Towards Palestinian Liberation: How resistance travels across borders

Towards Palestinian Liberation: How resistance travels across borders

Submitted by
Hossam el-Hamalawy
on
Wed, 07/15/2026 - 11:46

A new collection of essays places the struggle against Israel in a global context

A protest against Israel's genocide in Gaza, in Los Angeles on 25 October 2023 (AFP)

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Written amid genocide, regional war and the collapse of a credible claim that the Western-led international order protects human life, Towards Palestinian Liberation challenges the paralysis that such devastation produces.

Edited by Abi Bae and Hamza Hamouchene, the collection recovers liberation as both a historical possibility and a practical project.

Its contributors examine how resistance is built, how it travels across borders and how movements transmit their knowledge to later generations.

The editors of the work reject the habit of treating every defeat as final. 

Their long approach places the present catastrophe within more than a century of Palestinian resistance and a wider history of anti-colonial struggle. 

Hope emerges here through organisation, memory and collective action, rather than sentimentality.

The book insists that Palestine today cannot be reduced to a humanitarian emergency.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza is situated within the colonial history of Zionism, the imperial interests that sustained it and the continuing project to eliminate or displace the Palestinian people.

Restoring Palestine to history

Adam Hanieh develops this argument by placing Israel within the political economy of American power and the changing structure of the Middle East. 

Its power is sustained through US strategy, Gulf capital, energy corridors, trade networks and military normalisation. 

Relations between Israel and the Gulf monarchies extend far beyond diplomacy. 

They form part of a regional order designed to integrate capital while suppressing Palestinian and Arab popular demands.

Palestinian liberation consequently requires more than a negotiated alteration of borders. 

It demands a confrontation with the structures that continually reproduce Israeli domination.

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The collection moves through Africa, the Arab world, Asia and the Americas, recovering histories in which Palestine operated as a shared political language among movements fighting colonialism, racial rule and imperial intervention.

Wael Omar examines the place of Palestinians within Global South solidarity, when Vietnam, Algeria, South Africa and Palestine were connected through political education, diplomacy and a common conception of imperialism. 

Hamza Hamouchene likewise captures how movements studied one another’s victories and failures and adapted strategies to new conditions.

Kribsoo Diallo’s history of African solidarity is careful not to romanticise state policy. 

African positions were shaped by liberation movements, Cold War pressures, Israeli diplomacy, western coercion and the contradictions of postcolonial governments. 

Solidarity was often profound, but never automatic. Alliances must be organised and renewed.

Zhang Sheng traces Chinese solidarity from the revolutionary period to the ambiguities of the present, while Achin Vanaik examines India’s transformation from a prominent supporter of Palestinian rights into one of Israel’s closest partners. 

The Global South, the collection warns, is not a morally unified bloc.

Egypt, Sudan and the Arab revolution

The chapters on Egypt and Sudan are among the volume’s sharpest takes. Muzan Alneel rejects the fragmentation that treats solidarity with Palestine and support for Sudan’s revolution as separate commitments.

She shows how the failure to defend the Sudanese revolutionary movement strengthened counter-revolutionary forces now implicated in Sudan’s war and the regional architecture sustaining Israel.

Alneel died suddenly on 15 April 2026, aged 39. 

An engineer, socialist writer, researcher and organiser, she combined a lucid analysis of class power with an unwavering commitment to Sudan’s grassroots revolution, and comrades remembered her as intellectually generous, courageous and uncompromising in her defence of the oppressed. 

Her death robbed Sudan and the international left of one of their most incisive voices, but this chapter preserves the force of a political life devoted to freedom from below.  

Elsewhere, Nihal el-Aasar places Egypt at the heart of the struggle for Palestine. Egypt is central not merely because it borders Gaza or controls the Rafah crossing, but because the Egyptian state has become indispensable to containing Palestinian resistance. 

Fans of the Egyptian Al-Ahly football team chanted for Sudan in a match with Al Masry SC at the Borg El Arab stadium in Egypt on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/z7tdSkTHJx

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) November 5, 2025

The peace treaty with Israel, the blockade, energy integration and security coordination have tied Egyptian authoritarianism to the preservation of the regional order.

Aasar’s emphasis on the Egyptian masses is decisive. Official rhetoric cannot alter the balance of forces. 

That can happen only when ordinary Egyptians recover the capacity to organise and enter the streets. 

Palestine has repeatedly linked regional anger to domestic revolt in Egypt. 

The Second Intifada helped revive street politics under Hosni Mubarak, while solidarity protests created networks and political experiences that later fed into the 2011 revolution.

Ecology and militarism

Asmaa Ashraf and Vijay Kolinjivadi’s chapter on eco-apartheid widens the book’s horizon. It shows how the language of sustainability can legitimise dispossession, surveillance and racial segregation.

Eco-apartheid describes a future in which protected enclaves for the wealthy coexist with sacrifice zones, forced migration and ecological collapse for everyone else. 

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Gaza offers a concentrated image of that order. Destruction can be repackaged as reconstruction, while ethnic cleansing is marketed through plans for trade corridors, luxury developments and renewable infrastructure.

The chapter links greenwashing to militarism. The military-industrial complex produces destruction, secures extraction and imposes the political conditions required for accumulation. 

Climate justice stripped of colonial analysis risks decorating the systems producing catastrophe.

The chapters on the Americas reinforce this analysis. Andressa Oliveira Soares connects Gaza to militarised policing, Israeli weapons and greenwashing in Brazil. 

Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel situates Palestinian resistance alongside indigenous struggles against settler colonialism on Turtle Island, while Maria Landi traces Palestine’s place within Latin American histories of dictatorship, anti-imperialism and struggle over land.

Strategy instead of performance

Arun Kundnani’s chapter on Eqbal Ahmad gives the volume its clearest strategic vocabulary. 

Ahmad’s demand to “out-organise the enemy” redirects attention from spectacular gestures towards disciplined political work. 

Towards Palestinian Liberation is published by Daraja Press

Liberation movements must mobilise international support, isolate their opponents and expose contradictions inside the societies underwriting colonial domination.

Ahmad assessed tactics according to their political effects. Armed struggle could advance liberation when embedded in a coherent strategy, but it could also substitute myth for strength and confuse movement with victory. 

Revolutionary organisation requires an honest evaluation of power rather than morale built upon declarations of imminent triumph.

The contributors ask how movements endure, expand and win, examining political education, boycotts, trade union action, popular mobilisation and alliance-building inside the imperial core. 

Solidarity becomes a practice rather than an ethical posture.

A book from the movement

Karma Nabulsi’s foreword describes internationalism as a collective practice resembling love or freedom. 

Rafeef Ziadah’s afterword returns to the same terrain: liberation is sustained through memory, care, organisation and the stubborn cultivation of possibility. 

Between them lies a global archive of movements confronting settler colonialism, empire, racial capitalism and ecological destruction.

Towards Palestinian Liberation celebrates neither suffering nor sacrifice in isolation, but the capacity of oppressed peoples to think, organise, resist and transmit knowledge across generations. 

Towards Palestinian Liberation celebrates neither suffering nor sacrifice in isolation, but the capacity of oppressed peoples to think, organise, resist...

Palestine appears not as a passive object of sympathy but as a revolutionary force that has educated movements around the world.

The collection restores a language of liberation at a moment when political horizons are being deliberately narrowed. 

It reminds readers that empires can be defeated, colonial orders can collapse and solidarities can be rebuilt after long periods of retreat. 

From Palestine to Africa, Asia and the Americas, its contributors offer a map of shared enemies and, more importantly, shared possibilities. 

Towards Palestinian Liberation: Global Perspectives on Anti-Colonial Resistance and Solidarity, edited by Abi Bae and Hamza Hamouchene, published by Daraja Press, 2026.

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