Boycott and Solidarity: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the 1968 World Youth Festival
The University of Arizona (UA) is committed to ensuring an accessible and inclusive experience for students, employees and all who use University technology and resources. If you require a captioned version of this video, please reach sbs-cmes@email.arizona.edu If you are interested in an upcoming CMES talk and require captions, please reach out to the above-listed email. CMES staff will work with the Disability Resource Center to ensure that captions are done either at the time (if it is a live-streaming event) or that captions will be done immediately for a video used in furtherance of classroom activities. Maha Nassar, Assistant Professor, MENAS, University of Arizona MENAS Colloquium Series cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium Filmed on 4/20/2015 While great strides have been made in scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel, less attention has been paid to their positionality within broader Arab cultural and political formations. This paper seeks to address this gap through a close reading of the Seventh World Youth Festival, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, from July 26 to August 6, 1968. This cultural festival, which brought together over 20,000 leftist activists from around the world, provided a rare opportunity for Palestinian members of the Israeli communist Rakah delegation, including famed Palestinian poets Mahmud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, to meet face-to-face with some of the roughly 500 Arabs in attendance. During the festival many Arab delegates eagerly sought out Darwish and Qasim, who were preceded by their reputation as “resistance poets,” but others saw them as violating the Arab boycott of Israel by “accepting” that country’s citizenship. Within this complex political environment, I argue that Palestinian festival participants from the shatat (exile) played a key role in helping to demystify the Palestinian citizens of Israel to a wider Arab audience. Through a discursive analysis of contemporary press reports, memoirs, literary works and interviews with participants, I show how these Palestinians served as a bridge between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the wider Arab world. By examining these dynamics, this paper sheds light on the discursive genealogy of a political vocabulary that came to include more fully the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The University of Arizona (UA) is committed to ensuring an accessible and inclusive experience for students, employees and all who use University technology and resources. If you require a captioned version of this video, please reach sbs-cmes@email.arizona.edu If you are interested in an upcoming CMES talk and require captions, please reach out to the above-listed email. CMES staff will work with the Disability Resource Center to ensure that captions are done either at the time (if it is a live-streaming event) or that captions will be done immediately for a video used in furtherance of classroom activities. Maha Nassar, Assistant Professor, MENAS, University of Arizona MENAS Colloquium Series cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium Filmed on 4/20/2015 While great strides have been made in scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel, less attention has been paid to their positionality within broader Arab cultural and political formations. This paper seeks to address this gap through a close reading of the Seventh World Youth Festival, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, from July 26 to August 6, 1968. This cultural festival, which brought together over 20,000 leftist activists from around the world, provided a rare opportunity for Palestinian members of the Israeli communist Rakah delegation, including famed Palestinian poets Mahmud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, to meet face-to-face with some of the roughly 500 Arabs in attendance. During the festival many Arab delegates eagerly sought out Darwish and Qasim, who were preceded by their reputation as “resistance poets,” but others saw them as violating the Arab boycott of Israel by “accepting” that country’s citizenship. Within this complex political environment, I argue that Palestinian festival participants from the shatat (exile) played a key role in helping to demystify the Palestinian citizens of Israel to a wider Arab audience. Through a discursive analysis of contemporary press reports, memoirs, literary works and interviews with participants, I show how these Palestinians served as a bridge between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the wider Arab world. By examining these dynamics, this paper sheds light on the discursive genealogy of a political vocabulary that came to include more fully the Palestinian citizens of Israel.