2025 Workshop
Julia Gettle
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Brown University
Catastrophe as crucible: The regeneration of Palestinian politics through Nakba-era student political life
This paper presents a history of mobilization amidst the Nakba and its immediate wake, charting the regeneration of Palestinian popular politics through the radicalized environment of student political life in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As Palestinian students and their classmates responded to the emergency of ethnic cleansing and sociocide, this paper argues, they produced new forms of political mobilization that would shape the Palestinian National Movement (PNM) for decades to come. Drawing from oral histories, memoirs, party papers, and university archives, this paper explores how the Nakba galvanized a renaissance of Palestinian political mobilization under a student vanguard of the “Nakba generation” who would continue to play critical roles in the PNM for the rest of the 20th century.
This regeneration process reached a critical turning point on October 22, 1951, when students met in the heart of the American University of Beirut campus to begin a protest march supporting the abrogation of the treaty that had legitimized British military occupation of the Suez Canal. The Lebanese authorities had banned demonstrations and sent police to encircle the university, but this did not deter the assembled students, who fought their way through the police and marched in a growing crowd to the Egyptian embassy. The AUB administration responded furiously, expelling seven known or suspected organizers and placing dozens more students on probation. This proved to be a misstep: AUB students launched a campaign of student demonstrations and strikes across Lebanon, forcing the prime minister to intervene. The university administration ultimately bowed to the political pressure and allowed the expelled students to return, setting a formative precedent of securing tactical victories through techniques of organizing and mass mobilization. Moreover, the uprising cemented the relationship between the two secretive student cells who had planned the demonstration, who fused in its wake into the founding cohort of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement (ANM), the first major political group established by the “Nakba generation” that would later splinter into the PFLP, DFLP, and much of the Arab New Left.
This paper chronicles the gestation and birth of the first important faction of the post-Nakba Palestinian National Movement through the crucible of AUB student political life, which radicalized dramatically through the course of the Nakba to forge new modes of political mobilization that would characterize the “Arab nationalist phase” (Baumgarten 2005) of the PNM for the next two decades. Beginning in the autumn of 1947, the Nakba process spurred mass student mobilizations to aid the displaced, join armed struggle against the Zionist colonizers, and force the Arab regimes to intervene militarily to save Palestine. Building upon older student practices of ideological dissemination and mobilization, this radicalized ecosystem of student political life was also characterized by rolling cycles of demonstrations, building occupations, and hunger strikes met with expulsions and retaliatory uprisings against these expulsions that would escalate the campus community’s participation in the anticolonial, antizionist mobilizing project over the course of several years. This history of a defining moment in the evolution of the PNM thus also presents a microcosm of how the “Nakba generation” agitated for liberation amidst existential catastrophe.
Julia Gettle is a PhD candidate in the department of history at Brown University. Gettles dissertation, “'Political Life in the Shadow Years: Arab Nationalists and Popular Mobilization in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1948-1975,” is a history from below of the post-1948 stage of the Palestinian national movement and the rise and fall of political Arab nationalism.