The Palestinian Americas: revolutionary struggle across the global south, 1950-1979

The Palestinian liberation struggle has long been a standard-bearer for anti-colonial movements around the world. Rarely, however, have scholars investigated the historical process by which Palestinians embedded their cause within other struggles in the global south. The Palestinian Americas is the first project to document in detail how Palestinians forged such ties in a specific geographical context: that of Latin America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rather than assume Third World solidarities to have been produced across discrete national or regional blocs operating under Cold War logics, the project focuses on the revolutionary activism of diasporic Palestinians, emphasising forms of south-south migration and connectivity that bypassed European and North American channels.

Since the early 20th century, Latin America has been home to the largest number of Palestinians in the world outside the Middle East (around 1 million), with particularly high concentrations in Central America and Chile. While these communities have long been known for their success as business entrepreneurs, significant numbers joined Latin American revolutionary movements from the 1950s onwards. Against a backdrop of rising Third World solidarity, this new generation of activists came into increasing contact with the nascent Palestinian liberation struggle as they sought to link their local activism to a global picture of anti-imperial resistance. Yet they also had to contend with hostility among fellow Palestinians in Latin America who often viewed involvement in left-wing activism as a threat to their economic interests.

The project explores the complexity and specificity of these diasporic spaces, providing new insight on the struggles involved in forming south-south solidarities in the mid-20th century. From indigenous demands for land reform in El Salvador, to student movements in Chile, to the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Palestinian revolutionaries in Latin America were embedded within distinctly local socio-political contexts. At the same time, their activism frequently forced them into clandestine lifestyles as they escaped persecution and sought to build new ties of solidarity. Using carefully chosen case studies, the research probes this interplay between movement, localised space and revolutionary activism through a combination of ethnographic and documentary sources, reconstructing the networks of kin and ideology that sustained diasporic Palestinians in their precarious journeys across disparate locations.

The research is geared towards 3 main outputs. Firstly, an article in a leading journal of global history will look at Santiago de Chile as a hub for Palestinian revolutionary activists from across Latin America and the Middle East in order to make a broader intervention in how global historians can explore south-south solidarities in the era of Third World revolution. Secondly, an international conference and resulting special issue will establish a new, collective research agenda looking at the Arab diaspora's historic engagement with the Palestinian struggle. Thirdly, the project will digitise materials held in Chile, El Salvador and France to produce 3 new collections and 2 digital stories in the Planet Bethlehem Archive, an online resource that documents the diasporic heritage of Bethlehem - the town that produced the majority of Palestinian migration to the Americas.

The project will make these outputs useful to key stakeholders beyond the academic sector through a consultative engagement programme that sees the PI partnering with archives and cultural organisations in Latin America, as well as a group of diasporic Palestinian writers and artists, to shape collectively a series of public events, educational materials and media publications. The PI will also draft a book aimed at a general readership which tells the story of Latin America's entanglement with the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century.