“And For Us, Too”: Decolonization Movements and the Palestinian Counterpublic in Israel, 1960–67

This paper examines how Palestinian activists in the Israeli Communist Party (ha-Miflagah ha-Komunist ha-Yisra’ilit - MAKI) utilized expressions of solidarity with anti-colonial movements in Angola, the Congo, Vietnam, and Algeria to challenge state policies and assert cultural ties to the Arab world and the global South, helping to further develop an already emerging Palestinian counterpublic in Israel.  Though often viewed as politically quiescent and geographically isolated, many Palestinians in Israel prior to 1967 were keenly aware and supportive of anti-colonial movements around the world, largely due to the information they read in local media outlets.  As a result, their political sympathies were often at odds with official Israeli positions.

In particular we examine the party’s two main Arabic-language publications, the semi-weekly newspaper al-Ittihad and the monthly literary journal al-Jadid.  These publications reprinted news items from wire services, Soviet propaganda outlets, and regional communist publications, and they became important venues for Palestinian-Israeli writers and intellectuals to express their views.  As decolonization movements began gaining ground in the 1960s, Palestinian writers, intellectuals and activists affiliated with MAKI celebrated the anti-colonial movements of the day and compared the situations of newly independent peoples with their own through essays, opinion pieces and poetry written in solidarity with the colonized people. As a result, they helped propel the political discourse within the Palestinian-Israeli community towards a greater anti-colonial stance that became increasingly at odds with Jewish-Israeli political discourses and helped further establish a Palestinian counterpublic in Israel that continues until today.