There is a shadow cast over the student uprisings of 2024. Details of the events and memories of the moment’s promise are fading at various campuses. Efforts to eviscerate the student movements’ tenacious energy are palpable, but not accidental. Most of the uprising’s core actors have been suspended, expelled, punished, or have graduated. At several campuses, disciplinary proceedings and criminal prosecutions continue, draining the movement of its resources and diverting its attentions. Administrations have authorized the expansion of campus police and security systems, restricted time, place, and manner policies, and colluded with private donor and federal government demands to criminalize free speech and academic freedom on the subject of Palestine. Staff still talk about Palestine but without saying the word. Professors teach about Palestine but often as analogue. A small handful of students who have sought to carry the torch of the Palestine student movement have returned to staple programs: commemorations of the 1948 Nakba, film screenings,101 teach-ins, medical panels, discussions on how to actualize divestment campaigns, and so on. Others have returned to the mundane capitalist order of campus life. But if we listen closely—in the hallways, in our classrooms, at the anti-ICE rallies where students adorn their faces in keffiyehs—and beyond the “noise of complacency,” Palestine’s liberatory promise is still there, and perhaps more there than ever before.
How do we remember the landmark student uprisings of 2024 with ethical maturity and political integrity in a context of unyielding repression? How do we think of the student uprisings, when the bodies of the martyrs—killed by Israeli and US imperialist aggression—are not yet cold? When Gaza remains besieged and starved? When Palestine remains militarily occupied? And when bombs continue to rain onto Iran and Lebanon, devastating life, infrastructure, and the promise of freedom, over and over again? What happens when fear, political fatigue, and despair take hold, when the shadows of ongoing genocide obscure sustained resistance to it? I propose that the answer to these questions is rooted in the question of praxis: the always-in-becoming dialectical relationship between theory and practice from which liberatory movements are endowed their power to shift the course of history. Reflecting on the rich tradition of Palestinian student and youth movements provides clarity on what this praxis might entail. For more than a century, student and youth movements have stood at the helm of the Palestinian struggle, to renew its promise, despite a colonial condition characterized by repeated catastrophes and times shaped by collective grief. Much of this work has taken place in the shadow years.
Shadow Years
The year 1948 has, according to Beshara Doumani and Alex Winder, “cast the longest and deepest shadow on the history of modern Palestine and the Palestinians.” The two refer to long stretches of time before and after the Nakba as the “shadow years,” which for decades remained unexplored, existing as dead zones in Palestinian history […].” Doumani and Winder’s interest in the shadow years as important sites of study stem from a growing concern of how “structure[s] of commemorative politics solely constructed around events of massive destruction, loss, and colonial machinations—such as 1917 [Balfour], 1948 [Nakba], and 1967 [Naksa]—can imprint the time/space architecture of colonial narratives onto Palestinian ones, constituting, effectively, a discursive “iron cage” (8). Instead, the two invite us to consider continuities of Palestinian life that endures beneath the shadows, and despite the ruptures that have characterized the Palestinian experience across time and place. The invitation is not to be mistaken for the creation of a structure of commemorative politics based solely on watershed moments of resistance, for even this structure might hold eclipsing properties. On the one hand, commemorations of uprisings and revolts can affirm Palestinians as agents of history, rather than merely subjugated passive victims of colonization’s design. On the other hand, commemorative politics based solely on celebrating Palestinian agency in resistance often absent attention to the material conditions, balance of forces, key actors, labor, and organizing praxis that make historical inflection points possible to begin with, enrobing these moments within their own shadows.
Tremendous political and organizational development transpired beneath the surface of the shadows between 1948 and the widely heralded Palestinian Revolution launched in the late 1960s. The post-1948 “shadow years” were never solely characterized by loss nor should they be rendered as dead zones in Palestinian history and organizing. The time was one in which theories, ideas, tactics, strategies, and movements for liberation were blooming, even if clandestinely. The organizational experiences of groups like the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) formed out of the student group Jam‘iat al-‘urwa al- wuthqā (The Firmest Bond Society) at the American University of Beirut (AUB); the Palestine Student Union (PSU) of Cairo, the Conference of Jordanian Students (CJS), the Damascus-based Arabs of Palestine and later the Palestinian Student Association in Syria, and the 1952-formed Organization of Arab Students (OAS) of North America all laid crucial foundations for the emergence of several of the modern Palestinian political parties, the guerilla forces, and the grassroots unions and syndicates that facilitated the Palestinian Revolution. Importantly, the cumulative organizing efforts of these groups contributed to the formation of the 1959 General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) as the first Palestinian transnational popular organization, which provided a blueprint framework and structure to organize Palestinians across various group affiliations, ideological views, and geographic dispersions. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—the transnational political infrastructure that facilitated Palestinian political life in the decades to come—was formed on the basis of this model, and in 1969, it was reconfigured under the political direction of a generation of political leadership, most of whom had emerged as student movement leaders two decades prior.
Mjiriam Abu Samra and I previously argued that nearly twenty years of organizing between 1948 and 1967, in which Palestinian student movements played no small part, produced the Palestinian Revolution’s conditions of possibility. Yet even this argument mistakenly reaches for a demarcated temporality that assumes the Nakba was a complete breakage in the continuity of Palestinian history and political praxis. As Julia Gettle notes, these assumptions might reproduce “scholarly tendencies [that] treat the pre-Nakba and post-Nakba regional politics […] separately despite movements’ and activists’ vocal recognition of these continuities” (6). For Gettle, “the post-Nakba [Palestinian National Movement] had far more continuities with its pre-Nakba antecedents than such narratives recognize….” Let us consider here Iraqi Arab nationalist Basil Al-Kubaisi’s writings on the formation of the 1951 ANM, which he cofounded. Al-Kubaisi pays tribute to the labors of the student and youth movements of the first half of the twentieth century for offering his generation the embryonic stages from which a “new and more conscious movement of resurgence, inspired by a determination, on the part of the Arab youth…[could] face the challenge” (29).
The language of resurgence is key here. In a practice of historical retrieval, Al-Kubaisi’s writings on the ANM reveal a continuum of struggle that endures despite history’s shadows. Specifically, he looks to the 1909-formed Jam’iyah al-‘Arabiyah al-Fatāt (The Young Arab Society), established with an executive committee of seven Arab students in France. The transformative efforts of these students contributed to the creation of a vast network of Arabist secret societies that bloomed across Palestine and the Arab world in the pre-World War I period and catalyzed the first Arab National Movement in its wake. On al-Fatāt’s enduring legacy, Al-Kubaisi states:
A number of Arab societies and political parties were formed in the aftermath of the 1908 coup to defend the Arab cause and protect Arab rights. One of these organizations, Jam’iyah al-‘Arabiyah al-Fatat [The Young Arab Society] […] is of particular significance to our study. Its ultra secret nature, its main objectives, (the liberation of the Arab lands from foreign rule and the creation of an Arab national state) and its hard core militants, (mostly Arab students from the Fertile Crescent), did not only provide the model for many political organizations of the time, but also provided the model for the Arab Nationalists Movement about half a century later (10).
It was an enduring and unfinished struggle—obscured by history’s shadows—inaugurated by earlier generations of Arab nationalists that set the organizational “model” for young Arab nationalists in the wake of 1948. Despite political and military setbacks and miscalculations on the part of Palestinian/Arab forces, and irrespective of the shadows cast upon the promise of historical inflection points, Al-Kubaisi’s study teaches us that every generation pulls a torch from the wreckage of history and that there is a specific kind of labor necessary to assume the responsibility of this generational inheritance.
Shadow Work
A movement becomes most visible when it strategically and energetically meets the political demands of watershed historical crises or inflection points—but building the discernment and agility to do so requires disciplined preparation from its organizers years, if not decades, in advance. As a movement moves into the spotlight, the embryonic stages of the movement’s formation often fall from view and its particular labors are invisibilized. Creating an effective political program that can meet a political moment once it arises requires organizers to engage internally with a lengthy collective process of historical retrieval, rigorous study, engagement of contradictions, and sound assessments of contemporary realities. This process necessarily requires the movement’s core actors to develop sharper political intuition, instinctive reflex capacities for criticism and self-criticism, and honest collective assessments on previous errors and miscalculations. Acknowledging defeats—without internalizing nihilism—is key for the movement to organize with the foresight it has gained. This organizing, which often is unglamorous, tedious, and takes place outside of the public eye both before and after a historical inflection point, is what I call a movement’s shadow work.
Even and especially if unspectacular, the methods with which movements develop matter. The contradictions they seek to sharpen externally and grapple with internally are equally instructive. The kind of work they engage in the interstitial shadow years is key. This often includes honest appraisals of the group’s current state (its assets and weaknesses), renewed internal visioning, structure building, membership onboarding, alignment, and training, the (re)generation of resources, political field power-mapping, and the strengthening and development of tactics and skills. The labor required to rebuild or sustain a movement’s place and credibility among its mass bases in periods of tremendous political despair is central to shadow work. This often includes the creation of programs that revive a genuine popular belief and hope in freedom. The development of programs that offer a service to the people, the creation of political education and consciousness-raising materials and initiatives, and the exemplification of integrity in leadership are all crucial to restoring relations of trust between a movement and its mass base. The (re)building of relational bridges and alliances between the movement itself and other movements and political actors is a critical form of movement shadow work as well.
There is both intellectual and political value in understanding the processes and methods at work within shadow years as foundations to be assessed, revisited, and built upon. These processes demonstrate how the renewal of struggle is interstitially structured—not broken—by different chapters of the liberation struggle. As the labors of the student movements that formed in the wake of the Nakba show us, shadow work produces the conditions of possibility for landmark moments to enter the history books. Let us think here of two other examples: the 1936 Great Revolt and the 1987 Stones Intifada. In the decades that preceded these insurgencies, student and youth formations played no small part in forging the liberatory vision, leadership, popular political consciousness, methods of agitation, infrastructure for popular committees to mobilize the bases in unison, and grassroots power that challenged the complacency of the Palestinian bourgeoisie—all of which was central to producing conditions for these two watershed moments of Palestinian resistance to transpire. Recently, grassroots groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) have returned to Ghassan Kanafani’s study of the 1936 Great Revolt to understand the balance of forces conspiring against the national struggle and to learn from the political praxis of revolutionaries during this period. The point of this study is not merely to emulate past organizing, but rather to engage in a pedagogical exercise that trains organizers on how to better think, analyze, and prepare given the contemporary political reality.
It is worth noting that not all work taking place in narrative shadows should be brought into light. Clandestine organizing and operations, in both the context of the 1936 Revolt and 1987 Intifada, have been a material and strategic imperative in the face of brutal colonial repression and surveillance. Surreptitious work operated under the surface of what was made known, beneath the shadows of a colonial condition that necessitated discretion. Moreover, in shadow work, a movement’s members must set aside personal ambition in exchange for what is in the best interest of the collective. Some of the movement’s actors must necessarily be anonymous to the public while others will assume the task of being its faces. The substance—the power of a movement to effect liberation—is what centrally drives its actors, whether they are the spokespersons at a press conference or those who lick and mail the envelopes. Neither shall be rendered disposable or marginal despite what and who the shadows seek to conceal. These lessons show us that shadow work is both about the kind of labor invisibilized in a political economy that assigns currency to a movement and its actors only when the movement becomes widely known and also about the political intuition of a movement to build itself and its mission, with discretion and discipline, and with preparedness to protect itself and its mission from the matrix of forces operating against its interests.
On Clarity in the Clearing
In the first year after October 7, I engaged in several discussions with movement comrades in which we reflected on how the genocide provided us blistering moral, political, organizational, and psychological clarity. Our people in Palestine and Lebanon taught us profound lessons about what it means to practice life and resistance in the most strangulating and unlivable conditions on the planet. Through our organizing in the US, we learned what it means to assume the responsibility to act—with urgency, vigilance, organized discipline, and integrity—to confront the crushing material force of empire from within it. The genocide politically exposed the balance of forces—both obvious and not—conspiring against the Palestinian people. The genocide revealed what would be required and who was willing and prepared to steadfastly defy colonial and imperial aggression. The genocide sharpened and exposed the contradictions of the ruling class in the US, particularly among private industry and the political elite, and especially among the Left and within our universities. It also showed us the reflexive capacity necessary to assess our strengths and weaknesses as a movement: how to confront ideological confusion within our ranks, name points of (mis)alignment, and identify our own strategic errors and miscalculations. That we could not stop the slaughter humbled true organizers—operating in the interest of the collective—while emboldening the arrogance of individualist movement critics and spectators.
Though the genocide has not ended, the political moment we face today—marked by continued imperial aggression and genocidal slaughter across the region, and brutal political repression within the US—has dampened the kind of clarity we might have held in 2024 when the student encampments delivered what appeared to be an irreversible promise that shattered the status quo in the US. What does it mean to organize in a time of mounting loss and presumed defeat? Is there any kind of clarity that might come with the clearing of a promise that felt impossible to reverse? Writing from the context of the Cambodian genocide and its afterlife, Katharya Um teaches us that shadows are those genocidal remains—a spectral register of loss—that traverse time and space to haunt its survivors (and witnesses). Yet hauntings are, as Avery Gordon teaches us, also instructive. They remind us that something must be done. The very awareness of what these shadows seek to obscure is made known by those who continue—against all odds—to retain life, dignity, and an optimism of the will in a context of complete moral abyss. A shadow may have been cast over the promise of Palestinian liberation, but in this shadow—in the presumed clearing of the promise of Palestinian liberation—there is another kind of clarity that is taking shape.
The ranks that swelled in 2024 have now tightened. It is now clear which actors (people and institutions) have surrendered to political fatigue, nihilism, fear, and a barren imagination and which have not. There are clear lines that distinguish the opportunists from the organizers and even more clarity on the variation of ideologies and tactical approaches within the political field. In this shadow, there is space for breath, to take stock of what we have gained and lost, of how we have suffered, of what we have learned. All these lessons must be commuted into our organizing praxis moving forward. So that the next time Palestine emerges into full light again and the ranks of the movement swell, we will be prepared as if it were the hour of liberation. In the meantime, we must continue to disrupt the complacent silence—shining light on the shadows—with an unyielding insistence that genocide is not normal.
The Palestinian struggle is now embedded in the annals of revolutionary history, signaling the struggles of the poor, the working classes, the colonized, and the oppressed, in every corner of the earth, in the past and present. Gaza is the compass for revolutionary struggle everywhere. There can be no return to the time before 2023, for all people of conscious know, with full certainty, that Palestine must be free or perish along with the very idea of freedom. Living history tells us that students and youth are the ones who have, who will, and who must dedicate themselves to this labor of liberation, the shadow work that carries with it, the promise and readiness for a free future, even and especially in times of great uncertainty. The shadows are counterrevolutionary currents and dark interstitial spaces, laden with grief, loss, confusion, and even defeat. But beneath the shadows—in the clearing—there is clarity and an always-in-becoming possibility we must apprehend.
