In recent years, an alarming discourse has taken root in Mizrahi Israeli circles, in which intellectuals focus exclusively on the Mizrahi struggle, while relegating the Palestinian struggle for independence and sovereignty to the margins or Israeli politics, or, in worse cases, denying this struggle completely or actively attempting to suppress it. These Mizrahi writers and activists argue that the liberal Zionist left, or what they called “the white left,” has done nothing for the sake of the Mizrahim. Therefore, any position that seems to echo a liberal Zionist concern, not to mention a radical pro-Palestinian one, is considered detrimental to attempts to create Mizrahi solidarity, which must include left- and right-leaning Mizrahim. In this discourse, the battle against the occupation of the Palestinians and the continual denial of their rights is perceived as an exclusively Ashkenazi affair. My paper attempts to challenge this view by tracing a long genealogy of moments of Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish and Palestinian solidarity. I argue that Palestinian-Mizrahi solidarity was not born out of the efforts of important Mizrahi and Palestinian intellectuals in the 1980s, in which PLO leaders on the one hand, and radical Mizrahim, on the other, met and discussed pertinent issues. Rather, these sentiments of solidarity have important historical roots, dating back to the nahda, and the interwar period and to Mizrahi resistance to Zionism. In fact, this expression of solidarity emerges in every decade since the 1890s. My paper focuses in particular on two moments of Palestinian-Mizrahi solidarity. One is the migration of Iraqi Jews to Israel after the Nakba. It looks at the approaches of Palestinian intellectual Emile Habibi into the question of Mizrahim in Israel, following in particular his relationships with Iraqi communist Jews and Iraqi Jewish novelist Sami Michael. I introduce how Habibi envisioned connections and collaborations between oppressed Arab peoples – Jews, Christians and Muslims. The second moment is the activities of the radical Israeli group Mazpen after 1967, and its writing on the Palestinian and Mizrahi issues, viewing the two as intertwined and deeply connected to one another. The paper attempts to uncover the new political language created by Palestinian and Jewish intellectuals to think through these issues, and to suggest a new periodization of Mizrahi and Palestinian modern thought.

The extant scholarship on the 1968 Battle of Karameh remains primarily limited to the fields of military and political history, focusing either on the battle’s geopolitical significance to the regional state actors or its role in Fatah’s rise to power within the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Academics writing about Karameh in English, with the notable exceptions of Yazid Sayigh and Paul Thomas Chamberlin, rely almost exclusively on American and Israeli military and diplomatic documents, eschewing entirely the primary and secondary literature written in Arabic. Yet even scholarship that utilizes Arabic sources seems primarily focused on establishing whether the Jordanian military or Palestinian guerrilla groups contributed more to the outcome of the conflict. By instead examining the instances of collaboration and competition between Jordanian and Palestinian participants before and during the battle, I aim to go beyond the Jordanian-Palestinian divide that has heretofore dominated the scholarship of al-Karameh and instead focus on the social factors that shaped these relationships. Indeed, the differences in class, military rank, and leftist proclivities among participants, as much as their ethnic identity, influenced the nature of these alliances and rivalries between Palestinian and Jordanian groups during this period. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s notion of “thick description” and on testimonies from Arab participants in the battle, published in early issues of Shu’un Filastiniyya, my paper seeks to reconstruct the lived experience of Karameh through the unexamined voices of teenage recruits in Fatah, Palestinian officers in the Jordanian army, and local farmers internally displaced by the conflict. In addition, I examine the nationalist histories of the battle written by several Jordanian officers in the aftermath of Karameh in order to highlight the early signs of the military’s mutual antagonism with the fida'yyin that would erupt into violence within a few years during the Jordanian Civil War. The juxtaposition of these military elites’ accounts with the Shu’un testimonies’ depictions of an amicable relationship between PLO fighters and the local peasants illustrates the complexity of the social networks forming in the East Bank in the aftermath of the June 1967 War.

This paper examines the Marxist literary scene established by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals, political organizers and writers of the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI). I examine the roots of this joint culture in writers interconnected roots as Arab Marxists in the Palestine Communist Party, the National Liberation League and the Iraqi Communist Party before the birth of the state, tracing their encounters through the 1948 War and into the reconstitution of MAKI in the 50’s and 60’s. I argue that due to their inability to ground their program in a coherent national liberation movement, they established its collective imagination on the basis of a conversation between anti-Zionism, nascent Palestinian anti-colonialism and other local and global Marxisms. Reading exchanges, debates and poetry and short stories that illustrate conversations between local intellectuals and thinkers from the Arab World, the Soviet Union, the Third World and Europe, I show that despite its near total isolation from the Israeli mainstream, this scene was able to develop an independent democratic aesthetics affiliated with multiple intellectual and political nodes. This focus on micro-histories and their relationship to macro-histories recovers Arab left history from the totalizing erasures brought about by the national historiography and canonization of the post-colonial period. Instead, it reveals the network of conversations and influence at play in the Arab world during the period of decolonization, the rise of Communism and the Internationals. Furthermore, it revives the notion of various local, popular literary imaginaries that are both distinct and in conversation with one another. The paper contributes to recent scholarship that aims to centralize the transitional, heterogeneous, ethnic and religious plurality of the Arab Left during the period of decolonization, highlighting the forces that tied intellectuals and tendencies across national and regional lines.

One oft repeated lament of historians of education and childhood is the difficulty of archival retrieval. Despite children being the lynchpin of so much social life, both past and present, their imprints somehow slip past capture. This paper considers this archival conundrum through the study of Palestinian refugee childhood after the 1948 war in the expanded Kingdom of Jordan, and that central crucible of identity and experience for nearly everyone, education. By writing on the archival (mis)adventures in researching a history of education during this period, this paper turns to children in their most regular habitat, their classroom, and asks: what forms of archival collection allow us to see that site historically? Which children made themselves (or were made) visible? Whose voices do we fail to hear? How does one gather against this shifting visibility? Should one do so? What does the act of conjuring do, both historically and archivally? While centrally a story of the search of childrens’ histories of schooling and pedagogy, this paper also considers the archival traces or non-traces of the teachers, parents, bureaucrats and even the state and international organisations, tasked with their care. In the best of times, a search for a history of pedagogical life is vexing and undetermined. In aiming to write a story of schooling on the run, in displacement, under subjugation and dispossession, this paper argues that perhaps archival methodology is not so much, or only, in the finding or reading against a stable archive or collection, but in conjuring it into being, in unearthing ordinary treasures of extraordinary life.