Affective Solidarities and Struggle: The Palestinian Revolution in the 1970s

This article examines the Palestinian revolution as it unfolded in the early 1970s, which marked a peak in the power as well as the radical politics of the Palestinian left in their struggle to liberate their homeland. It looks at how Palestinians engaged with the revolution from a variety of angles and means such as cultural productions, militant struggle, student movements, and alliances with foreign movements. How Palestinians identified the national struggle and its concurrent anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles through the fraught multivalent category of intimacy elucidates the interlinkages of personal, familial, communal, and global networks. The article analyzes this constellation of solidarities through the prism of magazines produced by solidarity groups and Palestinian groups. It argues that the revolutionary temporality generated affective commitments linked with past and present revolutions unfolding across the Global South and a lasting resonance that regenerates similar sentiments in the present frame. Intimacy allows for rendering the abstract notions of revolutionary liberation tangible and how the interlocking matrixes of comradeship and relations challenged the colonial project that Palestinians and their allies resisted.