Palestine in a world of struggle The role of Palestinians in Third World solidarity

A few months after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began, a scene in Godard’s documentary Notre Musique (2004) went viral. In it, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Israeli journalist Judith Lerner pause over a fundamental question at the heart of the politics of recognition: How do oppressed people enter the world’s consciousness? Is it because of who their adversary is? Is it the result of solidarity from those more proximate to power? Or is it because of their own political force?

Lerner: Mahmoud Darwish, you once wrote that he who writes his story inherits the land of that story. So, you don't believe the Israelis have a right to the land? You say there is no more room for Homer, that you are the Trojan's bard, and that you love the vanquished. You speak like a Jew! 

Darwish: I hope so, because these days, that carries a good reputation. But the truth has two faces. We've heard the myths of the Greeks, and at times the Trojan victim, through Euripides. As for me, I search for the poet of Troy, because Troy never told its own story. I am the child of a people not yet recognised enough. I want to speak in the name of the absentee, the Trojan poet. Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The world’s interest in us stems from its interest in the Jewish question. We are unfortunate to have Israel as our enemy, because she enjoys limitless allies. Yet we are fortunate, because the Jews are the centre of the world’s attention. You brought us defeat, but you gave us fame. 

Lerner: We are your public relations ministry?!

Darwish: Indeed. Because the world cares more about you than about us!1

By invoking the Trojan poet, Darwish refuses mediation and any attempt to convey Palestinian existence through narratives that focus on the enemy’s tragedy and monstrosity. This is also a refusal to be given a voice: to be made audible through the voice of a sympathetic metropole. What is being refused here is not recognition as such, but recognition on terms of which are set elsewhere. Rather, Darwish claims the right of the vanquished to narrate themselves.

That said, when Darwish speaks of “the world”, a question keeps returning that I find difficult to avoid. Which world is being invoked here? His claim that the world cares more about Jews than about Palestinians is not without weight, but the problem is that it presumes a singular world organised around imperial attention. If truth has “two faces”, as he suggests, could we perhaps claim that there is not one but more than one world, as Fanon reminds us? What kind of world should we think of when Palestine functions as a point of political orientation rather than a stage for imperial designs? For Darwish, recognition seems to imply entry into the imperial world on one’s own terms, though whether such entry is possible remains uncertain. Yet what would it mean not simply to be admitted into an already constituted world, but to act as one of the forces that shape it? What kind of recognition would that require? And what would it demand of politics?

These questions are pertinent for anti-imperialist politics today. In recent years, Palestine has come to occupy a distinctive place in political life and mass consciousness, functioning for many as a threshold of international solidarity and progressive politics – what Angela Davis labelled a “litmus test”.2 At the same time, this position has been met with unease and critique. “Why is this litmus test Palestine, and not another struggle?”. This is one of several questions that are generating discussions, one that compels some to accuse and others to justify, and that prompts us here to consider what kind of centrality this is. How should we understand it? And what assumptions do such debates hold about history, solidarity and world order? Is centrality here a reflection of geopolitical structure, of moral projection, of preferential or easy solidarity, or of something else entirely? What does it mean for a struggle to be declared one that “frees us all”, and what kind of politics does such a claim perform? The intensity of both the attachment to Palestine and the imperial repression it produces, and some of the discomfort it generates surrounding its prominence, all suggest that what is at stake is not only sympathy or visibility, but also deeper assumptions about how struggles acquire political force across borders.

If we examine the history of the Palestinian liberation movement as it re-emerged in the aftermath of the Nakba, ‘the international’ was never simply a supplementary arena, nor additional lingo adopted by cadres based on strategic considerations. Rather, it was a constitutive dimension of Palestinian revolutionary thought itself. The “scale of the world”3 served as one of its generative conditions, shaping how the struggle was imagined and organised, even if the form and strategic function of internationalism looked different across different factions.

In 1959, Fatah4 maintained that international solidarity with the struggle would not arrive on its own but had to be forced into being through Palestinian labour; it had to be seized, since “screams and pleas for rescue” after the Nakba had failed to awaken the conscience of the world. They added, in what might seem ironic given the position of Fatah today, that only when the “flags of revolution” were raised would “the whole world chant for us”.5 By 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)6 criticised the “leadership” of the Palestinian movement (referring to Fatah, of course) for failing to invest seriously in cultivating alliances and a sustained presence within the international arena.7 Yet the disagreement did not turn simply on the extent to which the international was cultivated. It concerned, more fundamentally, the political form of internationalism itself. For the PFLP, and for segments of the left within Fatah, the international was not just a reservoir of support, from which they might secure political and material resources. It was also understood to be a site where struggles converged, where the process of liberating Palestine was part of an international revolution, a project of worldmaking.8

Despite differences across and within factions, one conclusion continued to be shared: the international was not optional. Grounded in a material reading of world politics, this position held that the liberation of Palestine could not be realised within the existing order, but required its restructuring.

Nonetheless, the rupture of the late 1980s and the reorganisation of global power in the 1990s, driven by the dismantling of the Third World as a political project and the narrowing of Palestinian political possibilities under a new international order and a capitulating leadership, meant that many of the Palestinian institutions that were once responsible for organising the Palestinian masses, solidarity and alliances dissolved, together with many of the relations Palestinians once held.

For those of a later generation, the effects of the new world order recur across what remains of the Third World. I have frequently heard Palestinians born after the 1980s talking about encounters during their travels in which someone of an older generation, on learning they were Palestinian, responded with startled recognition: “Where have you been? We have been waiting for you!” The recurrence of such stories across different geographies gives this point analytical force: indicating a recurrence that registers not absence as such, but an interruption. The question (“Where have you been?”) recalls political relations that had once connected movements, institutions and struggles, as well as communities, friends, distant relatives and lovers – relations that were forcibly separated rather than exhausted. This points to the problem of how a political presence that once circulated across these worlds came to be withdrawn, and what it would take to reconstruct it.

It is against this background that Palestine’s renewed prominence in contemporary left politics needs to be considered. Palestine’s centrality is often framed either as a function of structural geopolitics, or as the product of sympathy generated by others. Both matter, but neither is a sufficient explanation on its own. The missing piece of the puzzle is the active role played by Palestinian students, workers, fidayeen and intellectuals in shaping how their struggle travelled – a process that left political and organisational traces across other peoples, movements, institutions and geographies. The argument I make in this article is that Palestine’s current centrality cannot be understood without attending to this history of political work, in which internationalism was not an abstract horizon but a historically produced field of political practice.9

The article proceeds as follows. Part 1 situates the question of Palestine’s international centrality through a dialectical engagement with structure and praxis, moving between theoretical debates and an account of the formation of the Palestinian national movement. Rather than separating theory from history, it traces how arguments about structure, praxis and political capacity were worked through in practice, as Palestinian politics took shape across regional and international terrains. Part 2 turns to Palestinian organisational labour in history, focusing on how the struggle became embedded in revolutionary infrastructures and imaginaries beyond Palestine itself as Palestinian organisations, between the late 1960s and mid-1980s, supported liberation movements and postcolonial states across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Europe. Part 3 turns to the contemporary moment, examining how Palestine’s centrality is now being explained, questioned and contested by some, and what these framings reveal about prevailing understandings of solidarity, organisation and internationalism today. The article asks how different ways of accounting for Palestine’s centrality reflect broader assumptions about collective political capacity, structure, and the conditions under which internationalist struggle is imagined to be possible.

Imperial structure and the conditions of struggle

A struggle’s centrality in the contemporary political imaginary cannot be reduced to visibility or circulation, especially when transnational state power and capital work to withhold the very conditions of appearance. When viewed solely through representational politics, centrality appears merely as an effect, analytically thin and derivative. Political weight instead accumulates through forces of production and historically sedimented relations. These relations condition whether a struggle compels response and alignment at all. Traction as an object of representation – how a struggle is perceived or narrated – matters mainly insofar as it is an indicator of a pressure that is already building, not its origin 

Anti-colonial strategy has long followed a similar ordering of politics. Amílcar Cabral insisted that national liberation must begin from material reality, rather than abstract ideals or tactics that are detached from one’s environment.10 Reflecting on a dockworkers’ strike in Bissau which was crushed by Portuguese forces, Cabral argued that methods that are effective in industrial economies falter in agrarian societies, where urban labour lacks leverage over the rural majority. In this line of thought, structure sets the terrain of action, but does not exhaust it. Against claims that guerrilla warfare requires mountains, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) turned Guinea’s rivers into arteries of movement, communication and surprise.11

Palestinian intellectuals in the 1960s approached their struggle in comparable terms, from Abd al-Wahhab Kayyali and Fayez Sayegh to Ghassan Kanafani. They analysed Zionism not as an exception but as a structural expression of imperial strategy. Revisiting this analysis resists gestures that exceptionalise Zionism. Kayyali located Palestine within a longer arc of imperial interest, understanding it as a strategic corridor linking Africa and Asia.12 Kanafani made this logic concrete in his analysis of the 1936–9 revolt, pointing to the Kirkuk–Haifa oil pipeline built in 1934 and treated by the British as a vital imperial asset.13 The pipeline’s defence inside Palestine by Zionist armed groups under British backing revealed a practical security arrangement for guarding imperial infrastructure. Here, Israel’s very existence appears less as a national, religious or ethnic outcome than as the consolidation of an imperial outpost.

By the early 20th century, Palestine was folded into an imperial system organised around transport routes, maritime access and extraction, with oil moving to the centre after 1920 through agreements such as the Red Line Agreement.14 As Kayyali points out, the strategic rationale for a Jewish state long pre-dated political Zionism and was certainly not driven by “philo-semitic” sentiment (in Kayyali’s phrase).15 Settler colonies have repeatedly served as instruments of strategic projection abroad, as well as outlets for alleviating domestic pressures, from the deportation of British trade unionists to Australia to the exile of Paris Commune revolutionaries to Algeria.16

Israel’s value to empire required by design a permanent dependence on imperial sponsorship. Britain controlled the tempo of Zionist state-building in order to ensure reliance on, and justify, its own presence in Palestine; likewise, the US ensured that Israel remained an “alien body” in the region in order to maintain its dependence on American support and protection, thereby securing its subordination to its patron.17 While the US model was consolidated after 1967, from 1948 onwards an alliance with Israel had already been perceived as strategically essential for securing West Asia oil and energy flows,18 given that key routes transporting oil from West Asia to the Mediterranean ran through territory it held.19 A logic already visible here later culminated in military and economic support to Israel as a long-term strategy of imperial maintenance, which deepened Israel’s integration into the US economy. By the 1990s, this integration had reached such a point that the line distinguishing Israeli from US capital had become “ambiguous”.20 This integration, and its role today, cannot be understood as separate from the centrality of fossil fuels and the regional architecture of imperial power.21

These are some of the structural conditions that shaped the Palestinian struggle and its centrality to revolutionary politics around the world, but they did not determine its trajectory. Treating them as mechanically decisive reduces history to a closed system in which economic, political and ideological domains are assumed to move in pure alignment. By contrast to such an approach, Samir Amin stresses the concept of “underdetermination”: as he shows in his account of Islam’s historical expansion, political and ideological formations develop relatively independently of the economic base and its mode of production.22 It is precisely through the unevenness and friction between these domains that political intervention becomes possible.

Dispersal, contradiction and political reorganisation

If Zionism was embedded in imperial structure, Palestinian politics after 1948 had to be rebuilt under conditions not of its own choosing. Defeat and dispossession did not merely destroy Palestinians’ territorial base, it reorganised Palestinian political life across a geography of dispersal under the rule of Arab states. Fragmentation across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf fractured organisational continuity. As a result, political activity was pushed into translocal circuits, unfolding across borders and within borderlands,23 rather than within a consolidated national space.

This dispersal took shape within a regional Arab nationalist context formed by postcolonial state formation and Cold War geopolitics. As postcolonial regimes consolidated, state power became the primary container of political legitimacy, accumulation and coercion.24 Arab nationalism rendered Palestine central as a cause, while simultaneously limiting the Palestinian national movement’s ability to engage in armed resistance from neighbouring states, or to organise along class and national lines – as was the case in Gaza during the 1950s. The result was a contradictory formation: symbolic elevation of the struggle alongside material constraint, as political horizons were mediated through state interests that mobilised domestic populations around the Palestinian cause while seeking to contain and manage its political direction.

These constraints generated the material conditions in which new forms of Palestinian organisation took place. Surveillance and political control in frontline states encouraged activists, most prominently the “Cairo group”,25 to relocate to the expanding economies of the Gulf, where wage labour, mobility and remittances were later converted into organisational resources.26 It was in this setting that Fatah emerged (in 1958–59), insisting on Palestinian autonomy and seeking to insulate decision-making from Arab regimes. Meanwhile, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) was formed by Palestinian students expelled from Syria and Iraq who were taken in by Nasser. However, the defeat of 1967 exposed the limits of Arab custodianship, leading ANM members to established the PFLP as a distinctly Palestinian organisation.27

It was against this backdrop that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), founded in 1964 under Arab League auspices, initially functioned as an instrument of state management of the rising and disruptive Palestinian armed resistance, rather than as an expression of autonomous Palestinian power. Within Palestinian circles, it was widely viewed as a regime-managed body that lacked independent legitimacy. However, this position did not remain stable. After the famous Battle of Karameh (1968),28 armed struggle gained popular legitimacy, enabling factions to seize control of the organisation. By 1969, Fatah had led the capture, while the PFLP secured itself as the second major faction within the PLO.29 The organisation thus became a Palestinian political centre – contested and uneven, but newly legitimate and no longer dismissed as an ‘Arab instrument’.

Although the different Palestinian guerilla organisations remained distinct, the consolidation of the PLO enabled Palestinians to emerge as a political subject. It was a vehicle that carried them into the world of states, international organisations and diplomacy. This did not resolve all contradictions: the expansion of the international front sometimes worked in complementary ways, while at other times it sharpened the pull between revolutionary armed internationalism and diplomatic statecraft. Arab states, meanwhile, simultaneously sought to negotiate with Palestinian leaderships and to discipline their political horizons: Egypt and Syria provided military and logistical support while placing limits on independent guerrilla activity; Jordan imposed the sharpest constraints, while Lebanon offered a more permissive but politically fragile arena for armed action; Iraq and Libya offered backing tied to regional positioning; and Gulf networks supplied an essential material base.

By the end of the 1960s, Palestinian politics had been reassembled through dispersal, constraint and sustained organisational labour, securing not only armed capacity and institutional presence, but a position inside revolutionary and postcolonial state systems that could be worked upon.

Palestinian politics did not simply ‘come back’ after 1948 through sheer will. It was rebuilt under conditions shaped by defeat, dispersal and rule by other states. The regional order rendered Palestine highly charged as a cause, while limiting Palestinians as independent political actors. Pan-Arabism carried this contradiction at its core: it elevated Palestine in speech and symbolism, while functioning as a mechanism through which Palestinian politics was both constrained and expanded.

The same structure that produces a space for organisation is the structure that polices its limits. In this sense, the movement from dispersal to organisation, from factional labour to institutional capture, cannot be narrated as linear emancipation from constraint. It is the problem of transition itself, and the very form of historical development as a struggle over how political force can exist within relations that simultaneously enable and restrict it.

Such a manner of reading history refuses notions of inevitability and avoids collapsing historical analysis into nationalist romanticism or materialist fatalism.30 Here, consciousness does not determine historical movement: it forms within structures that distribute capacity, legitimacy and coercion. Self-activity works through conditions it does not choose, while contradictions become historically effective only when fought out in struggle, in moments whose outcomes remain uncertain and internally contradictory.31 The early PLO therefore cannot be understood simply as an external imposition, or born out of voluntaristic activity by Arab states. It was created to manage a contradiction. Arab states supplied ideological and material resources, while also surveilling, banning, expelling and disciplining. These processes formed a single contradictory movement, rather than separate realities.

The contradiction matured when attempts to manage it generated its opposite, when containment produced organisation, when Arab ‘mediation’ produced autonomy. What became decisive after 1967 (around 1968–69) was not the sudden appearance of a subject, but the moment when rhetoric and public display were no longer enough to hold the contradiction in place. It had to be displaced materially and institutionally, into Palestinian control over decisions and resources. The Palestinian seizure of the PLO marked the maturation of this contradiction: the transfer of political authority from an Arab-administered body to a Palestinian contested leadership. This was a transformation within structure, forced by the unity of constraint and possibility organised through Pan-Arabism.

The seizure of the PLO did not simply mean securing a Palestinian centre: it enabled the scale at which struggle could be made effective, as a political centre once organised through representation was refunctioned into a capacity for intervention beyond its immediate terrain. In this sense, Palestinian politics appeared less as a question enclosed within the national sphere, not because of an exit from that scale, but because the contradiction could no longer be contained at that scale alone.

This is not a story of Palestinians ‘entering’ internationalism, as an external stage that was already fully formed, but of a political struggle and its political subject emerging and acting through contradiction, as the international came to shape the terrain of strategy for national liberation, where national consciousness continued to develop alongside the development of Pan-Arab and internationalist consciousness.

In Guinea-Bissau, limited resources restricted imperial entanglement, allowing the PAIGC to confront Portuguese colonial power in a more concentrated form. Under Palestinian conditions, this relation was reversed: deep insertion into imperial circuits produced exposure rather than insulation. Confrontation therefore unfolded not against a single colonial power but across what Kanafani termed an “enemy trinity” of local reactionary leadership, Arab regimes, and the Zionist–imperialist nexus.32 Constraints operated across multiple scales, enabling diverse forms of resistance, rather than confining them to one bounded arena.

“Behind the enemy everywhere”33: internationalising the struggle

In the 1960s, Che Guevara’s widely circulated statement about the need to create “many Vietnams” was not a reference to the outcome of the Vietnamese revolution alone: it was an acknowledgement that it had helped ignite consciousness and sustain revolutionary possibility across the Third World.34 In her memoir, Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled recalls that “next to the Algerians, the Vietnamese” were a central source of inspiration, and she explains that Palestinians realised that they had to “learn the secrets of the Vietnamese”. Above all, this meant learning how to build a revolutionary party that was ideologically, strategically and organisationally unified. Looking back, Khaled writes: “We could do it. We had to.”35

These lessons were not absorbed abstractly: they were forged through direct encounters in training camps, student spaces, political offices and diplomatic settings in Algeria, which in the 1960s functioned not only as channels for obtaining weapons and resources but also as spaces of shared life. Here, Palestinian militants lived alongside African, Latin American and Asian comrades. It was here that Che Guevara, meeting Fatah militants, expressed his astonishment that the Palestinians had not already initiated a formal armed struggle, urging them to do so and promising Cuban support.36

From this base, connections widened across the revolutionary world. Support followed, from Cuba, Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, Angola and elsewhere. The same infrastructures that moved Kalashnikovs also circulated ideas and carried books, pamphlets and political writings by  Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Cabral. Historical materialism and theories of guerrilla warfare, revolutionary nationalism and people’s war were absorbed, debated and reworked, shaping how Palestinians understood sacrifice, endurance and defeat not as endings but as phases within a larger world-historical struggle. What was named at the time as the “new Palestinian”, or fida’i, took shape through these circuits and encounters, as intellectual production, militants’ testimonies, and everyday narratives attest.

At a 1973 roundtable on Palestine and Vietnam attended by senior military figures, Palestinian cadres, and Arab political and media actors, Vietnam’s victory was read as a composite process, resting on two interlinked components: a regional extension of the battlefield and an internationalisation of the struggle.37

Read through this lens, Palestinian armed struggle began to assume a particular international form, and this mattered not only tactically but also politically. Armed struggle asserted Palestinian existence, built political institutions, and projected Palestinian capacity across transnational arenas, reshaping internationalist revolutionary infrastructures. The emergence of a recognisable autonomous Palestinian political actor, the PLO, rested not only on internal cohesion but also on its capacity to intervene beyond its borders.38 Armed struggle was thus not a secondary element of Palestinian foreign policy, it was central. From the late 1950s, Palestinian guerrilla formation tied armed struggle directly to building alliances and gaining recognition across the Third World.39

This externalisation of the struggle was not mere relocation: it was a strategic reorientation. After Jordan’s counter-revolutionary war in 1970–71, which drove Palestinian forces into Lebanon, external operations became increasingly central as cross-border incursions grew less feasible. While the PFLP initiated this phase with aeroplane hijackings in 1968, the use of such tactics expanded after the departure from Jordan, and Fatah followed, most prominently with the Munich Olympics attack. Both sought to demonstrate their strength and relevance to their own people, regionally and internationally. Under Arafat, this turn was adopted under pressure from left and populist currents within Fatah, despite his objections. For the PFLP, such operations were meant to break imposed isolation and force Palestine onto international agendas as part of a wider people’s war against imperial forces.40

The world stage thus became a theatre of struggle, marking a decisive move from border zones to airports, embassies and the circulation networks of the international order. While not the first to target the interstate domain, Chamberlin demonstrates how the PLO’s assemblage of tactics and strategies was unprecedented, emerging as the world’s first “globalized insurgency”.41 While the Cubans had popularised the rural foco model, built around a small vanguard cadre, the Algerians had pulled guerrilla warfare into the city,42 and in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the struggle traded mountains for rivers.43 Following a similar trajectory of grounding warfare in their own conditions of exile and dispersion, the Palestinians shifted the terrain, switching from “forests to skies”: plane hijackings were one tactic among others.44 The battlefield itself had moved.

Guerrilla warfare in the Palestinian context of exile and dispersion was forced to reckon with distance, speed and visibility, so that exile itself came to function not only as a condition imposed upon the struggle, but as one of its primary strategic terrains.

These operations succeeded in re-inscribing Palestine within the international revolutionary field, dispelling notions of defeat, attracting Palestinian and Arab recruits (as well as youth from other parts of the world who joined their camps) and enabling Palestinians to situate their struggle within Third World liberation movements.45 The external operations also established repertoires of revolutionary action and reshaped tactics, as confrontations with the United States, Israel and allied forces accelerated the emergence of “international terrorism” as a term of global governance, through which Israel’s counterterrorism practices functioned as a key model, consolidating its position as a strategic regional asset.46

Civilian casualties and the growing classification of these actions as international terrorism generated pressures that threatened the diplomatic advances the PLO had begun to secure. By 1974, external operations were halted. However, this did not mark withdrawal from militancy within the international, but its reconfiguration, as the internationalisation of the battlefield was paired with intensified engagement in multilateral forums, including the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), culminating in Palestine’s admission to the UN General Assembly in 1974. This turn towards organisation and diplomacy did not signal a retreat from supporting armed struggle elsewhere. Instead, it redirected engagements and support through new tactics and institutional routes. As the PLO transitioned towards a more professionalised armed structure, it generated surplus expertise, training capacity and material resources,47 which, as the next part of the chapter explains, were redeployed elsewhere.

“We got visas … We went to Beirut …We were driven by military vehicles without lights along a mountainous track through the night and finally reached … the Beqaa Valley … we were interviewed by Abu Jihad. He briefed us and told us we would be put through a program … [one day, during training] we were told to face the wall … [he] quietly congratulated each one of us … but we couldn’t see who it was … after he spoke to you, you were to put your hand behind your back with your palm up … it was Yasser Arafat.” 

   – Shankar Rajee, Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS)

This part of the chapter approaches Palestinian support to other revolutionary and liberation struggles through the lens of what scholars of insurgency describe as insurgent or counter-logistics.48 Here, logistics refers to the practices movements develop to secure mobility and resources – practices that ensure they are able to survive, regroup and expand under conditions of surveillance and constraint.

In the Palestinian context, these logistical practices were anchored in refugee camps and guerrilla rear bases, which together constituted an infrastructural base for extending support to other revolutionary groups: training capacity, arms, refuge, transport, money, intelligence, organisational aid, documentation and expertise. Because these relatively stable sites provided protected spaces for accumulating resources and coordinating activity, the PLO was able to enable long-distance internationalist circulation for a limited number of locations, mainly in Lebanon and Syria, and for a shorter period in Jordan prior to that, through hosting militants in their camps or dispatching their own cadres to offer various forms of assistance elsewhere. 

Taking up this insight, the sections that follow trace how Palestinian internationalism operated through three logistical forms: the camps; the circulation of arms; and the provision of expertise, ranging from combat training and operational support to technical and developmental assistance for states in the Third World. I then turn to the strategic complexities generated by these practices.

The camps as sites of internationalism

“Lebanon … made clear to me the extent to which the Palestinian Resistance served as a magnet … from all over the world ... our comrades ranged from an Irishman with IRA connections to a member of the Haitian Communist party’s politburo ... I had the feeling that I was at the very center of the World Revolution.”49 

– A Turkish left-wing militant

Palestinian internationalism, manifested in support extended to other struggles, took shape within the spaces in which Palestinian life itself had to be organised under conditions of dispossession. Before turning to militancy itself, it is important to note that the various sites of Palestinian presence, including  refugee camps in particular, were not merely backdrops to militancy, as discussions of this topic might tend to suggest. Instead, they were sites in which everyday life, collective life, intergenerational continuity, political organising, and cultural production sustained Palestinian life in exile. Militant activity unfolded within this broader organisation of communal existence, rather than standing apart from it; it was these enabling conditions that allowed militancy to form. And so, what made these spaces operatives sites for exchange, training, passage, and internationalist militancy was not movement as such but the fact that they already functioned, across different conjunctures, as semi-autonomous spaces of Palestinian life.50 Communal life did not produce itself inwardly: the camps functioned at the same time as intercommunal spaces, holding together encounters, responsibilities, and forms of struggle that exceeded any single movement. These sites were thus laboratories in which the Palestinian struggle became embedded in the ideologies, strategies, and organisational structures – as well as dreams and ways of life – of anti-colonial movements worldwide.

One concrete expression of this was the training infrastructure that took shape within the camps. A coordinated network of militant exchange operated within certain refugee camps and in separate military bases operated by Palestinian factions. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, South Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and Libya became sites of this activity, while a wider network of cadres extending to Central America and Africa also provided instruction and support. These camps were mainly run by Fatah, the PFLP, the PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

The scale of the PLO’s training infrastructure remains difficult to establish, but what is known points to something vast. US intelligence reports estimated that the PLO trained “over 10,000” militants from around the world. While the estimate is difficult to verify,51 its recurrence across US security reporting indicates that US intelligence consistently understood the PLO as operating training infrastructure at a large transnational scale. The same study reported that 2,250 fighters from 28 countries were trained in 1980–81 alone,52 while other sources put the figure closer to 1,700 for 1980.53 The origins and identities of these militants spanned the entire globe. The scale was such that US intelligence (despite the limits on what it could reliably count) labelled Beirut a “terrorist center”.54

From Argentina to Thailand, from Angola to Ireland, thousands of fighters and cadres passed through the Palestinian camps. These were neither symbolic nor one-off events: revolutionary support was systematic, extending to the armed wings of national liberation movements, anti-imperialist coalitions, and postcolonial insurgencies across four continents.

Militants from a wide range of revolutionary fronts in Latin America and the Caribbean joined Palestinian-run training camps. They included fighters from Haiti55 and Costa Rica, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL), the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), Argentina’s Montoneros (MPM), Brazil’s Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares (VPR),56 Colombia’s 19th of April Movement (M-19), and Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR).57 Across African liberation fronts, training was provided to fighters from Congo, Nigeria, Malawi,58 and Eritrea, as well as a range of South African groups, including the African National Congress’s (ANC) uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK),59 and the Azanian Liberation Army of the Black Consciousness Movement.60

Within the European revolutionary underground, Palestinian instructors worked with Irish militants from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA), and with other European groups described by one Palestinian trainer as “looking for guidance” and to whom the camps offered “training and a valid cause”.61

From Asia's diverse insurgent movements came Philippine militants,62 South Thailand's Muslim Fatanis, members of the Japanese Red Army, various Iranian anti-Shah groups,63 the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK),64 and Eelam organisations, such as EROS and the Tamil Tigers.65

That Irish republicans trained beside Tamil fighters, Nicaraguans and Germans under Palestinian instructors points to a geography of struggle in the making, where formative encounters produced relationships and shared practices that reorganised political space across continents. This was especially visible in places like a DFLP camp in Na’ameh near southern Beirut, where more than 300 tents housed Congolese, Kurdish, Turkish, Yemeni and Iranian militants between the end of 1979 and the spring of 1980,66 and in the Hamouriya camp south of Damascus, which served as a training site for Iranians, Basques, Italians, Germans, Japanese and Armenians.67 The list of visitors and trainees is extensive, some recorded in archives, others carried in the memories of those who passed through them, most surviving only in fragments of recollection or scattered across personal histories; others we will never fully know or piece together.

In many ways, these formations echo what Cabral described as a “new human geography”.68 Denied their own sovereign territory, Palestinians reorganised political life in exile by forging networks of relationships across continents through shared living, collective drills, coordinated operations, and clandestine mobility. Where Cabral imagined roads and bridges as the arteries of a liberated nation, Palestinians built underground routes of transit and infrastructures of passage that remade political space across borders. Fatah’s Western Sector, for instance, provided foreign militants with Fatah IDs,69 while the PFLP produced forged passports70 and the DFLP issued refugee cards.71 These document-related practices asserted an insurgent right to movement that unsettled border regimes and blurred juridical boundaries.

Those escaping repression elsewhere found safe haven in the camps. PKK and Turkish militants were provided with operational housing that allowed them to reorganise after heavy blows and fragmentation of their organisations following repression and military coups in Turkey in the early 1970s and the 1980s. In this way, the camps embedded Palestine into the everyday reproduction of armed struggle elsewhere, offering fugitivity an anchor. In the case of the PKK, this support was foundational, enabling its formation and eventually allowing it to convene its first conference in 1981.72

The infrastructure of the camps constituted a disruption of the spatial, legal and security architectures of the imperial sphere, enabling the circulation of insurgent life within and against the ordering of the world it sought to stabilise. Underground routes for transit, arms transfers, and personnel relocation were maintained not simply in order to evade capture but to sustain and expand ongoing coordination across groups. For example, through Palestinians, Iranian groups were able to build ties with other anti-colonial movements across the region.73 Similarly, US intelligence reporting from the late 1970s noted that links between the American Indian Movement (AIM)74 and militant movements in Latin America and Europe were mediated through PLO networks.75 In each case, association with Palestinians mattered as much as the provision of weapons or training. Movements were drawn into one another. It was through this process that a broader political project was formed: what we have come to know as the Third World.

Besides opening the door to broader revolutionary networks, some militants have described how association with the PLO altered how their own struggles were recognised, and their standing among the wider anti-colonial world. In a 1975 interview, Issac A. Tabata of the Unity Movement of South Africa expressed “regret” that many across the African continent misunderstood the South African struggle as a demand for civil rights, rather than a national liberation moment. He explained that it was only once the Palestinian resistance “gained momentum” that it began to be recognised as such.76

For others, the impact was more internal. Shankar Rajee of Tamil EROS remembered he and his companions returning to London from Lebanon with what he described as an “ENORMOUS quantity” of weapons and ammunition stuffed into their bags. At Charles de Gaulle airport they were stopped. Asked what they were doing with all of it, he said they told customs it was a “souvenir”, a response that reveals a political world markedly different from our own. They handed over a few pieces and were waved through. Looking back, Rajee called the experience as “crazy”, but at the time he said it felt entirely reasonable.77

At the same time, Rajee was clear that the trip to Lebanon was not just a thrilling adventure. It was a kind of demonstration to his own people, a way of showing what was now possible. What followed mattered as much as the experience in Lebanon itself: after two weeks on the front lines in Lebanon, there was a sense that the training received and the ties formed with the PLO had altered how Rajee and his comrades could position themselves in relation to their own people and to other Tamil organisations, including the Tamil Tigers. They had experience and contacts, and something tangible to show for it. 

Beyond embodying the unresolved continuity of the Palestinian struggle – a condition that has long unsettled reactionary Arab regimes by exposing their complicity and harbouring revolutionary possibilities that resonate among their own populations – what becomes clear through the history I have traced above (and which I describe further below) is that it is precisely because of the transnational possibilities offered to others by Palestinians and their condition that the camps were, and continue to be, targeted for discipline and containment. They have always been attacked not only for what they reveal, but also for what they have made possible, a latent force that continues to haunt different regimes in the present. Such efforts of discipline and containment have recurred across decades and political orders: from the Hashemites in the early 1970s, to Baʿathist Syria (from the Tal al-Zaʿtar massacre to the War of the Camps after 1985), and more recently Mohammed al-Jolani in Syria in 2024 and the Lebanese state in 2025. Israel’s relentless attacks on Palestinian camps in Lebanon have been the most sustained expression of this logic, conducted under the banner of disarmament but in reality having much more to do with the erasure of Palestinians as a political presence.

Providing arms: a “transmission belt” of armed struggle

A different register of the same internationalist infrastructure represented by the camps was the transnational circulation of arms via Palestinians. With support from China, Algeria, Egypt, Libya and the Soviet Union, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the PLO armed other non-state actors worldwide. The CIA reported that the PLO was, alongside Libya and Cuba, the main conduit for arms and funds to armed groups in the Third World.78

By the late 1970s, the PLO had consolidated itself militarily, in part because of takeaways from the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (which exposed the limits of guerrilla tactics) but also because of the 1978 Baghdad summit, which provided massive funding for training and arms, enabling the PLO to extend these resources to revolutionary groups worldwide.79

It was in this context that the PLO directly supplied arms to organisations across the world, support that for many, such as the Sandinistas and the PKK, was indispensable for building their capacity to wage armed struggle.

Palestinian groups also functioned as intermediaries in the arms supply, through securing arms from countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Libya and the Soviet Union to supply to movements across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. This led the CIA to describe its role as that of a “transmission belt”.80 What mattered in this circulation was not accumulation but position: the ability to displace monopolies over force and insert alternative channels of military provision into state-dominated systems.

Palestinian factions, especially Fatah, delivered significant arms shipments to Central America, particularly to the Sandinistas during their revolution and in the period of post-revolutionary state consolidation, amid the US-backed Contra war. While it is difficult to establish whether this support directly disrupted US arms pipelines, the evidence suggests that it limited Washington’s ability to monopolise military provision in the region. A US congressional testimony in 1981 confirmed a “massive influx of arms”,81 which countered Israeli arms sales in the area.82 This positioned the PLO as a countervailing source of military provision across Central America and demonstrated its capacity to raise the political and military costs of US-led containment strategies.

While ideological differences help us understand the stated aims and visions behind arms provision among groups such as the PFLP and Fatah, what can be said with certainty is that arms supplies functioned as a means of reordering political space. They displaced monopolies, disrupted systems without collapsing them, and exerted pressure and leverage while remining embedded within broader strategic reconfigurations.

The sheer number of recorded failed shipments and interceptions shows the scale of Palestinian involvement in arming revolutionary movements worldwide. Interceptions included the uncovering of Fatah's attempts to send weapons to the IRA in 1972 and again in 1977, when five tonnes of arms were intercepted in Belgium;83 a 1979 PLO-chartered jet in Tunis carrying tonnes of Chinese weapons for the Sandinistas;84 and PFLP supplies of Soviet SAM-7 missile launchers caught in Ortona as they were heading to Italian groups.85

The circulation of arms involved multiple modalities: at times weapons were provided freely, at others they were exchanged for political commitments, and at others they were simply sold. Importantly, arms trading was never adopted as a PLO policy or as an institutional strategy. Arms circulation functioned in distinct ways across armed movements. While for some organisations it became absorbed into commercialised arms and commodity circuits, the PLO did not treat arms trading as a constitutive organisational logic. It is true that during the Lebanese civil war, individuals and certain security organs within the PLO exploited the vacuum created by the absence of the Lebanese state to profit from local weapons sales, but this practice ran counter to the organisation’s stated orientation and did not operate as a movement-wide or centrally sanctioned approach. When such activities began to proliferate, the PLO leadership intervened, launching internal campaigns to curb the sale of weapons for private gain and to reassert political control over arms provision.86

My aim here is not to provide a romanticised account of the PLO’s approach to militancy, particularly given how frequently the imperatives of militancy within the camps displaced other forms of social and communal organisation.87 Rather, it is to point out that arms provision usually functioned politically, such that when provision did take the form of sales it was not usually organised around profit-making but was anchored instead in strategic alliance-building, whether to build and sustain alliances, build a statist image, or exert leverage against enemies as a form of political pressure.

“An abundance of specialisations”88 : Palestinian provision of expertise

A third pillar of Palestinian support to other revolutionary and liberation struggles was the provision of a repertoire of capacities that aided and strengthened those struggles. Across different contexts, Palestinian factions mobilised skills that addressed overlapping needs: preparing militants for armed action, supporting operations beyond Palestine, and assisting movements and states in achieving effective endurance, defence and organisation.

One of these repertoires was military training, which varied in intensity, form, and duration: some training lasted four to six months,89  while in other cases it extended to just 45 days. Training often combined operational instruction with strategic and ideological guidance. While some militants described the experience as “touristic”, others recalled it as structured and comprehensive.90 Tamil militant leader Shankar Rajee recalled a fusion of physics and warfare: explosives taught through equations, calculations, and live tests, ranging from lessons about improvised “kitchen explosives” to the mechanics of triggers and timed delays.91

Camp life unfolded within material constraints, and was far from comfortable. As one South African militant recalled, “despite the improved training and better food, I remember camp life in the Golan Heights as tough, with lice being a constant nuisance.”92

Fighters received training in mock attacks, ambushes, infiltration, and retreats across varied terrain, using Eastern-bloc weapons ranging from small arms to RPGs, mortars and man-portable air defence systems.93 Preparation covered base security, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, concealment and survival. Some programmes taught underground work: forging documents and currency, and sabotaging infrastructure, transport and supply lines. Training was not limited to weapons and direct military action. Groups studied strategy and organisation. From East Timor to Chile, cadres in PFLP camps learned about “information activity”, propaganda and media campaigns for local and international audiences.

PLO documents captured by Israel underline the importance of consciousness-raising in the training camps. They show that cadres who attended PFLP camps also participated in the PFLP’s “communal activity”, whereby popular committees ran welfare, education and cultural programmes that sustained the movement’s base and advanced a Marxist vision of social transformation. According to one Italian militant: “They first delivered elementary training on why and how it was necessary to take up arms …[teaching] not only how to read and write, but also the structure of Arab society ... and the rationale for armed struggle.”94

Political and ideological education was an integral part of training programmes. Alongside literacy training, fighters studied regional history and attended political lectures. They learned not only how to sabotage but why. An Italian militant recalled that Palestinians “did not distribute Kalashnikovs indiscriminately”,95 but insisted on instruction in both their use and purpose, a point echoed by Kurdish militants who stated that “the rationale for armed struggle” was emphasised.96 Lectures situated militancy within anti-colonial theory and history, according to one militant, who reported doing “a lot of reading on the people’s war”.97 It was in this context that the CIA reported that Palestinians contributed “more than any other” to the spread of a transnational militant ethic.98

One captured PLO document records a subject that sits oddly alongside the expected catalogue of training subjects: karate. Taught under Captain Ismail Yasin, militants from Germany, Ireland, Pakistan and elsewhere practised the sport as part of their training, with interpreters translating instructions across multiple languages.99

Beyond training, another important contribution made by the Palestinian movement to other revolutionary and liberation groups was the operational support it provided. In particular, Palestinians shared their expertise in plane hijackings. For example, the PFLP backed the Lufthansa hijacking to secure the release of Baader-Meinhof leaders in 1977. Other forms of operational support included reported or suspected involvement of Palestinians in the IRA’s assassination of the British Ambassador in The Hague in 1979,100 and the deployment of Palestinian militants to Angola, El Salvador and Nicaragua.101

Importantly, Palestinian support was provided not only to revolutionary and insurgent forces: it also encompassed support to states, particularly those in the process of consolidating themselves in a post-revolutionary context. A key example is the Palestinian provision of expertise to post-revolutionary Iran. Arafat was the first foreign leader to meet Khomeini after the revolution, visiting Tehran in 1979, and very prominent figures within the Palestinian movement were tasked with coordinating assistance with the new government: Salameh of Fatah and Haddad of the PFLP.102 Only seven days after Arafat’s visit to Tehran, 50 elite Palestinian fighters from al-‘Asifa arrived to train Iranian forces in weapons use.103 It remains unclear whether the forces they trained included the newly formed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC arose from Khomeini’s distrust of the regular army, and one of its first architects turned to Arafat for fighters to train recruits. Iranian state publications credit Anis Nakash, a Fatah cadre, with conceiving the IRGC and drafting a proposal on their formation for Khomeini, following which he trained them. In doing so, he drew directly on Palestinian organisational models. The same current of organisational experience extended to Hezbollah. Imad Mughniyeh, along with a number of other figures who later assumed leadership positions within the group, were cadres of Fatah, including in its elite Force 17 unit.104 Mughniyeh himself was central to Hezbollah’s formation and served until his death as its senior military commander under Hassan Nasrallah.105

Sandinista Nicaragua offers another example of the provision of Palestinian expertise to a post-revolutionary state. In the aftermath of the victory of the Sandinista revolution, the PLO dispatched what contemporary accounts described as its largest delegation to Latin America: between 40 and 70 diplomatic and military personnel were sent to Nicaragua to provide training in Soviet weapons systems, specialised guerrilla tactics, and combat support. This included the deployment of Fatah’s 25 pilots to provide operational support to operations against the US-backed Contras.106 Nicaragua was not the only country to receive air-related support: Fatah’s Force 14 supported multiple postcolonial militaries in their aerial capacities, including Uganda and newly independent Zimbabwe, where it trained 100 cadets for the officer corps in 1981.107

The support Palestinians provided to post-revolutionary states was not only military, ideological and strategic, however: it also included support to the organisation and development of these states. For example, under an agreement with the OAU, Palestinians sent technicians, doctors and teachers to Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, Congo and Guinea-Bissau, and supported cooperative farms and agricultural projects in multiple countries.108 Moreover, Palestinians had cooperation agreements with Cuba, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic.109 They also planned delegations to Vietnam to aid postwar reconstruction there, with fedayeen donating part of their income to construction efforts in that country.110 A particularly striking example that highlights the diversity of the support provided to states was the PLO’s support to commercial airlines in certain countries: it played a role in setting up Maldives Airways and had part ownership in Guinea-Bissau’s first airline, Air Bissau111 and Nicaragua’s national airline, Aeronica, to which it reportedly donated the first of several Boeing 727s.112

As the preceding paragraphs make clear, what began as revolutionary solidarity became integrated into the technical and logistical processes of post-revolutionary statecraft. A stateless liberation movement thus became a source of material and technical aid to sovereign states, unsettling the assumed directionality of development and echoing contemporary Third World efforts to recast the terms of development through new forms of coordination and exchange. As Ihab Shalbak has shown, the PLO’s economic and technical initiatives in the 1970s formed part of wider, if fragile and short-lived, Third World projects associated with the New International Economic Order (NIEO), linking political self-determination to practical attempts at economic autonomy within a still-imperial order.113

Seen in this way, Palestinian provision of revolutionary aid did more than support armed struggle. It repositioned Palestinian dispossession as a source of organisational and technical capacity, redistributing not only the means to fight but also the means to sustain life. In doing so, it drew the Palestinian movement into the intimate terrains of reconstruction and social reproduction, binding the work of national formation to wider projects of Third World-making.

Navigating the tensions produced by solidarity: between principle and strategy 

In assessing the support that the PLO provided to other movements and nations, it becomes clear that solidarity emerged through a conception of internationalism that was both principled and strategic. Strategic alignment did not negate ideological commitment, just as principled solidarity did not preclude calculation. These dynamics were rarely straightforward. At times they reinforced one another; at times they pulled in opposite directions. Strategic considerations could compromise ideological clarity, while ideological commitments could strain strategic coherence. Alliances were sometimes forged even with actors tied to one’s enemy, making contradiction a constitutive feature of practice rather than an aberration. What emerges, then, is a layered set of tensions: between principle and strategy, across and within factions of the PLO, and between state-level diplomacy and underground networks.

Some support was extended with explicit expectations, as when the PLO backed Salvadoran guerrillas involved in the 1979 kidnapping and killing of the South African ambassador to El Salvador114 and the bombing of the Israeli embassy in San Salvador, culminating in a 1980 agreement between the Unified Revolutionary Directorate and Arafat to supply arms and aircraft to the Salvadorans. Other alliances remained informal or deliberately opaque.115 At times, support came at the expense of strategic interests and was therefore kept quiet. The contradiction between diplomacy and militancy was not resolved but managed: what could be proclaimed in one arena had to be denied in another. While Arafat openly celebrated ties with the Sandinistas and other movements in Central America, he publicly distanced the PLO from the IRA after the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979.116 By the mid to late 1970s, low-level contacts with European states had already begun, and the possibility of recognition was becoming more tangible. Even as diplomacy advanced, clandestine cooperation persisted: a declassified CIA memo indicates that around 10 IRA members continued to arrive in South Lebanon for training every month at this time.117 Public distance and covert proximity operated in parallel, each sustaining a different register of internationalism.

Importantly, while Latin America was one of the most visible frontlines of US imperialism in the 1970s and 1980s, and operating there carried the risk of backlash, the PLO did not retreat from the continent. By making its presence there public, it placed itself firmly within the anti-imperialist camp, thereby acquiring symbolic value beyond the region. As in southern Africa, where the PLO backed movements in South Africa and Angola, Latin America held particular force within Third Worldist political imaginaries. Coordination with Cuba was central in both regions, reflecting a shared revolutionary orientation. Moreover, in Latin America the PLO could exert more direct political pressure on Washington. Its presence thus functioned as a projection that compelled recognition of Palestine as a global political issue.118

At times, support was extended to parties that were hostile to, or in conflict with, each other. For example, while Fatah built close ties with the ANC in South Africa the PFLP-GC trained the military wing of rival formations, including the Black Consciousness Movement and the Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Front (APLF),119 which was not recognised by the OAU and had been suppressed by the ANC. Even more striking was the case of Eritrea and Ethiopia. In 1962, the former was annexed by Ethiopia, against which it waged a long war for independence. During this time, the PLO maintained relations with Ethiopia, while simultaneously supporting the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) with training and funding.120 When Eritreans appealed for protection against possible Cuban intervention in the war,121 Arafat sent Shafiq al-Hout to Havana to speak directly with Castro; Cuban forces subsequently assured they would not fight Eritrean forces.122 Here, contradiction was operative rather than incidental, being shaped by Arab League positions, PLO–Cuba relations, and pressures from left-wing currents within the PLO.

Strategic necessity at times led to compromising on ideological convictions, as demonstrated by Fatah’s alliance with Uganda’s Idi Amin, whose rule was violent and erratic but whose regime helped weaken Israel’s presence in Africa and advance African recognition of the PLO.123 Such alignments reflected a willingness to absorb contradiction in pursuit of political ground. Tanzania’s Nyerere, who had rejected Amin from the outset but was among the first to host a PLO office, framed this not as inconsistency but as the result of constraints, blaming the “world community” for leaving Palestinians with few alternatives. After the war, Nyerere raised the status of the PLO office in Tanzania to that of an embassy.124

Whatever the form or motive, the cumulative effect of Palestinian assistance was significant. It cemented ties with key revolutionary and postcolonial states, established the Palestinian presence across military camps, embassies, political forums, and underground networks, and positioned Palestinian groups within global fields of intelligence and counterinsurgency, where association itself became a site of threat attribution, leverage and containment. Palestinian support did not always determine outcomes, but it often reshaped them. It transformed possibilities, altered timelines, and redrew coordinates. It provided not only materials but also methods, not only shelter but also strategy, not only symbols but also structures. It allowed militant formations to reimagine their position in the world, not as isolated outposts but as nodes in an international infrastructure of revolt. If solidarity operated through contradiction, it cannot be assessed through alignment alone, rather it must be traced through the infrastructures it produced, the tactics it circulated, and the forms of legitimacy it reworked.

The history traced above, which has often been obscured by dominant rights-based framings that de-regionalise Palestine and empty internationalism of its material grounding, embedded Palestine within a wider architecture of relationships, political memory and the infrastructures of struggle. Read alongside accounts of structural transformation, this longer arc clarifies the conditions under which Palestine has re-emerged as a focal point of progressive politics.

As the Third World project dissolved into the language of markets and governance, Palestinians followed a parallel trajectory, but without passing through the stage of decolonisation. Liberation was rerouted into negotiation, epitomised by the compromise that rescinded the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in exchange for entry into the Madrid Peace Conference. At the same time, US hegemony, neoliberal restructuring, and the collapse of the Soviet Union dismantled the institutional bases that had sustained Third World internationalism as an organised political formation rooted in mass movements, states and parties. Palestine was absorbed into this order.125 The PLO withdrew from earlier networks and turned towards Western governments. A returning bourgeois leadership, legitimised through recognition of Israel, presided over the dismantling of exile institutions that had long sustained communal life and cultivated solidarity. What remained was increasingly channelled through NGOs and humanitarian frames, severed from popular mobilisation.126

After September 11th, juridical, military and infrastructural pressures hardened this reorganisation. Terror designation regimes, financial monitoring, and the criminalisation of solidarity became routine instruments of counterinsurgency. Endless wars entrenched permanent intervention while expanding privatised security, policing, incarceration, and surveillance. War itself became a laboratory for data extraction drones, sensor fusion, targeting systems feeding back into intelligence networks, and predictive policing at home. Within the left, NGO-isation also marked a class shift: professional strata consolidated around funding streams and institutional access while labour-based and mass organising weakened. Solidarity was reshaped into practices legible to donors and regulators, compressing politics into managerial forms. Across the region, defeated uprisings and proxy conflicts enabled a re-securing of order through militarisation and normalisation, as US security doctrine and Israeli counterinsurgency techniques reorganised movement, labour and dissent.

Under these conditions, struggle unfolds within infrastructures of power: logistics corridors, extraction zones, prisons, and borders. Israel occupies a pivotal position in this terrain, both as beneficiary and exporter of surveillance systems, counterinsurgency expertise, and data-driven warfare.127 Yet in this context, solidarity with Palestine was gaining momentum across movements even before October 2023. That moment functioned less as an origin than as a condensation, making visible a resurgence that was already underway and returning long histories of resistance and alliance to the political foreground.

It is in this context, and particularly during the genocide in Gaza over the last two years, that a relatively small but amplified current, boosted by digital circulation and echoed within activist spaces, has posed a familiar question: Why Palestine rather than other struggles? Why must Palestine be everywhere? Framed as concern for balance or non-hierarchy, these questions often signal anxiety about exceptionalism or overshadowing. They are sometimes voiced with genuine curiosity by individuals at the edges of organised movements, including members of diasporic communities in Western contexts. Yet they rest on unexamined assumptions about solidarity, internationalism, and political practice itself. To engage with them requires pausing to consider what is actually at stake, which logics sustain the unease, and what this discomfort reveals about the present condition of movement politics.

What critiques of Palestine’s centrality reveal about the needs of contemporary left politics
 

(Re)centring imperialism as the framework for analysis

Critiques of Palestine’s political significance within contemporary left politics frequently assume that foregrounding it produces a graded ordering of struggles: a supposed “hierarchy of solidarity”.128 In this view, positioning Palestine as a frontline of anti-imperialism renders other struggles legible only through it, diminishing their specificity.129 There is also a stated concern for Palestinians themselves: some critics express the worry that universalising claims detach the Palestinian struggle from its rootedness as a land-based struggle of a particular people.130 Still others argue that comparisons risk erasing religious meaning or “spiritual geography”.131

While these critiques allude to the claim that all forms of abstraction result in epistemic violence, abstraction does not function uniformly: analogies drawn from lived experiences of oppression can flatten difference into sameness, whereas material entanglements refer to historically produced relations that connect distinct manifestations of power within a shared structure. To treat Palestine’s prominence as merely representational is to miss the material structures through which its centrality is produced. When solidarity is reduced to discursive and affective registers, it strips internationalism of its grounding in material analyses of power: that is, an analysis of imperialism.

Recognising struggles as occupying structurally pivotal positions in global capitalism and imperialism should not be mistaken for exceptionalising certain struggles. Palestine’s prominence is not due to an ‘excess of discourse’ but is the product of the exceptional measures through which imperial powers sustain Zionism and repress solidarity. Zionism has been exceptionalised by imperial guarantors through military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. And through this exceptionalisation of Zionism, and hence Israel, a double movement occurs: the same support that normalises Zionism within Western state systems simultaneously exposes those systems to an internal crisis. To guarantee Zionism requires insulating it from the norms liberal democracies claim to uphold; yet that insulation generates visible contradiction. The more unconditional the backing, the more intensive the repression required to contain the solidarities that reveal this guarantee. What appears as disproportionate policing is not overreaction but structural necessity. None of this makes Israel analytically exceptional as a settler colony; rather, it names the degree of, and instruments of, imperial sponsorship.

What critics call an abstraction of Palestine into a detached symbol is an intensification of concreteness: localising the struggle, connecting scales and sites, making visible how imperialism organises violence across geographies. This extends from regimes of confinement and control and the outsourcing of incarceration and surveillance techniques developed in Palestine (including drones) to their deployment in policing racialised citizens and refugees from Papua New Guinea to Greece.132 From the bombing of homes in Gaza by Israeli F-35 jets to the inferno that consumed public housing in Grenfell Tower in West London as a result of cladding produced by the company Arconic that also supplies materials for those jets.133 From student tuition fee debt that blights people’s lives to universities’ investment of those fees in arms companies, and to the dividends enjoyed by their shareholders.134

In this light, Palestine's strategic salience is not a symptom of abstraction but a condensation made durable through dense infrastructures and organisational forms that allow moments of mobilisation to accumulate. In many places this phenomenon has revived left and student organising, reconnecting them with union work and with internationalist networks that had long been in decline. In these entanglements Palestine can act as a catalyst, drawing struggles out of single-issue form into a shared terrain. Ruling elites move to contain and crush this convergence because of the crises it generates, crises that lay bare the structural contradictions on which their liberal democracy rests. This is evidenced in the turmoil plaguing US and British party politics, as governments expend extensive resources on policing and repression of movements through increasing police expenditure, incarceration, terrorism proscriptions, surveillance and enactment of new laws.

Finally, it is worth asking: are all forms of abstraction the same? As noted by Marx (contra Hegel), concepts must rise from material reality, not descend from pure thought. In applying this approach, what appear as isolated struggles, institutions, or crises, become intelligible as connected. Anti-colonial traditions have often relied on this method: Fanon wrote from Algeria, but his analysis travelled far beyond it, illuminating structures of colonial domination others could recognise without assuming sameness. At different conjunctures, Vietnam, Cuba, Ireland and South Africa were seen as central fronts where imperialism concentrated its forces, prompting calls for “many Vietnams” and leading to a surge in the number of children named Guevara, Mandela and Castro. These gestures did not flatten struggles but marked sites where domination became sharply visible. Today, Palestine holds that role.

In today's climate of identity politics, to name difference has come to stand as a virtue in itself, and comparison is recast as analogy and analogy is assumed to mean erasure. However, the distinction that matters most is precisely this: analogies of oppression can flatten, while historically grounded material linkages bind struggles without dissolving specificity. Such entanglements are not new. Different groups have at different times occupied the position Palestinians hold today, but what endures are the theories forged in those struggles, theories that persist because they adapt as conditions shift. When these relations are mistaken for only a shared subjective experience of oppression, what disappears is the historical, logistical and organisational labour through which anti-colonial movements made such connections legible, and through which imperialism has been, and can be, confronted jointly. 

A growing discourse now treats comparison itself as “epistemic violence”, embedded “within the colonial matrix of power”, collapsing historically forged practices of internationalism into a single category of analogy imposed by coloniality.135 In this framing, no distinction is made between comparisons produced by colonial knowledge regimes and those forged by liberation movements themselves through struggle, encounter, and shared antagonism. The problem here is not ethical excess but a category error: comparison is treated as a representational act rather than as a political practice that emerges from organisation, coordination, and shared material conditions of struggle. The critique is idealist par excellence: it treats comparison as an epistemological problem rather than as a political practice, detached from organisation, strategy, and historical conditions. “Comparative frameworks” are said to marginalise Indigenous ways of knowing and to refuse struggles “on their own terms”, though the question of how those “own terms” come into being is never posed.136 Those terms are treated as pre-given, internally coherent, and insulated from historical encounter (as if political struggles could form without mediation, translation, or relational labour), rather than as produced through transnational struggle, organisational relations, and uneven structures of power.

It is these material entanglements that have rendered Palestine legible beyond itself. The ideological inheritances through which colonised peoples have interpreted their condition, including Marxism (so readily dismissed as Western), have been taken up, reworked, and transformed in struggle. Palestinians have not merely received these frameworks but have contributed to their development. Although the leading force of Palestinian armed resistance today operates within a different ideological horizon, its formation and mutation remain marked by the inheritances of the previous century. It does not stand outside its environment and cannot be abstracted from the conditions that produced it. Once struggles are detached from the relational processes through which they became intelligible to one another, critique moves towards nativism. It presumes ideological uniformity among the colonised and treats external reference as contamination rather than as a condition of political formation.

(Re)centring internationalism 

This brings us to the second critique, which criticises Palestine’s strategic centrality in progressive politics on the basis that it eclipses other struggles, rendering their visibility and urgency as secondary. Centrality is read as dominance, in which the suffering of others becomes marginal because of disproportionate focus: Palestine commands a high level of solidarity while other sites of brutality, including others experiencing genocide, receive less. The explanation usually invoked is Western proximity: that Palestine fits the model of European settler colonialism and therefore achieves greater legibility in the Western mind, while struggles less legible to Western audiences are marginalised. Within this centrality, it is said that Palestinians do not reciprocate or share this solidarity with others and therefore eclipse other struggles. Or, when struggles appear only in relation to Palestine, their visibility is mediated through representational proximity rather than the force of their own political claims. This creates a structure of attention in which Palestine appears as a gravitational centre, replicating a colonial “centre–periphery” model of recognition and, by implication, of solidarity.137 By this reasoning, solidarity is distributed not according to political principles or even based on the severity of oppression (if such a thing is even quantifiable) but through a hierarchy of recognition in which Palestine acquires an exceptional moral weight that is denied to others.

In contrast to such a view, as highlighted in Part 2, in anti-colonial and internationalist traditions, solidarity grows from shared conditions of domination and the political labour of struggle. It is in this context that the slogan “Palestine frees us all” acquires its force. It does not impose hierarchy but illuminates interdependence. If anything, it can be harsh on Palestinians: it implies that for Palestinians to be free, all others struggling against imperialism must also be free. Nonetheless, this is the structural position Palestinians occupy, and it is a productive one, in the sense that advances in one site reverberate across others.

The prominence of one struggle does not necessarily eclipse others, and it can actually extend visibility. With almost every rupture in Palestine since 2014, we have seen comparisons between Palestine and other struggles. As a British writer, the founder of Black British Radicals noted as early as November 2023: “Do you see how once people started talking about Palestine, they also started talking about Congo, Sudan, Tigray, the Sami people, Hawai'i, and everyone fighting for their right to be free?”138

Even so, these critiques point to disproportionality in media attention. Yet media attention does not translate into movement capacity. Treating uneven visibility as a moral imbalance produces guilt-driven solidarity,139 shifting responsibility onto Palestinians for being ‘too visible’, rather than analysing repression, organisation and power. This move also erases the reality of sustained Palestinian censorship: systematic takedowns, shadow banning, and platform suppression driven by state pressure and Zionist influence across Google, Meta and major media outlets. Visibility, where it exists, has been produced against these conditions through Palestinian political labour, including by journalists and organisers who have learned to contest censorship across decades. As Sudanese organisers and journalists on the ground have noted, the difference lies not in favouritism but in organisation: capacities Palestinians were compelled to develop over decades.140

The problem lies not in Palestine, but in a moralised and de-materialised conception of internationalism assumed by those who voice this critique. Internationalism is not the aggregation of suffering into a moral community but the convergence of people on the basis of shared material conditions and antagonisms. It means identifying, assessing, strategising and resisting along the structural fault lines that shape solidarity. The point is not to rank struggles or to assign greater virtue to those located within certain fault lines, but to recognise that some struggles occupy structurally pivotal positions in global systems of capital and thus offer transversal leverage for wider emancipatory projects.

Such an understanding of solidarity breaks with the idea that it is something that is bestowed by an other, in a liberal charity understanding. In this view, Palestine is cast as the passive object of solidarity, rather than its co-producer. What disappear here are the infrastructures Palestinians have built, rebuilt and sustained for both resistance and solidarity, in exile and in Palestine itself.

Mobilisations across the world do not emerge out of nothing, nor can they be accounted for as being generated only by violence inflicted on Palestinians: they are also explained by Palestinian-led resistance over the last three decades: two Intifadas, successive wars and resistance emerging from Gaza, the Great March of Return, the 2021 Uprising of Dignity, and the multiple accumulating mobilisations across Jerusalem, the West Bank, al-Naqab, and Haifa, and most recently the Al-Aqsa Flood, have all culminated in shaping the conditions under which solidarity with Palestine during the ongoing genocidal war has been renewed. To treat this renewal as a sudden burst of solidarity produced by Western legibility is to misrecognise its material basis. For those embedded in movement work rather than in algorithmic debate the question is not about prominence and the whataboutery logic of comparison, but about organising capacities. 

In exile, under the long shadow of the Oslo Accords, networks of Palestinian organisers, activists and scholars have revived traditions that place Zionism within the categories of imperialism, racism and colonialism, while reactivating political memory and organisational knowledge from earlier decades. From the mid-2000s onwards, movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and coordination actions and mobilising infrastructures, such as Israeli Apartheid Week,141 extended Third Worldist lessons and legacies, rearticulating them for a new conjuncture. They re-kindled ties with Indigenous struggles, mobilised trade unionists, and worked to reassert Palestine as a class issue and an anti-colonial struggle, rather than a humanitarian appeal or a purely state-centred question. Building on such efforts, the rise of formations such as the Palestinian Youth Movement signalled the reestablishment of Palestinian- and Arab-led organising. Through these deliberate efforts to reconstruct legacies fractured by Oslo, relations with other struggles could once again be articulated as internationalism and joint struggle, often in the form of organisation-to-organisation ties, a practice carried forward and adapted in ways that shaped how other movements organised internally and forged relations with one another.

(Re)framing solidarity 

Finally, often raised alongside the criticism of the relatively disproportionate space the Palestinian struggle occupies is the claim that such engagement is not reciprocated. Reciprocity here is assumed to be immediate, measurable, symmetrical, and visible to all. The demand for immediate reciprocity abstracts solidarity from the uneven conditions under which movements are built and sustained, so that unevenness is rendered suspect. It transforms historical asymmetry into moral imbalance and recasts solidarity as audit rather than strategy.

In anti-colonial practice, however, reciprocity unfolds across time, shaped by asymmetries of capacity and repression, rather than synchrony. Movements do not give and receive in the same moment; solidarities, as historical material practices, are often reciprocated beyond discursive gestures, in different times and spaces. The Palestinian and South African struggles are a good example of this. 

This critique often hardens into an explicit claim that Palestinians do not stand in solidarity with others, or that they lack knowledge of struggles beyond their own.142 An asymmetry of visibility is reinterpreted as a deficiency of consciousness. Palestinians are positioned as inward-looking, insufficiently reciprocal, and politically partial. Yet solidarities do not always manifest simultaneously across different sites of struggle. Political alignment may become visible only when conditions shift and organisational capacity re-emerges. To demand simultaneity is to misunderstand how movements endure across rupture and repression.

Such claims collapse organisational destruction, repression, and dispossession into questions of principle and morality, mistaking the dismantling of Palestinian political infrastructures since the 1990s for an absence of internationalism, turning structural isolation into ethical deficiency. What is revealed is an argument governed less by the realities of political organisation than by a politics of visibility, in which what is not immediately apparent is presumed not to exist. The result is historically and politically reductive.

Moreover, the facts on the ground do not bear out such claims. For example, various Palestinian transnational organisers, organisations and collectives have developed their skills, strategic visions and tactics through their presence in other movements. In the last decade, and especially over the last two years, these actors have played a prominent role in bringing decades of experience into various groups, collectives and movements, helping them organise strategically and tactically in ways that cannot be learned from tweets.

Since the genocide in Gaza began, and despite the difficulty of doing anything beyond urgent work for Palestine in this context, Palestinian organisers across Europe and North America have also brought struggles from various geographies into view by platforming and supporting those struggles. For example, the BDS movement has advanced a boycott campaign targeting the United Arab Emirates in solidarity with Sudanese organisers, while responding to calls from Congolese groups for support in mobilisation and advocacy. Symbolic and material gestures emerging from Palestine, and from Gaza in particular, before and during the genocide are too numerous to be listed or overlooked.

This is not to paint a seamless picture of solidarity. The isolating legacy of the Oslo Accords remains heavy, and Palestine’s separation from the world is only now being repaired. Political education and practices of material solidarity within Palestinian communities do not yet match the intensity of earlier generations. Despite positive developments, much of this labour has been directed towards rebuilding under conditions of contraction, as deepening isolation within a settler colonial reality converges with intensifying restrictions on organising in solidarity with Palestine across multiple sites. The urgency of genocide makes this labour harder, not because the impulse to build with others has receded, but because time, attention and organisational capacity are continually drawn into the immediate work of survival.

The Palestine liberation movement, in and through its factions, has not sustained strategic coherence nor maintained a unified revolutionary programme, nor have its military confrontations with Zionism secured decisive territorial reclamation. Yet this has not translated into political insignificance. The persistence of resistance in all its forms and across all its fronts, within Palestine and abroad, has prevented the completion of the settler colonial project and unsettled imperial stabilisation in the region and ruptured the world order it underwrites. Unable to secure a decisive victory, while remaining equally impervious to being defeated or neutralised, the Palestinian struggle remains positioned between strategic impasse and political foreclosure. It returns repeatedly to the world’s political consciousness as an unsettled question. In doing so, it continues to function as a point through which revolutionary possibility is rehearsed, circulated and reactivated across struggles.

The danger of exceptionalism is real, but this danger does not lie in ranking Palestine above other struggles: it lies in internalising the exceptional status imperial powers have awarded to Zionism, treating it as uniquely protected, untouchable, and invincible. Suspicion travels, narrowing dissent and sowing division, especially where organisation is brittle and principle displaces strategy. Within that atmosphere, Palestine is miscast as a moral spectacle rather than a political struggle, and division returns dressed up as conscience.

Solidarity, or its absence, is measured at the level of organised movements rather than individual stances, even when those stances number in the thousands. Individuals may register sentiment, but not durability; they can appear principled within their milieu while remaining oblivious to the invisible or underground labour across struggles. Organisation, by contrast, carries continuity in relation and strategy, sustaining the space in which self- and cross-group critiques, and risk, unfold over time, often beyond public visibility. It is this organisational labour that disappears in the critiques discussed above, which remain fixated on what is seen or symbolically foregrounded, rather than on the slow work through which political force is built and sustained. This is the very organisational labour that is obscured when solidarity is miscast as a good to be conferred, extended, or withdrawn, rather than claimed and co-produced by those who are its subjects and agents.

To close, I return to Darwish’s references to “the world” (that cares more about Jews than Palestinians). These references name a wound: the fact that empire sets the terms of visibility, then claims that visibility as its own moral theatre. Yet that is only half the story. The history  I have recounted in this chapter has not been offered as an archive for its own sake, nor as a plea for more grace, but rather as a way of making legible how Palestinians made themselves central, not as a demand for credit but as a wager about what political labour can do, and what others might learn from it. For Palestinians were not only made visible by the violence done to them: they made themselves visible through political labour that transformed structural weakness into strategic centrality. In that sense, Darwish is right, but still incomplete: the world is not only the place where suffering is seen and acknowledged, where empire congratulates itself for watching (via BBC coverage at dinner time) the tragic deaths of Palestinians rendered as distant news; it is also something that is made, for and beyond Palestine, as a field of practice, a way to claim Palestine for the world, and the world for Palestine.

Read back across the chapter, the point is not that one cause symbolises others, or that one tactic travels by moral force: it is that centrality is made through dense infrastructures, through organisational forms that embed politics in everyday life and allow moments of mobilisation to accumulate rather than evaporate. In that light, Palestine’s centrality is not a mystical attribute, and it is not a moral demand: it is an historically produced capacity, and the question is whether movements now can rebuild the forms of organisation through which such capacities are made, shared and sustained.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of TNI.