Palestine and Israel in the Argentine Political Imaginary: Anti-imperial Thought, the Displaced Citizen, and Public Space

Sandra Bartky asserts that the most critical aspect of solidarity from a phenomenological perspecive is that of affective ties, “mitgefuhl” or fellow-feeling, an understanding of the other that is generated in large part by imagination stirred to intuit through cognitive processing of information and the ability to sympathize with the pain and suffering of others (2002). Transnational solidarities in Argentina have long been critically implicated in the business of political organization, from anti-Fascist associations to anarcho-syndicalist militancy, and from influential networks of intellectuals to popular anti-globalization activists. This paper seeks to explore the question of how transnational solidarities are formed, expressed, and activated in public spaces, specifically in the context of political associations of the left in Argentine history. It examines the microcosm of a relatively understudied history, anti-colonialist solidarity with Israel-Palestine, in the hopes of uncovering the common understandings and the technologies that communicate, reproduce, and disseminate the Mitgefuhl that frequently translates into meaningful political actions and mutual aid efforts.

In order to uncover the process by which ideas and information begin to be structured into meaningful political understandings and mobilizing imaginaries, I examine the activities of civic associations and political parties in shaping transnational political agendas in public spaces by invoking the struggle of the Palestinian people to defend their rights.  I am interested in the discursive strategies of resolutions, solicitations, correspondence, speeches, and congress literature of transnational solidarity organizing activities, and the way these map onto broader trends of humanitarianism in the early organizing activity of solidarity campaigns and human rights movements specifically of the first wave of interest in the cause in the 1970s to the 2000s, when piqueteros began to use the keffiyeh to distinguish themselves from other anti-globalization public protesters.