AHA Session 106
Radical History Review 5
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Empire Ballroom West (Sheraton New York, Second Floor)
Chair:
Stacy D. Fahrenthold, University of California, Davis
Session Abstract
Global attention and mobilization around Palestine over the past several months has exposed its significance far beyond the immediate region. This panel investigates long global interconnections with Palestinian struggles during the twentieth century that predate the more contemporary conflict, from the 1920s to the 1980s. It brings together scholars who locate Palestine within a global context, considering the movement of expertise and ideas of both colonial governance and of solidarity from Palestine to Central America, Mexico, South Asia, and Egypt. While historians have studied both the ongoing occupation and transnational liberation movements that have characterized the twentieth-century Palestinian struggle, public perceptions of this conflict often cast it as a singular situation outside of history. This panel builds upon newer scholarship in global intellectual history and histories of political economy that highlight lateral South-South connections to illuminate the material and intellectual currents that brought Palestine into conversation and connection with diverse contexts. It brings together scholars to ask: what do affinities and encounters with Palestine throughout the twentieth century tell us about the nature of colonial violence and of resistance to it? How can Palestine help us rethink histories of postcolonial nationalism, Third World liberation, and insurgent struggles throughout the world?
Alexander Aviña will present on the use of Israeli weapons and military advisers in the genocidal counterinsurgent violence of Central America in the 1970s and 80s. In looking at the global use of these technologies of repression, Aviña finds the echoes of both state terror and collective armed struggle from Palestine to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Next, Kevan Aguilar considers the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as an inflection point for the Mexican left, as Spanish political refugees dissented from Mexican left wing groups and labor movements by expressing their support for the establishment of Israel. Then, Esmat Elhalaby examines the efforts of Indian intellectuals to write about the history and politics of Palestine after 1947 in the shadow of Non-Alignment and American imperialism. Lastly, Ahmad Shokr considers how political debates on Palestine among Egyptian intellectuals of the 1940s came to shape expressions of the postcolonial Egyptian state.
The objective of this panel is to generate a conversation on new directions in the study of colonialism as well as to enrich historical conversations about Palestine as a state that has been at the center of rich global intellectual and political currents. It seeks to encourage comparative and transnational approaches to the study of Third World liberation that deprioritize the metropole. The session should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, solidarity movements, decolonization, political economy, and global and imperial history.
