The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was based in Lebanon between 1970 and 1982, the years preceding and the first half of the Lebanese civil war. In order to create space in Lebanon to operate as a governing body for Palestinians, the PLO used political and economic power to gain clout in the Lebanese landscape and allied itself with the front seeking revolution for Lebanon, the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). The relationship between the PLO and the LNM became one of dependence in fighting their respective struggles, struggles they both supported. While this support was socially and ideologically upheld, the internal power struggles of this alliance eventually led to its destabilization as a result of mismanaged acts of armed resistance (among other things). Information will be drawn from oral history interviews with active participants in the struggle, both in leadership positions and as members of popular bases and will be coupled with discursive cultural texts. The active participants of both the PLO and LNM labeled this time as revolutionary and as the most liberating time in the struggle against Zionism. As such, this paper seeks to understand notions of revolutionary and liberatory praxes through the eyes of those active participants in the struggle. This paper will intervene in questions of revolution in different colonial contexts, one being settler and the other manifesting through imperialism, to develop a notion of armed struggle in liberatory praxis. Specifically, it aims to analyze the question of armed struggle in revolutionary praxis in both the Palestinian and Lebanese contexts jointly and individually. This paper will debunk notions of a violence/non-violence dichotomy by situating armed struggle practices within spatial and temporal realities and drawing upon the context in which violence is enacted, as well as what is labeled as violent to begin with. As opposed to approaching violence as a binary, this paper will look at violence as a decolonial pedagogy and seeks to understand the stakes for such a methodology within the larger question of revolution. This paper works to juxtapose the question of armed resistance as it relates to revolutionary praxis and will work to theorize through and expand upon Frantz Fanon’s notion of colonial violence. As such, this paper will take up the question of the use of armed struggle as a tool for decolonization, exploring the question of militarizing resistance practices as modes of survival and sustenance in the context of statelessness.

It is impossible to speak of “Palestinian resistance” without confronting the colonial-political ontology that structures Palestinian subjectivity, or appreciating how this ontology, far from maintaining a static coherence, is contingent, modulated by strictures that are overlapping, at times contradictory, and serve to inform as well as delimit the ever-shifting potentiality for Palestinian being and resistance both within and without Palestine’s continuously contested borders. This presentation utilizes a comparative reading of two Palestinian texts, Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” and Edward Said’s “Tribute to Abu Omar,” as the point of entry to a larger meditation on these concerns. Taken collectively, the three figures in question—Kanafani’s nameless narrator, Edward Said, and Abu Omar (formerly Hannah Mikhail)—constitute a kind of triangulation of the possibilities and restrictions of Palestinian mobility: Said, the exile who eventually came to the US; Kanafani’s narrator, who refuses a scholarship to the University of California in order remain in Gaza; and Abu Omar, who turns his back on a promising academic career in the US in order to join a resistance movement in exile (first in Jordan, then Lebanon). Symptomatic of the paradoxical register of Palestinian political life, the respective nodes of this comparison’s tripartite formation are not discrete, but inform one another in a series of relays. On this note, the significance of Said writing his dedication in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, which drew a sharp delineation between Palestinians inside and outside the borders of a would-be Palestinian state, cannot be emphasized enough. Finally, while the term “resistance” assumes an immediate, militant dimension in regards to Palestine (as with any other anti-colonial struggle), and though this dimension constitutes a significant component of both texts, I argue that Kanafani and Said’s pieces enact a productive complication of the meaning and possibility of “resistance” through a reversal of scale. When the physical and epistemic violence of the colonial project overdetermines the quotidian, resistance inhabits even the smallest moments of refusal, and individual instances of sacrifice take on the profoundest significance.

This paper examines a transnational network of pro-Palestinian activism from the early 1960s to the years immediately after the 1967 War. The Organization of Arab Students (OAS) and Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) were two academic-oriented groups that positioned themselves at the forefront of Palestinian advocacy in America. Although based in the United States, members consciously forged transnational connections with other Arabs in the diaspora and third world peoples. While doing so, they articulated the Palestine question as both a third world and Arab-American issue. Scholars have increasingly devoted attention to Arab-American activism in the post-1967 era, portraying it as an “Arab-American awakening.” However, this paper investigates forms of pro-Palestinian activism on U.S. campuses as early as 1960. The work of these student groups and the relationships they built with leaders of the Arab nationalist movement and nascent PLO laid a foundation for the more extensive organizing that emerged after 1967. Moreover, scholars who have analyzed the OAS and AAUG have largely neglected to interrogate the transnational character of these organizations. OAS and AAUG members occupied a unique position as recent emigrants from the Arab world or second generation Arab-Americans who were connected with both the Middle East and the United States. Prior to 1967, many Arab immigrants in the OAS were engaged in leftist activism on U.S. campuses by protesting the Vietnam War and civil rights infringements against African-Americans. In their view, the issue of Palestine fit logically alongside these movements. Similarly, although the AAUG formed in response to the Arab defeat of 1967, it refused to limit itself to solely advocating for a just resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Association determinedly aligned itself with both the Palestinian revolutionary movement and the global postcolonial community. OAS and AAUG members professed their support for the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism not only in Palestine, but also in South Africa, Angola, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Using the publications and archival papers of the OAS and AAUG, as well as oral history interviews with their members, I investigate how activists in these groups engaged with the Arab League and the revolutionary Palestinian movement prior to and after the 1967 defeat. I further analyze the alliances they constructed with activists in the civil rights and greater third world movements. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that the 1960s witnessed the emergence of a transnational Arab-American intellectual and activist generation.

In the realm of studying Palestinian political and social history, Gaza has been marginalized, with clear gaps still unexamined in the history of pre and post-Nakba Gaza District and Strip. This paper suggests ways to bridge these gaps by examining a pool of new sources from the late Mandate period through the early years post-Nakba, including memoirs, diaries, newspapers, etc. that have not been fully utilized. These sources can offer new insight into the understandings of the socio-political formations that emerged in the post-Nakba period and continued to affect Palestinian politics in general, and politics within the Gaza Strip in particular, to our present day. These sources highlight the ways in which the Nakba was a point of rupture in the history of the Gaza District, in that new socio-political formations emerged as a result of the changed economic, political, social and even cultural conditions in the newly-born Strip. This stage in Gaza’s history was influenced by external political changes (relationships with Egypt, the West Bank, and Jordan) and internal changes (influx of refugees, changes in land ownership, the presence of international bodies such as the UNRWA). However, more significantly this study highlights the ways in which the post-Nakba period was, to a large extent, a continuation of the socio-political formations that existed before 1948 (which includes a wide political spectrum including communists, Muslim Brotherhood, politics of notables, etc). This paper will offer perspective with regards new directions for historical research on Palestine/Israel by demonstrating how these various new sources can offer a unique lens through which to read the political and social history of Gaza. Furthermore, based on aforementioned sources, this paper will pay special focus to the emergence of the border area between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Marked earlier as an armistice line, the Gaza-Israel border was to emerge and evolve as a result of bloody episodes of refugee attempts at return and acts of resistance in the years that followed the Nakba on one hand, and Israel’s constant attempt to affirm its rights of sovereignty through applying various mechanisms of discipline. These acts of discipline, this paper will argue, helped to defining the current confined space known as the Gaza Strip, and planted the seeds of Israel’s disciplinary approaches towards Palestinians in the form of retaliation, reprisals, or what some refer to as Israel’s policy of “mowing the lawn.”