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.”

Many of the Nigerian contributors to The Analyst also shared in common a partisan affiliation to the radical populist People’s Redemption Party (PRP), which built popular support and gained control of state governorships in Kano and Kaduna states during Nigeria’s short-lived second republic (1979 – 1983). In fact, Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa — the magazine’s publisher — had served as governor of Kaduna state on the platform of the PRP before his controversial impeachment by a conservative-dominated state assembly. The pages of the magazine provided space for participants in this short-lived project of left-populist subnational government to attempt to sustain a mass following during the military dictatorship that brought the experiment to an abrupt end.

The ambitions expressed repeatedly in the magazine’s early volumes for the ‘working masses’ to, ‘speak for themselves in their own language through The Analyst’ faced inevitable constraints trying to reach the wider population of non-literate non-English speakers while operating an anglophone print medium.

Yet, the Analyst provided a platform for dissident perspectives voicing criticism of — and alternatives to — the Structural Adjustment Programmes implemented by the Babangida military junta through the late 1980s. Moreover, the magazine’s horizons were by no means limited to the Nigerian scene. Instead, it ambitiously sought to profile issues of concern across Africa and the rest of the world, ‘especially where the struggle between imperialism and the people is sharpest’. As such the magazine remains an important resource for struggle against the profoundly anti-social economic and political agenda that remains dominant in Nigeria in across much of the world today… read more