1948 marks the year that European powers facilitated the taking over of Palestine by Zionists and in the process dispossessed Palestinians that had resided in those lands for over two thousand years.  Today, through aggressive settler colonialism and other means, Israel continues to dispossess the Palestinians on the West Bank, in good measure with the approval of Europe and the U.S.  These processes of dispossession, or what economists call new enclosures, have made use of different mechanisms of control and validation but have in turn also generated various forms of resistance; in this talk we would like to draw some important comparisons between these historical benchmarks, noting some salient differences as well. Across different temporal and spatial locations what is shared is the deployment of military force along with legislation and financial maneuverings that work hand in hand to effect dispossession, displacement and disenfranchisement.

The poster is one of the main propaganda resources that the regime of the Cuban Revolution used to spread its positions and implemented actions in political, economic and social matters. After the celebration of the Tricontinental Conference and the constitution of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), in 1966 and 1967 respectively, dozens of Cuban poster designers made a commitment to graphically express the solidarity of their country with the causes of liberation of the Third World against all forms of oppression, colonialism and imperialism. The struggle of Palestine for world recognition as a sovereign State and the recovery of its territories occupied by Israel became one of the recurring themes of this revolutionary cultural expression. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the representations of the Palestinian cause in the Cuban posters published by OSPAAAL between the 1960s and 1980s, a temporal delimitation that follows the years in which Cuba was practically the only nation in Latin America and the non-Arab world whose government was consistent in defending the Palestinians. Composed by images of high visual impact, the posters communicated the suffering of a people expelled from their lands, but at the same time focused on the heroism of resisting the abuses of Zionism. These posters, in which the Cuban designers sought to educate their fellow countrymen as well as the rest of the world about the Palestinian tragedy, became another major manifestation of solidarity that the revolutionary regime have been demonstrating with Palestine in both diplomatic and military fields. In this sense, the posters are a faithful historical witness of the time in which the two countries established relations and, in turn, how they evolved in the convulsive context of the Cold War. Investigating the archive of Cuban posters from the aforementioned period, I will trace in my presentation the evolution of Cuban solidarity with Palestine from the wake of the Naksa ("Setback") to the very fierce condemnation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Key questions that I will address include: How did these posters depict actions orchestrated by Cuba in the international arena to concerning the defense and support of Palestine? What iconography was used to commemorate the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People? I ultimately examine how these visual expressions of solidarity established Palestine in the popular and political Cuban imagination.

Studies about the Arab community in Cuba flourished during the 1980s when a group of scholars from Museo Casa de los Árabes and la Unión Árabe de Cuba began using archival, documentary, bibliographic and oral accounts to reconstruct a history of this community. The existence of a large community of descendants of immigrants and elderly immigrants who still have vivid memories of decades of Arab immigration to Cuba enabled developing new research directions and several publications on the cultural history of Arabs in Cuba, most notably Rigoberto Menéndez Paredes’ Componentes árabes en la cultura cubana (1999) and Los árabes en Cuba (2007). This presentation seeks to shed light on the history of the Palestinians in Cuba, the second largest community of Arab immigrants after Lebanese. Since the last quarter of the 19th century, Palestinians migrated to Cuba for various reasons. They settled in the main cities of the island and also in rural towns. They also formed important associations, such as Sociedad Palestina Árabe de Cuba and el Centro Palestina. However, despite the evident political, cultural and economic assimilation of Palestinian-Cubans, including the Palestinian descendants of influential families, such as the Tabraue and Darwich families, the modern and contemporary history of Palestinians in Cuba remains largely understudied. Recognizing the significance of Palestine and its right to self-determination as a priority cause in Cuba, I will examine in my presentation the past and present efforts that have been made by Cuban and Palestinian-Cuban scholars, cultural historians and community members to archive the history of Palestinians in Cuba. In addition to describing some of the major material conditions that have affected the creation of a Palestinian archive in Cuba, I will address how cultural notions of integration and the categorizations of Palestinians as members of the Afro-Asian diaspora influenced writing the history of Palestinians in Cuba. Finally, I will discuss how the political solidarity of Cuba with Palestine informed and championed documenting two parallel histories: the history of Palestine and the history of Palestinians in Cuba.