The last year or so was a long string of anniversaries of crucial moments in modern Palestinian political history: 100 years since the Balfour Declaration, seventy years since the 1948 war and the nakba, fifty years since the 1967 war, fifty years since the battle at Karama, thirty years since the First Intifada, and twenty-five years since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Each resulted in a slew of thoughtful essays, including an ongoing rumination on the meaning of anniversary and commemoration itself. These pieces lived simultaneously with intensified local mobilizations, particularly in Gaza as part of the Great Return March, haunting them with an urgency and hopeful reminder of the still-present call for freedom.Footnote ¹ For the historian of Palestine and the Palestinians, all these moments raise an ever-present dilemma: how do we write histories of revolt and revolution after ruin, disappearance, and archival and political collapse? The archive, though a concept tied in metaphorical knots, has material body. But are its present constitution and usages capable of telling the stories that remain to be told about the Palestinian left?

This essay does not seek to propose answers to the question of how Palestinian revolutionary history should be written. Instead, it offers three forms of historical method that may be useful for the expansion of histories of the Palestinian left, and broader popular movements, beyond the narrow confines of geostrategic and statist analyses. Of course, writing social histories of the left does not mean to dismiss political history or histories of left political thought. Rather, it is to bring in lives and thoughts ignored, and in doing so, to reorient historiography on the Palestinians. These forms can push against a methodological eclecticism seemingly unable to read political life outside of preset notions and epistemologies that prioritize and often only see already legible practices, collectivities, and imaginaries.Footnote ²

These three forms are: the scale of the social; the conjuring of an archive of those still present; and a move against citational erasure. None is methodologically innovative. However, together they can potentially strike a different tonality in the writing of left life amid ongoing destruction and displacement.Footnote ³

Global history has offered a method for considering a broader scale of networks and ties between leftist movements, ideas, and institutions. The scale of the social, in other words granular microhistories, of those same mobilizations, would allow us to think of them in fuller context, and examine more closely conditions and contingencies in the history of popular mobilization and the everyday life of movement work. This social scale expands who we read as the agent and author of left politics. It democratizes the writing on popular movements, and unravels the weaving of rhetorics of unity to find not only fissures and silences, but also the constitution of political discipline and cohesion in particular sites and communities: Why did people come together, how did they come together, and how did they stay and work together? What happens to communities when things fall apart? For example, in considering histories of Arab and Palestinian left politics outside the Arab world, what would it look like to write a history of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine from the rise and fall of its party mobilizations in Youngstown, Ohio? Or of Fateh amongst Palestinians in Vlaardingen, Netherlands? How do we write about the capture of the Los Angeles 8 without understanding their role as mobilizers in support of Palestinian national liberation within a particular form of Arab communal life and politics in exile? Should we not be thinking about and examining the remarkable ground held by the Palestinian left in the midst of a fierce and powerful Arab right in Santiago de Chile?

At the scale of the institutional, of parties, formations, and movements, these histories have begun to emerge. But, what if such histories (as well as ethnographies and critical studies more generally) looked more closely and made another analytical cut, seeing in a particular site the architecture necessary for the maintenance of social ties within political formations and their local communities? What can we see differently if we read histories of political left formations as not those of movements seamed forcibly into local communities but rather weaved through and by them, even when in opposition to them? It would certainly allow us to better consider gender and class and a whole myriad of other social categories in the striations of movement work. For example, in addition to etching the contributions of women disappeared within histories of party formations, or in auxiliary services, or in the performativities of gender, and the complexities of women's place within party structures, how can we see the woman outside the frame altogether? For example, those who did indeed stay home but contributed to other forms of political practice in their neighborhoods: developing economic cooperatives or care collectives, or offering their expertise to piecemeal intelligence gathering or their bodies in comfort.

Or what of specific sites of political mobilization such as the classroom, the prison, the playground, and the health clinic? While the prison has been the subject of some ethnographic work, the other sites less so. Many on the political left amongst Palestinians, and in the Arab world, were educators, and yet little attention has been paid to the dynamism of the classroom (whatever its form) as site of ideological subject formation, or of deliberation and mobilization. How can we write a history of the Palestinian left without writing of Palestinian teachers in Kuwait? Or a history built by youth and yet without writing the political lives of children? Or the lives of Palestinian fighters after disability?

There can be expiration dates for the writing of such histories, predicated as they are on the ability to ask those who were in their midst questions otherwise near impossible to retrieve—how did you feel at that moment? What internal debates did you have about that tactic or strategy? The fog of recollection grows thick with each passing year, compounding the challenges of memory work already there in an attempt to extract some sense of the moment from the sludge of despair. As the door begins to close on the possibility of conducting oral histories with those with memory of the second half of the 20th century, let alone the first, and as Arab archives grow even more difficult to access amidst repression or shorn by rubble, to search and ask those who might have otherwise not recorded their stories becomes an act of methodological urgency. These oral histories need not be exercises in fealty but they require a spirit of tender regard for lives and bodies marked by disappointment, and scarred by violence, physical and otherwise. Methods of collective oral historical retrieval in particular can be fruitful, a purposeful yet lightly managed gathering of organizers and others together in socialities of intergenerational communion, and a positing of some measure of authorial agency, opening up memories of hurt but also of joie de vivre, hope, play and humor, love often expressed in poetry, literature, and song. These memories should be recorded—they are the affective scaffolding under which blows of pain were withstood.Footnote ⁴

Citational erasure of the knowledge productions of political movements by historians remains, and more troubling has been the curious tendency to see the writings of those revolutionary scholars in movement journals and newspapers, for example in the PLO's Palestinian Affairs, as somehow merely purveying primary data, or the work of organizers boxed in by their own ideological positions (presumably in contrast to the historians themselves).Footnote ⁵ With a few notable exceptions, they are rarely engaged as scholars of political thought and revolutionary theory, despite the overabundant, rigorous, deeply contentious, self-critical and reflexive debates and conversation across nearly a century in these journals.

These citational erasures are compounded by the lack of archival documentation at the scale of the social and local, the archives from which microhistories can be written. Sometimes erasure is purposeful, disappearance and forgetting a necessary corollary to precarious political work. Still other times, archiving becomes a therapeutic attempt to gather remnants in the hopes that it can stave off despondency and collapse of morale, and sustain political legitimacy in the lull of intensified repression. These materials must be found. Some of them are closeted away in the confines of state repositories and currently inaccessible, some are being gathered by communities and groupings, but so much is still in the hands of those who made these histories to begin with.Footnote ⁶ They carried papers, leaflets, journals, photographs, and film reels as they went on the move, exiled and expelled from Lebanon to Tunis; to Puerto Rico and Haiti; Kuwait then Amman. They kept letters from lovers in their back-pockets, and wrote letters back home to their mothers and friends. They scribbled and doodled on scraps, and they built entire bureaucracies for the care of injured friends, comrades, and neighbors. Many of them who have died have left these material artifacts of political life in the care of descendants often confounded by what is now in their keep. These materials might need to remain disaggregated, their scattered conditions protecting them from captivity by authorities and regimes seeking to further expunge and destroy, redact and repress. They should be searched for anyway. The quest itself would posit questions worth asking about how to write the history of the left from the standpoint not only of those who felt their lives worthy of memoir or record but also those whose political labors were purposefully only ever collectively understood, the foot soldiers who always speak in terms of “we.” Citation of these materials makes those invisibilized visible, if they so desire to be, and other questions come into view, ones that can unpack the varied experiences of the long century of Palestinian political life, across terrains, conditions, ruptures, and communities. Amid settler colonial violence, by excavating layers of nationalist mythology and denunciatory black legend, a social history of the Palestinian left reveals patterns that can help us see political mobilization not only during moments of triumph and doubt, unease and exultation, but also during the mundane stretches of life in between. It is to think of new periodizations that help us to write a history of the left that does not desire to tear down or exalt, but seeks a sharper read of the political stakes and social ties needed to sustain popular will. To scale the social, to archive memories, to cite what they wrote and what they held close, is to center the subjects of histories of the left as not vessels for the rehearsals of ideology, but as Palestinians, often young, often poor, who saw in the left the end of a rightless life, and the promise of justice and another future.