Free Palestine (April 1974)

Free Palestine was a monthly magazine published in Britain from 1968 until 1984, after which it moved to Australia from where it continued publication until 1992. The magazine, little known by activists or scholars today, is effectively an archive of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain during the years of its publication, and contains a treasure trove of information, experiences, tactics and strategies used by British-based activists in building solidarity with Palestine.

In the midst of an unspeakable genocide being committed against the people of Palestine, this teaching tool aims to retreive the lessons contained within Free Palestine’s pages and explore its significance for the current struggle against Israeli colonisation, Apartheid and murder.

The first issue of Free Palestine was published June 1968 and featured an editorial outlining its aims and positions:

As a group of Palestinian Arabs residing in the UK, we hope that through ‘Free Palestine’ we shall contribute our share to a greater understanding and rapport between the British people and the Arabs of Palestine. Thus, in attempting to acquaint those interested with the facts of the situation, we aspire to represent as well as reflect the rights and aspirations of our people. This means we fully subscribe to our people’s legitimate desire to return to a free, secular and democratic Palestine, and that we unreservedly support our people’s armed struggle to achieve these natural and elementary aims in its homeland.

Free Palestine (June 1968)

This editorial was written by Dr. Abdul Wahab Al-Kayali who was a PhD student at University College London, pen-name ‘Aziz M. Yafi’, a founder of the paper and its editor in chief until 1969. Al-Kayali went on to head the Education and Cultural Affairs Department of the PLO Executive Committee from 1973. His pen-name continued to appear regularly in the magazine as a contributor to the sections ‘Palestine Brief’ and ‘Palestine in the Western Press’, and as a pseudonym for subsequent editors, until he was assassinated in his Beirut office on 7 December 1982. Over the course of its publication, the magazine had several other named editors from various sections of the growing movement of solidarity with Palestine in Britain. This included Ghayth Armanazi, editor from 1969-70, then a Fatah member studying in London and founder of the activist group Friends of Palestine; Louis Eakes, editor from 1970-74, a national organiser of the Young Liberals and closely affiliated with Palestine Action (a campaign group formed in 1973 by Palestinian doctor Ghada Karmi that lasted until the late 1970s); and Andrew Faulds (announced as a member of the editorial board in 1981), a Labour MP (1966–1997) and president of Palestine Action.

The paper covers the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and elsewhere at a time when it was growing in reach and resonance across the world. Palestinian resistance organisations took control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 War, and transformed it into a national umbrella organisation for the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle. These resistance organisations were inspired by and built networks with fraternal anticolonial and socialist struggles in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, China and elsewhere. They, as well as Palestinian unions of women, students, workers, artists and more, engaged in a widespread solidarity-building campaign in order to transform the position of Palestine on the global stage. Integral to this was communicating the aims, strategies, histories and visions of Palestinian liberation to the world.

Free Palestine (October 1972)

Free Palestine is both an example of how that communication took place through such publications, and a documentation of the wide range of other solidarity-building activities during those years. The paper includes reports on the situation of Palestinians in Palestine and in exile, the crimes of the Israeli occupation, the activities of the Palestinian liberation movement, exclusive interviews with Palestinian leaders, letters and questions from the Free Palestine readership, media analysis, educational materials, reports on conferences, summer camps, and delegations, and coverage of connections with other internationalist struggles for liberation. As well as working to spread information and mobilise support through the paper, the team behind the publication participated in speaking tours, demonstrations and lobbying alongside other organisations and individuals in the UK who were committed to the principles of Palestinian liberation.

Free Palestine (January 1973)

This teaching tool focuses on the insight offered by this publication to the emergence, dynamics and principles of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. More than a marginal publication among the booming Left publishing scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, this magazine played an important role in documenting and shaping the emergence of an international conversation and organisational framework around questions of solidarity with Palestine. It had a significant circulation, from student groups to parliamentary networks, and maintained a monthly regularity over more than fifteen years despite the financial and political challenges it faced.

Free Palestine cover (September 1971).

The teaching tool highlights some of the key figures and themes that emerged from this magazine over that time, and is intended as a primer to alert researchers to the publication and the rich history of international solidarity that it documents. This resource provides an outline of the magazine’s role and influence, and key themes in it, over the following five sections:

1) An outline of the organisational landscape of pro-Palestine solidarity work in Britain, the context in which the magazine emerged and the role it played in integrating the diverse strands of the movement.

2) A summary of tactics and actions used in building solidarity with Palestine, utilised across different pro-Palestine solidarity groups, including conferences, boycotts and actions.

Free Palestine (May 1974).

3) A documentation of the internationalist themes in the paper, and the connection made between international anticolonial struggles and the Palestine liberation movement.

4) A record of different efforts by Zionist organisations to and the British state to silence and suppress pro-Palestine activism.

5) Finally, the resource looks specifically at the trajectory of efforts to build solidarity within the British trade union movement and in Parliament, documenting the early efforts by the Palestinian Revolution to gain some traction amongst these sectors.

Free Palestine (May 1974).

For those unacquainted with the Palestinian struggle over this period, there is much in Free Palestine that they will find striking. Beyond scholarly interest, studying the paper also provides important lessons for those engaged in organising for Palestine in Britain today. Its pages provide an insight into the longer-term nature of political struggle for Palestine and how organising efforts can accumulate to provide frameworks on which subsequent generations of organisers can build. Alternatively, they also show how the same battles are often fought and refought over generations. In either case, the paper makes available a wealth of experience and tactics for building solidarity with Palestine and protecting public space, whilst also reinforcing the multigenerational impact of political work. What also stands out is the sheer variety of tactics and strategies employed by organisers in making the case for Palestine in different arenas and amongst different sectors, rather than being limited to any single approach.

Such reflections are more important now than ever. As Palestinians face an Israeli genocidal regime committed to their total erasure from their homeland, the need for global solidarity to stem Israel’s murderous project is more important now than ever. Reading Free Palestine in light of recent Israeli massacres in Gaza, we can see that huge strides have been made in ‘mainstreaming’ support for Palestinian liberation amongst large sections of the British population, a significant achievement that, nonetheless, has yet to be translated into a movement capable of ending Britain’s military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel, even in light of two years of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Whilst not providing us with answers, the pages of Free Palestine do help orientate our questions: how can we materially impact the situation in Palestine, build solidarity and end British complicity? How can growing understanding of Israel’s settler-colonial, Apartheid and genocidal nature, and statements of support, be translated into effective solidarity? What are the different groups that must be organised, and how can this best be achieved? What have we acquired from previous generations of solidarity work, and what frameworks and tactics are useful to pass on to future efforts?

“As a group of Palestinian Arabs residing in the UK, we hope that through ‘Free Palestine’ we shall contribute our share to a greater understanding and rapport between the British people and the Arabs of Palestine. Thus, in attempting to acquaint those interested with the facts of the situation, we aspire to represent as well as reflect the rights and aspirations of our people. This means we fully subscribe to our people’s legitimate desire to return to a free, secular and democratic Palestine, and that we unreservedly support our people’s armed struggle to achieve these natural and elementary aims in its homeland.”

The Escola-Piloto was founded following resolutions at the Cassacá Congress to establish schools, storehouses and local administrative bodies within the liberated areas. Blufo was part of the same politics that established the Secretariat, and the Departments of Information, Culture and Cadre Training.

The paper was made available for free at PAIGC schools and distributed in small batches from January 1966 to December 1970. It aimed to reach the party’s “pioneers”, the student body made up of the children of combatants, PAIGC militants, war orphans and other young people. Its articles were unattributed, written in Portuguese using a typewriter and printed on A4 pages. The length of each publication varied; earlier issues were shorter and reached four pages, with issues ten, eleven and twelve reaching twelve pages.

Blufo acted as an innovative pedagogical tool. It educated the pioneers in culture and politics, towards the construction of internationalist, pan-African perspectives within the struggle for self-determination. This research analyzed the 1959 Pidjiguiti Massacre in the newspaper… read more

The significance of the periodical for historians belies its short life. Far from simply a nationalist party organ, Uganda Renaissance is part of the history of Cairo’s ascendency as a radical Afro-Asian hub. Kale’s office – officially that of the Foreign Mission of the Uganda National Congress – on Ahmad Hishmat Street was one of several offices for sub-Saharan liberation movements housed here by the end of the 1950s. Resident activists shared meals and debates with Egyptian intellectuals through the ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ surrounding the recently formed African Association. The publication of a periodical was an obvious activity for such an office: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government provided office equipment and financed printing at Mondiale Press, and from 1957 the multi-lingual periodical Nahdatu Ifriquiah (African Renaissance) served as a model for budding editors like Kale.

Kale was no stranger to publishing when he arrived in Cairo in late 1957. He had spent the previous months working for the Uganda National Congress at their office in Katwe, Kampala, where Ugandan press ventures like Uganda Eyogera were struggling to inform readers of the fast-moving political scene amid repressive permit laws under British colonial administration. Kale had been involved in publishing at Makerere University College too, where student magazines were launched and banned recurrently in the 1950s – until he was expelled in 1956 for attending a conference of the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students. Uganda Renaissance was quickly added to the list of proscribed publications in British colonial East Africa.

The pages of Uganda Renaissance demonstrate the editorial experimentation that was possible in an ecology of print where the usually prohibitive start-up costs of publishing were met by an anticolonial patron. Far from simply reproducing dominant anti-imperialist slogans, Kale cut and pasted material from his own pamphlets and brought together eclectic content to follow his interests: the 1916 poem ‘Africa’ by Rabindranath Tagore and a liberation song from central Kenya; an account of the plight of Batutsi refugees in East Africa, and a copy of the Sanniquellie Declaration that was the basis for the Ghana-Guinea federation… read more

Founded amidst the flames of the 1968 rebellion, BLM embarked from Malcolm X’s contention in Message to the Grassroots that “land is the basis of all independence.” As such, its program opposed both the colonial white land grabbers who profited from speculative dispossession in the ghetto and the neo-colonial Black government intermediaries who promoted urban renewal as a panacea. In their place, BLM envisioned a community-controlled and cooperatively-owned neighborhood, one which would provide an institutional base for Black liberation struggles and link up with parallel Black nationalist experiments in other cities. Beginning to create this vision, the group released an alternative comprehensive plan for the area and established a food buying cooperative for local residents. They also engaged in youth development through the YPNA, training students in carpentry and design in the mornings and teaching them African and African American history and culture in the afternoons. Confronting a white press incredulous when not outright hostile towards its organizing efforts, BLM decided to take the means of communication into their own hands, launching Black Land News within a year of its formation.

With the tagline “Unity through Truth!” on its masthead, Black Land News cast a critical eye on integrationist strategies rooted in the Civil Rights movement, instead encouraging its readership to come together as an internally colonized people in pursuit of national liberation. Operating at three distinct scales, its pages served simultaneously as an organizational newsletter, a citywide gazette, and a national forum. Columns by BLM members detailed their ongoing initiatives and greater aspirations for Shaw. Accounts from allied organizers in the city relayed public housing rent strikes and protests against police violence. Reports on political developments nationwide, such as the Republic of New Afrika’s securing of pastureland and the Black-led takeover of the Berkeley City Council, demonstrated the searching nature of the period strategically. Spreads featuring Black history and poetry, excerpts from speeches such as Amiri Baraka’s lectures at Howard University, and a lively Letters to the Editor section rounded out the paper’s coverage.

Like many underground newspapers and left periodicals, the bulk of Black Land News’ output appears lost to history, with its publishers prioritizing recruitment campaigns over preservation. The small record that remains from its 1969-1973 run, however, provides a striking portrait of US Black nationalist militancy in an era indelibly marked by Third World revolution. By tracing the role of Black Land News in the forging of counter-institutions premised on Black autonomy and the expanding of vocabularies of landed self-determination, this article aims to preserve its contributions as a resource for future struggle… read more