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Abstract
Histories of leftist and anti-colonial movements among revolutionaries in the Global South during the early second half of twentieth century have been extensively surveyed and theorized. “Liberation as Revolutionary Theory and Praxis: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the New Palestinian Left, 1967-1976” contributes to these extant narratives by examining the often-ignored intellectual history of Palestinian leftists in the 1960s and 1970s through the lenses of revolutionary theory and praxis, media theory, gender, and cultural production. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the idiosyncratic Marxism-Leninism practiced by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the foremost leftist organization among the Palestinian guerrilla factions of this period, did not mimic contemporary revolutionary movements in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Instead, the PFLP contributed to the global leftist discourses that influenced their ideologies by advancing a nationalist liberatory vision of class struggle shaped by the unique Palestinian experiences of statelessness and diaspora. My dissertation argues that the PFLP produced a unique model for popular struggle in the region as it developed into a vanguard party capable of mobilizing a new proletariat class composed of the Palestinian refugee masses. This intellectual and practical evolution in the organization emerged from a process of internal political fragmentation, experimentation with utopic visions of liberation achieved by the Palestinian people themselves rather than Arab governments, and the crystallization of mass politics through the Front’s social and economic development programs. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I employ the PFLP leadership’s extensive writings in its official Arabic biweekly organ, al-Hadaf (The Target), and other widespread publications at the time, most notably Shuʾun Filastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs), to posit that the Popular Front refashioned basic Leninist doctrines of revolutionary vanguardism and Maoist interpretations of people’s war to serve the nationalist and anti-imperialist aspirations of the Palestinian masses in the refugee camps. In the next chapter, I show how the PFLP rejected the dominant discourse among Arab leaders of nonviolent engagement with Western audiences and instead pioneered violent media spectacles grounded in the Front’s materialist historical analysis of global resistance. Marshaling archival material from government archives, the British Library, PFLP publications, and international press coverage, I also argue that the PFLP’s members were torn over the efficacy of such radical operations and their ability to shape international public opinion. In the final chapter, I analyze previously untapped literary sources and art criticism produced by PFLP intellectuals to demonstrate that the Popular Front was deeply invested in cultural gatekeeping and the cultivation of original Palestinian revolutionary aesthetics as necessary praxes that complimented armed struggle. Though ideological rigidity prevented the PFLP from ever growing into a grassroots movement with wide appeal and the destabilizing consequences of its violent operations weakened the Front’s local and international political relevancy, my dissertation illustrates that the PFLP nevertheless left an indelible mark on secular revolutionary tradition in the region and greatly contributed to the complex collage of left-wing thinking produced by post-colonial thinkers in the Global South.