Introduction

1Palestinians have historically articulated their struggle against Zionism through frameworks and methods of national liberation and anti-colonialism (Abdulhadi 2009). Since before the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), but especially since the inauguration of the Palestinian revolution in the late 1960s, Palestinians drew from their collective experience of disaster to articulate their aspirations driven by national principles of return of all refugees to the homeland and an end to Zionist colonisation of all historic Palestine (Y. Sayigh 2011).1 Combining broader aspirations for freedom with the internationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist political ethos that molded insurgency in this epoch, Palestinians drew important theoretical and methodological lessons and resources from anti-colonial struggles across the globe, including on the convergence of theory and practice for a guiding praxis of struggle (Nisan 1993; Abdulhadi 2009). These lessons helped shape Palestinian principles, frameworks, methods, and, most importantly, self-determined characterizations and articulations of Zionism as a colonial project.2

2Many theorizations of Palestinian resistance of this era were built in and through the anti-colonial movement, largely forerun by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after 1969, and in turn, reflected in liberation scholarship produced by the Palestinian intelligentsia. From the 1960s through the early 1990s, Palestinian intellectuals played a critical role in the national movement. They articulated the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people to the international community and were an important component of the grassroots liberation struggle. Rather than by-standers studying the movement as an object of analysis, Palestinian intellectuals often wrote about an experiential condition they experienced alongside their people, formulating compelling narratives and paradigms that were in service of the movement. As Mjriam Abu Samra and Luigi Achilli note in Chapter 17, Palestinian intellectuals in the early stages of the revolution were Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals”: the “constructor, organiser, and permanent persuader [who] give it [its broader class] homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.” Intellectuals were not only champions of the revolution, but also offered critical appraisals on the state of the movement, an analysis of its contradictions, and critiques of the mistakes, corruption, and misuse of power among its leadership as well. However, as Abu Samra and Achilli’s work goes on to show, the role of intellectuals was re-ordered following the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords whereby the anti-colonial intellectual was relegated to “dissident” instead of an important actor in a broader liberatory movement ecosystem (Abu Samra and Achilli 2020).

3The anti-colonial political framework, developed by the PLO and theorised by its intelligentsia, was eventually sabotaged with the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian leadership recognised their occupier and traded in the revolution for a hollow promise of a state on only 22 percent of historic Palestine.3 Since then, the PLO—which had purported to embody Palestinian liberatory politics and praxis—was supplanted with the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing force bound to jurisdiction and tasked with building a state in cooperation with Israel, primarily utilising tools of international diplomacy. Until today, Palestinians have not achieved their freedom, yet the shift in trajectory has, at times, obscured the very character and framing of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle and limited a critical interrogation of Zionism as a colonial ideology and project. This change was accompanied by a liquidation of the transnational infrastructure of the PLO, which once gave Palestinians everywhere, including the intelligentsia in exile, a direct role in an organized struggle. In turn, the Palestinian grassroots, inside and outside the homeland, were limited from being able to collectively theorise their conditions through organized popular movement praxis for the purpose of liberation. Instead, collective revolutionary action was suppressed, a prohibition that naturally also extended to collective Palestinian intellectual theorisations of comprehensive liberation. While liberatory action and intellectual production continues, like the conditions of the Palestinian people and liberation project, it remains de-centralised, fractured, and takes form through spontaneous and popular forms rather than through transnational organisation operating through a politically centralized vehicle.

4The 2006 formed Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which became a transnational movement with an international central council and national branches across the world, was created out of the desire of young Palestinians worldwide to revitalize a transnationally organized liberation project. Though it did not have “official” status as a political party or a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), the PYM considered and conducted itself as a “movement” body out of the conviction that the Palestinians who had been abandoned by the PLO’s abdication of a national liberation project nevertheless had the potential to revive and act upon the collective anti-colonial ethos that had united the Palestinian people and revolutionaries in joint struggle around the world in decades prior. Palestinian political history provides the key for the organisation’s particular focus on youth:. Like the student movements that formed in the wake of al-Nakba, who were the first post-1948 sector to institution build transnationally through engaging the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, the PYM recognised the central role that youth hold in breathing new life into the Palestinian struggle after every major catastrophe (Abu Samra and Qutami 2020). The early conferences of the PYM brought together Palestinian youth from 33 countries worldwide to collectively develop the methods by which to assume a relevant role in the national struggle. But before being able to design the pragmatic steps that might lead them to liberation, the early founders of the PYM recognised the importance of collectively naming their conditions and theorising the systems that oppress them, in order to chart out the most appropriate methods to realise liberation.

5Since its inception, the PYM has verified the importance of rigorous and historically comprehensive study and an appraisal of conditions based on the real lived experiences of Palestinians who remain dispossessed and occupied. This was not a question of intellectual fetishization: having grown directly out of a paradigm of political betrayal and opportunism of the Oslo era, the organisation held a conviction that revolution and political activism cannot be conducted reflexively, or thoughtlessly, but must instead be weighed in relation to a serious appraisal of socio-political circumstance and the weight of history and its contradictions. Insisting that true movements for liberation must be guided by revolutionary philosophies, and that a sound assessment of history is needed for the new generation to understand how we have arrived at the current political juncture, the PYM has affirmed the inseparable role between theory and practice in giving everyday people, particularly young people, a relevant role in anti/decolonisation work. As Paolo Freire writes, “It is only when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organised struggle for their liberation that they begin to believe in themselves. This discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis” (Freire 2005, 65.) Akin to Freire’s reflections, the PYM has been committed to cultivating a methodological process whereby a dialogical relation between theory and practice can in turn cultivate a guiding praxis for liberation organised and anchored by grassroots communities, particularly youth.

6Reflecting on the PYM’s organising-derived theorisations of struggle over the past few years requires considering growing trends in the activist-academic language on Palestine, as well as changes within the organisation and its current geographical context. As a result of the geopolitical shifts following the 2011 Arab Uprisings, by 2015 the weight of PYM’s work shifted to North America, where it is currently active through 14 local, city-based chapters. There are several works that outline the PYM’s pedagogical praxis at the transnational level in its early years (Salih, Welchman, Zambelli 2017; Abu Samra and Qutami 2020). And while new PYM chapters have formed in Europe as of this writing, references to the PYM throughout this chapter specifically refer to the PYM branch in North America, which has carried out its own projects and campaigns (2015-2020), while also building on the praxis established by the PYM historically and internationally (Qutami 2021). We, the authors, are both past and present PYM members who all live in North America and who have been actively engaged in these campaigns and projects, as well as part of both the academic and activist arenas that have taken up Palestine more seriously in the last decade.

7Based on our observations as scholar-activists, we have felt compelled to write this essay exploring four key political/analytical frameworks that have become increasingly prudent for the study of Palestine in both North American scholarship and activism: settler colonialism, refugeehood, apartheid, and racial oppression. These frameworks also hold broader relevance to the PYM’s own conceptions of the Palestinian cause and joint struggle praxis, even as they have gained popularity in the last two decades as a result of academic and activist analogies drawn between Palestine and other places and communities in struggle.4 For example, academics and activists have commonly drawn parallels between North America and Palestine through settler colonialism and indigenous solidarities as overarching frameworks (Salaita 2006; Sharif 2017; Barakat 2017). Refugeehood, apartheid and racial oppression are other frameworks increasingly being used to drive legal advocacy, solidarity activism, and scholarship on Palestine, often drawing from learned lessons of the Black freedom struggle in the United States (US), anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and global anti-border and migrant rights activism. (Jones 2012 and 2016; Clarno 2017; Erakat and Hill 2019). This chapter thus seeks to entertain these frameworks from our vantage point as past and present members of the PYM: an independent, and grassroots organisation of Palestinian and Arab youth organisers in North America deeply engaging in movement-building among Palestinians locally and transnationally, as well in joint-struggle relationships with local and global movements for liberation (PYM 2020a). We recognize that movements and their practitioners are always evolving in their analysis, methods, and political programs alongside the shifting terrain of local and global political contexts. The lessons illustrated in this essay reflect our own organising derived lessons rather than the organisation’s official positions and are limited to the scope of PYM’s work in North America up until 2020.

8For each framework, we highlight key lessons we draw from PYM projects, delegations, and campaigns in order to examine the following: how these frameworks apply to Palestine; how the PYM has engaged the theory and practice of engaging each framework; the important lessons learned from engaging this work; and how it has shaped PYM principles and philosophies of organising, in relation to the Palestinian national struggle and in joint-struggle relationships with other freedom struggles. This examination is situated within broader debates regarding how to engage and contextualise Palestine to mobilise transformative solidarity, as well as regarding how Palestinian youth in the North America can understand the particularities and distinct nature of their own national struggle against Zionism. As Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Sammour attest: “the Palestinian liberation movement has seen a series of ruptures and changes in emphasis, and in many ways scholarly production accurately mirrors the dynamics of incoherent contemporary Palestinian politics” (Salamanca et al. 2012). Building upon their work, which calls for the creation of a “transformative, liberatory research agenda,” we offer this essay as organisers committed to intellectual production in service of Palestinian liberation (Salamanca et. Al. 2012).

Settler colonialism

9Settler colonialism is a generative framework for explaining Zionist colonisation of historic Palestine and many of the barriers to Palestinian repatriation and return to the land (Lloyd 2012; Abowd 2014; Khalidi 2020). The advantages of the academic enfolding of the Palestinian struggle within settler colonial studies are as follows. In the first instance, it is a validation of previous political-intellectual writing by Palestinians that sought to explicate the colonial character of Zionism as a settler enterprise (Jabbour 1970; Sayegh 1965; Salamanca et al. 2012; Zureiq 1948).5 Secondly, as contemporary scholars have noted—provided that the settler colonial framework is not pursued in a merely descriptive sense but is rather put into conversation with conceptions of indigeneity— settler colonialism as a rubric has the potential to attend to what is entailed by a politically just outcome for the Palestinian struggle, as well as to encapsulate the revitalisation of necessary linkages between Palestinians and other Indigenous nations fighting the machinations and legacies of genocidal regimes elsewhere. (Amara and Hawari 2018; Barakat, 2017; Abu-Lughod 2020).

10Paired with global Indigenous articulations that illustrate the genocidal logics of settler colonial invasions and ongoing land grabs, the framework has offered Palestinians invaluable insights into understanding the driving logics of Zionism as a project motivated by Indigenous elimination facilitated by what Patrick Wolfe describes as “a structure not an event” (Wolfe 2006; Trask 2005). But historical precedent and linkages between struggles should not be taken to imply the interchangeability of experiences of settler colonial architectures and Indigenous dispossession. Projects of settler colonisation can realise deviations that, for all of their surface-level distinction, nevertheless do not invalidate the larger, structural character of the violence they exhibit. For instance, as Palestinian scholar Nour Joudeh has illustrated, settler colonialism in Palestine also functions through logics of confinement in addition to elimination, whereby cities like Gaza city are “technically void of settlers, but one controlled, ghettoized, and besieged by a settler colonial state” (Joudah 2020). In keeping with Joudeh’s account, Honaida Ghanim argues that following the June 1967 War and the resultant acquisition of Palestinian territories by the Zionist state, the Zionist project became a “hybrid system that integrates settler colonialism, military rule, and an apartheid regime” (Ghanim 2018). Both Joudeh and Ghanim illustrate the importance of a more nuanced analysis of settler colonialism as a framework; a call we have in part responded to in the remaining portions of this essay. Irrespective of the multiple co-existing and/or constitutive systems and logics that comprise the Zionist settler colonial apparatus in the present, its early iteration very much mirrored settler enterprises elsewhere.

11Palestinian scholars and political actors always accounted for the ultimate prerogatives of the Zionist project: to erase Palestinians from Palestine and Palestine from world maps. The early Palestinian youth movements following the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), for example, had insisted their goal was to “put Palestine back on the map” (Abu Samra 2020). The PYM understands settler colonialism to be an intentional and systemic project of extraction and exploitation of land and resources, like all colonial enterprises, but also recognises how settler colonialism seeks to permanently dispose of and replace the Indigenous population, enabling settlers to naturalise their claims to history and land (Wolfe 2006). As Fayez Sayegh has beautifully illustrated in his 1965 essay “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” Zionists aimed to “construct their own national ambitions upon the erasure, exploitation, or suppression of the pre-existing inhabitants of the colonized nation” (Sayegh 2012).

12At the same time, the Zionist ambition for Palestine would not have been impossible to realize without broader European backing. Explicit support for the Zionist movement on the part of the British empire, which exercised an imperial mandate over Palestine following WWI, is common knowledge. But as Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly notes, what makes the case of Palestine important to examine was not merely British support for Zionism, an assumption that runs the risk of reinscribing colonial logics of competing claims, or land disputes. In fact, Seikaly explains, by the time the Covenant of the League of Nations divided the world into so-called advanced nations versus those of former German and Ottoman empires that required “tutelage” to achieve eventual self-governance, its Permanent Mandates Commission had operationalized two defining aspects of the British Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine to the Zionist movement in 1917. These aspects were “the erasure of the Palestinian and the partition of the people into those deserving versus those undeserving of a national home,” and they became the “foundation” of the Mandate Commission’s document concerning British treatment of Palestine. While the terms of the Mandate system were already rife with imperial condescension, the Palestinians were even further dispossessed by the broad-based institutional acceptance of Zionist settler-colonial claims to Palestinian land (Seikaly 2016, p.5). As a result, Seikaly notes “The Mandate in Palestine was exceptional because it was the only case in which the Permanent Mandates Commission endorsed settler colonialism” (Seikaly 2016 p.5) Imperial, colonial and racial European understandings of human capability resulted in the explicit institutional operationalisation of settler-colonial dispossession and Indigenous erasure.

13One of the first prolific forms of Zionist erasure of Palestinians was orchestrated by land-based organisations—such as the 1901-founded Jewish National Fund—that sought to make Palestinian labour disposable. Early Zionists accumulated lands and implemented policies that prohibited the hiring of Palestinian/Arab workers (Lockman 2012). These policies ignited the first major organised Palestinian rebellion, the 1936 Great Revolt, whereby Palestinians sustained a general strike for six months and popular mobilisation for three years to protest land annexation and labour disposability policies and impending Zionist aspirations for conquest. Alongside land and labour policies, Zionists, who came to settle the land, formed the militias of the Alexandroni Brigade, Stern/Lehi Gang, Irgun, and Haganah. Though pluralistic in ideology and methods, these militias carried out attempted ethnic cleansing campaigns— including massacres and forced physical displacement— ultimately emptying the majority of Palestine of its Palestinian inhabitants and supplanting their presence with European Jewish settlers (Masalha 2012).

14A secondary Zionist claim routinely engaged in by settlers in other commonwealth colonies worldwide is that of divine right. Through articulations of “God’s testament” and “celestial destiny,” early Zionists proclaimed Europe’s Jews were the “chosen people” of the land, a familiar trope that can be found in proclamations of European settlers in Turtle Island (North America), under the banners of the “Doctrine of Discovery” and “Manifest Destiny” that facilitated the “God given right to expand westward” (Waziyatawin 2012). These prophetic colonial logics also appeared in Azania, which became the foundation of the settler colony of South Africa (Waziyatawin 2012).

15There were, however, other political claims being mobilised to secure Zionist ambitions in Palestine as well. Due to Palestine’s colonisation occurring late in the global context of colonisation, Zionists were pressured to quickly abandon their position as belonging to a colonial movement (Massad 2019). Instead, Zionists worked to “purge” colonialism from their literature, programs, and agencies, and rather re-branded their movement as a national liberation project by the to legitimise itself through “modern” lenses that naturalised Israel’s creation in the region as a liberal democracy (Massad 2019). Such a paradox was instrumental in galvanising global endorsement for the creation of Israel in the very moment colonial projects were being formally overturned across the Third World, torturously utilising liberal notions of the right to self-determination to legitimise Zionist ambitions for a state predicated on the erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians (Tareh 2020). More recently, no doubt due to the increasing academic prevalence of settler-colonialism and Indigeneity as concepts for framing the Palestinian struggle, Zionist academics and organisations have taken to redefining Zionist settler-colonialism as an “Indigenous” political movement. Though there is little in the way of large-scale academic convention that suggests such attempts are achieving success, we feel compelled to note that the attempt to inscribe a settler-colonial movement as an Indigenous struggle within contemporary scholarship seems in direct keeping with the settler-colonial imperative to erase all traces of the Native, in this instance through pilfer and sabotage of the very mechanisms utilized to ensure broader recognition of Indigenous struggle.6

16he 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan was the affirmation from the “international community” that solidified Zionist claims to the majority of the territory of historic Palestine. The UNs greenlight toward the establishment of the state of Israel, in May of 1948, cemented Zionist aspirations. By 1948, most Palestinians were facing much more than labour disposability or violence under the hands of the British colonial officers; they were forcibly removed from their homeland and left to perish in squalid refugee camps. The new-found state of Israel was built atop of some 15,000 massacred corpses in Palestinian graves and atop the destruction and renaming of nearly 500 Palestinian towns and villages as nearly 750,000 Palestinians were permanently dispossessed.

17Methods of the physical colonisation of Palestine were multi-fold, including the plunder of the land and defining exclusive access to natural resources, Palestinian bank accounts, belongings, and knowledge production, before finally commuting them into the founding capital of the new state. Today, Palestinian residency within the lands of historic Palestine is referred to in the past tense, if acknowledged, while the infrastructure of the modern Zionist state is literally predicated on top of the destruction, subjugation, occupation, and containment of Palestinian society (Calis 2015). Palestinians are not just battling the ongoing occupation of their homeland, they are also battling the violence of discursive erasure, manufactured by Zionist claims that Palestinians “never existed” to begin with or that their history as a people begins through the contestation of the Zionist project. Yet as Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat makes clear, “Written outside of a framework of Indigenous resistance, the story of the Nakba is one of endings: the story of the making of a refugee population and the memory of what Palestine once was as opposed to being the story framed around the return of refugees and Palestinian resistance” (Barakat 2017, p. 361)

18The uniqueness of the PYM’s situation is that the organisation is grappling with simultaneously understanding both the physical dimension of erasure that has forced many of us and/or our families into exile and the cultural/discursive erasures that concern us as Palestinians living in North America on another people’s stolen land For instance, much of the relevance of the PYM’s cultural and youth empowerment initiatives is intended to counter Zionist attempts to erase Palestinian cultural cohesiveness and history, and to cultivate proud new visionary leadership for the liberation struggle. However, we also contend with the added complexity of considering how our own Palestinian experiences of physical exile and cultural erasure inform our ethical and political commitments to Indigenous people on the land we currently inhabit. Much of the PYM’s work has thus been shaped by both a critical understanding of the methods and underlying logics of Zionist settler colonialism, as well as the practices of Palestinian and Indigenous communities worldwide who continue to resist annihilation and a rendering of the story of al-Nakba as a narrative of endings, as Barakat’s point summons us to do. Such a calculus allows the PYM to consider how our experience as Palestinians might politically engender our own ethical consciousness and commitment towards projects of Indigenous sovereignty and decolonisation not only for Palestine but for Turtle Island (North America) as well.

19The PYM understands that the workings of Zionist settler colonialism are not confined to the borders of a declared nation-state, and that the violence of erasure not only manifests with the physical removal of Palestinians from their land. Zionist cultural genocide has worked to emaciate and contain Palestinian expressions of identity, experience, and aspirations for freedom worldwide. Often enforced through regulative state policies of criminalisation and punitive attacks, suppression of Palestinian narratives is evidenced through the scores of Palestinian archives that have been looted and decimated, and the many Palestinian intellectuals disciplined for teaching and writing about the Palestinian struggle (Bazian 2015; Salaita 2015; Sleiman and Chebaro, 2018; Abdulhadi 2020). Many more Palestinians in exile who have offered riposte to Zionist hegemonic narratives have been deported, imprisoned, or assassinated for their activism, including in North America (Hussain and Greenwald 2015; Mustafa 2019; Sheen 2020). Because of these conditions, a good portion of the PYM’s work in North America is dedicated to fostering and cultivating Palestinian identity, narratives, and discourse among a new generation and to combat efforts that criminalize Palestinian identities, activism and voices. For example, the PYM’s summer schools for Palestinian/Arab youth, and annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts scholarship and anthology—the first creative writing scholarship exclusively dedicated to exilic Palestinian youth in North America—work to preserve and create Palestinian narratives and meaning-making as it faces consistent forms of repression (PYM 2017b; PYM 2020b). We venerate cultural work as an act of resistance to cultural genocide.

20Beyond the work of cultural identity preservation and cultivation, the PYM’s awareness of the particular and converging character of settler colonialism in Palestine with other settler colonies equips it to engage joint-struggle praxis with other Indigenous peoples and nations resisting erasure, and to interrogate the positionality of Palestinians living on stolen land in Turtle Island (North America).7 The PYM has responded to national and local call outs to defend sacred sites and Indigenous ways of life. For example, in 2013, the PYM organised a delegation to Black Mesa, Dinétah and were hosted by members of the Navajo Nation. The purpose of the delegation was to extend solidarity to Native peoples in their struggle for sovereignty over Diné ancestral grazing lands, cornfields, home sites, and sacred places (Minno 2012). Drawing direct links between resource and water confiscation policies in Palestine and those in Black Mesa was key to deepening PYM’s understanding of land as a provider of life rather than a commodity for extraction, even as Palestinian youth on Turtle Island cannot access their historic homeland.

21In 2016-2017, the PYM sent two delegations to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and facilitated the arrival of other Arab and Palestinian delegations. The PYM joined tens of thousands of people who arrived in Dakota/Lakota/Nakota lands to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline (Palestinian Youth Movement 2016; Tannous 2016). Reflecting on the action, the PYM stated: “When our Palestinian delegation arrived at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 and asked for permission to stay, we were met with so much joy and so many tears. We learned a history that had not been broadly taught to us: some of the Lakota elders said that they had not seen Palestinians since the 1970s and 1980s when delegations had visited Standing Rock and other reservations of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. One elderly woman recalled that a representative of the PLO, who had visited them, helped them craft the language of their UN petition for rights and recognition as a sovereign nation. These elders were overjoyed that we had returned” (Abuznaid et al. 2019). These delegations affirmed the historic modes of joint-struggle relationships between Palestinians and Indigenous people and reaffirmed the PYM’s commitment to learning more about and revitalising these relationships.

22In 2018, PYM carried out the Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine with ten youth organisers from Turtle Island and the Hawaiian Kingdom (PYM 2018). A few important conclusions were developed from this delegation, the first being that US imperialism, support for Zionism, and the War on Terror would not be what they are today without the long history of war waging the US had first implemented against Indigenous peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz 2013). Secondly, Palestinians can learn a multitude of decolonial resistance strategies from Native peoples, based on the longue durée of their struggle against settler-colonial erasure, including retrieval and preservation of cultural knowledge, despite destroyed archives and vanished landscapes. While Palestinians have long waged an anti-colonial struggle—combatting the system meant to destroy them—through the decolonial work we can create an otherwise possible alternative that has long been deferred under the looming shadow of the Oslo Accords. PYM members affirmed the importance of waging both struggles—the anti/decolonial struggles—simultaneously.

23In 2019, as a reflective offering for PYM’s 2018 Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine, members of the Red Nation hosted members of the PYM and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center on a delegation to Dinah (Navajo Nation) and Tewa (Pueblo) Lands. This delegation illustrated how, when colonial powers abandon direct military occupation and boots on the ground, they will entrench themselves into the landscape through weaponised bureaucracy and compromised community leadership. The Navajo Nation’s tribal council in charge of central administration today, for example, was first created in 1922 by the US Secretary of the Interior as the Navajo Business Council, marking the transition from an era of militarised westward-expansion into one of new settler start-ups and extraction of capital from land federally recognised as other’s “sovereign” territory. The Navajo Business Council was subsequently recognised as the official leadership of the Nation by the US government and was active in brokering leases of deeds for mineral mining and oil extraction between the US, settler businessmen, and the enrolled Navajo Nation members. The official tribal leadership is now in charge of brokering and maintaining bureaucratic violence towards members of the Navajo Nation, rather than acting as representative of visionary political, spiritual, and revolutionary leadership or actively opposing the process of settler extraction and systemic abuse; the tribal administration relies on the very system of settler colonialism itself to exist.

24The lesson could not ring truer in the Palestinian context today, where the official Palestinian establishment has effectively surrendered national political principles of return and liberation for the promise of legibility to the international community. The PA exists today because of the settler-colonial system implemented by Israel; thus, it exists not to proactively resist ongoing Zionist aggression but to facilitate the method of harm towards Palestinians and relies on the very colonial system it exists within to maintain its own status of power. Understanding settler bureaucratisation of Indigenous political life as an insidious strategy of colonial power thus becomes crucial to more nuanced comprehensions of settler colonialism’s layered arsenal, representing another key entry-point to accessing the meaningful forms that engaged joint-struggle and mutual, dialogic comprehension might assume. These comparative histories confirm the PYM’s critiques of the PA and its state-building authority apparatus, which teaches the youth that processes of neoliberal incorporation into settler designs can never realise true freedom.

25In 2019, the PYM members went to Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in the Hawaiian Kingdom. During the Ola or the offering to the Kupuna, council of elders, the Palestinian flag was lifted to join the other nations who offered support to those gathered in protest of another thirty-foot telescope set to be built on the Mauna. At Standing Rock, it became clear that Indigenous resistance against pipelines, extractive industries, and desecration of Native sites are repressed with the same technologies and crowd control methods that Israel uses on Palestinians in the occupied homeland. This lesson was elaborated at Mauna Kea, where members felt punctuated shudders of the ground from mini-explosion tests by the US and visiting militaries. Shortly after, during a visit to the Waianae Valley and another sacred mountain (Mt. Ka’ala), members heard stories from local Hawaiians about the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) international maritime exercises, with many militaries around the world, including Israel, coming to Hawaii every year to practice hitting targets on land by aircraft launched at sea. Coming face to face with the exchange of weaponry and military techniques between the US, Israel, and other colonial states, delegates verified the importance of joint struggle in tackling intimate bonds of material collaborations between US and Zionist militarism (Adalah Justice Project 2020).

26Learning and growing in movement with Indigenous peoples, the PYM has become increasingly mindful of how Palestinian residency in Turtle Island through liberal notions of the US “melting pot” of immigrants can be utilised to eclipse the ongoing colonial violence against Natives, Hawaiians, and Black people (Day 2015) and their resistance to it. For example, during a field trip as part of the 2015 summer school hosted in Riverside California, Palestinian youth visited Mount Rubidoux and listened to the creation, survival, and political histories from members of various local Native communities (Sepulveda 2016). Sitting at the top of the mountain, paradoxically in between a US flag and a cross, Palestinian youth reflected on how these sites equate to Palestinian sites of genocidal violence, such as Deir Yassin. These connections allowed them to consider more mindfully what it means to be stationed on, and incorporated in, someone else’s land.8 However, in accounting for their own location in the US as a result of Zionist dispossession backed by US empire, Palestinian youth have problematised the monolithical understanding of their own positionality as one of “settlers.”

27Instead, in line with some of the important conceptual developments arising from Indigenous Studies, the PYM has articulated Palestinian and Arab political positionality as that of guests and/or “arrivants,” which more mindfully allows us to consider the transnational imperialist histories that have driven people out of their homes and relocated them to other sites of genocide and dispossession (Brathwaite 1986; Byrd 2011). This analysis has further allowed the PYM to sort out how to build between communities affected by colonialisation without the intermediary of the US state facilitating solidarity. Through this approach, PYM members have deepened their understanding of their own positionality within the heart of the US empire: as subjects of its imperialist designs overseas, as beneficiaries as citizens of empire built through Indigenous erasure and chattel slavery, and as citizen-subjects of North American based anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim racism. Embodying this nuanced and self-reflexive rumination, PYM members have affirmed their responsibility toward other Indigenous lands and people: “Our presence as non-Native people carries the weight of inherently reifying the settler hegemony of the colonial state if not critically engaged and challenged through meaningful joint-struggle work” (Tannous and Zahzah, 2018).

28The history of international joint struggle between Indigenous movements, such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Palestinian movements, has in many ways set the foundations for cross-movement building today (Estes 2019). Palestinian youth are fortunate to come from a rich history of co-resistance and alignment between their own struggle and movements of other communities battling settler colonialism. However, that historicity alone will not sustain alliances. Relationships must be fortified through grassroots organising, alongside co-theorisation of conditions and resistance mechanisms that account for parallels and distinctions in varied settler-colonial enterprises and the responsibility that accompanies our positionality as Palestinians in Turtle Island.

29Settler colonialism as a framework provides a robust understanding of the creation of the state of Israel and the attempted erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians. It details the ideological and structural imperatives of physical removal from the land and erasure of Palestine and Palestinians from knowledge registrars. Indigenous studies is an important alternate framework offering insights that the settler-colonialism framework was not designed to address. Indigenous studies and joint-struggle praxis centre Indigenous narratives, resistance histories, critiques, futures, and political landscapes and are important to draw direct experiential links between Palestinians and Indigenous people across the world, that are not constrained to bonds of shared victimisation alone. As Yara Hawari and Ahmad Amara so eloquently put it, “indigeneity demystifies the Zionist project as something unique to Palestine and places it within a global context of settler colonial projects. This allows Palestinians to draw solidarity links with other indigenous peoples and to recognise intertwining threads of oppression. Considering a decolonial future is an important part of the (re)-shifting of the political paradigm” (Hawari and Amara 2019). Going beyond settler colonialism as a framework by centering Indigenous joint-struggle praxis allows us to transcend the violence afflicted upon us by actualising the future of resistance, agency, and decolonisation.

Refugeehood

30Among the greatest fatalities of the 1948 Zionist conquest was the mass dispossession afflicted upon the Palestinian people. As Zionist militias captured Palestinian land, nearly 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their historic homeland and scattered across the region, with thousands more internally displaced. Arab nationalist thinker Constantine Zureiq theorised the depths of disaster of the moment, in his August 1948 seminal text, Maana al Nakba (Zureiq 1948). Zureiq argued that what had transpired in Palestine was something much greater than a crisis or a disaster because it would result in the permanent exodus of Palestinians from their homes, their scattering across different corners of the world: a rupture in the social, cultural, psychological, and epistemological bonds of a people and land (Zureiq 1948).

31The Nakba was the beginning of many more modern exoduses for Palestinians. Languishing in cloth tent camps across the region and perilously suffering in destitute conditions, the first generation of Palestinian refugees were left without recourse. Aware of what may become (and what indeed did become) a protracted condition of refugeehood, the international community created the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine (UNCCP) tasked with offering legal protections to Palestinian refugees and developing long-lasting solutions which include, but are not limited to, “repatriation, resettlement, restitution, and compensation” (Rempel 2020). UNCCP’s executive function was guided by UN Resolution 194, the very same resolution that protected the Palestinian right to return (Rempel 2020). However, the commission was all but liquidated by the 1950s as a result of its inability to realise its mandate.

32On a parallel track, the United Nations created the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 1949 to consolidate relief services for Palestinian refugees offered by other international relief organisations (Bocco 2010). Though UNRWA was tasked with providing humanitarian relief and later educational and health services, it was never intended to offer legal or political protections or solutions. The paradox, however, lies in the UN’s commitment to establishing another refugee agency, which implemented a political, legal, and humanitarian protection mandate per the 1951 Refugee Convention for all refugees worldwide except for Palestinians: the United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR) (Akram 2002).9

33The failure of the UNCCP, the exclusion of Palestinians from the UNHCR’s protectorate, and the insufficiency of UNRWA’s function has had colossal effects on Palestinian refugees. While UNRWA has been able to maintain a comprehensive census of Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their descendants, it does not account for Palestinians displaced after 1948. Due to the protracted nature of the Palestinian struggle, new communities of Palestinians became exiled refugees or were internally displaced after 1948—as a result of the June 1967 War, the exodus of the PLO from Jordan in 1970, and the Lebanese Civil War, notably the exodus following the PLO’s defeat in Beirut in 1982 (Erakat 2014). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees also endured secondary displacement from Kuwait during the 1990/91 Gulf War, from Libya in 1996, and from Iraq following the 2003 US invasion (Erakat 2014). Because Palestinians remain stateless, host states in the region have been reluctant to receive them because of the likelihood of permanent settlement. Most recently, Palestinian refugees have endured new forms of displacement and sieges since the start of the war in Syria. All along, Palestinians have been denied exercising their right to return home to Palestine and many have not attained the ability to seek full rights-bearing citzenship in their host states. Today, the everyday humanitarian conditions of refugees and their camps have become even more dire, including as a result of the Trump administration’s funding cuts to UNRWA.

34While a historic examination of Palestinian refugeehood reifies how Israel, host states, and the international community have been complicit in the production and suffrage of Palestinian refugees, Palestinians lost faith in these actors relatively early on following the Nakba. This loss of hope fortified the realisation among them that it was necessary to self-organise to reverse the material losses of the Nakba (R. Sayigh 1979; Y. Sayigh 2011). In the early 1950s, refugee students and youth laid the foundation for the formation of the first post-Nakba political organising landscape and many of them later formed the fedayeen (guerilla) groups, which together constituted the Palestinian Resistance Movement (Abu Samra 2020). Following the 1967 war, where Arab regimes and the PLO suffered an embarrassing defeat of popular legitimacy, the masses turned their endorsement to the revolutionary fedayeen who were mostly refugees from the camps, granting them majority power of the PLO in 1969. From then on, the PLO recognised the centrality of refugee self-sufficiency and worked to reverse the pacifying elements of aid-dependency. The PLO created a profound national infrastructure that operated across state borders to provide medical and humanitarian relief, and education (Hamid 1975). This infrastructure complemented the services offered by UNRWA.

35While there is a lot that can be said about the deterioration of these programs—in no small part due to the corruption, ineptitude, and loss of political clarity and revolutionary ethos within the PLO from 1974 onward—we must acknowledge the importance of these programs in maintaining the steadfastness of refugees so that they could continue to serve as active political agents of history-making through the revolution (Y. Sayigh 1997; R. Sayigh 1979). These programs centred institution-building and vital wellness services as part of the Palestinian political program, not unlike the various service programs of other revolutionaries, such as the breakfast program for children and health services of Black Panther Party in the US (Majdal Center 2019). Cultivating these forms of self-sufficiency emerged as a result of Palestinian analysis of their own colonial conditions: the regulative exclusions from citizenship; denial of mobility and specifically the right to return, stay, and resettle; and the colossal effects borders had on their livelihoods and the resistance movement. This critical analysis that de-territorialised an understanding of the Palestinian nation—meaning that Palestine, its wellness services, and resistance programs were developing wherever Palestinians had ended up—was once a central principle of Palestinian national consciousness.

36The Oslo Accords left the new generation of Palestinian refugees stranded as stateless subjects in camps across the region, and in exile across the world, with a weak political leadership that could not represent their needs and aspirations or secure their rights, particularly in moments of heightened disaster (Bitari 2013). 10This is primarily because the PLO, which once represented and catered to Palestinians globally through anti-colonial political programs that centred social wellness, was emptied of its historic role and supplanted by the PA, an authority administration bound to the jurisdiction of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This re-ordering has eclipsed both refugee return and refugee agency as guiding national principles of revolution. In its place, refugees continue to receive insufficient humanitarian assistance by international agencies, like from UNRWA, which has confirmed their aid dependency in the absence of political strategies that could realise their rights and freedoms including the right of return.

37All this has prompted new generations of youth organisers, scholars, and groups (like the PYM) to re-evaluate the importance of refugee agency in social and political struggle and to retrieve past lessons. The PYM has insisted that the creation and sustenance of dignified services and rights for refugees is an essential component of political movement work, looking to the historic relevance of refugee modules for organising in order to inform new modalities of solidarity between Palestinian refugee youth and other refugee communities today.

38The very formation of the PYM in 2006 itself worked to reverse the damage the Oslo Accords had done in geographically and ideologically fragmenting Palestinians from one another and disavowing the role of the shatat in the struggle and as members of the Palestinian national body-politic. The organisation’s membership constituency and leadership were comprised of Palestinian youth from within Palestine, refugees from across the homeland and the Arab region, and exiles from across the world. From its inception, the PYM maintained that refugee return to all of historic Palestine was a non-negotiable Palestinian national principle and that Palestinians everywhere had a right and responsibility to participate in the national body-politic. In the wake of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, the Lebanon PYM branch, in collaboration with Ma’an Youth Club, began a new project that addressed the growing need of refugee children who had arrived to Palestinian camps in Lebanon from Syria (Ma’an Youth Group, n.d). In 2014, the youth opened the doors of the Al-Naqab Center in Burj al-Barajnah refugee camp (Al Naqab Center for Youth Activities, n.d). The Center’s programs offered continued education for Palestinian and Syrian refugee children whose education had been interrupted as a result of the war. The project affirmed PYM’s belief that services that uphold the dignity of our people most vulnerable to material violence, is key to ensure their full participation and leadership in the liberation struggle.

39By 2016, the North American branches of the PYM had come to ruminate on the importance of refugee services and refugee solidarities because of the magnitude of the refugee crisis worldwide. Taking cue from the learned lesson of the PYM-Lebanon Branch, the PYM in North America launched a pilot program in August of 2016 where members from the US offered support services to refugees arriving to the Greek islands as the front steps of the European Union (EU). The project has since evolved into SWANAConnect, which enabled a deepening of refugee and diasporic solidarities with other communities affected by the global refugee crisis including Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, Kurdish, and Iranian communities (PYM 2016). Since 2016, SWANAConnect sent 50 volunteers to Greece to offer culturally relevant, linguistically accessible, and politically grounded support services to refugees and has supported two political delegations to Greece with the Iraqi Transnational Collective and the War Resisters League. Grounding volunteer services in broader political visions and activism that work toward systemic change in solidarity with refugee communities, this program’s purpose, vision, and principles differed from those of neoliberal aid institutions, which offer humanitarian relief services through paid staffers in the absence of visions and strategies for structural change. From these experiences, delegates drew important lessons for future PYM political activism around migrant and refugee rights and services in the US, anti-militarisation, immigrant justice, border abolition, and renewed anti-war movement building.

40In 2016, the San Diego PYM chapter initiated the Arab Youth Collective, a support program for recently arrived refugee youth to San Diego. The program was intended to ease the sense of isolation for incoming refugee youth who had already overcome perilous struggle as survivors of war. This work resulted in the opening of the Majdal Center in El Cajon, California in January of 2018, which offers an array of social services and empowerment programs for refugee and immigrant families, most of whom are from Syria and Iraq (Majdal Center, n.d). Like the Naqab Center and SWANAConnect, Majdal Center is now its own independent center separate from the PYM; however, PYM member involvement in the initiative in its early stages has lent the organisation invaluable lessons on the inseparability between social wellness programs and political organising not just for our own Palestinian communities but in solidarity with other refugee and immigrant communities. The Majdal Center’s efforts have also highlighted the important intersections between refugee support/service work and the need to challenge racialized and Islamophobic surveillance programs like Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) which target and entrap already marginalized refugee communities (Majdal and PANA 2019.) Such efforts reveal that even though they may be prone to neoliberal cooptation, service work and refugee empowerment efforts are in fact highly political and inseparable from global projects of imperialism and colonial dispossession.

41Through collaborations such as the PYM’s annual Break Down Borders Run along the US-Mexico border in cooperation with Colectivo Zapatista, the PYM has learned the importance of combating violent border regimes as part of its global refugee solidarity praxis (PYM 2016). The PYM has also supported a number of relief efforts for Central Americans who have, especially since 2018, become trapped at the border. While extending its ethical commitments to other communities enduring mutual forms of oppressive displacement, the PYM has also organised around the national dimension of the Palestinian refugee struggle.

42From 2018 to 2020, the PYM held numerous political education events on the current struggles of Palestinian refugees and organised campaigns to counter the cuts to UNRWA funding. In 2020, as part of COVID-19 mutual aid organising efforts, the PYM launched several fundraising campaigns to support refugees in various camps across the Arab region and the Mediterranean (PYM 2020c). Drawing lessons from these engagements, the PYM has deepened its belief in services as a quintessential component of any ethical liberation political praxis and has come to pragmatically re-centre the principle of the refugee return in its political organising. Committed to offering refugee communities the critical support they need, not only to survive but to thrive as active-agents of their lives and the struggle like the generations before us, the PYM has affirmed the indivisibility between social wellness and political struggle in this work—just as it has linked the inseparable bonds between Palestinians and other displaced peoples worldwide.

Apartheid

43Particularly since the 2005 issuance of the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), apartheid has served—and continues to serve—as one of the dominant lenses through which to advocate for Palestine (BDS Movement, n.d). This is in large part due to the use of global boycott initiatives in ending apartheid in South Africa and because academics, political figures, and activists have popularised the parallels between conditions in South Africa and Palestine, arguing that Israel’s parceling of land in historic Palestine—especially expedited by the 1993 Oslo Accords—is reminiscent of the Bantustanisation of apartheid South Africa. As Palestinian youth organisers directly involved in the North-American based Palestine solidarity movement, the PYM has observed an increased reliance on the apartheid framework, as a guiding lens for discourse and activism on Palestine.

44Analogies drawn with South Africa have led scholars, legal advocates, and activists to argue that apartheid is a fitting framework for the Palestinian context, or that it at least provides a viable legal framework for pressuring Israel in international courts (Hijab and Gassner, 2017). Alternatively, others have increasingly interrogated the use of the apartheid framework for Palestine, critiquing the politics of analogy and arguing that South Africa should not be a blueprint for Palestinian liberation because apartheid continued there despite its de jure end in 1994 (Clarno and Eid 2017; Abdelnour and Calis 2018; Qutami 2020). Yet whereas the dimensions of “settler colonialism” and “refugeehood” describe wider phenomena of systematic oppression that govern Palestinian land and life, apartheid currently holds more pragmatic legal bearings.11 We recognize the difficulty inherent to pursuing international avenues as a means of undermining colonial impunity due to international law’s historical emergence from colonial structures and practices. Palestinian legal scholar Noura Erakat acknowledges this fact while arguing that the outcome of justice-focused legal work is not necessarily predetermined by these histories but rather shaped by a range of political variables, which include the impact of extra-legal political organizing (Erakat 2019) For this reason, a multi-pronged approach that situates international advocacy alongside grassroots resistance efforts is crucial.

45Apartheid is a unique example of a context-specific (South African) phenomenon that has since gained codification within international law. Now classified as a crime against humanity punishable under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), apartheid legally refers to “the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalised racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights”—not unlike the legal regime that implemented the system of Jim Crow segregation in the US South with which Palestinian youth in North America are more intimately familiar (Legal Information Institute, n.d).

46Certainly, conditions in Palestine meet the definition of the crime of apartheid under the 2002 Rome Statute and bear striking parallels to apartheid-era South Africa. These conditions include Israeli-only roads that connect a web of illegal settlements throughout the West Bank, permanent and fleeting checkpoints, roadblocks, security outposts, and the “apartheid wall” that together restrict Palestinian mobility. Passing between the governance areas established by the Oslo Accords II (1995)—Areas A, B, and C, or even within Areas A, which is nominally under Palestinian civil and military administrative control—Palestinians are required special permits, specific license plates, and residency cards comparable to South African apartheid’s “pass books.” These discriminatory practices infringe on the everyday freedoms of Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), including access to education, health care services, and employment. Moreover, Israel has transformed Palestinian villages, towns, and cities throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip into enclaves lacking any political or economic autonomy, enclaves commonly compared to Native American “reservations’’ in the US or “bantustans” in South Africa. Additionally, in legal terms and practice, Palestinians are governed and subject to military law—referring to curfews, travel restrictions, arbitrary and indefinite detention without trial—while Israeli citizens are subject to Israeli civil law. For instance, Israel tries Palestinians in military courts, where they face a 99.9 percent conviction rates and harsher sentences—while an Israeli settler is tried under civil law even though both live in the same area (Addameer 2018).

47In 1948 Palestine, Palestinians are subjected to de facto and de jure third-class citizenship because they are denied “national” status, which is exclusively reserved for Israel’s Jewish residents. Israel enforces over 50 racist laws and administrative policies that discriminate against Palestinian citizens and residents (Adalah 2020). These policies infamously culminated in the “Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People,” referred to as the Nation-State Law, issued by the Israeli Knesset in July 2018, which held that Israel is exclusively a state for Jewish peoples and demoted Arabic from national language status (Ben-Youssef and Tamari, 2018). Given all of this, the apartheid framework has been useful in illuminating similar material realities between Palestinians and Black South Africans.

48Apartheid’s legal status has offered the Palestinian Authority a vehicle for international advocacy—both legal and diplomatic, particularly following the Oslo Accords (PYM 2012c). Since 1974 but especially after Oslo, the Palestinian leadership emphasised diplomacy and appealing to the international community through forums. In 1974, the PLO earned permanent observer status as “the sole legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.” This pivot to the international arena was intended to earn legitimacy and the diplomatic support of foreign countries. However it was not until the UN upgraded the status of the Palestinians to “non-member observer state” in 2012, that the Palestinians earned membership in a number of world bodies they previously were barred from entering, including the ICC. Since then, the Palestinian Authority has brought forward legal cases against Israeli politicians and military commandos. In 2018, the Palestinian foreign ministry urged the international court to investigate Israel for crimes against humanity and crimes of apartheid. Since then, several world powers have gone to extreme lengths to repress and nullify calls for an open investigation; however, the legal utility of the apartheid framework cannot go unnoticed.

49The increased reference and utility of the apartheid framework has been instrumental for Palestine advocates, yet it has also compelled deeper explorations of the utility and challenges of the framework for a new generation of Palestinian youth thinkers and organisers. As South African scholar Ran Greenstein puts it, “Although the two are related [anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles], they have distinct features. An anti-colonial movement regards its struggle primarily as national liberation from external rule while an anti-apartheid movement aims primarily to transform relationships between internal forces” (Greenstein 2013).

50Since its inception, the PYM has examined the utility of the apartheid framework as compared to other frameworks. In 2008 and 2010, PYM-hosted international workshops to explore how to utilise apartheid and human rights law as tools for advocacy without allowing it to define the nature of the struggle precisely because as Greenstein points out, an anti-apartheid struggle assumes that the conflict is an internal one and in effect might naturalise the presence of settlers rather than challenge the legitimacy of their colonial settlement (Greenstein 2013.) In 2012, the PYM attended the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil and members participated in several workshops, one of which examined the relationship between settler colonialism, apartheid, and racism in Palestine (World Social Forum 2012). Building upon the historic claims of Palestinian scholars, such as George Jabbour’s Settler-Colonialism in South Africa and the Middle East, participants explored the history of settler colonialism in Palestine alongside parallel settler enterprises in places like South Africa (Jabbour 1970).

51By June of 2012, the PYM came to articulate its critique of how movements that solely rely on a rights-based frameworks limited to the mechanisms of international law, risk reaffirming Western hegemony, which has been all but complicit in Palestinian subjugation and dispossession (PYM 2012d; Welchman, Zambelli, and Salih 2020). The PYM maintained that law must be used as a tool, not a defining framework, and affirmed the colonial character of Zionism insisting that while different frameworks might be more fitting to discuss distinct Palestinian geographies and communities, their collective condition must be considered together. The PYM also came to argue that while South Africa offers an effective comparison with Palestine, “the apartheid framework is not definitive of the Palestinian experience or the Zionist Project” (PYM 2012e). Moreover, PYM articulated that apartheid and occupation are mechanisms or consequences of colonialism rather than the over-arching framework defining the struggle (PYM 2012a). In a 2016 workshop held in Malmo, Sweden between members of PYM-US and PYM-Sweden, the apartheid framework yet again became a source of debate. Some members argued that by relying solely on an apartheid or racial civil rights framework for Palestine, integration would become the overarching goal rather than decolonisation.

52In order to expand on the PYM’s early analysis and explore its ongoing debates, the movement decided to engage the apartheid framework and examine both its limitations and potential through an in-person study of the South African context. After two years of preparation, the PYM launched its Palestinian Youth Organizer Delegation to Johannesburg, South Africa in April 2019, hosted by the Afro-Mid East Centre (AMEC)(PYM 2019a). The objective of the delegation was to assess the current condition of the Palestinian national struggle through a comparative lens with South Africa’s anti-apartheid and anti/de-colonial struggle and ongoing challenges of economic and racial inequity. In order to include a wide range of the Palestinian experience and conditions, the PYM invited Palestinian youth organisers from different localities throughout occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Europe, the Arab region, South Africa, and the US to be part of the delegation.

53In witnessing the conditions in South Africa and in meeting with community institutions and anti-apartheid strugglers, members of the delegation came to a better understanding of the differences and similarities between the Palestinian and South African contexts, the limitations of the apartheid framework, and lessons learned for the movement for Palestinian liberation. Building on a history of reciprocal solidarity and exchange between the South African and Palestinian liberation movements, delegates also sought to deepen a joint struggle understanding and rekindle these historic relations best embodied by Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat’s long-term relationship, and the material exchanges and trainings between the African National Congress (ANC) and the PLO. Witnessing the conditions in South Africa affirmed a need to mutually engage to counter global systems that continue to subjugate those most oppressed. These findings were then illustrated in a number of reports, op-eds, and statements issued by the delegates where the youth delegates renewed their commitment to the South African people struggling against racial-capitalist exploitation and extraction (PYM 2019b). These theorisations have, since the conclusion of the delegation, informed new trajectories of PYM organising and analysis.

54The first major takeaway was that to achieve true change, resistance movements must be composed of pluralistic approaches and methods. For example, while BDS campaigns have been instrumental in applying pressure to colonial regimes both in the South African and Palestinian context, they did not realise the de jure end to apartheid in South Africa alone. Alongside global boycotts, at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was a robust, grassroots movement within the country led by various sectors of society, including students, women, and workers. Mass demonstrations, strikes, and armed struggle made South Africa ungovernable (Sales 1984). Labour unions, for example, played a pivotal role in the fall of the apartheid regime.12 Whereas Palestinians once had thriving grassroots social movements and armed struggle, these approaches suffered monumentally following the Oslo Accords. Today, the growth of BDS solidarity movements is insufficient to realising Palestinian liberation in the absence of a multi-pronged approach.

55The second lesson the delegates drew was of the dangers of an unfinished revolution. Witnessing the severe racial and economic disparities that continue in South Africa following the de jure end to apartheid in 1994, delegates explored how neoliberal economic policies and a growing security state were weaponised against Black South Africans and how this sustained racial segregation and unequal access to land, wealth, property, and freedom in the looming shadow of the official fall of the apartheid regime. Delegates witnessed a snapshot of these inequities during a visit to Sandton, one of the wealthiest cities on the African continent, and the nearby Alexandra township, an overcrowded slum within a few miles’ distance. Comparing these effects to post-Oslo neoliberal economic policies in Palestine, delegates grew increasingly committed to accounting for racial capitalism in our frameworks as well as interrogating negotiated settlements that do not account for complete decolonisation (Clarno 2017). This compelled the delegates to affirm that South Africa should not be considered a blueprint for Palestine because the struggle for complete decolonisation persists there. Further, it made the delegates interrogate the centuries of colonialism that existed in South Africa prior to the official start of apartheid in 1948 and question whether or not ending apartheid was sufficient to addressing persistent settler and racial colonial legacies in South Africa.

56Witnessing the material realities caused by an unfinished revolution and incomplete process of decolonisation in South Africa made delegates more committed to accounting for social, economic, and gender justice as part of Palestinian national liberation frameworks and methods rather than as secondary to it. Consequently, this led to the delegation’s third major takeaway: the importance of addressing the impact of gendered violence throughout the struggle rather than subordinating gender justice (and other social freedoms) to national/political liberation. By visiting the women’s jail on Constitutional Hill, delegates learned about the racialised and gendered state violence perpetrated by the apartheid regime in the form of torture, dehumanisation, and sexual assault. From speaking with former anti-apartheid activist and feminist, Fatima Shabodie, delegates learned more about gendered violence within the movement which went unaddressed and was effectively silenced in the name of prioritising political liberation before social liberation. Studying the history of structural gendered violence and oppression that was never overturned following the de jure end of apartheid, delegates were able to make sense of why gendered violence and femicide persists in South Africa at alarming rates. Delegates concluded that their own Palestinian liberation strategies must also reflect their vision for a just society, which includes comprehensively addressing social, gendered, economic, and political oppression together (Qutami 2020; PYM 2019b).

57The fourth major lesson delegates took away from the delegation was that apartheid does not account for global conditions of Palestinians. An important objective of the delegation was to assess the distinctions and parallels between the respective contexts through key frameworks, including apartheid, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. The delegates, representing many distinct Palestinian experiences and constituencies, offered specific perspectives on the parallels between their realities and conditions in South Africa. The group debated the merits of these frameworks compared against their conditions: under military occupation in the West Bank, besieged in the Gaza Strip, third-class citizenship in 1948 Palestine, refugeehood in Lebanon and Syria, asylum in Europe, and residency/citizenship in the US. Their examination of these conditions led to the conclusion that frameworks of military occupation, apartheid, and siege, which largely dominate the discourse and strategy of post-Oslo solidarity activism, go so as far as to explain the Palestinian conditions within historic Palestine. However, these frameworks alone fall short of explaining the multiple forms of structural oppression that shape Palestinian conditions beyond Palestine and do not account for over 60 percent of the Palestinian nation who live outside of historic Palestine. An analysis that accounts for all Palestinian subjectivities is critical in order for the PYM to develop strategies that achieve the full rights and freedom of all Palestinians wherever they reside. This is key to redressing the way the Oslo Accords dismembered Palestine as one indivisible territorial unit and segmented Palestinian constituencies across politically unintelligible geographies.

58After studying the South African context, the PYM resolved that it is critical that apartheid not be mobilised as an overarching phenomenon informing how we understand the collective Palestinian experience and methods of resistance, but rather as one facet with legal utility. Prior to its moral and political condemnation, which in part led to its codification within international law, apartheid referred to a systemic form of oppression that was specific to internal struggle within the South-African context, while negating the foreign-settler-colonial forms of seizure and oppression that instantiated the apartheid legal system. Whereas apartheid compounded broader racial colonial, capitalist, and settler-colonial systems in the South African region and across the African continent, it has since been legally refined and narrowly defined as a form of systemic discrimination and segregation based on race and ethnicity. On one hand, this codification of apartheid within a legal framework makes universal its utility; on the other hand, it risks reducing other contexts of oppression and struggle into one-dimensional or singular terms and perhaps even obscuring the core of the power differential in South Africa as it is rooted in settler colonialism. The delegates overwhelmingly agreed that apartheid within the Palestinian context needs to be understood and applied through a very specific analysis as one characteristic of Zionism—and that it cannot define the Palestinian struggle or the strategies that must be deployed to attain comprehensive liberation. Apartheid as an analytical framework describes certain aspects of the Palestinian condition but should not prescribe the means for changing that reality through resistance struggle.

59As such, it is critical to maintain a deeper anti/de-colonial understanding of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa when drawing lessons for the struggle for Palestinian freedom. This allows for a retrieval of important lessons from the South African struggle that is not restricted by an apartheid legal analysis, instead accounting for three centuries of colonialism that preceded the formal beginning of apartheid in 1948 and its legacies that continue to shape conditions in South Africa even after the formal end of apartheid in 1994. Furthermore, an anti/decolonial paradigm enables movement-building strategies and praxis to implement a dual approach whereby strugglers are actively deconstructing existing oppressive systems through an anti-colonial lens and reconstructing political, social, and economic systems through de-colonial methods for the cultivation of the alternative world liberation that movements envision.

60In an internal position paper on liberation, the PYM articulated an anti-colonial struggle as being achieved through dismantling Zionist structures: “This means that all Zionist colonial settlements and institutions must be dismantled in order for the Palestinian people to reclaim their stolen land and history” (PYM 2012b). Simultaneously, the PYM articulated de-colonisation as the liberation of the land as well as the people: “Not only is Liberation of the land critical to our struggle, but so is the Liberation of our people. This involves liberating our people across multi-faceted dimensions (including class and gender)” (PYM 2012b). A vision of liberation includes decolonisation of the land; compensation and reparations for destroyed livelihoods; the redistribution of wealth, land, and power; the right of return for all exiled Palestinians; and full political, civil, and social rights. The dismantlement of the apartheid wall in the West Bank—and of the apartheid laws that restrict mobility, rights, freedom, and resources for Palestinians within historic Palestine—are but one component of the larger strategy to achieve liberation. Juxtaposing this lesson against the US history of racial segregation, particularly in the post-civil rights era, youth delegates from North America realised how a formal overturning of apartheid systems cannot realise comprehensive racial justice—as confirmed today by movements for Black liberation that carry on.

Racial oppression

61Racial oppression frameworks have been applied to the Palestinian struggle for decades. (Jamal and Naber 2008, Naber et. al, 2006). In 1975, for instance, the UN adopted General Assembly resolution 3379 establishing that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” (Massad 2015).13 This resolution and defences following its submission were partially derived from publications released by the Palestine Research Center (PRC), founded by the PLO in Beirut in 1965 (Feldman 2015). Fayez Sayegh, the Center’s initial director—who notably served as the rapporteur of the special committee established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination from 1968 until his death in 1980—was one of the key articulators of the racial dimensions of the Palestinian struggle (Feldman 2015).

62His argument in support of resolution 3379 drew on various PRC materials, including his own 1965 piece, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” which characterised Zionist settler colonialism as both an outgrowth of, and deviation from, coeval European colonial projects in its radical re-alignment of European Jewish identity with colonial supremacy over the land and people of Palestine. A later monograph by Sayegh characterises the “political anomaly” faced by Palestinians, whose rights were simultaneously guaranteed and preemptively abandoned by the UN, which treated post-WWII support of a colonial movement—Zionism—as sufficient attention to its own explicit injunctions condemning racism and discrimination (Feldman 2015, 38). But despite this anomaly, for Sayegh the issue was clear: Zionism’s claims to supremacy and justifications for differential treatment operated “under the generic concept of ‘race” (Feldman 2015, 43).14

63Palestinian articulations of the struggle as one against racial-colonial domination permeated in the latter half of the 1960s as Palestinians were forging anti-colonial alliances across Third World movements and with racially subjugated groups in first world countries (Abdulhadi 2009). The interface between liberation movements across the world such as the Black Panther Party, Algerian National Liberation Front, and Palestinian liberationist ethos and cross-political messaging and inspiration has become an increasing topic of scholarly examination that sheds light on some of these alliances (Abdulhadi, 2009; Daulatzai 2012). But the geographical porousness between analytics centreing Palestine as a crucial entry-point to comprehending dynamic structures of race-making, as working alongside projects of settler colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, is also evident in the work of North American Arab American activist organisations, such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) founded in 1967.

64This organisation put considerable effort into documenting the interconnection between the burgeoning military-imperial relationship between the US and Israel (especially after 1967) and the resultant media discourse depicting Arabs and Muslims as “barbaric terrorists” whose various forms of resistance to and criticism of Israeli colonial policy constituted a strategic threat to the imperial prerogatives of the West. Arab organising was then met with the inauguration of state-sanctioned, anti-Arab (and later anti-Muslim) surveillance programs in the US, spanning from the Nixon era’s “Operation Boulder” to the present-day “Countering Violent Extremism” program (Pennock 2017; Zahzah 2017). But while understanding a) the racial-supremacist conceits underpinning modern political Zionist ideology; b) the overlaps between U.S. movements for Black liberation, global anti-colonial struggles, and Palestinian liberation; c) the dialogic relationship between political/racial suppression, surveillance, and discursive demonisation on the US front; and d) the ongoing support for Israeli colonisation is crucial, it is also important to understand how the material realities of Palestinian life under ongoing colonisation, occupation, and expulsion are themselves symptomatic of racial designs (Zahzah 2016). Groups such as the San Francisco based Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA) affirmed earlier articulations of Zionism as a racist project in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 moment. It’s members, Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky and Lina Baroudi state: “Any state that officially and legally privileges members of one “race” or “ethnicity” over another and establishes national identity on the basis of race or ethnicity, is inherently racist. Therefore, Israel is a racist state that is founded upon a racist ideology that protects and preserves the rights of Jews only. That racist ideology is Zionism.” (Naber et. al, 2006, p.99). While Palestinians and Arabs have drawn on their direct experiences to make such arguments for decades, broader scholarship has been very slow to take them seriously, so that, as Lana Tatour writes, “Despite race being constitutive to the Zionist ideology and to the structure of the Israeli state, there has been a neglect of race in the theorisation of the Israeli state” (Tartour 2019).

65Andy Clarno’s utilisation of Cedric Robinson’s and Neville Alexander’s frameworks of “racial capitalism”—the phenomenon by which capitalism is co-constitutively formed with colonialism and manifests within racialising formations in generating determinative rubrics of profit and extraction—to read neoliberal Palestine and South Africa side-by-side, is a contemporary piece of work that offers a key entry into understanding Zionism as a project of racial capitalism (Alexander 2003; Robinson 2005; Clarno 2017). Clarno diagnoses the terms by which the seemingly discrepant motions of military occupation, systematised segregation, biometric surveillance, and mobility control can be understood as operating all together in the procurement of larger economic gains through structural racialised containment and dispossession (Clarno 2017). As such, Clarno’s work suggests how vicissitudes of seizure and occupation can be considered a form of racialisation.

66Palestinian bodies held captive in carceral systems developed by the Israeli military occupation are not merely dispossessed, nor is their containment an economic and moral cost for Israel to maintain its so-called “security.” Israeli containment of Palestinian bodies is a racialised design that intersects with its settler-colonial logic of elimination, as Joudeh has pointed out, and yields considerable material and psychological profits for the Israeli state (Joudeh 2020). First, it allows for the creation of a robust security, war, and surveillance apparatus that has expedited the growth of racial-carceral techniques and technologies—first tested upon Palestinian bodies and land, then exported to global border, surveillance, policing and prison regimes. Utilising lexicons of “terrorism” to justify its racial design historically, following 11 September 2001 (9/11), Israel declared itself the forerunner of the global “War on Terror” and its economic profit derived from arms export grew exponentially in the decades that followed (Netanyahu 2001). Therefore, the racialised Palestinian body, which is not traditionally considered an exploited labour subject through a narrowly defined settler-colonial design, still is an important component of capitalist accumulation by the Israeli state, demonstrating the co-constitutive nature of racial domination, settler colonialism, and capitalism (Robinson 2005; Alexander 2003). Zionism can thus be seen as Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi states, “as a carceral enterprise, which is designed to control, confine, and dominate the Palestinians living in these areas. The most extreme example of this strategy is the treatment of the Gaza Strip” (Khalidi 2014). As these technologies are racially weaponised against Palestinians under siege and occupation, they are exported to other racially-violent regimes to police racial subjects under doctrines of containing “criminality” in places including Brazil, India, and the US (International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network 2012).

67Second, the cultural demonisation of Palestinians as so-called “terrorists,” post-1967 and especially post-9/11, legitimises Palestinian dehumanisation—resulting in important psychological and discursive effects that sustain international support for Zionism and the Israeli state via a false premise of Israel always operating from the position of defensive struggle. In the Zionist imagination, Palestinians are racialised nonhumans, the ultimate threat to Israel’s so called peace-loving democratic national imaginary, who must be exterminated or contained at all costs. (Qutami and Zahzah 2020, 79).

68In current Palestinian activist circuits in North America, racial dimensions have been primarily understood through analogies and comparisons, especially with Jim Crow segregation or South African apartheid, as a substitute for articulating ‘racial-colonialism’ and ‘racial-capitalism’ in the Palestinian context. Reliance on analogies and comparisons reflects a broader inability to name how race operates distinctly in the Palestinian context, or how Zionism racialises Palestinians, or how racial oppression—in all these contexts—constitutes more than separation/segregation. The PYM has thus worked to deepen its understanding of racial struggle beyond notions of ethnic/racial “separation,” and factored racial colonialism, carcerality, and capitalism in its analysis on and organising for Palestine (Kelley 2019; Qutami 2020).

69The PYM’s understanding of Zionist racial containment thus cannot be confined to the policies and systems that exist within the state (i.e., apartheid), but should include the role that Zionist forced play in mass surveillance, racialised criminalisation, weapons manufacturing, and the global exportation of military and surveillance technologies, as well as in cooperation with other state and non-state actors. We recognise these forms of racialised repression as a form of criminalising Palestinian communities globally (and other racially oppressed peoples), and attempting to neutralise the political activity, organisation, and mobilisation of Palestinians and allies worldwide in order to quell dissent that challenges Zionism as a status quo (Bhungalia 2015; Hussain and Greenwald 2015; Mustafa 2019). These theorisations have shaped PYM’s organising campaigns in alliance with other anti-racist struggles, especially with Black communities in North America, precisely because they inform racial oppression of our own communities there as well.

70In addition to the South Africa delegation, the PYM has engaged race through organising in coalition against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) initiative (Department of Homeland Security 2020),15 as well as similar surveillance programs by the FBI, including “Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and the “Black Identity Extremism” framework (Nguyen 2020). Through town hall meetings, the production of research portfolios, and protest actions, the PYM has offered the integration of an anti-Zionist framework and analysis to broader anti-racist state violence organising and coalition-building in the US, demonstrating the way Israel has utilised lexicons of “terrorism” to criminalise Palestinian dissent even before 9/11. More importantly, such coalitional work hones in on the centrality of Israel’s role in building the ideological and material infrastructure of the global War on Terror—and its resultant racialised grammar, and policies—which have disciplined and punished counter-hegemonic movements beyond those of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

71The PYM draws links between how new tactics and weapons inflicted upon Black and Brown communities by police forces in the US are oftentimes imported from Israel, even as Israel historically learned its racist designs from countries like the US. Part of the PYM’s work includes examining how the logic structuring the CVE program associates radicalism and extremism with resistance against oppressive foreign and domestic policies in the War on Terror context and illustrating how efforts to quell Palestinian political dissent have always been framed as an anti-terror project by Zionist forces globally and their allies (Center for Constitutional Rights 2007). For example, the PYM hosted an event in 2017 to commemorate the 40-year anniversary of the Los Angeles Eight (LA8), a case whereby seven Palestinian students and one Kenyan woman were criminalised for their activism in support of Palestine. This PYM event honored members of the LA8 for their contributions to the struggle and their tenacity despite excruciating surveillance and repression campaigns levied against them for decades. Drawing links between histories of anti-Palestinian surveillance and repression in the US with the Trump administration’s newly-issued Executive Order dubbed the “Muslim ban” and the CVE program, the PYM directly connected historic policies meant to stifle political dissent to their newer iterations.

72Building upon the PYM’s anti-surveillance organising, recently the PYM has more seriously focused on building campaigns in support of prisoners. The PYM understands the importance of prison abolition organising as part of anti-racist work because it understands prison expansion in the US, both following the abolition of slavery and in the aftermath of the 1960s Black power and civil rights movements, to be a mechanism of continuing on and re-organising anti-Black state violence (PYM and NSJP 2020). In a 2017 statement published on Palestinian Prisoners Day, the PYM expressly illustrated their joint-struggle ethos between Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities, while drawing direct links between Palestinian prisoners in the homeland with Palestinian prisoners in the US. The statement read

We further recognize that the connection between our colonization and incarceration extends to the US: Rasmea Odeh, a renowned organizer within the Chicago community for forty years, was imprisoned in November 2014, allegedly for false procurement of naturalization, but in what was undoubtedly an attempt to silence her for her outspoken support and activism for a liberated Palestine. It is not new to Palestinians that carceral systems have long been used to de-legitimize our cause, break our morale and spirit and silence political activism. In the US the prison’s centrality in the ongoing legacies of racial chattel slavery and indigenous genocide means that US prisons are critical sites of racial and settler-colonial subjugation and oppression [....] From the US to Palestine, we recognize that true liberation will only come with the end of racist and settler-colonial prisons and police forces (PYM 2017a).

73In addition to supporting the campaign to defend Rasmea Odeh, the PYM has also engaged prisoner support campaigns of other Palestinians in the US prison system who have been punished for their political activism for a free Palestine. The primary effort has focused on the Holy Land Five (HLF), a group of Palestinian community leaders that have been criminalised for offering humanitarian relief to Palestinians under occupation back home (Bhungalia 2015).

74The arrest and convictions of the HLF are not isolated from the transnational and historical racial legacies of both US and Zionist racist state violence that have been more overtly bridged through the War on Terror. The Free the HLF campaign demonstrates the way the PYM’s theorisation accounts for the racialised containment of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities in the US, which is driven by the political efforts to stifle dissent against Zionism and toward sustaining the US alliance with the Israeli state. However, a lesson PYM learned from the Free HLF campaign is that the imprisonment of Palestinians in the US is also linked to a historical continuum of the US’s racial carceral regime, which has assassinated, deported, or imprisoned the political leadership of various radical anti-racist and anti-colonial liberation movements. The campaign has opened up avenues for Palestinian youth in the US to learn about previous surveillance projects, such as the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and the resultant assassination, forced exile, and imprisonment of scores of Black Power and Indigenous movement leaders, from Fred Hampton and Assata Shukur to Leonard Peltier and beyond.

75Foregrounding an analysis of Zionism as a project of racial oppression, containment, and capitalism serves as a basis for the PYM’s joint-struggle organising with other communities resisting racist state violence, further expanding how organisers understand racial oppression to be a quintessential characteristic of colonial and capitalist enterprises. It is for these reasons that the PYM partook in the popular revolts against anti-Black state-sanctioned violence following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Joining a number of protests across the country, the Houston PYM chapter also organised a Palestinian solidarity delegation to the funeral services held by the Floyd family. In addition, the PYM printed t-shirts that read “Palestinians for Black Liberation” and sold them to raise funds for Black organisations sustaining the uprisings of the moment. While demonstrating its political and ethical commitments to Black freedom struggle, the PYM was also able to make tangible links between the Minneapolis police department (and other US police departments) and their cooperation with Israeli security, police, and intelligence training over the last decade. These material links affirm the joint-struggle ethos guiding the PYM in its work against racial carcerality, capitalism, violence, and oppression.

Conclusion

76Today, Palestinian youth movement practitioners in North America are rejecting the abandonment of collective liberation and the sidelining of committed intellectualism ushered into Palestinian political life via the Oslo Accords. They do this through attempting to locate themselves in relation to both their own Palestinian national struggle and the various causes and communities that have contributed to shaping their critical consciousness, passion for politics, and commitment to liberation. Deeply inspired by frameworks, analyses, and strategies fomented by Indigenous, Black, refugee, and migrant communities and through an intellectually engaged movement praxis, the PYM is exploring the mechanisms of maintaining and developing joint-struggle relations—just as it is experimenting with how to revitalise the role of the Palestinian shatat in their own national struggle.

77It thus becomes incumbent upon upcoming generations of organisers to experiment with a methodological calculus that merges theory with practice and that explores various global frameworks of power and oppression as we develop and centre Palestinian-specific theorisations and methods. This process is not easy nor free of complexity. However, to attempt it, to continue to do so while paying astute attention to the risks in such a complex task, we might realise different outcomes rather than hollow solutions to the current crises affecting Palestine and the Palestinians. Thus, we continue to ask: how can we continue to develop a joint-struggle ethos and praxis with other communities, geographies, and causes without flattening distinctions? How can this methodological approach result in a rich theorisation for understanding Palestine and how might such theorisations be instrumental in guiding new ideas, methods, and strategies to realise freedom in Palestine and everywhere?

78For Palestinians historically and today, Zionism persists as the specific and comprehensive framework that shapes Palestinian conditions globally. As articulated in one of the PYM’s internal position papers on solidarity, Palestinians are struggling against a specific form of oppression under Zionism that enacts a “trilogy of Colonialism” that includes apartheid, racial oppression, and third-class citizenship; ethnic cleansing, genocide, and displacement; and military occupation, including exploitation of labour, land, and culture (PYM 2012e). Zionism, as a structural system with an extensive economic, military, and political apparatus, operates as a settler-colonial project seeking to establish and maintain both the erasure and containment of Palestinians, as the work of Joudeh, Jabbour, Ghanim, Sayegh, and many more Palestinian scholars illustrates. Its power operates both within the homeland and globally. By refusing to truncate the fulsomeness of Zionist oppression presently and historically when engaging in exilic joint-struggle praxis, we ultimately arrive at a richer comprehension of how the Palestinian struggle globally converges with other anti-oppression causes. Further, we can examine how our present joint-struggle praxis compares with past forms of resistance and builds upon the rich intellectual and methodological histories that came before us allowing us to always re-consider how to accept responsibility and be better co-strugglers to other freedom fighting communities.

79Finally, we affirm that theorisation is not subordinate to, but co-constitutive of, organising and joint-struggle praxis. Cultivating a critical reflexivity among the new generations of Palestinian youth struggling globally for national liberation is the surest means of rejuvenating an intellectual culture of committed engagement to the liberation struggle. In this way, we can separate Palestinian intellectualism from the individualist trappings afforded to it by the Oslo Accords paradigm, supplanting it instead with the preceding vision of collectively-produced intellectual analysis and criticism in service of national liberation. The PYM continues to engage this work on topics that the scope of this essay did not allow us to reflect. The pursuance of a comprehensively just future and outcome to our anti/decolonial struggle means maintaining this critical reflexivity wherever we find ourselves. It means engaging the latest developments regarding broader intellectual conceptualisations and contextualisations of the Palestinian struggle from the vantage point of an accountable intellectualism committed to historical fidelity to our anti-colonial histories, and the procurement of genuine Palestinian liberation and freedom for all oppressed peoples. Just as in every phase of our historic struggle, time will not pause to allow for a complete theorisation that can guide our actions and service. Thus, we remain committed to allowing our practice to inform our theorisations and vice versa. History has shown that this can be the only suitable practice for true revolutionary struggle.